U.S. $16.95
MUSIC
With his critically acclaimed Rip It Up and Start Again, renowned music journalist Simon
The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, and Devo, postpunk achieved
new relevance in the first decade of the twenty-first century through its profound
influence on bands such as Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and Vampire Weekend.
With Totally Wired the conversation continues. The book features thirty-two interviews
with postpunk’s most innovative personalities—such as Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David
Byrne, and Lydia Lunch—alongside an “overview” section of further reflections from
Reynolds on postpunk’s key icons and crucial scenes. Included among them are John
Lydon and PIL, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, and art-school conceptualists and protopostpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren. Reynolds follows these exceptional,
often eccentric characters from their beginnings through the highs and lows of
postpunk’s heyday.
Crackling with argument and anecdote, Totally Wired paints a vivid portrait of individuals
struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process
leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day.
P R A IS e foR RIP It UP And StARt AgAIn
“[A] passionate, insightful history.” —entertainment Weekly
“Exhilarating . . . a perfect alchemy of lightly worn erudition and focused enthusiasm.”
—the Village Voice
“Reynolds’ study of bands such as Wire, Public Image Ltd, the Slits, Talking Heads,
and Mission of Burma is full of page-turning narratives and an infectious ambition to
reinvent artistic norms. When he turns his attention to the music itself, his metaphortinged, acrobatic descriptions show off how illuminating criticism can be.”
—time out new York (top ten Books of 2006)
Cover design by Jason snyder
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT
www.softskull.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
TW_covermech.indd 1
ToTally Wired: r eSyinmoolnd S
in the wake of punk rock. Spawning artists as singular as Talking Heads, Joy Division,
PostPunk Interviews and Overviews
Reynolds applied a unique understanding to an entire generation of musicians working
ToTally Wired:
PostPunk Interviews
and Overviews
ISBN 978-1-59376-286-5
51695
9 781593 762865
S o FT
SkULL
P RE SS
Simon reynoldS
Author of Rip It Up and Start Again
6/23/10 12:32 PM
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 7/8/10 10:37 AM Page i
PRAISE FOR
SIMON REYNOLDS
“If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the
last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music it
would have to be—on the basis of depth of knowledge, range of
reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of style—Simon
Reynolds.”—Geoff Dyer
“Reynolds’ writing [is] a perfect alchemy of lightly worn erudition
and focused enthusiam.”—Jessica Winter, Village Voice
. . . and Totally Wired
“A compelling oral history . . . On every level, Totally Wired is
never less than fascinating.”—Q
“With . . . Rip It Up and Start Again . . . Simon Reynolds
became the flag-waver for the importance of post-punk to pop
music from 1978 to 1984—a scene . . . where The Cure, Echo and
the Bunnymen, Public Image Limited and Scritti Politti could exist
in the same space simply by sharing the same double-headed ethos
of innovation and oddness . . . [Totally Wired] brings together a collection of people who recall that spirit of possibility so vividly you
end up wanting to believe them all . . . There’s so much to take in
and enjoy.”—Metro
“Reynolds sets about getting to the bottom of what made these people tick creatively, why they made the strange and often magnificent
music that they did, and what the social and cultural forces behind
that music were . . . There’s no shortage of laugh-out-loud moments
either.”—Sunday Business Post
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page ii
“Plenty of entertainment and interest for the post-punk
reader.”—Mojo
“As an interviewer, Reynolds’s boyish enthusiam is a joy.”
—The Wire
Photo credit: Joy Press
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 7/8/10 10:37 AM Page iii
Simon Reynolds
TOTALLY WIRED: POST-PUNK INTERVIEWS AND OVERVIEWS
Simon Reynolds is the author of numerous books, including Rip It Up and
Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 and Generation Ecstasy: Into the World
of Techno and Rave Culture. His writing has appeared in The New York
Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Spin, Slate, and Artforum, among
other publications. Born in London, Reynolds now lives in Los Angeles.
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page iv
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page v
TOTALLY WIRED
Post-punk Interviews and Overviews
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page vi
Also by Simon Reynolds
The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (with Joy Press)
Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–84
Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page vii
SIMON REYNOLDS
TOTALLY WIRED
Post-punk Interviews and Overviews
Soft Skull Press
New York
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page viii
First published in the U.K. in 2009 by Faber and Faber Limited
First American edition, 2010
Copyright © 2009 by Simon Reynolds.
Except “The Blasting Concept,” which originally appeared in a slightly different version
in the U.K. edition of Rip it Up and Start Again, copyright © 2005 by Simon Reynolds
American edition copyright © 2010 by Simon Reynolds
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reynolds, Simon.
Totally wired : postpunk interviews and overviews / Simon Reynolds.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59376-286-5
1. Rock musicians—Interviews. 2. Rock music—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML385.R49 2010
781.66—dc22
2010013032
Cover design by Jason Snyder
Interior design by Faber and Faber Limited
Printed in the United States of America
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of Counterpoint LLC
2117 Fourth Street
Suite D
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.softskull.com
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page ix
To my brother Jez
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page x
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page xi
CONTENTS
Introduction ix
PART ONE: INTERVIEWS
Ari Up 3
Jah Wobble 16
Alan Vega 27
Gerald Casale 40
Mark Mothersbaugh 54
David Thomas 57
Anthony H. Wilson 69
Bill Drummond 79
Mark Stewart 94
Dennis Bovell 103
Andy Gill 108
David Byrne 118
James Chance 131
Lydia Lunch 143
Steve Severin 154
Nikki Sudden 159
John Peel 168
Alison Statton 174
Green Gartside 177
Gina Birch 194
Martin Bramah 203
Linder Sterling 216
Steven Morris 229
Richard H. Kirk 244
Alan Rankine 258
Paul Haig 272
Phil Oakey 277
Martin Rushent 295
Edwyn Collins 307
Steven Daly 319
Paul Morley 323
Trevor Horn 337
PART TWO: OVERVIEWS
John Lydon and Public Image Ltd: Two Biographies 351
Joy Division: Two Movies 358
Ono, Eno, Arto: Non-musicians and the Emergence of
‘Concept Rock’ 367
The Blasting Concept: Los Angeles, SST, and
‘Progressive Punk’ 381
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London Glam City: Poseurs, Dreamers, Heroes and Monsters, from the
Bromley Contingent and Blitz to the Batcave and Leigh Bowery 397
A Final Interview: Simon Reynolds 404
Acknowledgements 429
Index 431
For bonus transcripts, go to the Totally Wired blog:
http://totallywiredbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com
For the footnotes to Rip It Up and Start Again, visit
http://ripitupfootnotes.blogspot.com
xii
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INTRODUCTION
One of the hardest parts of writing a book is the process of cutting it
down: working out what can and should go; being tough enough to
actually implement the excisions. With Totally Wired, I got a rare opportunity to undo and restore. Starting out, I thought, ‘Fantastic, this is an
author’s dream: the chance to put back all the good bits that got thrown
out, or at least some of them anyway. This will be fun.’
Well, it was enjoyable, but it was also hard work, involving its own set
of difficult decisions. Narrowing down to around thirty interviews
meant leaving out twice that number that were just as worthy of inclusion. The interviews that made the cut then had themselves to be cut.
Nobody – not the reader, not the interviewee, certainly not yours truly
the interviewer – would be well served by a verbatim transcript of these
dialogues from first utterance to last. Interviews, in my experience on
both sides of the mic, emerge gradually out of an amorphous preamble
of meandering pleasantry before they find a rhythm. At the other end,
they wind down into amiable chit-chat. In between, you’ll generally get
a fair few digressions and dead ends. Overall, there’s plenty of redundancy and raggedness that can be discarded with no loss to anybody. In
addition to shedding bulk, some of the interviews in this book underwent minor resequencing to eliminate double-backs in the conversation
and maintain a more shapely, logical flow. What you get here is the heart
of the dialogue, the fruit without the peel or pips.
Focused on a single person’s journey through the post-punk period,
these interviews supply a more richly detailed picture of the biographic
arc of the exceptional individuals who make up Rip It Up’s cast.
There’s a stronger sense of them as human agents with back stories and
backgrounds; products of a place and a time, yet also self-created
beings, fantasists and adventurers who pursued their dreams and
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sometimes, against the odds, realized them. The end result is, I hope,
something that can be taken as a companion volume to Rip It Up and
Start Again but that works just as well as a freestanding book in its
own right.
Totally Wired actually comes in two parts. The much larger first section collates the aforementioned conversations with some of the key
figures – and best talkers – of the post-punk era. The smaller second
section gathers my own further thoughts and conclusions about the
period. In a sense, Totally Wired breaks down into its constituents what
was gelled as one in Rip It Up. First, the human-interest stories of the
stars of the show: musicians, label founders, producers, journalists.
Second, my theories, interpretations, speculations, memories. Some of
these take the form of case studies (pieces on the absolutely pivotal
bands Public Image Ltd and Joy Division) and others are genealogies of
scenes and currents-of-ideas: No Wave and mutant disco New York,
the art-rock tradition of non-musician conceptualists from Brian Eno
to Malcolm McLaren. There’s also a ‘final transcript’: a megamix of my
overarching ideas about post-punk that draws heavily from the numerous interviews I did around Rip It Up. Books continue to write themselves in your head long after the official end of the project; the ideas
keep coming, whether unprompted or catalysed by interviewers. The
larger themes, the significance of the work, even one’s motives and
goals all become much clearer once it’s ‘done’; lifting your gaze from
the immersive graft of research, writing, rewriting, you suddenly see
the wood for the trees. You also become painfully aware of all the stuff
you forgot to deal with, all those too-obvious-to-need-saying things
that really ought to have been pinpointed in crystal clarity because
they’re not obvious unless you actually lived through the period in
question. So I do feel blessed to have this opportunity to return to the
subject.
Maybe all that seems a little obsessive-compulsive, yet I honestly
don’t think that these two chunky books come close to exhausting the
subject of post-punk. There are still many stories untold, still plenty of
areas that have just glancingly been touched upon in Rip It Up and
Totally Wired. The musical epoch of 1978–84 has a long way to go
before it is mapped out as thoroughly as the sixties, or indeed as punk
rock itself. All the signs indicate that post-punk is set to be a booming
field for investigation and analysis by critics, historians and academics
for some time to come. Chronicles of specific scenes, biographies of parxiv
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Simon Reynolds
March 2008
xv
introduction
ticular bands, even monographs on individual albums continue to come
forth in a steady flow. And you know, I couldn’t even say for sure that I
personally have run out of things to say about this remarkable period of
music and culture. But this will certainly do for now.
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Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page 1
1: INTERVIEWS
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ARI UP
The Slits, singer
Your parents are German, but you grew up in London . . .
We were in London when I was six already, then officially from when I
was eight. But you can’t pin me down to a nationality because my whole
family background is so bohemian. My mum was good with acting and
modelling, and my dad was a singer. So it’s all bohemian. And international. I come from Gypsy – on my mother’s side there’s Gypsy blood.
And then there’s the Munich side, which is again different from the rest
of Germany, because Bavaria is totally different.
Living in London as a pre-teen, did you quickly become aware of reggae,
the whole sound-system culture?
Because of my mum, I grew up with people like Jimi Hendrix and The
Bee Gees around. Barry Gibb used to play the harmonica and sing songs
to me when I was little, because he was going out with my mum.
Hendrix never went out with her, but we knew him because she was
hanging out with musicians. My stepfather was one of the musicians in
Yes, so I grew up with them as well. We hated them in punk days, but I
didn’t really know Yes musically as a child, just personally. The singer
was a nice guy, Jon Anderson. He made a major change in my life,
because he was married to a black girl called Jenny – and that was a big
rarity back then. When I was a really little girl, like three years old, there
were black people hanging around the family, but I thought they were
white people just with darker skin. But with Jenny it hit me in a big way.
The white women hanging around my mum were posh and very uptight
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around kids. My mum wasn’t very warm either. I could write Mommy
Dearest Part 2! When Jenny came, it was the first time I had warmth of
feeling. She gave me a big impression, subconsciously, of the African side
of things. Very affectionate – hugging me, holding me. It was nothing I
was used to from any of the family or friends that were hanging around.
I got a tropical glimpse.
So your mum’s house was a major hang-out for rock musicians. Is that
where you met the first punk rockers?
I was still in school. My mum brought people like Joe Strummer there,
and he taught me guitar. He was really into R&B and old rock’n’roll. He
had this beautiful guitar that looked like a fifties guitar and he taught me
on that. All the boys in punk bands, they were very supportive and protective and encouraging. Palmolive [Paloma Romero] started the band
because she was Joe Strummer’s girlfriend. She saw me at a gig with The
Clash and said, ‘Let’s do the female band.’ Tessa Pollitt was in a band
called The Castrators, an all-girl band that fell apart. We had a guitarist,
Kate, who later, I think, was in The Modettes. But then Viv Albertine
joined. She was very pushy and knew her shit. It was Viv who started
The Slits’ fashion look mostly, although I was wild in my style, and so
was Palmolive. Let’s say Viv created the Madonna style, because she was
the first with ribbons in her hair and crazy rubber stockings and fishnets.
You think Madonna ripped off The Slits?
Not think – I know. She came to our gigs. Back then fishnet tights was
only for Bryan Ferry-type girls with high heels. But we wore them with
Doc Marten boots, so it took a totally different meaning. Madonna’s
always been good at taking things from current waves. I won’t say she
ripped off The Slits, but she was . . . inspired. And she could have at least
worn a Slits T-shirt to acknowledge it!
What were the individual Slits like, as people?
Palmolive was the real tomboy, but very sexy on top of that. She would
wear crazy miniskirts with fishnet tops with her tits showing right
through. We weren’t doing this as a costume to perform; this was just
our on-the-street clothes. Palmolive didn’t shave anywhere, under the
arms or legs, was totally sexy and female but at the same time roughneck
– not like a magazine tells how a female should be. She had that tropical
thing, that Spanish thing. Tessa was melancholy, what people would call
Gothic now. She always wore black but had an interesting way of put4
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page 5
Wasn’t there talk of Malcolm McLaren managing The Slits at one point?
We all liked Malcolm as a manager for the Pistols. He was really eager
and excited – he thought, ‘Yeah, the female Sex Pistols.’ Then he started
coming more and more to our rehearsals and telling us how to play. That
became a real issue. We were more bass-oriented; even before Cut we
were doing tribal crazy shit. But he kept saying, ‘Guitar’s where it’s at.’
Malcolm was very male-oriented. We were very female-oriented. He said
the guitar needs to be up front, not the bass. I just wish we could’ve been
more mature about trying to convince him otherwise and I wish he had
been more tolerant. Because if he’d managed us, The Slits might have
survived longer and done more commercially.
I read this amazing quote where McLaren is supposed to have said, ‘I
want to work with you because you’re girls and you make music. I hate
music and I hate girls. I thrive on hate.’ That’s Viv Albertine’s recollection
of what he said, if I remember correctly.
That sounds like Malcolm! I would trust Viv with her recollections.
So McLaren was a bit of a sexist, then.
He was also sexless. Not homosexual, not straight – nothing.
Perhaps the kind of things he’d later do with Bow Wow Wow is what he
would have tried to do with The Slits. Exploitative, porno-tinged stuff.
He is an exploiter! We wanted to fool around with him because he was
very cunning in the way he tricked the system to get the Pistols big. But
of course he ruined the Pistols with exploitation and he absolutely
fucked over John Lydon.
You know, my first ever gig was seeing The Slits play at Aylesbury Friars!
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ari up
ting it together. Laidback and quiet and deep. She was an artist too: she
painted very well and she did a couple of Slits single covers, ‘Animal
Space’ and ‘Man Next Door’. Viv was the big fashion girl. And she was
the side of The Slits that wanted to be poppy. She was very conscious of
the pop side, but rebellious too. She was a girlfriend of The Clash’s Mick
Jones and she had a group, Flowers of Romance, with Sid Vicious and
Keith Levene. She was much older than us. And me, I was a total animal.
Wild and crazy, like an animal let loose, but an innocent little girl with it
too. Coming out of the background I did, I knew a lot of stuff and was
meditating on a lot of stuff, so I wasn’t a rebel without a cause. But I’m
totally the foundation of punk.
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Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:49 PM Page 6
Was that the gig when the whole audience pushed the bouncers over and
jumped on the stage and attacked us? Palmolive barely escaped with her
drums. She was fighting back . . .
No, this was later, after ‘In the Beginning There Was Rhythm’. Bruce
Smith was drumming . . . But what kind of stuff did you get up to on
stage early on?
We were more crazy in the early days, and less accepted. People were
more abusive to us, so we would be even more rebellious on stage. I
know I had to pee on stage once. It wasn’t to shock anyone; there wasn’t
a toilet near and I couldn’t piss in my pants, so I just peed on stage. Just
on the side, but everyone saw it. I didn’t care.
Where did you all live in those early days?
A few places. All that Westbourne Grove, Portobello Road area. At that
time it was a mixture of artistic, rebellious and the crazy and poor. There
were blues parties all the time – reggae parties, but in houses, not clubs.
All night long. The neighbours just had to live with it. They would only
hear the bass, which probably drove them insane. We used to find the
parties just following the bass. We would be streets away and listen for
the vibrations.
Were you some of the few white people at these blues parties?
The only white people. In 1976, 1977, 1978 there were zero white people. There was one place in Portobello, called the Shebeen, where it
became mixed. That was more like 1980, and it was a house party, but
more official. But mostly I was the only white girl. And definitely the
only one with dreads. It was very strict Rasta then, and I got a lot of hostile attitude from guys for not being covered. I went there in my
miniskirt. They had to deal with me. ‘Rasta or not, I don’t give a shit
who you think I am.’ They weren’t into punk.
People go on about Rastas recognizing an affinity with punk rock – as
renegades against Babylon. But was there really a kinship? Wasn’t it
more one-way – punks identifying with Rastas?
The musicians in reggae did see it, but the black youths who went to
these blues parties were very strict into Rasta. They hated punk because
they thought it was devil worship! The make-up, the dyed hair, the
miniskirts. That’s where I developed my attitude that I had later in
Jamaica: they had to deal with me, they had to accept me. You know
why I got away with it mostly? Because I was dancing the hell out of
6
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Were you already into the spiritual side of reggae then?
Even though I was being this outrageous anarchist girl, right away the
spiritual thing came at me too. So I think that’s my contribution to The
Slits. Viv was the poppy side and I was the spiritual side. When the Cut
album came, it was me being very persistent with all the dubby spiritual
and earthy stuff.
Was the famous Cut cover of the three of you naked and covered in mud
your idea then?
No, it was mutual. But I was the first person to have the tree – my dreadlocks up in a tree-type shape. I always kept that reggae tribal aspect. We
were in the country together doing the album. The studio was in a cottage and there was mud all around the place. We just decided, ‘Let’s
cover ourselves in the mud, be naked but natural. Ruin that image that
females need to be sexy by dressing sexy.’ We could be sexy by nature,
naked but not pornographic – not a prescribed way of how you’re supposed to be sexy.
Palmolive had left the band by this point, by the time it came to make the
debut album.
She left the group because mutually we all knew that the drummer’s direction had changed. The early stuff was very tribal: she was playing the tomtom drums with the snare, very punky and straightforward. We wanted
more complex rhythms, like we had on Cut. That was the sole reason we
broke up with her, because artistically we loved her. We wouldn’t have
separated if it wasn’t that she couldn’t do the beat. Budgie was great, but
he wanted to join Siouxsie after that one album. And then Bruce Smith
came in, and he was like the fourth girl of the band. He was like a male
with a sensitive side, without being gay. He was in touch with his sensitive
side. He was in this revolutionary band called The Pop Group.
7
ari up
their blues parties! Back then it was more like African dancing, not
dancehall stuff with hip movements and sexy movements. Back then the
style was ‘steppers’ – leg movements. I was such a good stepper!
Everywhere we went in the whole of London there were only three or
four top steppers, and I was one of them, stepping in the circle. All you
see is weed smoke and a big wall of people surrounding, no one in the
middle, just us steppers. That helped me survive as a white girl with her
locks out and her mini. Nobody could tell me shit because I was such a
good dancer.
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The Slits and The Pop Group were really tight for a while, almost like
one tribe. Viv went out with The Pop Group’s Gareth Sager, and Tessa
got together with Sean Oliver, who went on to be in Sager’s post-Pop
Group outfit Rip Rig & Panic.
Sean died of sickle cell anaemia. He was Tessa’s baby-father. An incredible original. The first to shave around the sides here and have dreadlocks
in the middle. In 1980 already!
The Slits and The Pop Group were also linked by having their debut produced by the same guy, Dennis Bovell, UK dub wizard. What was he
like?
Brilliant. The most excellent producer anyone could have. And being
that he’s so West Indian, he was very liberal. He had that feminine side
too. He let us be. We only got involved with him because we loved the
dub records he did at the time. We didn’t know him in person; he could
have been the biggest chauvinist. But he wasn’t!
One of the stand-out things about Cut is the wonderfully complex but
eccentric harmony vocals, the way your voices swoop in and out of each
other. Was that all three of you singing or were you multitracked?
That was the girls. And you know what? Viv and Tessa can’t really sing.
If they could at least manage a note, that was good enough for us,
because we wanted those different tones of voice. It has a sense of beat
and hitting a note, even though they couldn’t really carry a tune. It
worked. There was even a ‘Frère Jacques’ thing on ‘Instant Hit’. No one
gave us credit at the time. I didn’t even realize it until I started listening
to Cut again a few years ago. I had two reactions: surprise and disgust.
We got this big reputation that we couldn’t play our instruments, and we
even believed that stigma after a while. But we were fucking brilliant! I
want to see guys do that album and pull it off musically!
It got pretty positive reviews at the time, though. Mostly.
In our extended Slits family, among our peers and in the press we got the
best response, but I’m talking about people in the music scene and the
press who were outsiders. There was a male chauvinist element that said
we looked terrible, we couldn’t be managed, we couldn’t be a commercial act. As soon as we had the name Slits, that took away the chance of
radio play. I did Slits because of cutting up with the knife, but then we
said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s got a double meaning too.’
Well, it’s like the concave form of the convex Sex Pistols. Or something.
8
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Talking of boys, ‘Instant Hit’ is about troubled boy-men with an urge
towards self-destruction . . . Levene or Vicious?
That was about Keith and Sid, but mostly Keith. Viv wrote the words.
‘Shoplifting’ is one of my favourites.
Palmolive wrote it because she was a shoplifter. She went with a big
overcoat to the big awful supermarkets. They deserved to be robbed.
It’s clever the way it’s preceded by ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’, which is a
much more melancholy version of consumerism: ‘Satisfy this empty feeling’ . . .
It’s a very female song, too. When females get depressed they go shopping.
In ‘Shoplifting’ it’s much more gleeful and uproarious, to the point where
you scream with the adrenalin rush of doing a runner and go, ‘Ooh, I
pissed in my knickers!’
I probably did. That happens to girls, if you’re too excited. Probably I
peed myself.
‘Newtown’ is a haunting vision of the new urban psychogeography that
had emerged in the seventies and is now even more recognizable today:
hollow zones adrift with shopaholics and blank-eyed youths in hoodies . . .
‘New Town’ was ‘Junk Town’ originally. It was about the shopping centres just coming in. City centres with no cars. And this big reputation of
the punks being the violent, glue-sniffing crazy people. But we were the
least violent. The Teddy Boy revival was very violent and all the skinheads who were Ku Klux Klan, not the punky skinheads into reggae,
who were cool. Then you had the most vicious of all, the John Travolta
disco followers. They were the worst. That’s the one that stabbed me in
the back. It was winter and I had a big coat, and if it wasn’t winter it
would have killed me. I still have a little scar there. ‘There’s a slit for
you,’ he said, so he must have heard about The Slits. There was so much
violence going on back then. And then there were the ‘sticksmen’. Those
were the soul boys in the black community. Matumbi had a song about
it: ‘Sticksman, why you do that?/Brother man, why you do that?’ There
was a big rift in black Britain between soul boys and Rastas; you were
either one or the other. Sticksman was gold chains, pimp hats, flares,
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The boys got away with it, but they had a hard time with it. So imagine
us girls . . .
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open shirt. ‘Sticksman’ was the stigma that they would steal a lot too –
pimp and steal. Sticks – it must come from ‘stick up’, being an armed
robber. Rastas were really against the sticksman, they were about peace
and rebelliousness against the system.
So it was like a split between those who assimilated to an extent but fell
into Babylon’s ways and looked to America for music and style, and the
Rasta who wanted to stay pure and who had a sort of earthy look. The
sticksman, by contrast, wanted money and flashy clothes, to put slick
stuff in their hair . . .
Exactly. But it was Rastas who got the stigma in the media for being the
scary ones, the thieves. As punks we had that in common with the
Rastas too, that we were more peaceful too. Punks did get into violence
and fights sometimes but not compared to other youths. So ‘New Town’
was about how shopping-centres England was a whole other nation of
glue-sniffers. We had a revolution to live up to, as punks, but these gluesniffing kids had nothing to inspire them. And they weren’t just sniffing
glue, they were looking for violence too. Punk didn’t look for violence.
Those other sets of people were really scary. They had razor blades and
bottles, beca use there was no guns.
So in the eighties, in Jamaica, you could say that, with the rise of dancehall, the Sticksman triumphed over the Rasta. Were you a fully-fledged
Rastafarian believer?
I’m not into the word ‘believer’ and I’m not into anything that has an
‘-ism’, because right away that gets into rules. But very definitely I’m
spiritually inspired. I’m just not like a dogmatic, a fanatic. It’s very dangerous to come into that area; that’s when you lose yourself in a movement. But I wasn’t in it for the little trend of it. It wasn’t a fashion. As
you can see, my hair is down to my feet now. I’ve carried a lot of years
of hardship and tribulation with it. But it doesn’t mean I can’t have fun
with it, because people who are too religious, they can’t live up to their
own rules – that’s why they become hypocrites, a lot of them. To be spiritual doesn’t mean you have to have no fun, and it doesn’t mean fun has
to be something totally gluttonous, rolling in greed and feeling that anything that feels good is good. When you’re spiritual and have higher
aspirations to live up to a greater creator in the universe, you gotta balance it. You can’t be too rigid. And then you get where nuns kill their
own babies. They found in Europe, between the monastery and the nunnery, a big tunnel full of baby skeletons. The nuns killed their babies,
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After Cut you did the split single with The Pop Group. The Slits side was
the amazing ‘In the Beginning There Was Rhythm’, a spiritual song linking musical rhythm, sexual rhythm, natural cycles, cosmic vibrations . . .
I wrote that one because rapping had become very popular. At that point
it was only The Sugarhill Gang and there was some underground girls –
Lady T and Funky Four Plus One. Me and Neneh Cherry went to New
York and picked up these underground rap records. For us Sugarhill was
already too commercial! England hadn’t heard rap at all really, and me
and Neneh brought these records back and played them at Viv
Goldman’s house. So I think we’re partly responsible for bringing hip
hop to England. Some years later Neneh and I would do ‘In the
Beginning’ live, and I realized how good the lyrics were, because at the
time all the rap lyrics were like, ‘Look at me, look at my ring, look at my
car.’ And I did the rapping as more spiritual. In the bible it says, ‘In the
beginning there was the word,’ but I had a lot of fights with bible worshippers, saying, ‘What about aborigines who have never heard of the
bible and are more spiritual than anybody you’d think of?’ ’Cos these
Rastas would be saying, ‘If you don’t know the bible, you’re beneath
your ability to be human.’ I had fights with people like Fred Locks [roots
reggae singer] – not physical fights, but I’m like an abomination to him:
a woman is like an animal. So I’d say, ‘I learn a lot from animals, and you
know what? I think animals are better than human beings. I don’t see
them betraying nature and the natural order.’ So they’d be like, ‘In the
bible it says we are above animals.’ But I stuck to my guns!
Feeling kinship with the animal kingdom is something that comes
through in the second album, Return of the Giant Slits, which has this
green-conscious thread running through it – anguished empathy for
Mother Nature and the abuse she’s suffered at man’s hands.
Yeah, ‘Earthbeat’. Isn’t it funny they had an MTV show called Planet
Beat? We were the first to use these names like ‘world beat’. New Age
Steppers was like that too, because when I did that name there was no
New Age people. I created that name in my own head. I was writing a lot
in 1979 and 1980, and I came up with that name. Then New Age religion and New Age music came along.
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because the nuns got pregnant quickly. So that’s very high holy and religious of them, isn’t it, to get pregnant and kill the babies? If you’re going
to be spiritual, why can’t you also have a man and be married and have
babies? In the bible God said, ‘Go and replenish the earth.’
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Return of the Giant Slits is an underrated album – it’s like a sister album
to The Raincoats’ Odyshape. Both records are more diffuse and atmospheric than the debuts, but very adventurous.
Thanks, you’re one of the first to say that. It’s not so much underrated as
it was underpromoted. CBS were using us as a tax write-off and they
stuck us on the shelf. It wasn’t ever released in America. At least Cut got
promoted.
‘Face Place’ is one of the weirdest tracks on the record. It has all sorts of
eerie vocal stuff going on. Sounds like something built in the studio,
rather than playable live.
That was one I didn’t even sing. Viv was singing it. It was so out there
because of the jazz influence we had from Don Cherry. I got to know
Neneh through her father. She came on tour with him. We were friendly
with Don and we also went to a lot of Sun Ra gigs. Return of the Giant
Slits still has a reggae influence, but there’s jazz in there, and African
music too.
After that, The Slits just disintegrated?
We were without management, being sabotaged left and right. With a
horrible record company. It was too much.
And in parallel with the latter days of The Slits, you were starting New
Age Steppers?
I shared a squat in Battersea with Neneh Cherry and Adrian Sherwood
and some other people. Adrian was a hustler in a true sense: he was managing various reggae artists and toasters, and selling records out of the
back of his van. Distributing reggae releases from Jamaica. So he was
one of the only white boys in the scene doing heavy hustling-type business. When he lived in the squat, he got this tiny little mixing machine
with tiny little knobs – totally cheap, a terrible little thing – but he
became a genius out of that. He taught himself to be a great mixer, engineer, producer. We partnershipped and I found the name New Age
Steppers. ‘New Age’ meaning not the Old Age of the Queen and monarchy, but the new millennium. And ‘steppers’ relating to dancing to reggae. New Age Steppers was a collective, but it became more and more his
thing and he basically took over. It didn’t work out. We were like the pioneers of space-age reggae, ’cos it was still dubby and reggae-ish but very
space age and with a punky edge to it.
And then you took the whole nostalgie de la boue thing one stage fur12
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Were you just trying to escape Babylon?
Yeah, really trying to find the good people who were out of that, if there
were any spots left on earth that weren’t in that Babylon situation. We
went to Belize too later on. We had to carry a dog with us, because if we
were going to be attacked by a jaguar, the dog would be the first to be
eaten!
Did you grow your own food?
In Belize we were looking for land to buy, ’cos Belize had really cheap
giveaway land to buy. An area as big as Central Park would be $20,000.
You have to cultivate the land a little bit, as a farm, to get the land really
cheap from the government. But the rest of it would be just wild. Which
I would have continued, but I was too involved with the music. I was
continually coming back for the music scene. But if I had just retired, I
would have retired to the jungle.
Was the natural life everything you thought it would be, or a bit tough?
It’s both things. That’s the trouble. Nature was totally level. Cool.
Everything we know about nature in this society, it’s totally fake. The
amount of animals we run into, it’s very rare – they’re scared of people.
Only if you actually step on one do they actually attack. Nature was
completely kind. The only thing that is dangerous is the mixture of society with the jungle. The water was dangerous. The water in the jungle
had boat’s grease and washing soap. The least problem with the river
was the shit in the river, because when you shit in it you could see the
fish coming and eating the shit. The fucking soap was the worst. That
was really bad. And what hurt me the most was the psychological
trauma of the Indonesian government coming in to blackmail the tribes
or push stuff on them, to put on certain clothes or adjust to certain programming. The Indonesian government is so corrupt they could just do
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ther and actually went to live in the jungle, right? Jungles, plural.
Talking about Return of the Giant Slits reminded me of how I lived
through the eighties, because the eighties went so yuppie. It was the
cocaine age. But I just literally continued with the earthbeat thing and
went into the jungle, mostly in Jamaica and also to Borneo, where I
stayed with the Dayak Indians. They look and live like American
Indians. Only recently have they put down bow and arrow. An amazing
people. Next door was a tribe that was headhunters, so we had to be
careful.
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anything to those people. They lived really healthy and natural, and then
suddenly there was this one store which was full of plastic shit, chips
with colouring in, and everyone ran to it and then started to get sick.
They got sticky noses, which they didn’t have before. Only one TV in
that village, and then everyone’s running to that TV. It was horrible,
made me throw up. People started being conscious of their breasts. They
had long ears hanging to here, and the younger ones started thinking
that wasn’t pretty any more.
So did you discover to your dismay that there simply weren’t any
unspoiled places left?
Exactly. That was my horror – that there wasn’t anything untouched. If
anything, we have to preserve and protect people like that. But it’s too
late. One thing that was great for me to experience, and we can’t even
really imagine it, but men are really so different. These tribal men had
their feminine side. They were so equal rights, carrying the babies nonstop. These tribal warriors went hunting, then they were the babysitters
when the women had to do stuff. They were very soft and tolerant to
their women, very subdued and calm. They let the women run the shit.
The guys went hunting, not the women – for some reason it’s a boy
thing. The girls hung out, dancing and doing breastfeeding or cooking.
But when it came to equal emotional support, they would both share in
child upbringing. It made me cry.
And when did you come back to Jamaica?
There was jungle years in Jamaica too, but there were no animals – jungle life without the poisonous snakes and jaguars to kill us. Most of
Jamaica is rural. We lived in the hills and in the beach parts, and in Lime
Key, which is the island in The Harder They Come.
It’s interesting that you went from being on this earthy, spiritual, Rastainfluenced trip to being a dancehall queen, when the whole ragga thing is
a lot more urban and materialistic.
It is a total shift, but funny enough I found an affiliation in the later
dancehall in the nineties with the early steppers thing. It became very
rural again and very African, those beats. At the dancehall parties, you
really feel it, it’s so jungly. The eighties dancehall had a problem: they
were trying to do reggae with machines. They left the good roots of what
they had in the seventies, but they hadn’t found the niche of the nineties.
Then a lot of people started taking crack and cutting their hair too.
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So it brought you back to the original Slits spirit. Rasta’s idea of proper
womanhood is submissive . . .
And the dancehall idea of a woman is she don’t take no shit!
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Eighties dancehall, naaah – but nineties dancehall was great. And radical
because it has punk elements: the girls were so aggressive, so X-rated
dressing without being whores. Crazy punky hair.
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JAH WOBBLE
Public Image Ltd, bassist
Let’s start with your childhood in the East End . . .
I grew up on the Clichy Estate, at the junction of Stepney Way and
Jamaica Street – aptly enough! It was a ghastly holiday camp gone
wrong, a council estate with hardly any amenities. My early memories
are lots of old houses and bomb sites from the Second World War. Even
in the sixties, you’d get bomb-disposal units come in and you’d see the
steam because they’d steam the bombs. Old houses, but they were starting to build the new flats and moving people out to new towns. The slum
clearances started in the fifties and continued into the sixties, and that
was when they were building tower blocks. And you had no choice – you
either took a new council flat or were moved out to Harlow or Harold
Hill.
What was the first music you gravitated to?
The skinhead thing was going on when I was eight. There was a stall outside Whitechapel Station that sold bluebeat and ska. I bought the Trojan
compilations, the ones with the girls with not many clothes on the cover.
But I do remember certain Beatles tracks, like ‘Strawberry Fields’, and
liking psychedelic things without even knowing it. I didn’t come from a
culture where you intellectualized about things, you didn’t verbalize particularly. I liked The Who, and I was a big Stevie Wonder fan. I dabbled
around a bit but reggae was the real engine room for me. Always has
been.
I discovered Can through John Lydon. That was a big quantum leap.
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How did you meet Lydon?
I went to Kingways College in 1974, and John stood out. He had a certain kind of charisma. He was a few years older than me and into different music. And he had long hair, which I never did – I’m from a mod
culture. John was also into painting. Generally with your working class,
it tends to be music and movies. I’ve got really into painting and painters
over the years, but in those days it was music and movies. And books
too. Novels.
Aged sixteen I cut out and kept this 1980 interview that Angus
MacKinnon did with you in NME, where you talked about being a
George Orwell fan and being a regular down your local library. The
story’s angle was very much: ‘Jah Wobble – the nice one in PiL’.
I can be a complete arsehole. But if I could somehow be not me and
could go back in time and meet PiL, I probably would like me best out
of all of them. But in a way, that was PiL – they didn’t care about being
liked. It was very wilful, warped and immature. I’m a big football fan,
and it’s the same with footballers – you don’t want to meet them. All
they want to talk about is how big their Mercedes is. But on the pitch
they might have this moment of genius that transcends who they are.
Half of it with PiL was there wasn’t a manager. We could have done with
management, but because there wasn’t it all went a bit free-form. Then
again, if there’d been a manager, he might have been, ‘Fucking hell, don’t
give this Wobble kid from the East End all this power.’
So presumably, knowing John, you got swept up into punk very early
on . . .
I got swept up into it as a scene. I remember seeing John and saying,
‘Where you been the last couple of days?’ and him saying, ‘Oh, I’ve
joined this band.’ And at that point in the culture nobody did that. You
didn’t know people who were in bands! Punk music didn’t interest me,
though. I found it ungroovy and loud. It was kind of bad rock’n’roll
really. Whereas reggae had developed this bottom-end thing – around
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With Can, it was really the rhythm thing that stayed with me. They tailed
off a bit in the mid-seventies, as a group. As players they still had it. Jaki
Liebezeit is still refining what he does even now; it’s that typically German
reductionist approach. Later on, during PiL, this NME journalist Angus
MacKinnon that I’d become friends with introduced me to Holger
Czukay. And both of them, Holger and Jaki, became teachers to me.
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about 1973 you really started to feel the bass. When I started to play
bass, from listening to so much reggae I already knew how to do block
units, repeating patterns. You might work a few changes in there, but
you just kind of kept the pulse going. I worked the whole system out just
by looking at the frets. If the fret pattern had a nice shape visually, it
would probably sound good. That’s how I still work. You have your dots
on your bass guitar, and satisfying lines to me would be the open E string
down to B, then D, E and F sharp. That’s a lovely shape, very symmetrical. That’s still the essence of my playing, actually.
Did you find out any reggae secrets about getting that deep, booming
bass sound?
I learned that you want old strings for reggae. Nice and dull. New strings
sound too twangy. There’s too much tone. That’s fine for funk. Some of
these funk bassists will change their strings every night. I don’t change
strings. And there’s other techniques, like taking all the tone off with the
tone knob on your bass guitar. And you just play soft. You don’t play in
a percussive way; you caress the string, so you’re dealing with just pure
vibration.
I never learned notation. And the whole basis of western music is
Bach, it’s development, going back to what you started with, and all the
harmony that goes with that. Western pop music is still fundamentally
about that: it’s chordal, it moves through chords. For me, with the bass
and block units, it’s a whole other way, much nearer to an eastern way
of doing things, actually. It’s much more similar to the music of Lapland
or China. With a group like PiL, you don’t get much of a harmonic sense
there – The Beach Boys they are not! Not moving that way through
chords horizontally you get kind of a vertical thing with the repetition –
kind of like a mandala.
Although Lydon outwardly seemed to be anti-religion, there’s a mystical
aspect that he seems attuned to – that muezzin prayer wail quality to his
singing, where Middle Eastern music meets Celtic ululations.
When someone can’t sing, you get natural voice tones. If you play one
note or a drone, there’s an incredible pattern of subharmonics under that
one note, and in a way you get in tune with the God thing with that, in
a way that far outdoes the Bach way of doing things. If people say, ‘Oh,
you’re out of tune, man,’ it’s a bit like trying to stop a sunset – like saying, ‘Oh, that yellow clashes with that red.’ It’s all a self-imposed grammar anyway: there are no musical laws; it’s just a filter we impose to
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So how did Public Image Ltd actually come into being?
I hadn’t seen John for a while but I saw in the paper that the Pistols had
split. And then I got the phone call from him saying, ‘I wanna form a
band with you and Keith.’ I’d already played a bit of bass. Sometimes
picked up Sid Vicious’s bass in the squat – we’d all sit around taking
speed at night. A mate of mine nicked a bass for me – worst bass in the
world, very ugly, hard to play. And he got me a practice amp, but I sold
it to get a bit of beer money, and so I had to lean the bass against a piece
of furniture, like the headboard of the bed, to make it vibrate, in order
to get any sound out of it. I got into playing simple pulses for two or
three hours. It wasn’t dedication or ‘I will practise.’ I just lost myself. It
was slightly autistic, but a great comfort. Therapeutic.
Did you all get together and collectively formulate a concept for PiL’s
sound? ‘The bass will be prominent, it won’t be rock’n’roll’ . . .
It was more like, ‘It’s gonna be great!’ And then we just got on with it.
But yeah, it was bottom-end oriented. And we won’t be doing songs with
guitar chords as such. Keith Levene was the one person of all that period
who really got on my nerves, but he was quite a genius fellow back in
those days. I’ve never met a guitarist like him since. His harmonic sense
was fantastic. Me and him really hit it off musically, but hardly in any
other way.
So when it came to the debut album, did PiL really make it just thirty
minutes as the bare minimum fulfilment of the contract with Virgin?
It was this confrontational thing. And there was a bit of a fucking-about
thing going on with the last track, ‘Fodderstompf’. That was a real
mickey-take on the record company. But it’s got a great bassline, that
track. A perfect funk bassline. It’s one of those tracks that is mentioned
to me more than any other PiL track. People love it. It’s got quite a sense
of anarchy – in its own way it’s as mental as Funkadelic.
Coming at the end of an album that’s relentlessly grim, or just hostile, it’s
a terrific release of high spirits and humour – even though the lyrics are
witheringly sarcastic about love and commitment. Did you and Lydon
ad lib all that ‘only wanted to be loved’ stuff?
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make sense. Understandably. It’s just like we invented full stops and
commas, and we did the same with music. Unfortunately, a lot of the
people who want to go ‘natural’ have got no rhythm! They’re locked up
in their intellects and they can’t actually play.
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I think we’d had a bit of wine or whatever that night. We were bashing
on the fire extinguishers. I actually like the first album as much as Metal
Box. It’s kind of rock, but with a weird feel, like on ‘Low Life’. It’s disciplined as well: we were following song structures, and that completely
went out of the window on Metal Box.
The debut PiL album still has some relation to punk, whereas Metal Box
goes beyond rock.
It’s something else. Very total, very beyond. Around the time of making
it – maybe after we finished it – I saw Apocalypse Now. Which is somehow all very zeitgeist.
In one interview at the time you talked about dreaming about the end of
the world a lot.
There were a lot of things going on at that very specific time, 1979.
Thatcher came in, and I just thought, ‘This is such bad news.’ You just
knew great changes for the worse were gonna come. This person was
going to attack a lot of the culture of the country. She was the contract
killer, in a way – a lot of wheels were put in motion at that time both here
and in America.
The cliché about PiL – and it’s a cliché because it’s true – is that your bass
is the human element, the solid foundation. That you grounded the
group’s sound in some way.
I still fulfil that function in the groups I play with. With Metal Box, we
didn’t have a a full-time drummer, we didn’t have any one person playing a strong rhythm thing, so in order to put the pieces together you
needed something that you could build upon. And I was that. I was
always ready to put a bassline down, always ready to lay the foundations
for the house.
Is it true that a lot of PiL stuff was made up on the spot, recorded in realtime?
With some things there was take after take, so it could get quite torturous. ‘Careering’ was a session where I really took control. I’ve done the
drum track and I’m laying the bassline down, and Keith has this synth
and is making textures, and John was really up for it that night. That
was a quick night. But we never made demos, which I think was fantastic. John would often come in and sit on the floor while we were pulling
the music together, get lyric ideas together and then maybe disappear off.
And you’re waiting for this final thing, the lyrics, and you’re fascinated
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In interviews in the last decade or so, Levene has tended to present himself as the ‘musical director’ of PiL, in the same way that one of the Ian
Dury and the Blockheads albums credits Chas Jankel as being ‘musically
direct’ – the songwriter, the arranger, the band leader. Mr Music.
No, that wouldn’t be true. All the PiL stuff started from basslines. Things
would happen naturally. Levene had good taste. It was always very positive. I don’t even remember him ever saying, ‘I don’t like this bassline.’
And often he’d be with the guitar and he’d be like, ‘Fucking hell, I don’t
know what to do with this.’ Some of the stuff on Metal Box, I think
that’s why it’s left kind of bare.
Did you share equally in the production and mixing?
No. In the end the feeling got quite bad, and I’d go off and do the rhythm
tracks in Gooseberry Studio, in Chinatown. I’d go off and do a rhythm
track like the one that became Metal Box’s ‘The Suit’. With the mixing I
was definitely edged out on that side. I used to feel it could have been
left, without fucking around with it too much at all. Just the strong natural drum sounds and natural bass sounds. There was a lot of faffing
about in expensive studios with tosser Virgin engineers. I preferred the
cheaper studios like Gooseberry. And the rhythm tracks, like the one for
‘The Suit’, I used on my solo records.
Ah, the others were pissed off about that, weren’t they?
The reason I was releasing stuff on my own was there was no money. I
was young and not getting paid. For a band like that, the amount of
money that was generated, all I ever saw was £60 in cash a week. We
were on sixty a week, and even struggling to get that. The vibe was
druggy and not good. I could see that all coming on and I thought, ‘I
don’t know how long this is going to last. I want to put some solo things
out.’ I didn’t see any real money until sixteen years later: this lawyer
doggedly stayed with it long after I’d given up on it. See, everything was
supposed to be split four ways, from recording advances and all that.
That was my introduction to the music biz, which is ‘Don’t trust anyone.’ But at the time I thought, ‘Enjoy it, use the time in studios, do some
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by what he’s going to come up with. That was an exciting part of the
process. He’d never show you and he’d never ask what you thought.
He’d disappear off and get really intense about it. And then either
quickly or maybe three days later, bang! There was definitely this sense
of performance.
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solo things.’ I’d come off the dole and I wanted to work. I was like,
‘God’s been good – fuck me, I’m a musician!’ At the time I felt frustrated.
Mind you, if I’d been paid properly, I would probably have killed myself,
to be honest – would have gone mental. I wouldn’t have done anything
good with that money at that age.
The fact that you put out a stream of solo releases from 1980–3 makes a
stark contrast with the relative non-productivity and indolence of PiL
after you left.
It should have been more disciplined. We should have made more
records, had more of a group feeling. And the drug thing comes in, and
you got a lot of people around the band with different agendas. A creepy
vibe. The thing with successful bands in the music business is that you
get a lot of people around the group whose motives are not good. But I
would never say, ‘Fucking PiL, it was terrible.’ ’Cos it was fantastic. It
got me playing. It was a fantastic training ground.
What did you think of Lydon and Levene’s whole rhetoric of PiL as a
communications corporation, an umbrella organization that would do
video, films, invent musical gadgets?
I fucking hated that – having a company with a logo. At the time I was a
bit of a socialist, and just look at the way the logo brand thing has turned
out. It’s completely evil. I was, ‘Why do we have to have this corporate
umbrella thing? Let’s just keep it simple, be a band making great music,
going out and putting it to the people.’ That whole game of getting inside
the machine has resulted in this American idea of ‘I’m a brand called
me.’ Even back then I thought, ‘Fuck, what are we gonna do? We’re
going to make a film? We’re going to do nothing!’ And that’s why I irritated people, because I’d take the piss a bit.
You once said PiL was three emotional cripples on three different drugs.
Or was it ‘four’?
I stand by that! It was hardly four sound, mature people. It was four
emotional cripples, unfortunately on different drugs. If we had been on
the same drugs, we might have kept it together a bit longer! Some people
on heroin, some on speed, some on very strong dope, some on combinations thereof. I was a speed freak. I learned not to do that – I laid off it
at the end of PiL. And then I went back a few years later. But yeah, I was
into powders in a big way. And drinking. Drinking and powders. I
wasn’t a dope smoker. Never liked hallucinogens too much.
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The rock god who’s holed up, becomes a recluse, goes a bit potty?
Not with John as the rock god, but that general vibe with some of the
people on that scene. I don’t think he ever saw himself as a rock god as
such. That would be unfair. But there was that kind of vibe – withdrawing from the world a bit. A feeling that this drama, in here, is where it’s
at, more than going out there, out into the world. And I was nineteen
and I wanted to go out and do stuff. Play gigs.
What did Jeanette Lee and Dave Crowe, the two non-musician members
of PiL, contribute?
I dunno, to be honest. With Jeanette, I didn’t like her, ’cos it was like,
‘What the fuck do you do? Hold the super-8 camera?’ But the funny
thing is, Jeanette is one of the few people I’ll bump into from that time
where I get on with her. I bump into her now and she’s great. Most of the
people from that scene are actually quite mad. If you bump into them,
you compare notes, but most of them haven’t moved on. That’s the
spooky thing. Not so much the PiL people but that whole generation.
Time has stopped.
Dave Crowe was supposed to be sort of a secretary. It was all fucked
up. Woeful. I was one of the main people in this band and sometimes I
didn’t get my sixty quid a week at all. And at that point I was thinking,
‘Well, John, you got me into this, I did it for a couple of years, I now
don’t owe you anything.’ So I said to him, ‘I don’t want a big beef with
you. I don’t like the vibe and I’m not getting sorted out with the dough,
so I’ll see you later.’
So you had the solo album, The Legend Lives On: Jah Wobble in
‘Betrayal’, which you put out shortly before you left PiL in the summer
of 1980. The mood is totally different from PiL – very humorous, whimsical.
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You also described PiL and the Gunter Grove vibe as being like Hitler’s
bunker.
Definitely. All that paranoia. Which added to the vibe, the edge. You had
people hanging around who were a little bit maverick, shall we say.
Likely to get into trouble. I was a bit of a troublemaker – very wild, very
hyperactive. So you might have the police around. Compared to nowadays, though, very innocent, in a way.
The whole vibe with PiL and Gunter Grove at that point was like that
Nic Roeg film Performance. That was a bit of an influence with PiL.
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Fun. There was exuberance there. My attitude was, ‘I’m free here to try
a few things. I can just enjoy this.’ There’s a bit of horseplay even now in
the studio.
What did you feel about the direction PiL took after you left – the bassless, tribal-rhythm sound of Flowers of Romance?
Flowers, to be honest, flattered to deceive. It’s a bit lightweight. But the
next album that I did hear that I thought was very good was the one that
had ‘Rise’ on. The album produced by Bill Laswell. Anything Bill does
will have a focus, will make sense.
Meanwhile, you were doing things like starting a new band, The Human
Condition, a power trio including the first PiL drummer, Jim Walker.
And doing EPs with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. What was it like,
working with your heroes?
At this point I’m twenty-one, I’m just out of PiL, and I’m with these guys
in their forties. I’d got extremely frustrated in PiL, even though we’d laid
down some great music, but it was like baby stuff, in a way. And suddenly I’ve left that, and just as I’ve left it I meet the Can fellows. And that
was a fantastic, fantastic thing for me. I did an EP with them called How
Much Are They, starting at Gooseberry Studios. And I really wound
Holger up because I was young and impulsive, and after we’d had this
nice meal and knocked back the wine, I insisted on going to the studio.
Just insisted. This is at midnight. But by three in the morning we had this
great thing happening. Jaki is naturally a wonderful drummer. And
Holger was a real teacher to me. He knew his musique concrète, having
trained with Stockhausen, but he also brought a sort of spookiness factor – there was a spiritual thing going on.
Czukay must have just done his album Movies, right? The one where he
used a short-wave radio recording of an Iranian pop singer for the track
‘Persian Love’. In that NME interview I cut out you went on about listening to short wave, and I’d always thought you meant those squiggly
interference noises, but presumably you were actually listening, like
Czukay, to exotic foreign music from all around the globe?
No. I listened to both, but it was those very low oscillations, which are
linked to sunspots. So your first thought was right: the drones, the random abstract sounds. You’re listening to the stars. Stockhausen used a
lot of short-wave sounds. I liked the sound of ethnic singing, especially
because there’s that natural phasing effect you get as it bounces down
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So you were starting to feel the pull of spirituality at this point?
Very much. It’s always been about that, really. I felt it in PiL but didn’t
articulate it to myself. You’re pulled like magnetism in certain ways; you
just follow it, and your perception clears. I feel so lucky to have found
my path. I’m still doing what I did in PiL, but with a wider vision.
Did you always have this spiritual sensibility or did it come to you later
in life?
It’s a way of looking at the world. I was brought up Roman Catholic,
and it’s a way of looking at the world that you kind of feel under pressure to bury, ’cos you’re supposed to look at the world with the intellect
and just reason. But it kind of returned over the years, and I’m very comfortable with that. You can say ‘God’ or you can say ‘life force’ or prana.
I just happen to use the word ‘God’ a lot.
Music is an interesting interface between dark and light. With PiL
there’s a great darkness. It’s like Blake’s paintings: they’re very dark, but
there’s a luminosity to the darkness. The darkness glows. Rather than
pop music, which is major key, smile-smile-smile, or Shostakovich,
which is sad and sombre, I like the in-between thing which you get with
modal music or with impressionism. Light and dark diffusing; spirit
meets matter.
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from the stratosphere to the earth. But what I really liked was those very
low oscillations. And I’ve driven people nuts, because I couldn’t sleep
without that on at night. It would send me to sleep, which I don’t think
is a mystery – it’s that broad frequency thing of the mechanical hum, like
the heater in a car, or a fridge, that induces sleepiness.
Those tracks with Holger and Jaki were cult dance-floor hits in New
York. There was this underground post-disco scene, people like Larry
Levan, Arthur Baker and François Kevorkian. I worked with Kevorkian
in 1983, on ‘Snakecharmer’, and he introduced me to the whole afterhours New York scene. All the girls there loved Englishmen. All you
had to do was say, ‘Hello,’ and they were like, ‘Say that again, you’re
cute.’ Fantastic memories. Nineteen eighty-three really stands out. I’d
continued to develop as a musician and I’m drinking like a fish, but I
can handle it at that point. In 1983 I toured America as Invaders of the
Heart. We were playing Egyptian motifs, because I’d heard this
Egyptian female singer, Om Kalsoum, who had sold more than the
Stones and The Beatles put together, and I’d started getting into Islamic
scales.
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The PiL thing – it’s nice that people take an interest, but there are times
that it wears you out, to be honest.
I’ve been trying to fix up an interview with Keith Levene. And perhaps
for similar reasons – exhaustion with the subject, the weight of the past,
‘This person’s had enough of useless memories,’ to quote John – Keith’s
been proving elusive. His most recent – and seemingly final – communication with me was: ‘Been there, done that – I’m living in the space age
now. Nothing personal.’
[explodes with laughter] You’ve suddenly brought back a memory.
When we were in PiL, Keith used to go on about NASA all the time. He
had this thing about how it’s still the space age. It was like we had to get
to NASA. Actually, I think he’s living in a flat in Hackney now.
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ALAN VEGA
Suicide, singer
The neighbourhood we’re in right now, Soho – Manhattan south of
Houston Street – was Suicide’s home base back in the early seventies. It’s
long been gentrified, and today it’s nothing but clothes boutiques and
galleries. But back in the day . . .
Nothing but rats and roaches! You know how it goes: the artists move in
and make it so people notice – ‘Ooh, this is a nice area.’ The rents go up,
the artists have to move out again. We moved to Soho in 1971. It was all
factories and, over on Broadway, cheap clothing stores. Very dangerous
at night: you took your life in your hands walking out; it was pretty
deserted. We used to play music at three or four o’clock in the morning,
all-night-long jam sessions. We used to sit out on the stoop, at this
Project of Living Artists place on Greene Street, where we lived. All of a
sudden people started walking by, giving us weird looks like we don’t
belong there, and then you know it’s time to move again. First I moved
to Tribeca, further south in Manhattan, and when the same crap happened again, I moved further down to Fulton Street, where it was great
until they started building up the Seaport. Now I’m all the way down to
the Wall Street area. I’m on the tip of Manhattan after being pushed out
of every place I’ve lived in this city. But I’m not going back to Brooklyn.
That’s where I grew up. I left Brooklyn when I was seventeen.
All through Suicide you were also a visual artist, under the name Alan
Suicide. You did some exhibitions, had a bit of a reputation. What came
first, the art or the music?
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I started out as a painter. I went to City College in Brooklyn. Studied
Physics and Fine Art. I had been drawing since I was three or four. My
mom wanted me to be a physicist or a doctor. But around fifteen I got
into painting – oils, acrylics. But that didn’t really work for me. And then
one day I discovered the whole light thing. I was working on a huge purple painting, just one colour, and there was a single light in the studio
hanging from the ceiling. And I noticed as I was walking back and forth
that the colours changed because of the light bulb. I didn’t want this to
be an out of control factor; I wanted the canvas to be that colour all the
way across. So I got a socket and wired it up and stuck the light in the
painting, so I could control the quality of the light. I’d always been into
physics and astronomy, building telescopes and looking up at the colour
of the moon and the stars. My father was a diamond-setter and engraver,
and I did some work for him, looking at diamonds and the glinting light.
So I realized it was all about light for me.
What was the first work you constructed out of electrical lighting alone?
It must have been 1970–1 that I got into working with light and plastic.
For a while I fell in love with using day-glo plastic. But then I made the
big jump of deciding to do just the lights. One day I was like,
‘Something’s not right – either you work with light or you work with
plastic.’
Electric lights and plastic: they seem like very twentieth-century materials, whereas oil and canvas seem eighteenth century. Was that an attraction?
I’ve done some decent paintings, and the other day I walked by this artsupply shop, and I love the smell in there, all the new metallic colours.
But yeah, like you say, painting felt old. Lights are twentieth century. But
it’d be nice to get into the twenty-first century. Who knows what that’ll
be about.
What was this Project of Living Artists outfit you were involved with?
I started out with something before that, a series of meetings that artists
were having at that time under the name The Art Workers’ Coalition.
Around 1969–79, artists were trying to see themselves as ‘art workers’.
It was a socialist concept. We wanted to get paid when they put pictures
of our works in books. And we started to make demands of museums.
We actually barricaded the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitman.
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So this was a period when the art world was quite engaged, politically?
That’s why we started the Art Workers thing. It had a socialist connotation. More Trotskyist than Maoist.
Was that why Suicide did ‘Che’, that gorgeous paean to Che Guevara, on
the first album?
He was a hero. More than Castro, he was the real guy. He wanted to
continue the revolution. And, of course, the American government
hunted him down in Bolivia and killed him. Bin Laden, as much as I hate
the guy, his whole way of thinking is kind of like Che Guevara. For the
Muslim world, he’s their Che. Che was glamorous – a wall-poster icon
of radical chic. A revolutionary pin-up.
Talking of pin-ups, your artworks have lots of iconographic material and
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tion. One of the people managed to get money from the New York State
Council of the Arts. There were about six of us involved and we kept this
space open twenty-four hours a day so that any artist – could be a tap
dancer or anybody – was able to work there. That was The Project of
Living Artists. Often it was a lot of different people doing a lot of different things all at the same time, so there always had to be two or three of
us present at all times. We were janitors, but peacekeepers at the same
time. A lot of homeless people would come in, and deranged people too.
The Project was located near New York University at Broadway and
Waverley. And that’s where Suicide started. Marty Rev came in one day.
He’d just got tossed out of NYU – they asked him to play Beethoven, and
he played it his way. Marty was one of the weirdest-looking guys I ever
saw: a white guy with an Afro. He just hung around, not saying a word
to us, for weeks. He’d just come in every night. At that time I was working with a couple of guys doing electronic music, with tapes and guitars
and all kinds of stuff.
Eventually I had to live at the Project, illegally. I was saved by a friend
who gave me a sleeping bag, because it was freezing in the winters, man.
In the early seventies we were all starving. I used to eat a tuna sandwich
from Blimpie every day. It cost a dollar. Marty would have a tomato and
lettuce sandwich. We had no money but we managed to survive. Broke,
but we managed to make things happen. We were young and we were
going to change things. This was the time of the Vietnam War and
Nixon. I used to go on peace marches. Went down to Washington a few
times. Tear gas. Got my head whacked by the cops.
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pop-culture jetsam woven in among the lights – kitsch Catholic trinkets
and images of Jesus, magazine photos of movie stars, porno playing
cards . . . Was Pop Art, especially Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book canvases, a big influence?
It’s like a regurgitation. My way of handling that stuff, as opposed to
Warhol’s. In the eighties, when I was showing at Barbara Gladstone, I
had a lot of pieces using comic-strip things. I painted a big iron man on
a crucifix. And I have a piece using Mike Tyson, before he was really
famous, juxtaposed with Sigourney Weaver from the first Alien film,
when she was just becoming famous.
Some of the Suicide songs have that pulpy, ultra-stylized comic-book
quality. The characters are heroic and larger than life. And you use very
simple language, adding to the cartoon-like, two-dimensional quality.
In ‘Cheree’ there’s the line: ‘Cheree/my comic-book fantasy.’ ‘Ghostrider’
was from a comic book that was my favourite comic. It had all these religious, metaphysical things going on in it. Transformations. One of its
issues was titled ‘Satan Suicide’, and at that time me and Marty and a
friend were trying to think of a name for the band. We were laughing our
heads off at all these stupid names we came up with. It was three of the
funniest days of my life. Then I saw this issue of Ghostrider and I was
like, ‘There’s the title: Satan Suicide.’ But Marty was like, ‘Wait a minute,
let’s just take Suicide.’ We were talking about society’s suicide, especially
American society. New York City was collapsing. The Vietnam War was
going on. The name Suicide to us said it all. It was the worst choice we
could have made, though. Held us back a lot. Kept us off the radio.
Thirty years later it’s a little better. There’s all these bands with worse
names! It’s funny we’ve lasted thirty years with a name like Suicide.
Ironic. There are hardly any other bands who’ve lasted as long.
So the first Suicide gig was actually at The Project of Living Artists?
We did a couple of gigs there, before the Project petered out. Initially it
was three guys in Suicide, Marty and me plus this character Paul we
called Cool P. He played guitar. We didn’t have songs really; it was more
a free-jazz thing. And then maybe a year into it Marty started going into
this pattern and it became our first real song. Suicide was like the big
bang of the universe. Pow! Chaos, the formation of the universe, then
after a while the gases began to form little balls that became the galaxies.
Same with us: the gases began to form little songs. The first song that
came out of all that chaotic stuff was ‘Cheree’. Then ‘Ghostrider’.
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As well as The Project of Living Artists, Suicide also played the OK
Harris gallery in Soho, right?
We played our second gig there. They also put on my first gallery show.
The art-into-rock thing doesn’t seem to be quite as strong in America as
in Britain. But then again, there was Suicide, Talking Heads, Devo . . .
Tom Verlaine was art school. The New York Dolls, I’m not sure they had
art backgrounds, but they were very into the visual thing.
And they played a lot at the Mercer Arts Center, although that was more
of an Off-Broadway theatre than an arts lab kind of space, right? But
certainly you sense they were coming out of Warhol and the Factory,
maybe acting as a bridge between that milieu’s ideas of glam and decadence and punk rock. But Suicide, you hung around the Mercer Art
Center a bit and played some gigs there?
It was right around the corner from here. It started out as a theatre place,
and round the front of the building was this hotel where all the famous
junkies stayed. For some reason they started putting on music there. It
became a place to party. The Dolls got in there. They had some heavyduty management at the time – the same guys who went on to manage
Aerosmith, who copped all the Dolls’ ideas and went on to huge fame.
Suddenly a whole scene started there at the Mercer. And we eventually
got in there after a year. We knew the Dolls. Marty Rev was very friendly
with them. He knew a girl who was doing all the clothing for them.
Marty and David Johansen became really tight. David, he’s a brilliant
guy. He has this facade, but he’s tremendously into music and really
funny. He actually had the nerve and balls to come up on stage when
Suicide were playing, back when everyone was hating us, and he got up
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Early on we used to jam for hours. I wish I had been able to keep all the
tapes. I was playing trumpet in those days. So it was trumpet and Marty’s
drums. He is really a phenomenal drummer, the fastest in the world. I was
blowing, and then one day my body said, ‘Al, give it up.’ I had a stomach
that was like a rock. Trumpet is a demanding instrument: you have to
play every day, you get callused lips, you gotta keep your breath happening. It was the best thing in the world for me in a way, because I never had
any trouble singing. Playing a brass instrument is the best way to learn to
bring up the air. You’re supposed to sing from down in the gut, but most
people in rock sing from the throat and they get nodes. I never had any
trouble with my throat, despite screaming for twenty years.
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there on stage as a support thing. The Dolls were really hot and famous,
while Suicide were at the bottom of the barrel.
This Mercer crowd was the same scene that would later cohere around
Max’s Kansas City and CBGB.
Kinda. Suicide played very early at CBGBs, when they first opened up to
this kind of music. But we got banned for several years, for a stupid reason I don’t even want to get into. Then Patti Smith played one night, and
that was what really started it up. Suddenly all our painter friends
started going to CBs. Before that they never went to rock clubs. Patti
gave it the benediction because she was meant to be an artist, a poet. But
we were hanging out more at Max’s. It was a different crowd, a Bridge
and Tunnel crowd – people from Brooklyn and New Jersey – and for
some reason those people got on much better with Suicide.
Did they respond to the aggression of the performance?
Exactly. I just liked Max’s better anyway. It was on Park Avenue and
15th Street, and Warhol had hung out there in the sixties. Lou Reed and
all those people. Eventually I wormed my way in there. I finally got a gig
there. The guy who owned the OK Harris gallery gave me a note – ‘This
guy is a certified artist’ – to say it’s OK for Suicide to play there.
Did the problem Suicide had with getting gigs – in the six years between
forming and punk rock blowing up you only got to do a handful – stem
from promoters and audiences not being able to get their heads around
the idea of two people being on stage with no guitar and no drum kit?
Synthphobia?
Oh yeah, that was a cause for a riot immediately, before you even started
doing the music! We were coming out of the sixties, when guitar/bass/
drums was the sound. Marty and I knew right away we didn’t want that.
We didn’t want drums, although we needed them. One day Marty
walked in with this strange-looking brown box, which he didn’t even
buy in a music store but in a furniture store. This furniture manufacturer
was making little drum machines to be used at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Basic rumbas and sambas. And that’s where the Suicide suicide
rhythm came from. These simple beats. Yeah, having no drummer was
cause for a riot. Plus I was totally confrontational. In those days people
just wanted to go to a show to be removed from life, for entertainment,
to forget their lives for a few hours. They came in off the street, and what
I did was, I gave them the street right back.
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There’s a vein of classic fifties rockabilly running through Suicide, which
came out in your first two solo albums. The Suicide sound is like
rock’n’roll meets science fiction. But the rock’n’roll is mostly located in
your voice, the Elvis-like timbre and mannerisms, plus the ‘space echo’
that seems to consciously hark back to the famous Sun Studio reverb that
Sam Phillips slapped on Presley’s vocals.
Maybe not consciously, but I know what you mean. I grew up on Elvis.
That was the only way I could get me to school, put on ‘Hound Dog’ or
something. I didn’t want to go to school. I needed something to push me
out the door. Roy Orbison, though – that’s the greatest voice of all
rock’n’roll. He had a profound effect on me, the way he looked with
those shades. Elvis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry . . . boy, I was lucky to be a kid when
this was happening.
Was there a feeling at the very end of the sixties that rock had lost some
of its original raw feeling through getting too arty and conceptual and
technical? Rock had lost its roll.
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Almost every time we played was a riot. Then it only got worse when
we opened for bands like The Clash and The Cars. It was riots on a
larger scale! The worst injuries I received . . . one of them was a busted
nose, from the skinheads who followed Sham 69 around. Jimmy Pursey
wanted to go see Suicide, and they followed him. Hundreds of skinheads
managed to get over the iron barricades in front of the stage and punch
me out. But I wouldn’t leave the stage. Then there was the time in
France, near the end of the set, and ironically it was going really well,
and I said to Marty, ‘Let’s do more, man,’ and next thing I know, my
head started going black and I heard this hissing sound. I thought I was
having a stroke or something and I started to walk off stage and got my
sight back, but I noticed my hand was wet. There was all this blood, and
I checked my head and there was this huge bump. It just missed my eye.
I went out later and found this huge wrench which somebody had
clocked me with.
The things that I would see fly by me on stage! One time I was playing
support to The Clash, in Glasgow, 1978, and this axe flew past my head.
It was like a Western with arrows and tomahawks flying by! Nobody
ever believed that story for years. And then I did this solo gig in Leeds in
1987, and Jesus and Mary Chain came backstage afterwards and said
they were there at the gig and they saw the axe flying by my head.
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But you still had the Iggys. He pretty much changed my life. I saw him in
1969, when I was still basically a visual artist. I had been fooling around
a bit with electronic music. The only building left over from the New
York World’s Fair was the New York State Pavilion, near Shea Stadium.
One night I got a phone call, 4 a.m. in the morning, telling me to turn on
the radio. It was ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, with this amazing wah-wah guitar. I didn’t know anything about The Stooges, but my friend said,
‘They’re supporting the MC5 at the Pavilion, let’s go.’ I didn’t know anything about Iggy Pop; all I was interested in was hearing that big guitar.
All of a sudden I see somebody on stage standing behind this big bass
amp. I thought it was a girl, with these bangs, and I was like, ‘That’s a
nice-looking girl – strange-looking but nice.’ And then out walks this
androgynous figure, no shirt on, muscled. He was walking out telling
everybody to go fuck themselves, and he had this look in his eye and this
amazing body. It kicked into ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, then ‘1969’, and
suddenly Iggy’s flying into the audience. Then he’s back on stage and cutting himself up with drumsticks and bleeding. The bass player is humping
the guitar player with his bass. The whole set lasted twenty minutes
maybe. Right after the set finished . . . usually at rock shows they put on
some rock’n’roll between the bands’ sets, but whoever was in the sound
booth put on one of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. It was perfect,
because what we had just seen was great art, and the person in the booth
understood that. That show was the first time in my life the audience and
the stage merged into one. It was an environmental thing. Next night they
played again, and I dragged this friend of mine who was a heavy theatre
guy to the show, and his mouth dropped, because he’d done cutting-edge
theatre, but this was heavier than anything he’d done. I realized that as an
artist I could either carry on down this road and be dishonest or I had to
make some moves. Whatever I was doing as an artist was insignificant at
this point. That’s what got me moving in the direction of the music thing
more intensely, because it was a vehicle for doing something more environmental than painting.
So you consciously saw Suicide gigs as attempts to create happenings, to
transform what the situationists called ‘the spectacle’ into a situation,
where everybody’s a participant, whether they want to be or not?
Absolutely. The confrontational thing, I couldn’t do that any more,
because people are so receptive, they’ve seen it all before. I don’t bother
with all that jumping off stage any more.
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But when you hooked up with Marty you took on the role of vocalist
and frontman, rather than handling the electronics.
That’s what the Iggy thing did. I realized I had to become the front guy,
get out on stage – destroy the stage, in fact. And Marty was such a brilliant musician I realized I couldn’t compete. Some of the early gigs I did
do free electronics or trumpet, but gradually the lines developed.
In some accounts Suicide are the first group to describe their own music
as ‘punk’, as opposed to a critic designating garage bands from the sixties like Count Five with that term.
That first gig at OK Harris, in February 1971, we announced it as a
Punk Music Mass on flyers all round the city. As far as I know, that’s the
first time, except for an article that the great writer Lester Bangs wrote
on Iggy Pop in which he used the word. I’m sure I got the word from
Lester’s piece, thinking, ‘That sounds good, let’s use it on the flyer,’ but
never imagining that punk would become a style of music. But I don’t
think Suicide were ever a punk band. Then again, this guy Ben Vaughan
said everybody hated Suicide, including the punks – ergo, Suicide were
the ultimate punk band!
And yet you were also the first post-punk band – you got rid of the guitars, the drums, you brought in the synths . . .
People have called us everything under the sun, but they could never categorize us. I used to say, ‘We’re a country’n’eastern band.’ We’ve been
called techno, electronic, punk, post-punk, glitter, industrial, psychobilly. I always say it’s Suicide music.
You mentioned the street edge to Suicide, but there’s two sides to the
songs. On the one hand things like ‘Frankie Teardrop’ or ‘Harlem’,
which are apocalyptic, society’s bubbling over with tension and dread,
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You mentioned having dabbled in electronic music before this Iggy
epiphany. Were you into musique concrète and all that stuff?
I grew up with my father’s country-and-western and my mother’s opera,
and then I had rock’n’roll, which I had to listen to under the covers,
because they didn’t want me to be into it. And then I got into modern
classical. I did the first scratch records of all time, scratching Bartók
records to make them more interesting. A friend had a two-track tape
recorder, and I started using toy sounds and feedback from guitars. And
you could make the tape recorder itself feed back. It was related to being
into science, building telescopes and spectroscopes.
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on the edge of collapse. And then, on the other, Suicide songs that are
almost religious, with hymnal, trance-inducing melodies and this devotional aura of tenderness and grace. A dichotomy between living in hell
but dreaming of heaven?
That’s how I see my sculptures. Because they’re made of garbage that’s
been thrown out, but they’re Vega icons.
Do you have religious or mystical feelings?
I guess I do. I don’t subscribe to any particular religion. To me there is
some power out there. One day I did have this religious experience: I was
staying in somebody’s home for three months, this brilliant art critic, and
I found a pamphlet on infinity, about ninety pages, written by this college professor, and I started reading it, and I wasn’t stoned or anything.
But suddenly I saw it, those two parallel lines that start out at infinity
and meet. I got a picture of the universe and I understood what infinity
was for like three seconds or one tenth of a second. And then it was
gone. I tried to hold on to it, but it dissolved. I put the book away, and
then a day or two later I wanted to read it again. I looked all over, but it
had gone. It was like the book never existed.
There’s quite a lot of Christian imagery in your art pieces, crosses and the
like. . .
I never thought the pieces made from lights were that crazy or far out,
and I couldn’t understand why, despite having some shows with Ivan
Karp, I couldn’t sell the stuff. And I didn’t start selling stuff until later,
when I was showing at Barbara Gladstone’s gallery and I started putting
crosses on the walls. They used to be more chaotic, scattered on the
floor, but there was always the suggestion of a cross in there. But then I
started picking the stuff up off the floor and putting them on the walls,
and there were recognizable crosses. And when I started putting the
crosses on the wall, I sold nearly everything at one of the shows. The
early seventies’ work looked trashier, like something somebody had
dragged out of the street. It looked dirty. The raw materials I got from
Canal Street, same as nowadays, but they look different these days – the
light sockets used to be this ugly brown, now they’re white. And the wire
is different: it’s more glossy.
Having split your energies equally between music and visual art up until
punk, you more or less focused entirely on music after a certain point,
right?
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Is it true the first Suicide album was recorded in four hours?
Maybe a bit more. A lot of time was spent mixing it. But it was recorded
live, me singing along while Marty played. Except ‘Frankie Teardrop’,
which I redid. But yeah, it was recorded in a single evening. Then we
spent months mixing it.
In the late seventies, after the debut came out, Suicide started getting critical acclaim and there were some high-profile tours.
We opened for The Clash and Elvis Costello. Time Out put us on the
cover.
And for the second album you hooked up with ZE Records – a supportive home?
We were out on the West Coast. We’d opened there for The Cars, but I
didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles – hated it there. I came back to New
York and out of nowhere I got approached by Michael Zilkha. I really
liked what he was doing back then. He’s a good guy, let me have all my
publishing back. Now he’s in Houston in the oil business. I knew James
Chance from before ZE, because his first day in New York, fresh out of
Milwaukee, he approached us. I liked what he was doing with the sax,
the audience-baiting. I really thought he was going to be a superstar. He
had that Sinatra thing, the cool attitude. But the drugs . . .
Was that period when No Wave turned into mutant disco a good time for
you, the Mudd Club and that whole downtown bohemian demi-monde?
It was beautiful. You’d go from one club to another, and you’d see other
people walking to other clubs. The clubs shut at 4 a.m. and you had all
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People always say this to people who want to be artists. They say, ‘Study
this and use it to get a real job on the side. That way you can support
your art.’ And I say, ‘I did, I have this art career – but to support my art
career, I got into music to make money. Suicide is my regular job!’ In a
funny way I did do that. We didn’t make very much money for the first
ten years or so. But Suicide, which they say is totally non-commercial
music, we’ve been been making money off of this thing. We got a Tia
Maria commercial in Europe off the weirdest song: a basement twotrack tape recording from 1975 called ‘Amen’. It’s an out-take from the
second Suicide album’s sessions. Henry Rollins did ‘Ghostrider’ on the
soundtrack of Crow, which sold 6 million copies. And overall the first
Suicide album must have sold quarter of a million copies now, worldwide. It came out in 1977 and it sells quietly every year.
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the after-hours joints, like Berlin, which was across the street from
Danceteria. It was a never-ending thing where I’d go out around 2 a.m.
every morning and be out until eight in the morning. You’d walk out
from the clubs into the painful sunlight, stoned out of your mind, and
there’d be all these people going to work, straight people looking at you
really pissed as hell, ’cos you were looking all punk, fucked-up, and
going home to sleep while they’re off to work. I never had to pay for a
drink, or my friends either – there was an unwritten law that if you had
performed in a club, for ever after you didn’t have to buy a drink there.
So I’d come in with my entourage. In the early eighties I had an
entourage! I’d had the solo hit in Europe with ‘Jukebox Babe’, and then
I’d signed to Elektra. But it got to be too much, actually. I was never
alone, ever. And the women . . . At first it was great but after a while you
find you’re not doing any work. You have to deliver an album and suddenly you realize you’ve only got one song, because you’ve been partying all the time.
Before the Elektra deal you did those two great solo albums with
Celluloid.
Jean Karakos heard ‘Jukebox Babe’ and knew it could be a hit. He
pushed it over there in France and it made the charts.
Why do you think you have such a strong connection with the French?
I don’t know. I still perform there. The editors at Libération told me that
more’s been written about me and Suicide in that magazine than The
Rolling Stones! I’m still a cult thing there, but ‘Jukebox Babe’ was the
one time I crossed the line. I didn’t even know I had a hit. Jean Karakos
had me flying around first class, so I should have suspected something!
Just as you were leaving behind the electronic sound with the two
rockabilly-infused, guitar-driven, albeit still ultra-minimal albums
Alan Vega (1981) and Collision Drive (1982), Suicide’s influence was
coming through big-time with synthpop groups like Soft Cell.
In 1978 we opened for The Clash in the UK and got all the heavy shit.
After that we had our own tour of eight UK cities, and it went over very
well because we did have fans, but they couldn’t make themselves heard
through The Clash fans shouting abuse at us. And we played Leeds and
the dressing room was packed. I was scared for my life, I could hardly
breathe! And a lot of the kids who came through in the eighties were
these kids who were crushing me! Soft Cell, they were at the Leeds show.
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Dave Ball, the keyboard player, has been at me for years to make a
record with me, and I’m like, ‘OK, you’re the guy with the money, make
it happen.’ Every time I run into him he goes on about it. This has been
going on for about fifteen years now.
We are probably one of the most influential bands ever when you
think about it. REM covered our songs. Moby’s a big fan apparently.
And Björk. Sigue Sigue Sputnik, whose second album I was supposed to
produce. It would have been a perfect match. I really liked what they
were doing and it would have been a great album. You’ve got Spacemen
3, Spiritualized . . . The Panasonic guys in Finland – we did a record
together as VVV. They idolize Suicide the way I might have idolized
Elvis.
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GERALD CASALE
Devo, bassist/singer
In the beginning . . .
I was at Kent State, studying Fine Arts and English, a double major. And
I met Mark Mothersbaugh because he was using the art facilities to print
his decals of puking heads – a profile of a man puking. I’d done an irreverent blasphemous parody of a holy card with this character I’d made up
called Gorge, a devolved human being.
So in 1970 you were already thinking ‘devolution’?
I had this idea, a college prank: there’s been art nouveau and art deco,
well now there’s going to be art devo. It fell into that realm of transgressive art, performance art, fetish – taking images from pop culture that
were unacceptable to high art and elevating them. It’s become an
accepted postmodern credo, with Jeff Koons becoming very successful at
it. But that’s what we were doing back then and where we were going,
although we didn’t know it.
Tell me about your personal intellectual trajectory, what led you to this
‘devo’ concept.
I’d grown up very blue collar but I wasn’t stupid. I was exposed to good
things and retained them. If you’d lived through the filth of American
sixties politics, with the string of assassinations and the ascendancy of
the right wing, and you’ve read books like 1984 and Brave New World
and Animal Farm, and you tried to put it all together . . . We saw the
onset of the corporatization of a ‘democratic country’, the manipulation
of the media, and we thought things were going backwards. It seemed
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Written down?
All that was verbal. Then Mark found this quack religious book called
Jocko Homo Heaven Bound. We’d always go to junk stores, and there
was plenty of this stuff in hillbilly Ohio. This pamphlet showed the ascendancy of man from the point of view of a right-wing religious fanatic. The
steps to heaven – because man’s thinking is upside down – go from drunkenness and adultery to rape and murder, and it’s really the seven levels of
hell. There was an ape descending the stairs. Endless evenings of belly
laughs, plus the song ‘Jocko Homo’, came from this pamphlet. That same
year I found a review of a book by this whacked-out Bavarian guy, a
three-hundred-page treatise called The Beginning was the End: Now It
Can Be Told, about how man evolved from cannibalistic apes. In this
detailed pseudo-scientific Germanic style he describes how the apes that
ate the brains of other apes developed an enlarged brain that grew at a
rate faster than the ape cranium could contain, and this created all kinds
of bizarre mutations that became the human being. They lost their fur and
tails, their sixth sense, their ability to live in nature. They had to start subduing nature to survive. And it was, frankly, a more plausible explanation
of human behaviour than the bible. That just sealed the deal – with those
two books we had the whole devolution thing.
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like evolution was a fucking joke. At best history was discontinuous and
cyclical. And we were going through a devolved cycle. People were getting dumber, things were getting uglier, and the future promised in the
fifties’ popular-science magazines was not in fact happening. The world
was so corrupt and depressing – much like it is now, except the shenanigans of Nixon and Johnson were like kindergarten compared to now.
This is the big time – the true end of democracy and the beginning of a
republic-dictatorship.
When Mark and I met, we liked each other’s aesthetics, and I would
spout the theoretical artsy-fartsy stuff, like, ‘What would devolved music
sound like?’ So we tried to make devolved music. It involved stripping
away all the artifice and conventions and histrionics of the bad stadium
bands. We made our drummer drum with one arm taped to his waist. We
practised in a basement and tried to use as few sounds as possible, but
interlocking, so that you could hear each sound distinguished from each
other rather than a wall of sound. Those were the rules. And the lyrics
had to be about real things, about the contemporary world and real
ideas you hadn’t heard before. We had this Devo manifesto.
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When you and Mark started collaborating, it was during the time when
Kent State was closed down following the shooting of the students by the
National Guard. That seems awfully symbolic: the death of the sixties
dream – or one of its deaths – catalyzes Devo into existence.
I was in a little college within the college, an honours college, and I’d
only got in through getting a scholarship. But it was a work/study programme where in return I had to work all summer admitting new students to Kent State University, guiding them through the curriculum. As
a counsellor I got to meet Alison Krauss and Jeffrey Mill, two of the students who were murdered that day, and we became friends during the
summer. And these kids, who were portrayed as dangerous subversives,
were really just smart liberal kids from New York doing what we all did
back then. That day we were all running from the National Guard. They
were shooting into the crowd and it was largely random who got hit.
And most of those who were wounded or murdered were further away
than those in the front line. Jeffrey was further away than me, and Alison
was thirty feet to my right. When the guns went off and people started
screaming, it turned into a car accident – I don’t know if you’ve ever
been in one, but it’s like all sound blows away, you go into slow motion,
everything seems unreal. That’s what happened to me. Then someone
started screaming her name, and I looked over, and Alison’s lying face
down with an exit wound in her back and red blood streaming down the
sidewalk. I just literally thought I was going to pass out. I sat down in the
grass, kind of swooning. And slowly everybody started moaning. It just
sounded like a kennel full of hurt puppies. Even the National Guard
were freaked. We were there for what seemed like an eternity, and then
we were marched off campus and the university was closed for the next
three months. I had to graduate in absentia because I had been a member of Students for a Democratic Society.
That changed me. I was kind of a hippy until then. For me it was the
turning point. I saw it all clearly from there on. All these kids with their
idealism, it was very naive. Just shoot a few and it changed the whole
world. Everybody straightened up and went home. Got their hair cut
and worked for their daddies. It worked. So, in other words, evil wins.
Evil wins over and over.
You were deeply involved in the whole sixties adventures of radical politics and radical culture?
It wasn’t that radical to be against the Vietnam War. SDS didn’t seem
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But at one point were you flush with youthful hope about the possibility
of renewing American democracy?
I used to think that things didn’t have to be the way they were and that
there was a fair fight. I was silly.
So, with Devo, was the idea that instead of fighting against power ineffectually, we’re going to do this grotesque cartoon of it?
The choices at that point were either join the Weather Underground and
start trying to assassinate some of these evil people, because that was
their modus operandi – killing anybody who tried to make a difference
in this society or give people hope – or have just a creative whacked-out
Dada art response. That’s what Devo was.
And was all this formulated during the three months when Kent was
closed down?
It really took hold after I graduated. I was headed for a career teaching
art, and I actually did that for one semester and then got fired. I had the
kids keeping their own journals and sketchbooks. They all wanted to be
told how to do it, and I said, ‘You’re missing the point.’ And I brought
in six sketchbooks from my graduate-student art friends to show them,
and one was Mark Mothersbaugh’s. I wasn’t stupid; I knew what the
limits of showing imagery in school were, so I didn’t show the X-rated
stuff. But in the lunch break of this two-and-a-half-hour class a girl student went back in the room and picked up Mark’s sketchbook and
thumbed through it until she found the hardcore stuff. Things like
Mark’s self-portrait of himself as a butcher-doctor, where he’d take illustrations out of medical books and alter them, putting himself in as the
doctor but holding two halves of a baby coming out of a woman,
because he’d had to saw the baby up to save the woman. The next thing
I know I’m getting summoned over the loudspeaker system. I walk into
the dean’s office, and she’s there and it’s a scene out of a bad movie. She’s
weeping, with her head down, and she looks up at me and then looks
away right away. And there’s this right-wing conservative guy in a bad
suit, and he points to Mark’s sketchbook and says, ‘Gerald, did you
bring this to class today?’ And I go, ‘But see those marked pages, those
are the only ones I showed.’ And he’s like, ‘Gerald, did you bring this
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radical at the time. We just happened to be on the point of getting to
where we are now, where it’s a corporate, feudal society. Now there is no
real freedom, just consumer freedom.
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book into school?’ And then, ‘You can go now.’ But being fired just
threw me down the tunnel towards music. I’d just shut one door, so I
might as well go further down with music.
So you’d been in bands then?
I started by playing blues: classic rural blues, electric Delta blues,
Chicago blues. I loved all that stuff and I was in a band that played it.
Mark was playing in a band that did Yes and ELP covers. He had long
hair down to his waist, and this rich friend bought him a bunch of keyboards, so he’d sit there behind a stack of keyboards. That was what
made it interesting, me with these blues roots and him with his prog. We
said we’re going to go the other way here and make outer-space caveman
music. I told him to take the synths and make the most bizarre scary
sounds you can make – ‘Don’t do “pretty”.’ We were into Captain
Beefheart and weird stuff like Morton Subotnik and Terry Riley. All that
got incorporated. I love those shitty early Devo recordings; they were so
bizarre. With those early, early electronic drums. Mark’s brother Jim created an electronic drum set with Remo drum pads hooked up to guitar
pickups and all welded to a V-shape frame. Then he had them going
through a mixer. So it was an eight-channel home-made set of electronic
drums and, of course, they would mis-trigger and just fuck up. That’s on
the early recordings, before we found Alan Myers, just an incredible,
metronomic drummer.
There’s a thing you do with the bass that I really like, on ‘Come Back
Jonee’ and ‘Sloppy’, where it kind of rolls and bulges . . .
I was trying to do something that would have really required an electronic sound but I was trying to do it with a regular bass guitar. Kind of
squirty, liquid sounding.
Gloopy, yet dynamic – really revving the songs up. The visual side of
Devo, was that more your side of things, given your ambitions to be a
film director?
Mark wrote more of the music; I wrote more of the lyrics and did the
stage shows and the videos. He could program synths and understand
a patch bay; I knew how to shoot footage and edit it. But all the concepts were completely collaborative. Then we started working on it full
time, having horrible jobs to subsidise it. I was a projectionist in a
porno theatre, a counsellor at a methadone clinic, a graphic artist at a
janitorial supply firm. That’s how I found Devo’s yellow suits. I used
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What do you think of those ‘environmental’ theories that abound in rock
history, where a certain city breeds a spirit or attitude that manifest itself
in a music scene? The mystique that built up around Akron in 1978 must
be one of the most unlikely examples of that.
I always thought that was totally bizarre. But it’s always been that way:
a city is anointed, the media creates a myth and makes it come true.
Because frankly there’s always talented and creative people everywhere.
So really it’s who gets the shot. The city is anointed, and they scour the
city for anybody with half a brain and half a talent.
Akron as an ailing industrial city seems similar to key post-punk towns
in England like Sheffield and Manchester, post-industrial cities where –
no coincidence, surely – the Devo vision was warmly embraced.
Akron’s rubber business started to fail and started to move out. The
town was imploding and falling apart, and it was very Manchester and
Liverpool – bleak and decaying and dangerous.
Apart from Devo, did that give Akron’s music a particular character?
Chrissie Hynde was from there, but she really formed The Pretenders in
London and broke out of that city. The actual rock legacy of that area is
more a late sixties/early seventies thing: Joe Walsh and James Gang, The
Raspberries. That really was a home-grown scene. In terms of Devo,
Akron was the perfect house of pain – big enough to be a real city, industrial and nasty. Close enough to the centre of things so that you’re aware
that what’s really hip is coming out of New York, but far enough out of
it that you’re just scrounging and bottom-feeding. It’s boot camp. If you
can make it out of Akron, you can make it out of anywhere.
You guys had a real hunger to make it, to break out of there?
Oh yeah. People never knew how hard we worked to push Devo to
enough of a critical mass that it mattered. We practised day and night. At
weekends. When other people were out getting loaded and getting laid,
we were writing songs and playing over and over until we got good. We
put out two self-produced singles on Booji Boy, our own label. Drove
down to Cincinnati with enough cash to get 2,000 copies pressed at
Queen City Records. Mark and I sat up endless nights gluing together
the covers that we printed and then putting the records in envelopes and
mailing them out. Getting them to Drome in Cleveland, Bomp in LA,
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my college degree and everything I knew how to do to survive in
Akron, Ohio.
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Stiff in London. And then I’d call up and pretend to be the manager. Or
I’d drive to New York and book us into clubs. And since we wore suits
they never knew it was me all along, never connected me with the guy
who came in earlier with a briefcase and wearing a sweater and corduroy
pants to give them a 7-inch single and a promo shot.
It’s quite hard to recapture just how grotesque and twisted and defective
those early Devo singles sounded – the herky-jerky rhythms, the shrill
chants. It was the complete opposite to the loose, fluent soft-rock aesthetic of the time.
Those first singles sound like they were made in a cold basement, which
they were. We were cold, and also we were hardly playing in front of
people at all back then, so we weren’t into high-energy entertainment.
The getting good at performance came after those singles.
Was that sound – stilted rhythms, nasal, geeky voices with no R&B in
them – an attempt to make a true white suburban sound?
Pretty much. We were not going to try and compete with true black
musicians who were great. We had to exploit who we were, which was
pissed-off punk scientists with a plan – suburban robots for real.
Nobody was a leading man. Nobody was a big macho screamer.
The herky way the music moves and the jerky way Devo moved on stage
fits together. Mark Mothersbaugh told me you’d stolen some moves from
a constructivist ballet!
We watched a European production where they tried to restage Victory
Over the Sun, Malevich’s Russian constructivist play. And it really got us
off – it was unbelievable, the costumes, the look of the stage, the way
people moved. Those people were so far ahead. I mean, I’m not complaining about the times I grew up in because in retrospect it’s about as
good as it gets. But if I could I have been alive at any other time it would
be Europe in the twenties. All that early painting and theatre and dance!
Those guys laid down the twentieth century. All the ideas and themes
that would play out for the rest of the century, they really did it.
Speaking as a British person, I do enjoy Devo’s vein of scatological
humour. All the talk in interviews about how pop culture needs an
enema. Characters like Poot Man.
That all goes back to Kent State. I was Gorge and Poot Man was his sidekick. Gorge had this enema bag bandolero full of milk. Poot Man wore
black wrestling shorts and a black full-face mask like those Mexican
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People were more shockable in those days. There’s a whole vein of icky
sick humour in Devo that seems to come from a deep-seated disgust
with the human body. A tinge of misogyny at times. I know you were
into Henry Miller . . . were you also into that whole area of avantpornography, things like Georges Bataille?
Yes. When Jeff Koons did that show with Cicciolina, it was unbelievable
. . . If I had turned one degree to the right or left in 1975, I might have
ended up there. It’s like the Nine Inch Nails song, ‘Closer’ – getting closer
to God through intense forbidden activities that obviously everybody
knows are, rather than being evil, what they need and what they want.
But in an upside-down Christian world, it’s supposed to be filth. Either
that or it’s supposed to be meaningless. So long as you can get rid of the
meaning of content you’re allowed to do anything in capitalist culture.
Meaning is the number-one enemy. If you render anything trivial and
meaningless, then you’re allowed to deal with the subject.
In one early interview you go on about how all those sixties ideas – love,
understanding, freedom, self-expression, getting in touch with your
innermost feelings – had degenerated into a kind of soft-core mysticism.
That’s what we thought. We felt that individuality and rebellion are
obsolete in corporate society. So you get up on stage and dress like
maintenance-worker geeks, and then play this very precise music that’s
like if James Brown had turned into a robot.
It sounds like a very bleak world view. Was it a sort of post-sixties
burned, won’t-get-fooled-again cynicism?
All I can say is I wish we hadn’t been right, that it was just a posture. I
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wrestlers, and he never walked, he went around like a monkey with his
knuckles on the ground and his knees bent. We’d go to the faculty art
shows and graduate-student art shows and see the endless mindless landscapes and still lifes. The art was bad and derivative, and Poot Man
would lift his ass in the air towards one of these paintings or rub his ass
on the artwork and hold his nose. And every time Poot Man would take
a pretend shit on bad art, I would give him a reward of sucking milk
through the enema tube. And I’d pet him on the head. Immediately people would be horrified and disgusted and move out of the way. And
somebody would go get security. And after two or three of these things,
then they’d be waiting for us. I’m sorry, Simon, it all sounds soft-core
now, but it didn’t take much . . .
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can’t believe what I’m living through now. It’s a horror show. I’ve lived
to see the end of democracy. The 2000 election installed the son of an expresident and CIA man, surrounded by a regime that came from the
Cold War. With their military and oil interests, they’re now trying to
strip away any true democracy for a full-on military republic. He’s stupid and mean and grotesque and retro. He’s bullying everyone and trying to destabilize the world. It’s a corporate, feudal society where the
mob can be manipulated by right-wing TV pundits.
As part of your parody of regimentation, you did that track ‘Devo
Corporate Anthem’, which seems prescient. As I recall, it was much later
that we learned about how employees in Japan were starting the working day with the company anthem.
We got that from Rollerball, a really good 1975 movie which had the
corporate anthem idea.
That must have been an idea floating around in the mid-seventies – that
nation states would dissolve and be replaced by gigantic multinational
corporations. In Network, from the following year, 1976, there’s that
financier character who’s developed a bizarre corporate cosmology: ‘You
have meddled with the primal forces of NATURE, Mr Beale . . . There is
no America. There is no Democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and
AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the
nations of the world today . . . the world is a BUSINESS.’
That’s fantastic, that movie, but Network couldn’t exist without an even
better movie: A Face in the Crowd, by Elia Kazan, from 1957.
Oh, the one about the hillbilly singer who becomes a TV star and then a
cracker-barrel populist demagogue.
He develops the canned-applause machine and he’s embraced by every
sponsor and all the right-wing politicians, who use him as a mouthpiece.
It’s right on the money, as fresh as watching Dr Strangelove.
Talking of corporations, tell me the story of how Devo played off Warner
Bros against Virgin Records.
That’s what it looked like because that’s how the record companies and
the press wanted to portray us – as both incredibly evil masterminds and
Nazi clowns. What really happened is that Warners would not come
clean and make us a deal. We told them we didn’t want to make a deal
through David Bowie because we didn’t like his lawyer and his production company Bewlay Brothers taking all of the money and doling it
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That sounds like an unusual situation to be in – recording your debut
album before there’s a deal in place.
Because nobody would deal straight with us, and then they just turned
around and made us look like we were incredibly scheming. And it’s not
even true!
But how was working with Eno in Conny Plank’s studio near Cologne?
Did Brian break out the Oblique Strategies pack?
It was great. We had the cards out. And plenty of pot.
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! sounds a lot different from the
second album, Duty Now for the Future, which is so dry and clinical.
Whereas the debut has got this wet, glistening, abjectly dripping quality,
perfect for the lyrics to songs like ‘(I Saw My Baby Getting) Sloppy’ and
‘Shrivel Up’. The latter’s about mortality, gleefully gloating that your
‘maw’ is gonna die. What’s the story behind ‘Sloppy’?
That’s one of the only songs we didn’t really write. We had this friend
from Kent State, a brilliant acid casualty and great artist called General
Jacket. He had done so many trips. Where Charles Manson went into
the evil zone, he went into the beatific zone. He had written ‘Sloppy’,
and we wanted to honour him and do a rendition of it. We added some
changes to the words and put the lyrics to a different kind of beat and
music. We were never sure what it meant. It just made us laugh. It’s back
to that scatological side, and sexual innuendo: ‘I think I missed the hole.’
By the third album, Freedom of Choice – and the breakthrough hit
‘Whip It’ – it’s like you’re playing a kind of disco-rock.
That’s Devo getting more influenced by the larger culture and being able
to play better, so that it came together in a way that ends up more ‘commercial’. We wanted to do Devo R&B. ‘Whip It’ was inspired by
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back to us. We wanted a direct deal. But they wouldn’t commit. So in the
meantime we went ahead and recorded the album with Brian Eno without a commitment from Warners. Then Richard Branson descended
upon us and spun this story and got us to sign for half the world with
Virgin. But because somebody at Warners had given the band money to
fly over to see Brian Eno, that gave them – they thought – the right of
first refusal for the world, not just for America, Canada and Japan. So
Branson sat down with Warners and they all decided they’d cut the deal
that worked for them and just tell us what it would be. It wasn’t a good
deal at all.
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Gravity’s Rainbow, where Pynchon’s got parodies of American ‘You can
do it’ self-help books.
The promo still stands up as a high point of the pop video form. Creepy
as hell, even now.
It’s supposed to be creepy. We were horrified by Reagan and the fact that
he was going to be president. So we were just making fun of myths of
cowboys in their cabins in the west. We had $15,000 and one day to do
it. It was based on a magazine I had found, a fifties gentlemen’s magazine
with soft-core nudies. There was an article about a dude ranch owned by
an ex-stripper and her husband, where part of the entertainment for the
guest was he’d whip her clothes off in the corral.
That bit where the woman’s legs start trembling in fear is indescribably
abject. It’s one of several moments in the video where I think both of
(early) David Lynch and Luis Buñuel.
It’s naughty. It’s just exquisitely stupid. And that’s another thing we were
consciously doing. We wanted to do things that were so on purpose stupid.
You had these various rock-star patrons, like Bowie and Eno, and you
can certainly see why there’d be some affinity between them and Devo.
But the fact that Neil Young was a fan and a supporter seems really
unlikely!
He’s really a strange and complicated guy. And really tense. Very smart
and very conflicted. We thought, ‘Ho ho ho, the grandfather of granola
rock wants to meet us.’ But I loved his early music. Neil let me direct and
Devo perform in a scene in Human Highway, his movie, where we’re
nuclear-waste workers in Linear Valley. He said, ‘You decide what you
want to do,’ so we decided we were waste workers pissed off about our
job, loading leaky barrels of nuclear waste, and singing ‘Worried Man’.
They built a whole set with a loading dock and got a truck in there. It
was the only time in years that I got to use 35mm film.
Do you think Devo influenced Young when he did his controversial synthesizer album Trans?
It wasn’t just us, but certainly we were one of a number of New Wave
influences on that album. We got thrown in with New Wave, but at least
we were what was new about New Wave, as opposed to all those groups
that were just like sixties garage punk bands. I don’t think anybody else
looked or sounded like Devo.
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When did you feel like the industry was taking over again? Was it not long
after ‘Through Being Cool’ and the fourth album, New Traditionalists?
Yeah, you just sniffed that sea change and knew what was happening.
And thought, ‘What do we do?’
Devo had been crying out for something like MTV to exist for years,
because you were so into the video form and wanted to do laser-disc
albums. But after that initial period of playing cool stuff – including lots
of Devo promos – what MTV turned out to be must have proved bitterly
disappointing.
It backfired on us. At the start they came to us and begged us . . . I mean,
we had five videos in the can before MTV existed. And then Bob Pitman
and John Sykes took us to an Italian restaurant and pitched us the MTV
idea, told us why we should give MTV our videos for free. And, of
course, still being idealistic artists, we really thought, ‘This is it, they
understand what we’ve been trying to do all along.’ From 1974 onwards
we didn’t even really want to make records; we wanted to make video
discs with film shorts, our songs driving the story. Put ’em out twice a
year, and then perform the whole thing theatrically. Film it on the spot
and then broadcast it on TV. When they said they were going to do this
kind of thing with MTV, we were so elated and thought, ‘Now we’re
going to be able to do what we want. We can make feature films.’ Of
course, what happened is that MTV got tied into Top 40 radio, and their
playlist was suddenly based solely on what was a radio hit. It had nothing to do with how innovative or good the video was. Suddenly they
took all our videos off the air. And we were like, ‘How come you did
this?’ And they were like, ‘You don’t have a hit.’
The coup de grâce came with a song called ‘That’s Good’, where
there’s an animated French fry penetrating a doughnut. We sent it to
MTV and we get this call from their programmer, and he was like, ‘All
right, you can have the French fry or you can have the doughnut, but you
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Devo are certainly one of the truly original things in rock – a total package, from the music to the lyrics to the philosophy expounded in the
interviews to the clothes to the performance moves to the videos . . . It’s
pretty fucking impressive!
We did as well as we could for as long as we could. Everybody has so
much to say, and either they have no more to say or the marketplace
decides they have no more to say. You do it, and at a certain point you
feel like it’s no longer within your control.
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can’t have the fry and the doughnut. Because we know what you’re trying to do, Devo.’ We were like, ‘Wait a minute – you just had that Billy
Idol video where he’s singing between a girl’s legs.’ And he was like,
‘That’s just good fun, but a French fry going through a doughnut, that’s
a message.’ And I was like, ‘We’re not gonna change that,’ and he was
like, ‘Well, we’re not gonna play it.’ Our manager was like, ‘You really
fucked up now, Casale, you and your hot-headed ideals. You wanna
stick to this integrity shit?’ Sure enough, a week later I give up, and we
re-edit it and turn it back in. They wait some weeks and then they say,
‘You’re not getting enough radio adds.’ So they don’t play it anyway.
That song was off New Traditionalists.
Was the grind of the industry taking its toll on Devo by that point?
Yeah, we weren’t a step ahead any more. They’d figured us out and were
telling us what to do.
But you’d sold a lot of records with Freedom of Choice and ‘Whip It’.
Didn’t that give you some clout?
Are We Not Men went gold, nobody got Duty Now, but Freedom of
Choice went platinum and sold a lot around the world, and that in turn
picked up sales on the first two albums. We had that good combination
of art credibility and financial credibility. But we weren’t breaking on the
level that the record company was interested in. They wanted us to be at
The Cars’ level. That was where it started to go all wrong.
I meant to ask, what was ‘Through Being Cool’ about?
That was when Reagan was president and all these right-wing policies
had free rein. They were actively trying to make abortion illegal again,
taking benefits away from old people and sabre-rattling to the Soviet
Union. ‘Through Being Cool’ was kinda ‘no more Mr Nice Guy’ . . .
So it was kinda, ‘It’s time we fought back.’ You know, I never realized
that you guys were so left-wing. I guess because you hid your bleedingheart liberalism so well behind this mask that made it totally unclear
whether you were actually celebrating devolution and cultural mind rot!
It’s truly frightening. The future of humans on the planet is at stake and
these guys have the wrong vision. Oh, the planet’ll be fine but humans
won’t. These guys are out of their minds. They’ve got exactly the wrong
idea.
People once thought music was a way to ‘fight the power’. Today it
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doesn’t feel like music is a particularly potent arena for challenging any
of the evil forces in the world.
Music is further proof of the de-evolution of mankind. It’s amazing how
little you have to do to amaze people. I like watching The Vines and
Hives and Strokes, but c’mon – it’s like if someone in the TV commercials field said, ‘Let’s make a TV commercial that looks exactly like the
Dodge ad from 1967.’ It’s unreal that you can be a rock star and do these
carefully reverential remakes. If somebody was making music for now
that had the same transformative power that The Who or Hendrix had
in their time in music history, it would not sound like anything we’ve
heard. It would be, ‘What the fuck is that?’ And maybe some people
would be like, ‘That’s not music,’ but it would be powerful and kind of
hypnotic. It would take a while even to understand it. That was what
music then was like. Nobody thought that was what they wanted to
hear. And if they’d run it up a flagpole and had a focus group, nobody
would have thought it would work. But once you heard it, you were
changed. Everything now is just like rock muzak. It’s all background
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MARK MOTHERSBAUGH
Devo, vocalist/keyboard player
Devo as a concept existed from 1970, but as a working band it started in
1972?
We didn’t really play anywhere until we played a show in 1972. We hired
a couple of people to be in the band, and it was called Sextet Devo. We
thought, ‘If we call it Sextet Devo, we can trick ’em into thinking we’re
a jazz band and letting us play at this jazz festival.’ We were an Ohio version of The Magic Band at that point – Trout Mask Replica was something that influenced us very heavily then. We were much more
dissonant. And slow and plodding. It wasn’t until ’75 when Gerry took
a drive to New York and saw The Ramones and other bands that we
thought, ‘Wow, listen how fast they’re playing.’ We thought, ‘Our music
will sound better faster.’ Until then we’d been playing at Ohio unemployment speed. Punk really inspired us to fire it up a notch or two.
What influenced your approach to the synthesizer?
We all liked early Roxy Music, and I liked Brian Eno’s asymmetric,
atonal synth solos. I thought he was the best synth player in the world
and laughed at people like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, who
seemed so old and tired. Eno brought a whole new way to think about
the instrument. I thought, ‘Eno thinks like I do too.’ Because he was
coming in the other way than people who started from the keyboard and
went into the electronics. With Emerson and Wakeman, it just sounded
like a glorified organ, whereas with Eno and me, it was about being the
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Devo came up with a whole private jargon of terms and buzzwords, like
‘poot’ and ‘spuds’.
The ‘poot’ is a dance, as in ‘All dance the poot.’ When Gerry and I first
met, he used to critique art shows at Kent State, and he’d have on a leash
a man he called Poot Man, dressed in a leather jockstrap and leather
mask and nothing else. Gerry would point at a painting and say, ‘Poot
Man, what do you think of that one?’ And Poot Man would either hold
his nose and try to brush the smell away, or he’d turn around and point
his ass at the picture. Gerry would reward him with a squirt of milk from
an enema kit he attached to his outfit. I saw him do that and I was like,
‘Who’s this guy? This guy’s great.’ Everybody hated him, so I knew I was
going to like him. Devo, we all loved the scatological humour. Gerry and
I both had parents who’d read in some Dr Spock book that it was a good
idea to give your kid an enema once or twice a month. We lived in fear
of the next enema. You know, when we were in our twenties we finally
said, ‘Dad, that’s enough.’
Spuds, that came from me and Gerry looking in magazines at pictures
of royalty and famous people and rich people, and going, ‘We’re not
that.’ We decided in the vegetable kingdom we would be potatoes.
Potatoes were dirty and asymmetric and lived underground, yet they
were a staple of the American diet and were on your plate just about
every single meal. But you never talked about them. So we decided we
were potatoes, where Brooke Shields was an asparagus.
At one point Iggy, Bowie and Eno were jostling to be patrons of Devo!
When Bowie was touring with Iggy, we couldn’t get backstage but we
sent a pretty redhead backstage and she gave him our cassette. Then he
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ment. So the keyboard was actually more of a hindrance than anything
else. I used to write songs where I could play the synth part with a fist
instead of fingers! We were looking for a new palette – for sounds like
V2 rockets and mortar blasts, things that weren’t on the settings when
you bought a synth, like those buttons for ‘trumpet’ or ‘violin’.
Our first drummer was my youngest brother, Jim, and he left the band
to be an inventor and he actually created one of the first electronic drum
kits ever. But before he built his first electronic kit he would run acoustic
drums, with acoustic-guitar pickups attached to the drum heads, through
wah-wah pedals and fuzztones and echoplexes. And on stage there’d be an
amp that was constantly feeding back. I have early recordings, and what
he built sounds really amazing now, like a walking, broken-down robot.
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went off to Germany to record another album with Iggy, and they didn’t
care for the music on the radio so they went through the suitcase of tapes
Bowie’d been given on that tour. When they heard ours, they were thinking, ‘This can’t really be a band!’ A little later we came out to Los
Angeles and played a club called the Starwood, and this guy came backstage and started singing one of our songs that we hadn’t played that
night back to us. And we were like, ‘How do you know that?’ and he
was like, ‘I’m Iggy Pop.’ We didn’t recognize him because he’d just cut
his hair off and was wearing wire-rim spectacles. And Iggy tells us that
he and David had been singing our songs and sometimes jamming on
Devo songs to get their sessions started. They wanted Iggy to do an
album full of Devo songs as his next album, before we’d even put an
album out. And we were like, ‘N-n-no.’ We didn’t let him, but Iggy let
me and Bob Casale live with him for a month in Malibu. Then we went
to New York to play our debut show, and Bowie showed up at Max’s
Kansas City. He saw the first set, and he came on stage to introduce the
second set and said, ‘This is the band of the future. I’m going to produce
them in Tokyo this winter.’ And we said, ‘That’s great. We’re sleeping in
a van tonight, we’ll go to Tokyo.’ But then he ended up doing the movie
Just a Gigolo in Europe and told us, ‘I’m stuck in Germany, can we wait
six months to do the album?’ But none of us had an apartment any more
or a job, and just one car out of the five of us. So Eno said, ‘Let’s go to
Germany and do the album there, and David can come work with us on
the weekends. And I’ll pay for everything.’ That sounded pretty good to
us! He loaded us in the plane and took care of all the arrangements, and
we made our first album at Conny Plank’s studio near Cologne.
The high point of Devo hype in Britain came in the summer of 1978 at
the massive Knebworth rock festival, with the group playing to thousands of very traditional rock fans. How did you guys go down?
It went down really wild. Everybody started throwing things and having
fights. We were wedged in between Jefferson Starship and Genesis, and
we got a lot of people pissed who were there for Genesis. We got kinda
talked into doing Knebworth. We had no road crew, so we wore blue
jumpsuits and went over and sat on stage with the other bands’ roadies.
And when it was our turn to play we set up our equipment and then ran
off stage and put on our yellow suits and came back and played the set.
And then afterwards we ran off stage and put on our roadies’ uniform
and came back on and tore down the equipment.
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DAVID THOMAS
Pere Ubu, singer
There’s this memoristic essay by Charlotte Pressler about Cleveland in
the seventies titled ‘Those Were Different Times’, and she says that everybody in the scene was from an upper-middle-class background. Or even
upper-class.
I’m not sure who was from the upper class, but certainly we’re all from
very strong middle-class families. My dad was a professor. I had an academic upbringing and certainly an academic path was indicated. I was
extremely bright, in the top 1 per cent in my class.
Pressler also wrote that most of the people weren’t musicians primarily,
that they came to it from other areas, like art or writing. Did you ever toy
with other art forms apart from music?
Nothing else particularly interested me. I was always interested in sound,
and then shortly after that I became interested in rock music, and ever
since I haven’t been interested in doing anything else. Everything else is
an inferior by-product along the evolutionary path to rock, which is the
only true art form. We were all taken with the expressive capabilities of
sound, and rock music was the form that was making the most inventive
and expressive use of that medium.
Is it true that the first album you bought was Beefheart’s Trout Mask
Replica?
No, the first album I bought was Zappa’s Uncle Meat. Then Hot Rats. Then
Trout Mask and Strictly Personal. All this was within about three weeks.
The gang I hung around with in high school was really into Uncle Meat.
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Beefheart was a protégé of Zappa’s at that point?
In Zappa’s version of history, yeah! We liked Uncle Meat because we
were in high school, and in high school you’re into surrealism and
Dadaism. Uncle Meat was making use of interesting sounds. Zappa
never moved beyond that; his appeal was always directed at high-school
students. Absolutely Free was all that hippy stuff – we weren’t particularly taken by that. Hippy was pretty passé even then. We were two or
three years post-hippy, and those two or three years were pretty significant. We felt hippies were pretty useless as any sort of social happening.
Zappa’s always struck me as kinda cynical and sneery, whereas Beefheart
seems more . . . humanist, maybe. Not a misanthrope.
Beefheart was certainly much more angular. We liked hard music. Or at
least I did. I was more Midwestern-oriented – I liked MC5, Stooges and
all that sixties garage stuff, like Question Mark, The Music Machine . . .
Beefheart is very close to that sort of approach. At that time, if you were
looking for electronic sounds, there was Terry Riley, Beaver & Krause,
Silver Apples and all the German stuff. All of that was a component of
bands like MC5. There’s always been a relationship between hard
Midwest groove rock and pure sound. So it was natural for us to do that.
So is that the genesis of ‘avant-garage’ as a concept? The Stooges started
out doing abstract noise stuff with a Fluxus/Dada edge, using vacuum
cleaners and the like. Then they turned into a primal hard-rock band.
They got less experimental as they went along.
Avant-garage was much later. We got tired of not having a pigeonhole,
so in 1979 one of our friends was doing an art exhibition at Cleveland
Stadium of garages – literally a collection of fronts of garages. I don’t
know how he got them. He might have even called it the Avant-Garage
Exhibition. We thought that was a good name, so we stole it, but only
because we got tired of all the silly labels. This thing of pigeonholing and
calling things by generic names is in rock terms a fairly recent event. In
our formative years nobody did that, which is why nobody thought it
was that weird that Jimi Hendrix opened for The Monkees. The last time
I saw The Stooges they were opening for Slade. This notion of the latest
trend was always a fabrication of the English punk movement. When
our parents or friends would ask what kind of music we played, we’d
say, ‘We’re kind of underground.’ Which meant only that we couldn’t
play shows and nobody would come to see us. But we always saw ourselves in the mainstream tradition of rock music.
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What makes the early seventies the peak of rock creativity as far as
you’re concerned?
Eno. Amon Düül and Neu!. Kevin Ayers. The Soft Machine. The Incredible String Band. The Stooges’ Funhouse. John Cale. Things were beginning to move and accelerate. Maybe people didn’t notice it underneath
all the other mainstream stuff, but it was moving. Sabbath was too derivative of the blues. There’s a real difference between Midwestern rock and
that kind of heavy rock. It’s really night and day. Midwestern rock is all
based on a flowing riff pattern, not a ba-domp-ba-domp. We liked
groove rock that had the minimum of changes in it. Tom Herman’s
famous defining line was that he judges guitar parts by how little he has
to move his fingers. That’s a pretty Midwestern concept.
Cleveland was considered to have extremely advanced taste, to have the
largest concentration of adventurous listeners between the East Coast
and West Coast. How come?
Marc Bolan was considered in Cleveland to be conceptual art, because of
the sickness of his world view and the weird envelope of sound he was
working with. All his teen girlie stuff seemed to be very conceptual
because nobody in his right mind would do it seriously. There’s always
been a struggle in Cleveland, a dynamic between the Midwestern-oriented
people and the Anglophile people. West Siders are always Anglophile.
They’re all Eastern European immigrants, Lithuanian and Hungarian and
Polish. Cleveland was the largest Hungarian-speaking city outside of
Budapest for decades. These Eastern European immigrants were working
class – white socks, accordions and so on – and that was, of course, considered to be the uncool side of town. And we were on the east side, where
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Oh, so Ubu weren’t motivated particularly by that proto-punk sort of
disgust with what rock had degenerated into during the early seventies?
Not at all. This is more or less an invention of the punk-era music press.
The early seventies was one of the highlight periods in rock music. There
was more innovation between 1970 and 1974 than ever before. There
wasn’t this narrow vision that has come to characterize things since. The
only frustration was that we couldn’t get gigs. Only the copy bands were
getting any jobs, the cover bands. But then, after we stopped whining
and moaning, we figured out there are tons of bars, so there must be
somewhere we could play. Then we got off our butts and found this
wretched little sailors’ dive in an industrial part of town, the Pirate’s
Cove, and started playing there.
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all the liberals and the blacks were. East side was considered to be the
coolest part of town, but of course as time went on I discovered that in
fact the west side was cooler! I don’t know what made them Anglophiles.
It’s not my problem! But The Kinks and Syd Barrett were just massive on
the west side of Cleveland, and the Bowie stuff. The east side tended to
be more black people and people of English stock. The black people
were into black music, and the whites tended towards Velvet
Underground, MC5, Zappa. The thing that bound the two sides of the
city was The Velvet Underground – that was the current, the universal
language. Everybody understood the Velvets, and we on the east side
were particularly Velvets-oriented.
Was Cleveland as grim and industrial in those days as legend has it?
I suppose so, but we didn’t sit there saying, ‘Gee, this is grim.’ The river
caught fire once – so? It’s a heavy industrial town. The mayor’s hair caught
fire in the seventies, but nobody ever tells you about that.
So where did the bohemian or nonconformist or unusual people gather?
Cleveland was a town of record stores. That’s why it was the birthplace
of rock’n’roll in 1951. Alan Freed was in a record shop, the same shop
that everyone in Ubu ended up working in at one time or another:
Record Rendezvous. He noticed all these white kids getting off on ‘race
records’, so he started doing hops. Everybody who was in a band
worked at a record store, and all the record stores competed against each
other to have the most complete catalogues. To have everything of everything. There was a lot of specialized interest. That’s why the worldwide
Syd Barrett Appreciation Society was in Cleveland. There were these
strong cliques of people. It was a real hothouse environment. There were
only a hundred people – musicians, girlfriends, sound guys who were
your friends – and everybody knew what you were doing. Everybody
was competing to be the best. There weren’t any places to play, so your
reputation would be based on the five shows a year you could play somewhere. Which meant that everyone was very well-rehearsed. The Electric
Eels, who everyone thought were totally anarchistic – well, they were
indeed totally anarchistic, but they rehearsed too. Way more than any
similar band would have. Everyone took it pretty seriously.
The Drome – that was the hippest record store of all of them, right?
It was the store that picked up on the beginnings of the English punk
stuff and the weird American stuff like The Residents and MX-80. John
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So Johnny Drome was one of those catalyst figures who don’t make
music themselves but foster and direct the energy.
Robert Wheeler, who’s our current synthesizer player and is a generation
younger than me, told me he went into Drome when he didn’t know
about anything and picked up our single ‘30 Seconds Over Tokyo’. This
is just when it had first come out. And Johnny said, ‘You can buy that for
$1.50, but instead you could take that $1.50 and go see the band play
tonight at the Pirate’s Cove.’ This was his attitude – and this bad commercial vision was the reason for Drome’s downfall a few years later.
Johnny would rent this radio theatre, the WHK auditorium – an old
radio theatre from the thirties that had been abandoned and was on the
edge of the ghetto. And this was where the first Disasterdromes took
place – shows he’d put on with Ubu, Devo, Suicide and other bands from
other towns. Bums and winos would be coming in and lurking in the
shadows. Somebody lit fire to the sofa. Stuff was always going wrong,
and people were always complaining to him. After the first one like that
he decided to call it Disasterdrome, so you wouldn’t be disappointed.
Free the consumer from the burden of anticipation. ‘No, it’s not going to
be any good, it’s going to be a disaster.’ They were extremely popular.
You were one of the few members of Pere Ubu who never lived in the
Plaza, the building co-owned by Allen Ravenstine . . .
I lived with a girlfriend there – it was her place. Everybody who lived
there was a writer, an artist or a musician. It was the red-light street on
the edge of the ghetto. The ghetto started one street over. It wasn’t scary,
but you had to be careful. You couldn’t wander around blithely at night.
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Thompson, who owned it, was extremely supportive of local bands.
He’d have bands play in his store. The other stores were owned by fiftyyear-old men, so none of them had the same focus, or they were stuck in
the hippy thing. Johnny was really into used-car commercials and he’d
build these television game-show sets – he was totally nuts. We lived
together for a long time, and the whole house was violent pink and festooned with game-show sets and cut-out characters. He had a very modern, American vision of things – that’s where the concept of Datapanik
came from. Johnny and I came up with that in 1976, this doctrine about
data panic, where all information had become a drug-like substance, in
and of itself meaningless, and the only thing that mattered was data flow.
I have to admit immodestly that these ideas were far ahead of their time.
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Early on you went by the name of Crocus Behemoth!
I had a girlfriend who was in the Weathermen or the White Panthers or
something. She was very much taken with the Detroit MC5 thing. All the
people on the fringe of the political underground always had pseudonyms. At the time I was writing for a local paper, Scene, and I was writing a whole lot, so I had a bunch of pseudonyms. The way they’d come
up with pseudonyms was they’d just open up a dictionary and put their
finger on a word, so she opened a dictionary and put her finger on ‘crocus’ and then on ‘behemoth’. That was the name for the writing I did
that was most popular, so I was sort of known by that.
What kind of writing was it?
I was a rock critic. Endless bands, endless reviews. I didn’t have any
dreams of being a rock critic. I became a writer because I’d dropped out
of college and I knew this guy who’d been at the college paper who was
the editor of Scene, so I got a job doing art layout. Then they needed
somebody to copy-edit. Soon I was rewriting so much of the stuff they
said, ‘We can all save ourselves some time if you just review the stuff
yourself.’ I didn’t have any theories – some things I liked and some things
I didn’t. Eventually I got to thinking, ‘If I’m so smart, I can do this –
music – better.’ And I did.
Calling the band Pere Ubu . . . were you a big fan of Alfred Jarry and Ubu
Roi?
Not a big fan. I’m aware of what he did. All that Dadaist and surrealist
stuff is the stuff you do in high school. After high school it doesn’t have
much relevance to anything. Jarry’s theatrical ideas and narrative devices
interested me.
Didn’t you have this thing called the Theory of Spontaneous Similitude,
which was related to ‘pataphysics’?
Maybe. Spontaneous Similitude just grew out of a joke, although I suppose it has a serious core. You could complete the phrase ‘I am like . . .’
with the first thing that comes into your head and it still makes sense.
Which is not much of an idea, but it has a certain relationship to the
surrealists and Dadaists. For human beings there’s no alternative to
meaning. That’s the serious point of it: there is no such thing as nonmeaning for humans, so if you say, ‘I am like . . .’ and fill it in with anything, a listener will make some sense out of it because there is no
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Wasn’t there a kind of split down the middle of Ubu between the weirdo
‘head’ elements – your voice and Ravenstine’s synth – which were kind of
un-rock, and the more straight-slamming physicality of the guitar, bass
and drums, which rocked hard?
Why is there a split? You want there to be a split, but there isn’t one.
How many minutes ago did we talk about the genesis of the Midwestern
sound? That it’s a combination of pure sound elements and hard rock.
We don’t see that they’re separate. This is a corollary of the inability of
most foreigners to understand the nature of rock music. You want this
separation of what you would call pop versus what you would call serious art. There wasn’t a separation as far as we were concerned. We liked
Marc Bolan as much as we liked Lou Reed. One wasn’t intrinsically
more serious than the other. This idea of pop versus art was alien to us.
So you thought what you did would be embraced and you’d end up on
Top 40 radio?
We thought we were the mainstream. That’s not the same as being popular. What we were doing was mainstream; what The Rolling Stones and
Toto were doing was weird and experimental – forty- or fifty-year-old
men going on about teenage girls. That’s weird. What we were doing was
aspiring to a mature, fully realized artistic form that spoke for ordinary
people and their lives.
Oh, so the idea of being deliberately esoteric or avant-garde had no interest, was redundant as far as you were concerned?
We were making popular music. That’s why we did singles. Whether
people liked it or not was not our problem. In the pure, platonic meaning of the word, we were pop.
Well, Ubu were pretty popular at one point, I guess.
Nah, nobody’s ever liked us.
But in the UK, around the first couple of albums and tours, you had
droves of people coming to the shows. There was a massive buzz about
Ubu in 1978.
Only because of herd mentality. That’s not cynical, it’s realistic. We were
on the edge of being popular, but we were fundamentally incapable of
being popular because we were fundamentally perverse and uninterested. This is the strength of our upbringing. This is why all adventurous
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tic force. Any sound you hear, there is no alternative but to figure it out.
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art is done by middle-class people. Because middle-class people don’t
care. ‘I’m going to do what I want, because I can do something else better and make more money than this.’ If you sit down and make a list of
the people you consider to be adventurous in pop music, I’d bet you lots
that the vast majority of them are middle-class.
What about The Beatles?
Do you really think The Beatles were working-class? Really? The Beatles
were not working-class. The Rolling Stones . . . Sit down and make a list.
Well, I agree with you to the extent that the traditional slant of looking
at rock as an essentially working-class thing . . . it’s not total bunk, but it
has been woefully exaggerated. Art students and university students have
always played a big part in rock history, at least from 1963 onwards.
The notion of street credibility is a recent aberration. It’s all designed to
create commercial niche markets. Since punk this compartmentalization
has been designed to aid advertising executives target their products at
the market. That’s not what music and art are about.
So presumably you had no time for The Clash going on about tower
blocks and kids on the street.
That’s alien stuff. That’s your problem. All this is nothing to do with
rock music. It has to do with the aberrations of European social structures. To do with a guy wanting to sell clothes. From the beginning punk
rock was designed as a commercial exercise to create a market. This is
the reason why it’s weird when it came to America, because what was
going on in America were things like Television, Pere Ubu, The
Residents, MX-80. It was operating on a totally different level than The
Sex Pistols. Our ambitions were considerably different to the Pistols’.
Our ambitions were to take the art form and move it forward into ever
more expressive and mature fields, with the goal of creating the true language of human consciousness. To create something worthy of William
Faulkner and Herman Melville. What was the damn ambition of The
Sex Pistols?
But don’t you think a lot of rock music is about baseness and vulgarity?
It’s about vulgarity if you think ordinary people are vulgar. I don’t think
so. I think the poetry of the ordinary man is great. If you believe that art
forms or social progress must be frozen in aspic and maintained at its
adolescent, easily manipulated stage, then sure you’re right. But there are
a lot of us who feel rock music should aspire and evolve to greater
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I get the distinct sense that you don’t much care for the English approach
to rock, but at the same time Pere Ubu were much better received in the
UK.
Only because of the size of the country. I think the English are the most
civilized of all the Europeans. They’re responsible for most good stuff.
But you wouldn’t have this confusion if we were talking about reggae or
Chinese folk music. Nobody would in their right mind argue that an
English band could play African tribal music as well as African tribal
people. So where do you get this idea that English people can play rock
music – the folk music of America – in any authentic way? Some years
ago a magazine paid me to go to Siberia to see what was going on and I
met [Russian rock critic] Artemis Trotsky. He said, ‘The most ordinary
amateur garage band in America has more authenticity and fire and soul
than the most adventurous band from England, because they’re playing
the music of their blood.’
Hmmm, do you really think rock music is folk music? It’s so heavily filtered through the mass media. Bands learn from recordings much more
than from their geographical neighbours. It’s mass culture, not community music. Folk music doesn’t change that much or that fast, whereas
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things. The best way of keeping something manipulable is to keep it at
its adolescent stage. Because adolescents are the most gullible sons of
bitches on the entire planet. You can get a kid to do anything. So if you
want marketing, yeah, let’s keep it all about how blue jeans and spiky
hair is going to make you different. If you want that kind of world, that’s
the world you got. Punk music won. But that’s not what we were trying
to do. We exist in a different place. One of us lives in a real world and
one of us lives in a fantasy world. Well, maybe you live in the real world
and we live in a fantasy world, or maybe we live in the real world. It’s a
question of what you want and what you get.
There’s all sorts of music and ways people appreciate music. To some
people it’s nothing more than a soundtrack to a mating ritual. To others
it’s a language of poetry and vision. Not everybody has to pursue poetry
and vision through the same medium. Some understand things visually
or conceptually. The world would be an unpleasant place if Pere Ubu
was the only kind of music you could listen to, because frankly it’s hard
work sometimes and that’s the way we make it, so that it’s hard. I don’t
sit around listening to our music; it’s impossible, because it requires you
to sit there and submit to it. It doesn’t make good background music.
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look how insanely rapidly rock mutated and diversified in just a couple
of decades.
Both your points are baloney. Folk music is passed from one generation
to another. It doesn’t matter if the medium of its passing is a record; the
nature of it is that it’s a passage. And involved in any folk music is a
series of common themes and obsessions. Well, that’s certainly true of
rock music, where people write songs that are continuations of other
people’s themes. Images are created – seminal things like ‘Heartbreak
Hotel’. That image has possessed writers endlessly from the moment it
was heard. I’ve written probably a dozen songs based on ‘Heartbreak
Hotel’. Read Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, it’s all about this passing on
of communal images. The notion of being down by the river, the railroad, the worried man. The worried man stretches back hundreds of
years. ‘Worried Man Blues’ by The Carter Family from 1920 probably
has roots back in Babylonia. You’re confused by the commercial
exploitation of the medium, which has nothing to do with the reality of
its function. Because a folk music is of the people. In any bar in America
you can find ordinary musicians playing rock music of such high quality
that it puts to shame stuff from other countries. That’s because it’s in
their blood.
Americans don’t have a ‘blood’! The USA is an unsuccessfully melted
melting pot!
Yes, we do. Only recently, since Oprah Winfrey and the do-gooders have
taken over, has it been less successfully melted. I would argue that, compared to everybody else, it’s totally melted. It has to do with the New
World versus the Old World, disposing of the Old World’s nationalistic
and socialistic prejudices. This notion that you reject the past and throw
yourself into the modern, into the future, is at the same time the strength
and the weakness of America. Once Edison invented the phonograph,
Elvis was only a matter of time. Edison invented rock music; he created
the magnetic age in which we still live. Robert Johnson wouldn’t have
been anything without a microphone; music became intimate, you could
create quiet songs, the singer could be perceived as a mortal individual
with hopes and dreams. All this is fundamental to the creation of rock
music. Also fundamental is the American landscape. It’s a music of perspective and space. That’s why all rock has to do with the car. In Europe
they had iambic pentameter; in America they had the automobile. All of
a sudden the ordinary man had a poetic vehicle.
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There was a point in the later Pere Ubu where your imagery shifted from
‘industrial’ to pastoral.
That’s not Pere Ubu, that’s my solo work. That was because people came
along and said, ‘You write songs about cars.’ I’m a perverse sort of person, so I said, ‘OK, I’ll write a bunch of songs about pedestrians and call
my band The Pedestrians.’ I’m going to do whatever I want. I always
look for the other side of the coin. Whatever everybody is saying is true
is probably not. It’s never let me down.
On The Art of Walking, you have that line about ‘The birds are saying
what I want to say.’ Have you ever listened to Olivier Messiaen? He did
all these symphonies based on his transcriptions of bird songs.
I don’t pay attention to instrumental music. Music exists for the singer.
The only exception is the instrumental in the middle of a show where the
singer can get a drink and go to the bathroom. That’s the sole purpose of
instrumentals.
That’s a bit of a limited view – I mean, oops, there goes most of jazz,
nearly all classical . . .
Yeah, because those were inferior evolutionary forms. Since Thomas
Edison invented rock the whole point of music is the singer . . . I’m a contrarian, I’m going to stick to my own silly path.
Have you never been interested in doing abstract stuff with your voice?
I did that a lot in the beginning – that’s why you can’t hear anything I’m
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But wasn’t there a period when Pere Ubu itself tried to break with
rock’n’roll? Starting with New Picnic Time and intensifying with The Art
of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man, it got pretty abstruse and unrock.
We got abstract, but you’re assuming that everything has to stay exactly
the same all the time. We’re obsessed with not repeating ourselves. One
of our abstract albums might have been us looking at a glass from the
bottom, but if you’re going to know what a glass is then at some point
you’re going to have to look at it from that perspective. One album that
everyone considers abstract – Art of Walking – was to create an image
of water going down a drain. The idea was to define the meaning of the
song by colouring in everything but the thing you’re talking about.
We’re obsessed with always pushing it. But you don’t want to look at
the bottom of the glass if you want a pop career. Well, we don’t care.
We’re middle-class. We’re free.
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singing, because I was totally obsessed with the abstract. I had all sorts
of rules I would follow, because I was obsessed with not ripping off black
music. Like Brian Wilson, I wanted to create a white soul music. I had
rules where I would refuse to bend a note or extend a syllable past one
beat. Until I realized I’d made my point, and it was limiting to keep
going. I like there to be words and meaning.
You were talking about not wanting to repeat yourself . . . Didn’t you
also once say that Pere Ubu became obsessed with not repeating Dub
Housing, the second album?
We’re obsessed with not repeating ourselves in general. But this particular incident occurred after Dub Housing. Our manager was very successful – he had just signed up Def Leppard. And he said to us, ‘All you
have to do is repeat the same album two or three times and you’ll be
stars.’ And I said, ‘What if we can’t repeat it? What if we don’t know
what we did? What if we don’t want to?’ And our big-time manager said,
‘As long as you make good albums, you’ll get signed. But you’ll never be
successful.’ Our eyes all lit up and we said, ‘That sounds pretty good!’
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ANTHONY H. WILSON
Factory Records, co-founder
In 24 Hour Party People the character Tony Wilson declares: ‘Most of
all, I love Manchester . . . That is my heroic flaw: my excess of civic
pride.’ Has being a patriot for the north-west really been your prime
motivation all along?
That’s something I would have said to Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote
the screenplay. The creation of that movie was a wonderful process of
Chinese whispers: Frank four years ago coming up with thirty names
with Jeremy Paterson, who was at Factory, and interviewing them and
getting all these anecdotes. And it all gets jumbled up and Frank writes
the story. I had a problem with the sequence where I have a blow job in
the back of a van, because it never happened. Most of the things in the
film never happened. But the miracle of the film is that it’s a complete
bunch of lies but it tells the truth. The way that story worked is that the
guy who ran the Russell Club, where we did the Factory, was a very tall
elegant gangster called Don. And I would tell this story about how Don
would leave and a transit van with two beautiful prostitutes would draw
up, and Don would get in and drive off, sandwiched between two beautiful ladies of the night. In the movie, that story turns into me being in
the van.
But where does the Mancunian excess of civic pride come from? Because
it’s not just you, everybody in the city thinks the place is God’s gift to
humankind. And people who move down south, to make it in London,
are considered the biggest traitors.
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People who move away are often defensive with me. Like Paul Morley.
He told me you invited him to appear at G-Mex for the 10th Summer of
Punk event in 1986 just so he would get booed by the audience!
In Manchester everyone who’s a figure gets booed. That’s Manchester’s
way of saying hello to someone famous. That’s very Mancunian.
Thinking about the city’s post-punk scene, it struck me that none of the
Manchester bands inspired into existence by punk were particularly
political. Certainly there was no protest punk, no agitprop.
I always thought the Pistols were the greatest band because they weren’t
really agitprop. The more overtly agitprop lines were thrown in by Jamie
Reid. None of real punk was Red Wedge. That would be too reasonable.
Agitprop is socialist, but the whole background to punk is situationist.
Punk was more simple and brutal, which is why post-punk had to happen. One of my only regrets is that Bernard in New Order is clever, and
that so fucked me off. So, 1990, Radio One, I’m listening to a programme on the Joy Division/New Order story, and Bernie says, ‘Punk
was wonderful, it got rid of all the shite. You can’t really remember how
bad music was in the early seventies. It was diabolical, a total wasteland.
Punk was an explosion that blew it all away, but it was simple and simplistic. All it could say was, “I’m bored.” Sooner or later someone was
going to use the simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions.’
I was like, ‘Fucking hell, the bastard’s right again!’ My reworking of
Bernie’s comment is, ‘Punk was wonderful, but all it could say was this
one simple emotion: “Fuck you.”’ Sooner or later someone was going to
have to use that music to say, ‘I’m fucked.’ And that was Joy Division.
I see Joy Division as the first band of post-punk and U2 as the second.
Sure, they can be soap boxy and sermonizing.
Oh yeah, you can hear PiL’s ‘Public Image’ in the early U2 sound.
Talking about PiL, there’s a story about the Factory people driving
around Manchester at night, stoned, listening to the first PiL album.
We loved PiL. We loved them so much, I rang them up and said, ‘Will
you do a number on Granada Reports?’ This is early PiL. They came to
Manchester and did some songs on the show. And then at 3.40 in the
afternoon, John turns to me and says, ‘You still do that fucking club of
yours?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ John says, ‘While we’re up here might as well do a
fucking gig. Organize it.’ I asked Keith Levene, ‘Is he serious?’ and he
says, ‘Yeah.’ So I called Alan Erasmus and asked if he could open the
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I interviewed John Keenan, the guy who did the Futurama post-punk festivals in Leeds, and he said he never ‘got’ Joy Division until he saw them
play a big hall. ‘In small clubs, they were a bit of racket,’ he said, but that
was because they were made to play bigger spaces. So maybe if Ian
hadn’t died, they’d have made it to the arena level, done a U2.
About Joy Division, I don’t agree with John Keenan. He’s from
Yorkshire, right? They know nothing. I mean, the scout club in Bolton,
our first video of them playing live . . . the intensity. The first time I saw
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club that night. We’re running around like idiots. Got the news on Radio
Piccadilly. At 7.30 in the evening I got A Certain Ratio out of bed to support them, and that night was Manchester’s first PiL gig. Fucking great.
Another big band in Manchester was Suicide. Manchester loved Suicide.
They played the Factory club at the Russell twice. When they supported
The Clash, in every other city in Britain they got booed. But in
Manchester it was ‘Fuck The Clash, we’re here for Suicide.’
But back to post-punk – I always think of Joy Division and U2. Two
months after Ian died, U2 still hadn’t broken. There was this wonderful
kid who was a radio DJ and plugger, and he used to bring U2 to every
radio station and every TV station in the north of England every three
months to break his beloved U2, whom no one cared about then. I
remember him bringing Bono into my office, and Bono sat on the desk
and said to me how incredibly sorry he was about Ian’s death. How it
had really hurt him. How Ian was the number-one performer of his generation and he knew he was always going to be number two. And he
made some statement – it didn’t sound as silly as ‘Now he’s gone, I promise you I’ll do it for him,’ it wasn’t as awful as that, but it was something
like that. I thought, ‘Yes, thanks a fucking lot, fuck off.’ Until the afternoon of Live Aid. I was watching, so angry because all the dinosaurs at
Wembley were playing and going out to the world, and they were all
utter shite. And then U2 came on and they were good. And then a girl
fainted, and Bono began to move off the stage to help her. I actually leapt
out of my seat and said, ‘All right, I give in! You did it, you did it for Ian!
God bless you.’ So God bless U2. They were fantastic at the Superbowl.
Edge’s guitar was unbelievable.
The great line about U2 is Bernard’s again. It’s Rapido in 1989, and
he’s asked whether as a pop star you can take yourself too seriously. And
Bernard says, ‘Yeah, you can. You can get a bit above yourself. Like that
guy, what’s his name . . . Bongo.’
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them properly as Joy Division was the Electric Circus, when they did
three numbers. Thirteen bands played. The first twelve, all right, all
right, all right. And then this band goes on for two numbers – chalk and
cheese doesn’t describe it. Shit and I dunno what. It wasn’t that they were
better, it was a different universe. And that was playing to fifteen people.
John Keenan: wrong.
What insight can you give me into Martin Hannett’s contribution? Steve
Morris told me the band were dissatisfied with everything he did!
Yes. But two of the greatest albums in history! So fuck ’em! Martin was
a svengali. He was beyond description. Have you read Nothing, by
Morley? ‘Martin Hannett is the kind of man who could hear the sound
of the moon moving round the earth.’ He had ways of putting musicians
under pressure. Like in the movie, they use an A Certain Ratio story –
their first full time in the studio doing ‘All Night Party’, and on the ninth
take Martin says, ‘Right, this time I want it faster but slower.’ A story we
all tell ended up in the movie, and it’s absolutely true: how he made Joy
Division disassemble the entire drum kit. Whether there was a rattle or
not was a moot point. Certainly the idea was to put everyone under psychological stress.
Where on earth did he get the idea that would produce good results?
I don’t know!! Martin’s attitude was, ‘Fuck ’em. Fuck their heads.’ The
glory for us is that he did Happy Mondays’ Bummed, which is wonderful as well. But all great producers have that moment in their lives when
they and a piece of recording technology come together to change music.
For Martin it was the digital delay machine. Let me tell you a story. My
partner, Yvette, her father’s business needed investment in the early
nineties. Finally I got to some family christening, and one of the guys
who’d invested in the business was there. This guy says, ‘Hello. Stuart
Nevison. I wanted to meet you for a long time because one of your partners was extremely important to me. Martin Hannett.’ And I went, ‘Oh
my God, you’re that Stuart Nevison, from AMS. The company that
made the digital delay.’ It was an echo machine. Echo machines used to
use tape, but the AMS was the first one to turn sound into digital, binary
information and use that to create delays and echoes. There’s a Jon
Savage interview with Martin where he tells how two weeks before he
went into the studio with Joy Division he got delivery of a machine that
was called Digital. It was heaven sent. So Stuart Nevison tells me,
‘Martin was part of the machine.’ I said, ‘You what?’ And he told me this
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The way Steven Morris describes the things Hannett subjected him to,
playing each part of the kit separately – it’s like he was trying to turn a
human drummer into a drum machine.
What I learned from Martin about production is . . . I’m talking to you
now, and you’re hearing echo, reverberation and something else that is
telling your brain this is an open space, that there are plants next to us
absorbing sound . . . What Hannett did was take the sounds and strip all
those signifiers from them, and then add his own signifiers: he added
imaginary rooms around each sound. By the seventies people may have
been adding imaginary rooms to the drums, but Martin took every
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story about how on two or three occasions he and his partners would
drive out of Burnley at midnight up to a car park on the moors. And
Hannett would drive out of Manchester in his old Volvo and get in the
back of their car and tell them the sounds he was imagining in his head.
Stuart said, ‘And we’d drive back and try to create these sounds.’ That’s
where the machine came from. Martin went to Nashville in 1982 and
came back saying, ‘They’re all using my fucking drum sound.’ It changed
the way drums sounded.
I know the band hated Unknown Pleasures. And if they’d had their
way – this is why musicians should be shot – it would never have been
released. That’s musicians. Bernie and Steven get the credit for creating
modern music with ‘Blue Monday’. I like to think that tune is the piece
of music that defines the next stage, after Joy Division and post-punk:
the use of primitive computers and old synthesizers, all linked up with
wires and soldering – all Steven’s crap, in the corner of the rehearsal
room – to make what we now call sequencers. There’s a lovely story
about how The Pet Shop Boys had figured out there was a new possibility for music and were working away in their bedrooms. Then they got
NME’s review of ‘Blue Monday’, went and bought the song, and were
like, ‘Oh fuck!’ And then shut the door for three weeks because someone
had beaten them to it. ‘Blue Monday’ is seen as the archetype, but the
first song of the modern movement is two singles before that:
‘Everything’s Gone Green’, produced by Martin Hannett. And Bernard,
who is a genius, absorbed everything he saw Martin and Steven doing –
because Steven wasn’t just the drummer, he was doing all the techy stuff
. . . So ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ is the first song of the modern era, and
it was Martin’s last single with them. Then came ‘Temptation’, and then
‘Blue Monday’.
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sound and did that to it. He stripped every sound down to a pure sound,
and then used the digital delay machine from AMS and some other
devices to create the imaginary room in which that particular sound is
happening. And that’s the sound of Unknown Pleasures.
That bit in the movie where Martin goes, ‘Stop, fucking stop . . .
drumming, we’ve been doing this for 5,000 years and it’s not getting any
better.’ I don’t know if he ever said that, but that’s him – ‘Let’s fucking
move on, shall we?’ He gave Steve a hard time! Steve’s a musician in the
end. Enough said.
So do you agree with Hannett that musicians are obstacles to the producer’s vision, something to be overcome?
No. Musicians are in the end what it’s all about. The musician, unfortunately, is given the godlike gift that none of the rest of us have. The fact
that they’re almost all fucking tossers is just . . . And the fact that they
don’t even know what they’ve got! The suits are really into music.
Musicians don’t give a fuck about music, all they care about is money!
It’s true. But we don’t tell the public because they get terribly upset.
In the movie, Hannett comes off as a bit of a lout . . . Is that accurate?
He was very crazed. My favourite review line was, ‘What a great actor
Andy Serkis is, and at last he gets to play someone weird.’ It’s like,
‘Fuck Gollum, Martin Hannett is weird.’ [Serkis plays Gollum in Lord
of the Rings.] Martin was deliciously clever. Here’s a typical example: I
was getting a Jag, because Hooky said you can get a Jag. Hooky used
to control what cars we all had. So twelve years ago Martin says,
‘Fantastic, Tone, you’re buying one of the miracles of British engineering.’ I go, ‘What, the Jag?’ He says, ‘No, the ashtray, the Jag ashtray.’
As usual he was totally fucking right! It’s typical he would know that
and would know exactly how it worked. A great drug man, Martin.
And yes, he put on all that weight. There is a New Fast Automatic
Daffodils video shot in the Haçienda where they wheel Hannett around
in a supermarket trolley. That ten-second image contains everything
Shakespeare ever wrote about Falstaff in that lolling figure. It’s very
tragic and very sad.
The Haçienda is named after Ivan Chtcheglov’s declaration, ‘The
haçienda must be built,’ part of the situationists’ idea of a utopian urbanism where architecture helps to create a new reality. Tell me about your
take on situationist ideas. People like Guy Debord could be pretty stern
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Malcolm McLaren was another fan of the situationists, and he was
equally into the havoc and mischief side of them, as opposed to the
despair-laden critique. But he hated post-punk, and above all PiL. He
thought it was the return of all things ‘arty’ – in the ponderous, undergraduate sense of ‘art’, as opposed to what he did with the Pistols and
Bow Wow Wow, which he saw as art but a different kind of art, dangerous and disruptive.
Let us remember that punk was a massive mistake for Malcolm. His
whole idea was to create a Bay City Rollers of outrage. What he wanted
was to have a pop group that was the biggest group in Britain just
because it was revolting. Instead, his pop group was the biggest group in
Britain because it was the most fantastic piece of art of that decade.
Malcolm – you don’t want to believe a word he says. He’s my greatest
hero, but you wouldn’t want to believe a single word. History took over,
and what he created grew and grew. If you’d grown up with the excitement of the sixties, to go through the early seventies you almost wanted
to kill yourself. If Malcolm hadn’t come along . . .
But you were into the ‘under the pavement lies the beach’ side of situationism, rather than ‘society of the spectacle’. About imagination, freeing
the spirit, play power.
Yes, abso-fucking-lutely. Playful. Hysterical. Raoul Vaneigem was funny.
Did you live out the drifting, psychogeographic side of situationism?
No. Looking back, I think maybe. Peter Saville’s line about 24 Hour
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and grim – he ended up committing suicide – but Factory picks up on the
playful side of situationism.
I find it quite funny. I was a fan. I was nineteen years old, and at my college in Cambridge were translators of the English edition of the situationist writings. I sometimes flatter myself that the way we behaved,
which was not to want to be rich or make money, and the way we lived
that every day was kinda maybe to a degree what might’ve been suggested by the situationist philosophy. But mostly I was just a fan. And
stole phrases from them. When Peter Saville did the first poster for the
Factory Club, I cut out the cowboys from the situationists’ ‘Return of the
Durutti Column’ cartoon, which I found in Adrian Henri’s book on
political art, and made posters of that as well. At the time Peter thought,
‘Fucking shite.’ He thought that for ten years. And now, as he’ll tell anybody, he opens and closes his lectures with that poster. He loves it now.
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Party People is that it does capture the aimless serendipity of us. John
Berger, one of my heroes, says on the back of the Christopher Gray collection of situationist writing, Leaving the 20th Century – which I gave
to everybody when we started – that it’s one of the most insightful and
entertaining ideologies. Now, if you’re going to have an ideology, it
might as well be entertaining!
Did A Certain Ratio come up with the idea of titling that song ‘Do the
Du(Casse)’, in homage to the situationists’ great hero and ancestor,
Isidore Ducasse, better known as Lautréamont?
No. They called the song ‘Do the Do’. And I said, ‘Do you mind if I put
the “u” instead of the “o” and then Casse on the end?’ It’s like
Madchester. I asked the Happy Mondays, ‘Hey, guys, can I call the EP
Madchester?’ They go, ‘Yeah, hilarious.’ Of course, three days later – the
group are much cleverer than that – they say, ‘No, we don’t want to call
it that.’ I said, ‘Sorry, guys, it’s gone to the printers!’
FAC 241 was a T-shirt that read ‘Just Say No to London’. This is
November 1989, the absolute height of Madchester – Stone Roses and
Happy Mondays in the charts. But why is there such enmity from
Manchester to the capital? It’s a one-way thing – nobody in London feels
the least bit bothered about Manchester! In terms of Factory, the antiLondon sentiment is the prime reason why you wanted bands to stay in
Manchester and stick with locally based independent labels.
This is a sad country because you’ve got one city that thinks it’s the country. How do you think it feels to the 83 per cent of people who don’t live
in London when they open the paper and see the restaurant reviews . . .
in London? Manchester’s first indie labels were New Hormones and
Rabid. But The Buzzcocks immediately signed to United Artists. And in
the autumn of 1977 I remember interviewing Tosh Ryan of Rabid and
saying, ‘Why did you sign John Cooper Clarke to CBS and Jilted John to
EMI when you were an independent?’ And I can remember him saying,
‘Oh, that was just a little period we went through of idealism . . . That
was a few months ago, that’s gone.’ Indie labels at that point existed for
the managers of bands to get their bands signed by majors.
The first really arty, clever independent label wasn’t Factory, it was
Fast Product. A damn sight artier than us. That label was fantastic. And
then Bob Last signed Human League to Virgin and Gang of Four to EMI.
I was doing the same thing. Orchestral Manoeuvres went off to Dindisc,
a subsidiary of Virgin, and we were all set to sign Joy Division to
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He thought the independent-label phase was over, and if you wanted to
achieve impact you should go through major labels?
Yes. And he got very angry with us. But guess what? Rob Gretton was
doing it all right. Someone asked me a year ago: if The Stone Roses had
been on Factory, would they have lasted longer? That had never
occurred to me, but the answer is probably yes. There’s a constant thing
of giving artistic freedom to our bands. They can do what they want, but
if it wasn’t what we wanted, we’d shout, scream, cajole . . . The freedom
wasn’t just to do what you want. But whatever we did was right, and
Bob Last was wrong, because we had a damn sight more fun than he did.
You mentioned Orchestral Manoeuvres – it seems like there was a really
strong Manchester/Liverpool alliance then.
Yes, because Roger Eagle, who started Liverpool’s punk club Eric’s, was
originally from Manchester. And he was a profoundly important figure
on the Liverpool scene. Liverpool and Manchester were quite close, yes
. . . To Mancunians, Leeds and Sheffield are further away than London.
It’s not just hills – at the top there’s peat. There’s a complete psychic separation. There’s an enormous antipathy between Manchester and Leeds.
We’re anti-London because it dominates the country. As A. J. P. Taylor
the historian said, Manchester is the only city in Britain that can look
London in the eye. Not just as a regional capital but as an alternative
vision of how men can live together in a community.
What’s the difference between Manchester and Liverpool? Because
there’s a big one, when it comes to post-punk. As much as Joy Division
and Echo and The Bunnymen both got the grey overcoat following,
there’s a gulf there. And there were no bands like A Certain Ratio in
Liverpool, doing the avant-funk thing.
One of my musicians from The Space Monkeys says, ‘Liverpool bands
think it’s all about melody; Manchester bands think it’s all about attitude, and the melody will follow.’ Which is quite true. Also, Manchester
is the great immigrant city. I’m German. This is where you came to if you
came to England from Germany. Dave Ambrose, a great A&R man, said
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Genetic, which was part of Radar, which was part of Warners. That’s
what indie labels did then. But then Rob Gretton said, ‘Maybe we’ll do
the first fucking album with you and then go to Genetic.’ I said, ‘Are you
sure?’ I didn’t go, ‘Oh fantastic!’ And Bob Last came to visit Manchester
and spent the whole time here going, ‘You’re doing it all wrong!’
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Manchester kids have the best record collections. That’s true. When he
said that, I flashed onto a Hulme squat in the mid-eighties. Ranged
against the wall would be three hundred records: an entire collection of
samba records, a load of German noise bands, the entire ParliamentFunkadelic. In Liverpool, it would be the entire Love collection. Unfair,
perhaps, but acerbically true.
[Postscript: Anthony H. Wilson passed away on 10 August 2007. RIP.]
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BILL DRUMMOND
Zoo Records, co-founder; Echo and The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes,
manager
Tell me about your early life.
I was born in South Africa in 1953. My parents were missionaries. My
first language was a Bantu language, but we moved back when I was
eighteen months old. Then I grew up in Galloway, in the extreme southwest of Scotland. Very rural.
How did you come to Liverpool?
I did a year and a half of art college there. Didn’t complete it, and then
did various jobs around the country. I’d been inspired by reading On the
Road and decided that being in college wasn’t the thing to do – I should
be out there experiencing life. The last essay I wrote at college was ‘Why
Andy Warhol Is Shite and The Beatles Are Fab’. This was when singles
were seven shillings and six pence, and if you got a single by The Beatles,
your single was as good as anybody else’s. The idea was, ‘Nobody’s copy
is more original than your copy.’ My whole thing about Warhol was I’d
gone to this Warhol exhibition in 1971 at the Tate and was completely
blown away by it. Obviously it gets your mind in motion, but then I
thought, ‘He’s only painting the pictures of the Coca-Cola bottles,
whereas The Beatles are being the Coca-Cola bottles.’ So in my head
there was no difference between what Warhol was doing and what any
other painter was doing . . .
Because it’s a single artwork that only one person can own, which
involves the whole art-world apparatus of money, privilege, art as investment and also ideas of authenticity and the original . . .
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It was very simple teenage, left thinking – the pop thing and the Kerouac
thing and reading Jack London, all that made me think, ‘Fuck art
school.’ Even though I loved painting. I did tons of jobs working on
trawlers in Aberdeen. As a teenager I was living in Corby; it’s in the East
Midlands but it’s like a mini-Scotland. Eighty-five per cent of the people
are Scottish. It was a one-industry town then, a steelworks. I worked
there and I worked in a mental hospital, inspired by reading One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I became the orderly – holding people down for
electric shocks, giving them injections. And laying them out when they
died.
So you enrolled in the university of life, basically?
Nothing as analysed or thought-out as that. There was no real plan.
But you were suddenly disgusted with the idea of official, respectable art.
Looking back I can see that, but I hadn’t rationalized it that way at the
time. I didn’t have the intellect to think those things through properly. I
ended up working in a theatre in Coventry – building stage sets, painting
the scenery. Then I ended up getting a job at the Liverpool Everyman
theatre. That brought me back to Liverpool, in 1975.
Interviewing post-punk people, the word ‘theatre’ has popped up fairly
regularly. I get the sense that it was an exciting space, culturally, in the
seventies.
It was a lot more exciting than it is now. It was left over from the fifties
and sixties – a place where young people with radical ideas would aspire
to work. They’d gravitate towards theatre. And I was excited, as a young
man in my early twenties, by a lot of those things. There were figures like
Ken Campbell, who’s now seen as a bit of a clown, but he came to
Liverpool and set up a thing called the Science Fiction Theatre of
Liverpool. And he did a series of plays that I got involved with, designing the stage sets and the costumes, which took place at this place called
the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun. Which was
heavily influenced by Jung. This place had a tea shop called
O’Hallaghan’s Teashop. It was only open until 6 o’clock and you could
only get tea and biscuits and cake, but that place became the meeting
place for the whole generation of bands that came up. It was on Mathew
Street, where the Cavern is. There’d be all these tables, and you’d go in
and see if your mates were in and ignore the rival tables that were there,
like the Pete Wylie table. Or whoever the arch rivals were.
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So was this O’Hallaghan a bohemian-minded guy who had some money?
He didn’t have any money; he was just a working-class Liverpudlian, but
he was of the generation of Liverpool Beats, people like Adrian Henri.
He was influenced by those early sixties people.
So the core forty or so people that made up Liverpool punk and postpunk, they all hung out in the tea shop and the market?
Yeah. And just round the corner was Probe Records, the record shop,
and quite a few people had part-time jobs there, like Wylie.
I’ve noticed, interviewing people, that often in these key post-punk
towns there’s a record store that acts as a node. Like Rare and Racy in
Sheffield. Places where you can educate yourself musically, or with certain kinds of literature.
Probe didn’t sell books, but that was the vibe. This was all pre-punk, so
they’d just as likely be playing Thelonious Monk or Beefheart in there.
In Liverpool, it was always incredibly eclectic.
At the time, did you feel, ‘This is a scene, this is a milieu, something is
happening here’?
No. I’d have expected that this was going on everywhere. And I’m sure
it was, to a lesser or greater degree. But it was very much the case that
you defined things by long hair and flares. Long hair, the idea of long
hair, was ‘out’ by ’72.
So instead of the proggy stuff, your kind of people – the cool people –
were into Bowie/Roxy/Cale/Lou Reed/Eno, that whole glammy-but-arty
cluster?
The gay thing was a big thing, so that whole area was hip. But I was
never attracted to it. I was maybe a little bit too old for that. I was into
soul music, but I was also into avant-garde stuff.
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The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun wasn’t
really a school, or even an institution. It was a kind of free-thinking
space. It was fantastic. Downstairs, originally, was a market where people could sell bits and pieces, second-hand clothes. This O’Hallaghan
guy rented the whole building. And I rented off him, for next to nothing,
a basement as a workshop. And the theatre thing that Ken Campbell put
on was staged in the tea room. There were all these market stalls, which
is where I met Jayne Casey, because she had one of the stalls, and Paul
Rutherford. That’s where we all met each other.
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Were Deaf School an important band? Liverpool’s own Roxy?
They came out of the art school, the year after I left. That band was
influenced by the Portsmouth Sinfonia. One of the main guys in the
Sinfonia came up to give a lecture at the college, and it was a groundbreaking thing – the whole idea that anybody could play an instrument.
That was the inspiration behind Deaf School, what brought them
together. Clive Langer could play guitar and do stuff, but he put a band
together of people who had never really played before. And they were
almost like the house band. They’d go and do tours, but they’d always
come back and play at O’Hallaghan’s tea shop on Saturday afternoons.
They were called Deaf School because the art school was in three old
buildings, and one of the buildings was called the Deaf School – that’s
what it had been before the Second World War.
That’s wearing your art-rock credentials on your sleeve!
Nobody was embarrassed about being an art-school band then – it
wasn’t something to be ashamed of.
How did you meet the other members of Big in Japan?
The original bass player, Kevin, and the drummer, Phil, were part of the
road crew for Deaf School. Jayne Casey was selling second-hand clothes
from a stall in the building, so we got her to be the singer. Then she was
going out with Kev, but then they fell out with each other, so we got
Holly Johnson in to be the bass player.
Was Holly at art school?
He was too young to be at art school. I got an email from him this past
week and he was saying he does one day a week at the Royal College of
Art. So he’s doing his art school now. But he started playing with us
when he was sixteen. And Paul Rutherford and Pete Burns and Gary,
who became the drummer for Teardrop Explodes, they were the Big in
Japan roadies.
Most rock scenes are incestuous, but Liverpool is insane like that! It’s as
though everybody’s been in some kind of band with every other person
at some point. But what was Holly like in those days? Was he a punk
rocker?
No, people in Liverpool weren’t punks. We perceived that whole look of
safety pins and so forth as a naff London thing. Paul Rutherford had a
bit of the Johnny Rotten about him, to an extent, but being gay it came
across different.
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But weirdly she’s the only one in Big in Japan who didn’t become a pop
star: Holly did with Frankie, you in the KLF, Ian Broudie with The
Lightning Seeds, Budgie drumming in the Banshees . . .
But in a sense she’s done a lot more with her life than a lot of them have.
She has a real commitment to the city of Liverpool and an impact on the
city [through her work at Cream, amongst other things]. At the end of
the day I don’t think music was a natural thing for her to express her
energy and ideas through.
You didn’t like the Pink Military and Pink Industry stuff then?
To be honest I didn’t really hear the records. Jayne and I will be friends
for, like, ever. I’ve got a very healthy ongoing relationship with her.
So, Big in Japan – you were quite a theatrical bunch?
It’s quite embarrassing if you think about what we were doing. I hate
retro, but I know personally where I was coming from: I was inspired to
try writing Phil Spector-ish pop. The Jayne/Holly axis was far more
influenced by the whole Warhol/Factory scene. Ian was an incredibly
good musician, and his main thing was The Beatles.
I saw some photos of Big in Japan and the whole vibe was slightly Rocky
Horror Show.
Slightly. I’d sometimes wear a suit and a tie, but not a Blondie-type
skinny-tie suit, more like a suit you’d end up getting married in. Holly
would nearly always wear tartan trousers and braces and T-shirt.
Broudie was always dressed down, as was Budgie. Jayne and Holly and
myself were brighter, louder. Big in Japan hit the stage as an explosion of
colour. We totally went for it on stage. And were totally embarrassing.
We weren’t theatrical in the sense of Alice Cooper, but theatrical in the
sense of entertaining people.
That’s a Liverpool thing, isn’t it? Bands have no hang-ups about being
entertainers. They’re not into being blank-faced and cool, or experimental.
A lot of our peer group, or the bands in our wake, were far more serious
about it than us. Being slightly older – twenty-three at the time – I could
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What was Jayne Casey like? She seems like a colourful character.
She was and is. She is small in stature but totally larger than life.
Everybody knows her, everybody loves her. And she will be a driving
force until the day she dies.
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already have an ironic view on pop and things like Spector. Whereas for
the generation that came after, The Bunnymen and the Teardrops, it was
far more serious. Big in Japan never had any aspirations other than
maybe to have a hit single. We weren’t waiting to make the Great
Album, to write the lyrics that would speak for a generation. It was just
loud pop.
You mentioned before about avoiding the Pete Wylie table at the tea
shop – was there rivalry between Big in Japan and The Crucial Three lot?
No, because The Crucial Three didn’t really exist as a band. The one
thing they did, the one published thing they did, was to start a petition
for Big in Japan to disband. Wylie put it up in Probe Records, and it got
loads of signatures. So when we went in to sign it, Wylie was trying to
stop this! Budgie had been in Wylie’s band, and then he jumped ship and
joined Big in Japan. And that caused a terrible problem in terms of who
sits at what table in the tea shop!
But then you drifted over to their side, eventually, because you managed
both The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes.
Yeah. The rivalry was playful. Kinda. But you would go for a couple of
weeks where you wouldn’t talk to that lot. When we knocked Big in
Japan on the head, we decided to put out these tapes we’d done as a oneoff thing, on the label. We had kicked out Holly because at that time he
was a lazy bastard, and we got Dave Balfe in. And that was the end of the
band really, kicking Holly out. So we knocked it on the head. And I said,
‘I want to have a record label and make pop.’ Not so much pop, but I
used to buy American soul records all through the seventies, all the
southern independent labels, and that’s what I wanted to do. So I ended
up putting out friends’ records. And because I was old enough to hire a
van and have a driving licence, I ended up in the position of being a manager, which I had never really intended or aspired to. Or was any good at.
Didn’t Teardrops and Echo have a big rivalry?
Oh yeah, they wouldn’t talk to each other. Especially Mac and Cope. At
the time of the tea shop, we were always shifting allegiances. The tea
shop moved downstairs, to where the market stalls were, and its name
changed to the Armadillo Tea Rooms, but it continued having this vibe
as the hang-out. Then he moved the tea shop across the road and tried to
make it an evening thing with music. And that was the end of the
Liverpool scene. Because if you don’t have a place to hang out . . .
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Where did you get the initial capital?
I’d bought a house in Liverpool for £4,900, when I was still working.
And I borrowed £3,000 on it, because by then it was worth £9,000.
That’s quite a commitment, staking something very important – your
home – on this label. So were you a believer in that whole idea of indie
labels replacing the stupid majors?
Nothing was thought through like that. This was a time before any of
these things were really written about or understood. All I knew was, I
had this big theory at the time that Sgt Pepper’s was the death of pop
music, because it was the beginning of the album era. And this label of
ours was never going to do any albums. Only singles. And we stuck to
that. Well, we put out a compilation album. And we did that Scott
Walker anthology, Fire Escape in the Sky. But otherwise . . .
And in fact The Bunnymen’s albums came out on Korova, which was an
imprint of WEA, right?
That was because we didn’t have any money. We had no finances. I had
no income, so we had to sign the bands to proper labels. Which was
really a mistake, looking back on it. I remember Tony Wilson telling me,
‘Don’t do it.’ And I said, ‘It’s OK for you, Tony, you’ve got a proper job
at Granada TV.’ He was in a real state about it, saying, ‘Once you can
put out albums, you’ve got them beat.’ But I didn’t feel like that, wanting to beat the major labels.
How many releases did Zoo do?
Seven or eight. Nine maybe.
You almost had a hit single with Lori and the Chameleons.
The first song was ‘Touch’. It was originally written for Big in Japan and
was my attempt at pop. Lori and the Chameleons got in the Top 75 and
it was Dave Lee Travis’s Record of the Week. Got played on his Radio
One show every day. And then we licensed it to a major, and the money
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So Zoo, the label you and Balfe started, was the first Liverpool independent label? Were you fired up seeing The Buzzcocks with New
Hormones?
Not really. For me it was about those indie soul labels in the south of the
USA. And there were some independents in country music as well. That
was the inspiration for us. Although I did phone up Rabid in Manchester
and ask them, ‘Where do you get records pressed?’
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we got was enough to record the Teardrops’ first album. Because none of
the major record companies were interested in Teardrop Explodes.
When you first saw The Bunnymen, was it obvious that McCulloch was
gonna be a star?
Not at all. It was nothing to do with me thinking he’s a star or could even
write songs. It was just, ‘OK, let’s make a record.’ And the same with
Teardrop Explodes. It was just part of the fun – or not fun, but the whatever of making a record. The sleeve, everything. It didn’t matter if these
things were great or not great, it was to actually do it. And make ’em as
good as you actually could make them. There was no, ‘Hey, this guy’s a
star.’
So was he a shy, unassuming figure in those days, Mac? A specky git. He’s
famously short-sighted, right?
He wore aviator blue-tinted glasses. They’re really crap! And often had
tape at the corner, ’cos they were also falling to bits.
A geek?
Not a geek as in ‘trainspotter’, but a tall bedroom dreamer. Which is the
best thing, I’ve learned since, for pop, because you’ve spent a lot of time
in your bedroom, staring into the mirror. That’s where it’s learned, how
to put it over.
Until I met him in person I always found Julian Cope a bit irritating, his
whole frothing-with-enthusiasm magazine-interview persona. Then
when I met him to do a piece around Peggy Suicide, he charmed the
pants off me. But again, early on he seems to have been an unlikely pop
star. He was at a teacher-training college during the early days of
Teardrop, right?
So he obviously wasn’t from Liverpool! He was from the Midlands. I got
to know him through his then wife, who used to come out with Big in
Japan – she was part of our entourage.
Was Cope as rabidly enthused about music then as he appears later and
to this day?
Absolutely. For all sorts of music. In those days it was music; it wasn’t all
the stone circles.
So never having intended to be a manager, how did you find dealing with
record companies – contracts and deals and money?
I hated it. It was something I had to get my head around. But also I never
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Did that creative side of it go on for you?
That’s the only side that went on for me. I didn’t bother with any of the
rest! I did it, I had to do the contracts, but it was like, ‘Do it as quickly
as possible and then go back to trying to make this band into a great
band.’
So in what ways did you steer The Bunnymen towards greatness?
Me and Dave Balfe would just sit in rehearsals with them and say, ‘Nah,
not like that, like this.’ For the first album, we said, ‘Get rid of the drum
machine. We’ve got to have a drummer.’ We went and got one: Pete de
Freitas was a friend of Dave Balfe’s brother in London. He was about to
go to university. We took him up to Liverpool and told The Bunnymen,
‘OK, this is your drummer.’ It was very much like that. Which obviously
is awful, looking back on it.
What, the haphazardness of it?
Yeah.
All the post-punk cities in the UK had a certain distinct character:
Sheffield with its electronic thing and the J. G. Ballard influence;
Manchester being more existentialist and guitar-oriented; and then
there’s Liverpool, where there’s the choonfulness and the connection to
the sixties and psychedelia. Everything that came out of Liverpool – even
the things that grappled with synths, like Orchestral Manoeuvres – was
intensely melodic. There weren’t any Liverpool groups who were dismantling the syntax of rock like The Raincoats or Throbbing Gristle or
This Heat. Nor were there any Gang of Four-style agit-pop militants.
Nah. We’d just think that was completely stupid. It didn’t have to be
tuneful so much as it had to be a celebration. Even though a load of
Mac’s lyrics were angst-laden, there was a gloriousness about it. So you
could never have a Gang of Four coming out of Liverpool. Those things
you got the feeling were slightly university-led. These were people who’d
read books. Whereas in Liverpool it wasn’t people who’d read books,
although I said earlier that Kerouac and On the Road influenced me
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thought that was what the job of a manager was. I thought the job of a
manager was to turn a useless bunch of individuals – or whatever you’d
got, whatever was there – into something that has greatness. I didn’t
know my job was actually to try to negotiate contracts and make money
for people. I thought it was trying to make a great band out of something, and get that band to make great records.
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when I was seventeen. And that did carry on all the way through with
Liverpool. Wylie would walk around with his copy of On the Road in
his back pocket and he’d sit down and read it out to people.
That fits, because Kerouac and the Beats, it’s celebratory and incantatory rather than a Marxist dissection of society. It’s not analytic, it’s
poetic.
It’s like, ‘Yeeeaah!!’ And obviously on the gay side, there was a bit of
Jean Genet. And Burroughs. But that’s not intellectual. You can intellectualize Burroughs, but he’s not being intellectual.
So did everyone in Liverpool read the Beats?
I remember Ginsberg saying – and this gets quoted in Liverpool a lot –
‘Liverpool is the centre of the universe.’ I think Liverpool identified with
San Francisco in quite a lot of ways – whether it was the Beat thing, the
City Lights books thing, all that kind of pre-flower power stuff. And
Liverpool identified not with flower power the look or the clothes or
even politically, but with all that kind of music.
They are both port cities, on the west coast of their countries. And they’re
kind of the third or fourth city of their nations.
But also each is a city that has an incredible sense of itself, an identity:
this is what we are, this is who we are. The difference between San
Francisco and Chicago, even though they’re 1,500 miles apart, is the difference between Liverpool and Manchester.
Oh, are there actually affinities between Chicago and Manchester, do
you think?
I don’t know if there are. But I can imagine if you went down to the
Haçienda in the late eighties there’d be far more identification with
Chicago house tunes than there would be in Liverpool. Even though
Cream’s in Liverpool.
Another odd, distinctive thing about post-punk Liverpool compared
with Manchester or Sheffield or Bristol is that there didn’t seem to be
much influence on any of those bands from black music – reggae, funk,
disco.
No, although I personally was into black music. And when I was at art
school there was all these African clubs, because of the sailors, and I used
to go to them. But nobody except a few of us was listening to black
music on the whole.
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On the menu somehow?
Unless it was black people in a white context, like Jimi Hendrix. Or
Arthur Lee.
Going back to touchstone authors, the Manchester and Sheffield scenes
were totally different musically, but one thing they had in common was
J. G. Ballard. Whereas I get the impression Ballard was not a Liverpool
author at all, even though the city’s landscape was probably fairly
Ballardian, right?
No. It was depressed economically, for sure. But all those big housing
estates outside Liverpool, they had this high Victorian but crumbling
splendour. And that’s where everybody had their flats – in these fantastic, incredibly cheap, crumbling Victorian mansions. They were far more
ornate than the same kind of thing down in London.
Was that because they were built at the height of Liverpool’s mercantile
prosperity?
Somehow that kind of thing had been influenced by the rest of the world
coming in, through Liverpool being a port. You go to Manchester and
it’s far more stern, the Victorian and post-Victorian architecture. And
Factory Records reflects that. Whereas in Liverpool everything celebrates that kind of ‘Hey, so we’re off to Java’ spirit. The feeling that
there’s a whole world out there.
Manchester brings to mind Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times.
Whereas Liverpool, it didn’t matter how little money you got, it was still
a celebration of life and poetry. Poetry has always gone through the
whole Liverpool thing, and it carries on. Being good with words was
always considered a positive thing. Not from an educated point of view,
but in turn of phrase. And that’s been reflected in the wit used in constructing song lyrics.
I’ve been told that despite all the psychedelic influence in Liverpool,
drugs didn’t become important in the post-punk scene there until much,
much later. The psychedelic vibe was derived entirely from records, not
from actual psychedelic experience.
We used to loathe any sort of drugs. Absolutely loathe them. Smoking dope
was just absolutely naff. Even taking speed was considered completely
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But there’s quite a big black population in Liverpool, right?
I know, but it wasn’t . . .
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uncool. We saw it as a southern, sleazy thing. I just thought of it as this
other world we didn’t want any part of. Although we did all become part
of it later. But at that point it wasn’t part of what we were about.
Did people just drink then?
Drank tea! No, they did drink alcohol, but it wasn’t like a big thing. That
all came later – with touring and that kind of success. And this is all
before heroin had taken off on the estates.
So Cope wasn’t into acid until much later?
Not until success. And you must have heard the story of how acid came
to Liverpool?
No.
Courtney Love.
She turned everyone on?
She came over from Ireland. I think her father had been part of the road
crew for The Grateful Dead. I’m not sure why he was in Ireland. And I
don’t know why she came to Liverpool – perhaps she just realized there
was a scene that she wanted to be part of. And she came over with tabs
of acid.
So there were no local heads dealing?
No. I remember Dave Balfe, once we’d signed The Bunnymen to WEA,
was desperate to get some acid. He was asking everybody down at the
record company, ‘Do you know where we can get some acid?’ And then
Courtney turned up in Liverpool with all this LSD. And she bought her
way in! She wasn’t a hanger-on, though; wherever she went she created
energy. I think if you were to interview Julian Cope now, he’d not want
to mention her name. I think he perceives her as some sort of terrible
woman.
Did the arrival of acid have an effect on the music, like the sudden
appearance of a 1966-style sitar in The Bunnymen’s ‘The Cutter’?
Not really, because we were all attracted to that anyway. I was so into
The Beatles and the whole idea of experimentation.
You were talking about how there’s a celebratory aura to The
Bunnymen’s music, even though the lyrics were often harrowed, just this
sheer majesty of sound . . .
Mac was trying to make widescreen lyrics . . .
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The Bunnymen became identified with the same audience that flocked to
Joy Division: young men in grey overcoats, burdened with angst. Did
that become something the band wanted to move away from, the gloomrock tag? Whereas The Cure embraced it, for a while anyway, with Faith
and Pornography.
The Cure were always Goth, whereas The Bunnymen and Joy Division
were never Goth. They would never consider dying their hair or wearing
anything black. They always considered themselves ordinary people.
You went to the pub with The Bunnymen, and it’d be a pint of bitter or
a pint of mild. It would never be something else more affected. That was
Mac’s dread of touring America – you couldn’t get any bitter there! That
was the worst possible thing! Mac was the most educated of the original
three Bunnymen, in that he’d gone into the sixth form.
Didn’t he have an opportunity to go to Oxford or something?
Nah!
But he’d studied a bit of English literature . . . There’s a whole swathe of
Porcupine littered with Jacobean playwright allusions – John Webster . . .
That came from his girlfriend, a book that she had. Mac’s reading never
went beyond the sport. I’m not trying to take anything away from him,
but he disdained anybody that read books. That wasn’t right. It displayed a weakness and a fundamental lack of courage in your artistic talent, that you went and read books!
I didn’t realize until recently that Will Sergeant had this whole secret side
of being an Eno fan and an experimentalist, doing solo albums and
soundtracks. He even described himself as a non-guitarist. Which is a
cool thing for a guitar hero to say!
That was very much the case. He was incredibly primitive in his
approach to playing.
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When I think of Liverpool music of this era, I tend to think of vague
words that gesture at vital intangibles – spirit, passion, heart, grandeur,
quest, atmosphere. They’re crucial in a way that they’re not elsewhere in
the country during post-punk. You wouldn’t use those same words to
describe the music coming out of Sheffield or Scotland, except for maybe
Simple Minds. Does that come out of this local romanticism? A love of
natural grandeur, elemental imagery?
Yeah, but not a love of grandeur as in pomp. Not in the Yes and Genesis
fashion.
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So was he an arty guy?
No. He became that. But Will left school with no O levels. He was a
short-order chef in a department store in Liverpool. Les Pattinson was
working building boats in a boatyard.
Echo had a moment where, just after Joy Division and just before U2,
they were the British rock band as far as music-press readers were concerned. Then came their great shift towards pop with Ocean Rain. But
after that it all seemed to go wrong. Were you still involved with them
circa ‘Lips Like Sugar’?
I stopped after Ocean Rain. I’d lost interest by then. I felt they’d achieved
what they were going to achieve. I did think that it was now time for
somebody else to take over who could maybe exploit their situation –
not exploit them – and make them into a successful worldwide act. I’d
done all I could to get interesting records out of them and make them an
interesting band. I wasn’t interested in going to America and making the
record companies think they could be huge. Bang tables and all that.
When did your involvement with the Teardrops end?
That ended earlier. Once the Teardrops became successful, my relationship with Julian Cope completely broke down.
Didn’t you write a song about him with the lyric, ‘Bring me the head of
Julian Cope’?
No, he wrote a song about me called ‘Bill Drummond Said’, and I wrote
a song called ‘Julian Cope Is Dead’. Which I didn’t mean in any real way.
That was written in good humour. On both our parts. And we have gotten on since, although there are times we haven’t. He doesn’t like what I
do, at times. But I stopped working with the Teardrops, because it
became Julian Cope and a backing band. It was all about hired London
musicians. I hated dealing with all that. It was right for him but . . . I was
out of my depth.
Were you still involved with Cope when he went through that whole
phase of cutting off all his tousled hair and calling himself Kevin
Stapleton? What was that all about? Not wanting to be a pin-up in the
teen-pop magazines?
It was once it was starting to be successful. It seemed like a let-out – we
could have this parallel universe. As soon as you have chart success,
things become more limiting. It’s pressure on yourself from yourself, not
just from the record company. As I found out later, when I had hits with
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How did he come up with that name?
I don’t know. It’s a perfect name. And it really reflected something about
him. He had to be this type of person for the music papers and things,
which did reflect part of his character. But Kevin Stapleton was actually
a big part of his character.
Teardrop Explodes, Echo and The Bunnymen – they both had that transcendent, almost messianic quality, but there was a humour that partially
deflated the grandiosity and saved the music from being pompous.
Unlike, shall we say, U2. And in interviews McCulloch and Cope would
both rant about U2. . .
I think Bono and the management were really driven to be successful, in
a major American stadium way. They were driven by a mission that they
had something to impart other than the records they were making, other
than the art.
The Bunnymen had an atmosphere of mission – but did they actually
have one?
Not a mission to save the world . . . I think U2 had a mission to redeem,
and being Irish they had far more focus on America. Whereas we had no
focus on America. All the American bands that we were into, they were
all failures: Love, 13th Floor Elevators, Velvet Underground. U2 seemed
to be hell-bent on becoming a big classic rock band. But there was no
part of any of us that was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to play stadiums?’
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the KLF and there was nobody telling me what to do apart from me and
Jimmy telling each other. Just incredible pressure. For Julian that was a
way out. Kevin Stapleton – a great way out.
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MARK STEWART
The Pop Group, singer
It’s Bristol, in the early-to-mid-seventies. What would a teenager have
done for amusement before punk rock?
We were going to heavy funk clubs. The Bristol Funk Army, that’s what
we called ourselves. This would have been 1975 onwards. All dressing in
fifties clothes, going to these clubs, dancing to Ultrafunk, T-Connection,
BT Express, The Fatback Band. I was fourteen then, but I was so tall –
six foot seven – I could get into clubs from the age of twelve. Trouble is,
all the older kids, skinheads, would think I was twenty and try to beat
me up, so I had to climb out of club toilet windows! The first love was
all these obscure funk imports from America, and then I started getting
into reggae. I lived quite near to St Paul’s, the black area in Bristol, where
there were sound systems and a club called the Bamboo Club. A tiny little club where U-Roy and I-Roy and Sly & Robbie’s early band The
Revolutionaires played. The Pistols tried to play there and it got burned
down the night before!
Talking to people from Manchester and London later on, it turned out
that the fashionable kids drawn towards punk had been into similar stuff
as us – funk and fifties clothes. In Bristol we called them ‘kit chaps’,
because they were into kit, wicked clothes. Things like zoot suits, plastic
sandals, mohair jumpers. That crowd, a lot of them evolved into punks.
I remember going up to London, to the boutique Let It Rock, which
became Sex and then Seditionaries, and also to this other shop, which
became Boy. We were going there to get fifties clothes and brothel creepers. This is before the Pistols even started.
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So there was the funkateer thing just before punk, and then punk rock
came and it was anti-dance, but you in The Pop Group were the very
first to turn the music towards punk-funk, to bring back the idea of
dance.
At the beginning of The Pop Group, the only peers I felt we had were
James Chance and The Contortions. They were doing the white James
Brown thing and were quite near to what we were, in terms of the funkiness. But yeah, that was the stuff I really loved, the funk. It was in the
blood. We formed when punk had just happened. Punk gave us the confidence to think we could pick up instruments and have a go. But we
wanted to turn it around and challenge the straightforward rock tradition. Bring in funk and dub, and even weirder things like John Cage and
Stockhausen and Neu!, stuff I’d discovered on my own going around
second-hand record shops.
Sounds like you were a pretty precocious teenager!
Well, yeah, but quite a few of my friends were. We were just digging out
loads of weird records, musique concrète. Maybe it sounds pretentious,
but it’s just searching . . .
Oh no, I totally understand – you were hungry for every kind of stimulation. There’s a great interview in ZigZag where the writer, Steve Walsh
(later to join post-punk funkateer outfit Manicured Noise), marvels at
the erudite array of books and records in the flat of one Pop Group member (I’m guessing you): Artaud, John Cage’s Silence, Pierre Henry . . .
Pierre Henry we used to play over the sound system before we went on
stage. Our earliest gigs were these funny glammy discotheques. This was
when I was still at school. When we supported Patti Smith on tour, I’d
come back and go do lessons. But it’s probably through having an older
brother who went to art school that I got into some of this stuff, like
Baudelaire and Gregory Corso.
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So people were casting around for something exciting, the New Thing,
something different from all the stuff that was a hangover from the sixties, like prog rock and folk?
There was nothing to latch onto. I did get into Iggy, Lou Reed and The
New York Dolls, but there was nothing English you could relate to.
Maybe Dr Feelgood. There was a band in Bristol called The Cortinas
and, like the Feelgoods, they were a fast R&B band, but they then
became the first Bristol punk band.
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Was it you who came up with The Pop Group catchphrase about wanting to be ‘beatniks of tomorrow’?
That was a bit of a twist on the part of the journalist, as far as I can
remember. I remember going on about wanting to be an explosion in the
heart of the commodity! A situationist-type thing.
How did The Pop Group coalesce? You were all friends at school, right?
I had the idea of getting a band together when I was fourteen. My best
friend was running The Cortinas, and I had this idea of being a band
called Wild Boys. We’d play in this youth club and come out of dustbins
with bin-liners on stage. Now this is two or three years before punk. And
out of the gang of us, we decided, ‘You’re gonna play guitar, you’re
gonna play drums.’ Half of us went to one school and I went to another
one down the road.
When did The Pop Group start to have an impact? It blew up real quick,
didn’t it? Only took a year for you to be hailed the Future of Music in the
After-Punk Zone. Or less, even.
We started doing concerts in Bristol, and a local buzz started up immediately. All the funk-club people grabbed hold of us straight away and
we were getting 400 people at these concerts, which we had organized
on our own, done all our own graphics. Then a few local stringers for
music papers started giving us incredible reviews. We’d only been playing for six months or so. This would be early 1978. Then we hooked up
with Dick O’Dell as our manager. Richard Williams from Melody Maker
and Neil Spencer from NME grabbed hold of us. They started giving us
front covers really quite early on.
It was like everyone was scratching their heads wandering where next
after punk – the Pistols had split, Rotten was formulating PiL but had
put nothing out yet, The Clash had done that stodgy second album . . .
And then along comes this young band bursting with ideas. No wonder
the music journalists latched onto The Pop Group.
The older journalists especially were coming to the concerts and saying
you’re like Captain Beefheart, you’re like Albert Ayler. I knew Ayler, but
I hated Beefheart, because of this biker bloke down the road playing it to
me. Couldn’t get into it, thought it was just gobbledygook. But as we met
the journalists, they loved it, because they could bring in all the stuff they
liked and could talk about it. The dub stuff too.
Yeah, they could talk about Miles Davis’s On the Corner or Krautrock.
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That’s the vibe you get in the music: explosive energy, a movement
towards the breakdown of every constriction – sonic, intellectual, spiritual. Smashing down the compartmentalization of experience that places
‘politics’ here and ‘poetry’ over there. All dividing walls – private and
public, black and white – tumbling down.
Questioning everything, challenging everything. Right down to the core
of personal relationships and the relations between the audience and the
band. And then later, as soon as Rough Trade started, we went to them.
So it was about trying to challenge corporate structures too.
Before that, you had a brief, not particularly fruitful relationship with
Radar, a semi-autonomous subsidiary of Warner Bros. Well, it produced
a classic single and an impressively out-there debut album, but it caused
the band some agonized soul-searching because of the parent company’s
ties to larger corporate entities with involvement in arms dealing.
The guy who started Radar, Andrew Lauder, was a really good bloke,
and his musical taste was really great. We only dealt with the Radar
office and weren’t really aware of the connections with Warners. We put
a big poster in the middle of the first album, and I remember going to
Radar and sitting on the floor in the middle of their office sticking all
these pictures together of concentration camps and youth armies in
Cambodia and the burning of books in Nazi Germany. This montage of
atrocities and civil-rights marches. And the people were just looking at
me like I was mad. Then I had a conversation with Mayo Thompson of
The Red Crayola, who was a real leftist, and he told me about the
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In some ways The Pop Group was almost a fantasy band for a certain
kind of rock critic – extreme music meets radical politics. But not dour,
programmatic politics, the dreary politics of committees and rallies, but
more like a dream fusion of poetry and revolution . . .
I don’t find politics dreary. I’m still incredibly fired up about things.
When we were ranting, we meant it from the heart – it was all coming
out in a mad rush. But we were questioning so many things, and that
questioning came out of punk. When I first heard the Pistols and Clash,
I really thought they were questioning the value of everything. We felt we
had to challenge with the music as much as through the lyrics. And really
go for it. Talking to people, the power of some of those Pop Group
shows . . . I still meet people to this day who say it gave them a shared
fiery feeling. That there were other people who felt as frustrated as they
did.
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Warners connection. Then I met with Geoff Travis, and we started thinking that Rough Trade would be a better home for us than Radar. And
ultimately we had Y, our own label, which we ran with Dick O’Dell, but
it went through Rough Trade distribution.
Especially in the earlier Pop Group stuff, it feels like protest music, but a
protest against the limits of life as much as against the constraints of society. It’s existential-political, this howl.
‘Thief of Fire’, that song is the idea of grabbing at something really far
away. Finding out about things that you thought you weren’t meant to
find out about or allowed to find out about. Prohibited knowledge. It’s
the Prometheus legend, but I twisted it to be about going into unknown
areas. I remember people saying stuff like, ‘To be alive is not enough; I
want to live.’ So it was against all the constrictions.
I think it was the situationists who talked about how a poem should be
reason enough to start the revolution. A lot of situationist energy went
into critique, this total negation through dissection of everything. But
underneath the negativity was this utopian idealism, this lusty vitalism.
Coming out of reading De Nerval and some of the Baudelaire stuff and
extreme existentialist stuff, there’s this idea of going through nihilism
and going against all the conditioning and education you’ve had, then
you come right back round to a kind of romanticism. The sense that
things can be better. A yearning for change. I find things like De Nerval
very political, in the way that he’s questioning things. And a lot of the
French poets were linked to extreme politics. It was all happening in radical drinking dens.
Then there’s the English romantic poets, like Shelley, or Byron going off
to fight for the liberation of Greece. Or later with the Spanish Civil War.
So it’s a false opposition to say art is over there and politics is over here.
Definitely. A lot of Dadaists and surrealists were linked to left-wing politics. And then in Germany a lot of the radical sixties things came out of
radical art and Fluxus. ‘She Is Beyond Good and Evil’ is a very young
attempt by me at trying to draw on and mix together the poetic and existentialist stuff. It was linking the idea of the perfect love with the idea of
a perfect political world. The power you feel from a really strong love for
somebody, and a kind of unconditional love for the world. A kind of
light switches on; you just hope for a better world.
One of the reasons I want to write about post-punk is precisely this qual98
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With the debut Pop Group album Y, how did producer Dennis Bovell
cope with all your wayward energies?
Dennis loved it. We were doing tours with Pere Ubu and Patti Smith, and
started thinking of who we could get to produce the records. We had
crazy ideas. I wanted to get hold of King Tubby at that stage, but we
didn’t have links with the Jamaican guys back then. And I heard some of
Dennis’s obscure dub productions, like ‘African Love’ by the African
Brothers. But before we got Dennis, John Cale had flown over to talk
about producing the record. But we didn’t get on with him, and we
wanted to draw on the black side of it. Dennis was totally into it. For
him to step into our world was great, because at that point he’d had no
involvement in the rock world at all.
Bovell also produced The Slits’ debut, and by the end of 1979 The Pop
Group and The Slits had almost merged into an extended musical family,
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ity of idealism that suffuses the music of the era. There’s a lot of fear
about the way the world is going, but also a lot of hope and determination. Compared to now, where music culture seems a lot more disengaged and cynical. You have isolated figures like your friends in Asian
Dub Foundation, say, but in general there’s rarely that sense of burning
sincerity and commitment.
I’m more idealistic than I ever was. And travelling around Europe,
there’s lots of good things. Asian Dub Foundation do a lot of work, joining up with Algerian sound systems. When we were doing it, there was
crappy pop music going on, but we wanted to be a pop group, we didn’t
want to be marginalized. We wanted to go out there and take it as far as
it could go. And in recent years things like Rage Against the Machine
have done that and been massive. Or what Trent Reznor was doing with
Nine Inch Nails – when he was number 1 that was like Throbbing
Gristle being number 1 in America. Or these new metal groups, or the
thugged-out rap people like DMX selling millions of records – the
aggressiveness and pure punkiness of that sound, it’s pure street poetry.
It’s a very British journalist thing to get into this irony and this feeling of
defeatism, to think that there’s not much going on . . . But England is a
very small country. You have to look to things that are happening in
Japan and France and Spain. In Italy there’s this group called Alma
Magretta who are one of the most revolutionary groups I’ve ever heard,
and they’re huge. They sell more records than any pop group. It’s mainstream in the volume of sales, but they do their own distribution.
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resulting in the split single, your ‘Where There’s a Will’ coupled with their
‘In the Beginning There Was Rhythm’. Ari especially was into this whole
exodus trip, ‘Jah Jah people must leave Babylon’, return to tribal ways,
rooted living . . .
I wasn’t into that, you can’t blame me for that one! They were quite separate bands, Simon! I did like The Slits’ early gigs, with The Clash. Later
on, Adrian Sherwood was really friendly with Ari, and on their New Age
Steppers project, the first album, I did a track. PiL’s Keith Levene’s on it
too.
The dub and roots thing is a massive backdrop to post-punk. It’s something that many of the most innovative bands are plugged into or
touched by in some way. And roots reggae in itself is a good example of
music where the radical form and radical content are inseparable, and
where there’s a holistic world view uniting the poetic, the sonic, the political, the spiritual. It’s not compartmentalized.
A lot of the logic behind Rasta was quite questionable, but the feeling
and the spiritual uplift I’d get just dancing in my bedroom to early
Tubbys and Jah Stone, all that heavy dub – it just made my hairs stand
up on end. It really got to me. All that yearning for a better world, and
the questioning. Then going to sound systems with loads of black mates
. . . They were like huge evangelical meetings. You didn’t get that energy
very often at rock gigs. I remember saying we wanted to be a mix
between Funkadelic, Tubby and Neu!
After Y came ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ and How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder . . . The lyrics went from being abstract-expressionist
to propagandist. Pretty direct protest.
The first album was written when I was sixteen or seventeen. But on Y
there’s ‘Don’t Call Me Pain’, about torture, and ‘The Boys from Brazil’,
about Nazis hiding out in South America. So yes, the first one is more
mystical, but there’s songs about issues. ‘Don’t Sell Your Dreams’ is one
of my favourites of that period – it is poetic but it’s incredibly idealistic
and it’s really out there, as pure as you can get.
Still, there was a period around that time – ‘Prostitutes’, How Much
Longer – where it seemed like The Pop Group had decided that there was
no room any more for music as sheer entertainment or art for art’s sake.
That the political imperatives of the time were too urgent to allow for
such decadence. In one interview Gareth Sager even says it’s trivial to use
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It got panned by critics at the time, How Much Longer, but now seems
a really scorching record – not as free-form and scatter-splurgy as Y, but
definitely more focused and forcefully funky. You come across as something like the white Brit Last Poets!
Even before doing that album I was into the Last Poets. And the Watts
Prophets too. There’s the situationist thing of ‘No Spectators’, which was
the first pure dubby thing we did, and then songs like ‘Blind Faith’ and
‘Forces of Oppression’, which are about questioning authority and
police brutality. The B-side to ‘Prostitutes’ is the Amnesty report about
the treatment of political prisoners in Northern Ireland. We’d find something out and we just got fired up and wanted to shout out about it. At
that stage I just didn’t want to do the more romantic poetic stuff. Felt
like you had to get to the effing point! At that time we were totally committed to what we were doing. We virtually gave away all our money
from benefit concerts – we did ones for Cambodia, for Scrap Sus. We
linked up with Linton Kwesi Johnson and went to rallies in Southall,
where Blair Peach had been killed by the police. At his funeral I remember standing with all these black activists from the Radical Alliance of
Black Poets and Players. Everyone had their fists up in the air as the
police helicopters circled overhead while they were putting this poor
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interview time to talk about the music when they could be talking about
serious political issues.
It wasn’t really conscious, but there was a fire in our belly. The idea was
that if there was a space to use in any kind of media, you had to use it to
get out what you really wanted to talk about. It was connected to hanging out with all these radical groups, like People United in Southall, and
Race Today. That was a really good magazine run by Linton Kwesi
Johnson and Darcus Howe, based out of Brixton, and it was going on
about the ‘Sus’ laws – stop and search – which I sang about in ‘Justice’
and ‘Forces of Oppression’ on How Much Longer. Loads of black people were dying in custody. Demonstrations were getting broken up. Race
Today was the only thing putting out that information at that time. For
us, it was all part of the same thing – the fire, the music and the desire to
get these things across. Nobody was talking about it really. It wasn’t
party political; there was just this fire about different injustices. It wasn’t
this worthy thing, you know. It wasn’t really preaching. The things that
excite me – be it a musical form or a lyrical form – often the singing is
buried inside the music. So it’s not like giving a fucking speech.
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bloke into the grave. It was a fiery time. There’s still fiery times now, but
you really felt something was kicking off then. We did the T-shirt for our
single ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ and it had Margaret Thatcher giving the
V-sign. That went all over the world. People were walking around with
that as a badge of pride. They were heavy times.
Did you feel like the world was going to get destroyed? Thatcher and
Reagan were rattling sabres at the Soviets, cruise missiles were set to be
stationed in the UK . . . It was like everything was going backwards politically.
Exactly. I became really involved with CND, and they were organizing
this huge rally in Trafalgar Square. The last gig for Pop Group was in
between the lions in Trafalgar Square, playing to 250,000 people. But
before that I’d spent the last three months actually helping in the office,
coordinating the whole event. At that stage I was getting more and more
politicized, and what I think happened with the band breaking up not
long after Trafalgar was that some of the musicians were getting to know
their instruments more; they were going more and more on a free jazz
tangent. They couldn’t express themselves verbally like I could, so they
wanted to express themselves through their instruments. We’d always
loved Ayler and free jazz, and even had Tristan Honsinger playing on
‘We Are All Prostitutes’. Some of the jams we were having, it was going
way out there. And I was finding it quite difficult to sing on the abstract
stuff. I was being drawn more and more to reggae. At the Trafalgar
Square demonstration I wanted to do a song that was like a rallying cry.
There were hundreds of thousands of people there, and I wanted to have
a rallying cry for all the different age groups there. A version of Blake’s
‘Jerusalem’, because he was a real prophet and that is a real socialist
anthem, but it’s visionary and idealistic. I ended up doing a dub version
with a couple of Jamaican musicians playing with us at the same time. So
with The Pop Group, it was an organic disintegration. There’s no hard
feelings and we’re all still kind of matey.
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DENNIS BOVELL
Producer
What did you feel your role was as producer when it came to the postpunk groups? Typically they were semi-skilled in terms of conventional
musicianship, but they often had a strongly conceptualized sense of what
they wanted sonically.
The Slits and The Pop Group were quite lucky they had me there. Often
I’d listen to their comments and ignore them. Or listen while they were
there and then send them to bed and do what I wanted to do. Being producer, it’s not about being democratic. If you’re a producer, you bloody
well better make up your mind. Otherwise you’ll just be a namby-pamby
fence-sitter, a middle-of-the-road geezer who takes the money and runs.
So it was pretty much iron fist! I was very young and cocky and trying to
carve something for myself. I didn’t need to be aided and abetted. And
no time for opinionists. Friends and family, boyfriends and girlfriends –
they’re the worst session wreckers in the world.
What did you think of The Pop Group as players?
They were loose and they needed to tighten up. In their own right,
they’re all great musicians, but together they were quite loose. Bruce
was a wicked drummer. Simon Underwood was a wicked bass player.
Together Simon and Bruce were the Sly & Robbie of the punk period.
The thing that was not together about The Pop Group was the guitars.
And then Mark Stewart would drift all across the frame of the thing.
And being near to a seven-footer, and having that kind of voice tone
that commanded, ‘You will listen to me’ . . . those were the elements
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that made it very interesting and made me want to do The Pop Group.
You were into the idea of freak-out music, being a Hendrix fan?
Oh, definitely. Hendrix was positively my hero. And as far as I can
remember, Jimi Hendrix is responsible for the first dub record: on his
debut album, Are You Experienced, that song ‘Third Stone from the
Sun’, it’s dub, what with all the echoes and delays in it. I was a kid, and
hearing that turned me on. I’m a bass player now but back then I played
guitar, aged thirteen or so. I was into Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Free . . .
My favourite group in those days was Spooky Tooth. This is at the same
time as playing in reggae bands. I was big into music of all kinds and trying not to be blinkered. My thought was always that nobody eats fish
and chips every day. No matter how English you are, you’re going to go
down the Chinese one day and the next day you’re gonna have a curry.
What was making The Pop Group debut album Y like?
The VUs [volume units] were working back to front. Normally, it’s
mostly in the black and occasionally going into the red distortion zone;
with that record, it was mostly in the red and only occasionally in the
black! We were using Jon Anderson from Yes’s equipment, and the people in the white coats who were letting us use it were like, ‘Be careful,
you’re gonna decalibrate those meters,’ and I was like, ‘I hope we do,
man.’ Like, ‘We’re moving the goalposts, baby!’ And we did. The white
coats were like, ‘You’ll never cut that onto vinyl,’ because there were limitations in those days. You could get the wickedest sound you liked in the
studio, but if you don’t get it on vinyl – start again. In those days, before
digital, it had to be to a specification. Or you could take it right to the
limit and walk on the line. And that’s where we chose to begin.
And how about working with The Slits, possibly even more chaotic than
The Pop Group?
They had so much input that it was more a case of sorting out what
should go out first. They were just bulging with material, and I had the
task of sorting it out and saying this goes here. It was like an enormous
jigsaw puzzle all dumped in your lap. And that’s why Chris Blackwell
shoved the project onto me. I said, ‘How much time have I got?’ and he
said, ‘As long as you need really.’ It was the first album session where I
didn’t have to watch the clock. It took a lot of time to digest. And to convince the band. I remember playing a classic acoustic guitar riff on one
song, and Viv Albertine going, ‘No, rub that off.’ And I was like, ‘No,
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How did you rate the individual Slits as musicians?
Tessa Pollitt is a very good bass player. Viv is a good guitar player. Always
very conscious of not trying to play the guitar like a man. Borrowing from
all the famous guitarists, who in those days had still been mostly men, but
actually trying to create a style of her own. No Jimi Hendrixette, but
more of a female Steve Cropper. She played great rhythm things, and the
occasional lead-guitar part, the kind of note-singling that she was capable
of and could do with conviction. A few single notes – not a solo, little
runs.
And how about Ari Up? One of the best things about Cut is her multitracked vocal parts, dovetailing with vocals from the other two.
That’s Ari’s direction. Most of those voices were coming directly out of
her head. I was just there to say we’ll slot that one in there, or that one’s
a little bit out of tune. I felt a bit like a psychiatrist, trying to arrange the
voices inside someone’s head.
What did you think of Ari getting into talking in Jamaican patois and
having dreadlocks? Did you think there was anything jive or even offensive about it?
No. She just picked it up. She’s from Bavaria and that’s the part of
Germany that is very much patois. The way the people there speak
German, it’s a bit like a Geordie from Newcastle. I know German people
who learned English through Jamaican. They cottoned on to the patois
quicker than through the proper Oxford way. The words seem to be broken up the same way.
The Caribbean is a vast territory – lots of islands with different cultures
and sounds. Being from Barbados originally, did that give you a different
feeling for reggae than someone from Jamaica?
Not really. Even though I’m from Barbados I was deeply buried in reggae. Reggae did spread across the Caribbean – not fully but partially. A
lot of people took to it as the new black music. Others turned their noses
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Viv, listen – it’s wicked, it’s beautiful.’ And she was like, ‘No one’s ever
going to believe that I played that.’ And I had to agree. So it just went to
the magnetic heaven in the sky. Originally the riff was me suggesting to
her the mood she should play the guitar in, and then I played something
and I said, ‘Let’s keep that, you could learn to play that later on.’ And she
was like, ‘No, I want to play something in that vein but it’s got to be me
playing it.’
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up at it – the soca diehards, the spouge diehards. Spouge is the music
from Barbados. Kid Creole’s ‘Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy’, the beat on
that is spouge. But it’s very complicated, spouge, just too mathematical.
Whereas reggae is simple, and the simplicity of it adds to its beauty. I
arrived in the UK in 1965, just as the Stones and The Who were going.
Then I started getting into reggae and playing on the sound system.
Did you embrace the Rasta spirituality too?
Yeah, because it was a new way. Something to be explored.
And politically resonant, its pan-Africanism chiming in with things going
on in Angola and Rhodesia.
African oppression. It was like our holocaust, mate. And it’s still happening now. At least for the Jewish people it was a period of time and an
amount of people. Ours is timeless and numberless.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, who you’ve long worked with and who was a
major icon during the post-punk era, isn’t a Rasta, though. He’s closer to
a Marxist. Did that put him at odds with his own community?
Of course, because he referred to them as a bunch of ostriches with
heads in the sand and caused great uproar! He referred to Rasta as an
ostrich religion. He did ‘Reality Poem’, talking about how in ‘the age of
reality, of science and technology’ some people were still ‘dealing with
mythology’. That caused a stir!
It’s interesting that you were involved in the whole roots’n’culcha side of
reggae, with LKJ and your own band Matumbi, but you also invented
lover’s rock. And got to number 1 with Janet Kay’s ‘Silly Games’.
Lover’s gave women a platform. At that time that was a void in the reggae business, which I saw and tried to fill.
Lover’s seems more like an assimilationist sound, appealing to young
women who were perhaps more down-to-earth and practical than their
dreadlocked male counterparts: not dreaming about repatriation and
Zion but about trying to make a life for themselves in the UK.
Make the best of it – let’s sing about happier times. Let’s reset our sights.
Making luuuurve! The guys would be going on about ‘revolution, man,’
and the girls were like, ‘Nah, lovealution.’
Was there a split in the black British community at this point?
Some wanted roots rockers, and others were like, ‘We’re fed up with too
many songs from the bible. Enough Jah, let’s have songs about my baby,
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my girl.’ The whole thing about fanaticism, it’s more like your Taliban.
Purists. Undiluted geezers. In the days of Matumbi, I plugged the
fuzzbox in and this guy in the studio said, ‘What are you, a rock band or
a reggae band?’ And I’m like, ‘Listen, we’re playing music here. Don’t try
and compartmentalize me.’ Show me that mould, I wanna break it.
Make a new one. That’s what it’s about. Otherwise we’d still be in the
Dark Ages.
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ANDY GILL
Gang of Four, guitarist
Before Leeds University, you and Jon King already knew each other from
growing up in Sevenoaks, where you’d attended the same school and
been in bands together. Then you both went up to Leeds University in
1976 to do the same course, Fine Arts. What did that entail?
A mixture of book learning and writing stuff with doing your own art
activity. Tim Clark, the professor, was particularly good. It’s said he used
to be in the situationists, but he used to bang on about Manet, not 1968.
So I became an enthusiastic Manet convert. It’s one of those bizarre combinations of things going on at the same time: looking at Manet paintings and then doing gigs with Siouxsie and the Banshees. Some of the
people who became The Mekons and Delta 5 were in the same year of
Fine Arts at Leeds.
Was Leeds a radical hotbed, in terms of political theory and left-wing
activism?
I suppose so. Not as much as Sussex. Students doing sit-down protests.
The joke was, nobody noticed the difference!
What kind of stuff were you absorbing at the time, theory-wise? I know
you’ve often stressed that Gang of Four weren’t card-carrying Marxists,
but then again you did songs like ‘Capital (It Fails Us Now)’.
Have you listened to it? It’s definitely coming from the Benny Hill end of
Marxism. It’s a bit of comedy, that song. If you see that title, anyone’s
instant reaction would be: are they serious? And the first line is, ‘On the
first day of my life/I opened my eyes/I reached out for my credit card/Oh
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Yeah, but how did you get to the point of seeing it like that? For most
people, mired in common sense, it’s quite jarring to look at things in such
an abrasively demystified way. Marriages as contracts, commodities as
fetishes – this is not how everyday people see the reality of their lives! So
you must have been aware of the Marxist conceptual armoury of reification, commodity fetishism, false consciousness, et al.
You’re correct in thinking we were familiar with those terms, but we
were really not approaching songwriting from any theoretical point of
view. As far as we were concerned, it was just telling it like it is, from our
own point of view and in our language. Some of the less good Gang of
Four is when we strayed into pontification or accidentally strayed into
adopting an unthought-through stance. But at its best Gang of Four was
wholly original and very much not from a theoretical point of view.
But if you think of the context, rock in the mid-seventies, people would
write about love and sexuality still in this blues-derived, funky,
rock’n’roll way. And your approach was much more dispassionate and
diagrammatic, observing these couples struggling in their living rooms
and bedrooms with a cold, dry, distanced eye. In rock music, this was a
shockingly new way of looking at stuff. Where a hard-rock band would
sing, ‘You mess with my mind, woman,’ Gang of Four would depict people as buffeted by impersonal forces, splayed by the contradictions of
capitalism and consumerism.
Take the band Free, for example. I loved them in the early seventies – it
was very rhythmic and stripped down. I loved the minimalism. But Paul
Rodgers would be singing about his car and his woman. That’s part of
the package, and you go along with it. You loved Free and yet were completely aware of the utter idiocy of the lyrics. So there was an element of
suspended disbelief. You could say that Free were an influence on Gang
of Four, but when we started doing our own stuff, it was a question of
‘I’ll have this bit, but that bit is ridiculous and not only am I going to
avoid that, I’m going to do the opposite of that.’ So we did the opposite
of the Free thing, which was these clichés straight off the shelf. We took
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no, I left it in my other suit.’ To an extent it’s about consumerism, but it’s
also a piss-take of the conventional analysis of consumerism from a leftwing perspective. It’s true, I was forever making the point that we
weren’t card-carrying Marxists or anything, just open to ideas. In the
songs we were describing in real terms and in our language what we saw
in our own lives and around us.
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the cliché off the shelf but said, ‘Let’s have a look at it, let’s turn it inside
out, see what’s in there.’
So what else were you listening to in those days?
I’ve always rather liked the Stones. The Velvet Underground. The Band.
And lots of reggae – Culture, Big Youth, I-Roy, the Trojan compilations.
Did you get the idea of using melodica on some of the songs from
Augustus Pablo?
We’d put our hands up and admit that one! We were talking to Jon King
and asking, ‘Is there anything you can play in addition to singing?’ And
he said that he played melodica at school. It’s a plaintive, yet comic
sound. It’s a good sound.
Someone in the band once gave a succinct definition of post-punk, on the
lines of, ‘You could tell listening to Gang of Four that punk had happened, but it definitely wasn’t punk rock.’ Was there an idea in circulation by 1978 that punk had kinda failed as a musically radical force?
A lot of punk was basically slightly faster, slightly worse-played heavy
metal, with slightly fewer chords. There’s almost nothing in Gang of
Four that relates to what purists would describe as punk. For a start it’s
funky, it’s stripped down, it’s simple. Power chords aren’t part of the
repertoire.
Your guitar style is pretty unprecedented. Didn’t you have certain standard guitar things that you adamantly refused to do, like solos?
We called them anti-solos. When you stopped playing, just left a hole.
Did you avoid other things, like certain bluesy chord progressions, or
certain effects, like fuzztone and wah-wah?
Certainly, to begin with. For instance, valves were not allowed.
Everybody wants valve amplifiers these days. Valves are the prerequisite
of a ‘fat’ rock tone. People go on about ‘warmth’. My amps are transistorized. It’s a more brittle sound. It’s actually a cleaner sound. And it’s
not warm. We were against warmth.
And then you did that chipping-flint style of rhythm guitar, sometimes
using harmonics. Related to James Brown and Chic, but much more
hurtful to the ear.
Chic was another absolute favourite of mine. I was obsessed with a couple of their tracks. And if you listen to American R&B, those guitars are
quite skinny and very rhythmic. People like Steve Cropper.
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But overall the balance of instruments is more equal in Gang of Four.
Yeah, the drums and bass and guitar all kind of coexisted. We built
something out of the interaction of those things. It wasn’t about layers.
The instruments are on the same level.
I asked about you avoiding traditional ‘rock’ effects and sounds, but you
did use feedback a bit, notably on ‘Love Like Anthrax’. But perhaps that
wasn’t something people were using much in early-to-mid-seventies rock?
Hendrix obviously used feedback, but in a controlled, melodic way.
‘Star-Spangled Banner’ is feedback, but very much harnessed to a
melody. We were more in the line of the Velvets, where it’s just raw noise.
The difference would be that in the Velvets it’s just a huge cacophony,
everything going full tilt like in ‘European Son’, a big wall of noise. In
‘Love Like Anthrax’, you have this bizarre and totally robotic drum beat
matched with a strange bassline – just a two-bar looping thing – with the
emphasis in both the drums and the bass falling entirely in the unexpected place. And then this guitar doing random free-form noise against
that. So it’s structured a bit like . . . [incredibly long pause] I was going
to say something pretentious.
Oh, go on, I’m a big supporter of pretentiousness in interviews! From the
interview subjects as well as the writer!
A bit like a Frank Stella painting. There, I’ve said it.
Oh, so do you mean the song is like two incompatible elements joined
together?
No, it’s like rigid structure and . . . Actually, the Frank Stella analogy
doesn’t quite work.
I read somewhere you talking about having a thought-out approach even
before you picked up the instruments to write a song. And that you
weren’t interested in melody, so much as making unusual drum patterns.
You used to argue with Hugo Burnham about trying to avoid conventional rhythm patterns. So would it be fair to say that Gang of Four
approached songwriting in this structuralist way, as opposed to tunes
emerging out of jamming?
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In that music, the guitar isn’t meant to dominate the soundscape.
It’s not meant to dominate in Gang of Four, but it is more central and
prominent than with the American R&B I’m talking about, where the
guitar is a bit more back in the mix.
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Definitely. Jamming was the J-word. Things were thought out ahead of
time. With ‘Anthrax’ we thought, ‘Let’s have the drum part, and we’ll
have the guitar making this noise, and then the noise will stop, and then
Jon will start chanting something and I’ll start talking at the same time.’
And then, when you’ve thought that out, you actually have to do it!
So on some level you were resisting the mystique of the artist’s intuition
and creativity pouring forth from deep within or from some other mysterious outside realm, and proposing a different model where songs are
art objects that are constructed.
The idea of just sitting around and ‘Let’s just see what happens’ – it
seemed to relate to some older ethos that was basically alien to us.
Having said all that, there are practical reasons for just messing about
with instruments: you do that and you quickly just come up with ideas.
I’m not knocking improvisation; that’s a whole other thing. I like a lot of
jazz. But rock bands who sit about and jam, usually it goes hand in hand
with bluesy noodling about.
One thing that struck me about Gang of Four and the whole era you
belonged to was this total confidence that there were new things to do,
musically. Post-punk was a real golden age of modernist, non-traditional
approaches to guitar playing.
It certainly felt that people were going down a new road. I was slightly
surprised by how quickly it turned into New Romanticism and Spandau
Ballet. That’s the action–reaction syndrome.
Another thing that comes across in the old music-paper interviews is the
Gang of Four as an argumentative bunch, constantly questioning their
own approach, debating the resonances and ramifications of everything
you did, at every level from the music to the lyrics to the business side to
everyday practical band stuff.
That’s a slightly exaggerated impression. We were talking about what we
were doing. But most of the time it was getting on with it.
So it wasn’t like a Maoist self-criticism tribunal?
I like that idea. At the time I would have answered your question with,
‘Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.’ Just for the hell of it. But people got on
with it and made the music they wanted to make, whether it was The
Mekons, Delta 5 or us. And just down the road at the polytechnic, Scritti
and Soft Cell were just starting. Green was at the poly and was pretentious and quite likeable really.
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So as a well-known socialist band, was Gang of Four a target for rightwing skinheads?
There were physical battles with skinheads. You’d get some of them
turning up to gigs and fighting with people. There was a pub, the Fenton,
we used to go to a lot, us and The Mekons. The Fenton was known as a
pub where the commies and artists and fags hung out. One night about
twenty NF people came in and smashed the whole place up. People getting hit, glasses flying everywhere – just like a Wild West saloon. Then on
other occasions a gang of twenty skinheads would prowl around the university campus looking for people. And there’d be the occasional pitched
battle with people lobbing stuff at each other. They used to have metal
traffic cones back in those days, instead of plastic ones. One of my
friends had his skull broken by one of those metal traffic cones being
thrown. He was all right, but in hospital for a while.
So there was a palpable sense that some ugly stuff was brewing in British
society – fascism as a real threat that you had to stand against and fight?
On a couple of occasions some of the leading figures in the National
Front or British Movement would come to Leeds. They’d have police
escorts and they’d march around. And people would demonstrate
against that.
One of the ideas circulating at the time was ‘the personal is the political’.
The idea that there was such a thing as ‘personal politics’, that politics
wasn’t this thing segmented from everyday life, confined to elections and
governments and protest groups. And conversely, that an individual’s
political attitudes and values were rooted in the real life of emotion and
behaviour. You got it in Gang of Four and The Au Pairs and Scritti, but
also in more mainstream New Wave artists like Elvis Costello, with
albums like Armed Forces, which was originally going to be called
Emotional Fascism.
When I look back on the early Gang of Four stuff, more and more I don’t
see the word ‘politics’ having much of a function in it. It’s too easy to say,
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So there was this cadre of leftist bands in Leeds. But Leeds was also an
active stomping ground for the far right. The British Movement’s HQ
was there, I believe.
There were very flourishing Nazi groups around there. Leeds at that time
was a classic semi-run-down industrial town, going through some
changes and so prime territory for that kind of thing.
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‘The personal is the political,’ therefore what we’re talking about is politics. What we’re talking about is how one feels about the various forces
that are brought to bear on one’s life. Things that some people would
describe as personal are actually happening to everybody else and aren’t
personal. Like the way one feels pressurized to buy something. But I’m
not sure how useful it is to describe them as political.
Songs like ‘Contract’, or ‘Paralysed’ on the second album Solid Gold, it’s
not cut and dried, it’s very concrete and visceral what the people in these
songs are going through. But then again, there is the sense of impersonality that gives Gang of Four its edge: the vast, almost inhuman forces in
society that are placing people in these emotionally devastating positions.
I wrote ‘Paralysed’. And Greil Marcus, who we talked to a lot in those
days, wrote enthusiastically about the song and described it as being a
song that describes the conditions of someone who’s been made unemployed. And it’s not really. It seems to be, but it’s much more kind of generalized.
Was it based on how you yourself felt at the time?
That’s a complicated question, but in simplistic terms the answer would
be no. It’s not autobiographical in simplistic terms. But neither is it a
Billy Bragg song going on about a miner who’s been kicked out of a job.
‘Love Like Anthrax’ is still quite a shocking song: the structure, the two
voices going simultaneously and the whole assault on romantic love,
heartbreak being compared to being a beetle on its back. There was an
anti-romantic streak running through punk that carried on with PiL (all
the way to ‘This Is Not a Love Song’). A big idea at the time was that you
could write about other stuff, ‘buildings and food’. But of all the antilove songs of that era, ‘Love Like Anthrax’ is the harshest. And then it
goes ‘meta’ with your spoken-word critique of the prevalence of love
songs in pop.
The funny thing, though, is that in my monologue I’m not saying there’s
anything wrong with love songs. It’s even-handed.
Did Gang of Four ever do a love song as such?
We did do some. We were happy to embrace the form later on. There’s
lots of songs that could loosely fall into that category.
What was Bob Last from Fast Product like?
He was interested in situationist stuff and into a lot of the ideas Gang of
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After doing the one single for Fast, ‘Damaged Goods’, you signed, with
Bob’s encouragement, to EMI. A lot of the bands who were embracing
the independent-label system looked askance at that. Was that entryism,
the idea of reaching the biggest audience you could? Or more about
deliberately playing up the contradictions of working through the massculture entertainment industry?
The whole Gang of Four project seemed to have more potency as an idea
on EMI than on an independent. So much of the Gang of Four ethos was
from the point of view of, ‘Here we are looking at ourselves as individuals and our relationship with bigger forces – market forces, social forces.’
And being on a major worldwide label like EMI seemed to be in perfect
congruence with that.
Other groups got into agonies about being implicated in multinational
corporate capitalism. Like The Pop Group, when they discovered that
Radar, their label, through being part of Warners, was connected to larger
entities that owned Warners and had connections to the arms industry.
But did you think there was no point in thinking about stuff like that?
Absolutely. The point for us was not to be ‘pure’. We weren’t trying to
have clean hands. Again, the Gang of Four songs are so often about the
inability to have that. We’re all implicated, so it wouldn’t be on the
agenda to be ‘pure’ through being on a truly independent label – as if
there could even be such a thing.
So did you think that whole current within post-punk – The Pop Group
and The Slits, in particular – of trying to escape Babylon, to find an ‘outside’ where you could live without being contaminated by the corrupt
system, did you think that was naive?
Escaping Babylon was bollocks hand wringing. As much as we loved
both of those groups.
What did you think of New Pop, groups who followed your entryist
logic of signing to major labels but – unlike Gang of Four – went shiny
and poppy and accessible too? Did you think that was the end of your
era, in a way? A capitulation to Thatcherism?
No. I thought there was some stand-out stuff, like ABC and Scritti. I’m
being loyal to our old manager, Rob Warr, by saying that. He went on to
manage ABC, Scritti and Human League. He was in cahoots with Bob
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Four were into. The fact that he called the label Fast Product was related
to this Brechtian thing of calling things by their correct name.
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Last. Rob’s now controller of talent at the BBC. I thought the Scritti
thing was really good. I liked them in the Rough Trade DIY era and I
liked the big-label pop version of them as much, if not more. I enjoyed
and appreciated those moves.
In some ways, Gang of Four’s biggest impact was in America. There’s a
certain generation of rock critics in the US that, if they’re asked for their
all-time Top 10 rock albums, place Entertainment really high. It might be
their number 1 album, jostling for the top spot with Chairs Missing by
Wire. And Gang of Four had a huge influence on bands in America, from
Pylon and The Minutemen to Red Hot Chili Peppers, Big Black, Fugazi,
Rage Against the Machine . . . the list goes on and on. Why do you think
that was?
It’s a good question. I don’t know. We played there quite a lot. Most of
the stuff that I’d put in my own favourites list would be American music,
apart from The Rolling Stones. Either American stuff – groups like The
Band – or Jamaican.
So you think that American listeners can sense you are steeped in things
like The Band?
I’m just thinking aloud. It doesn’t stand up.
No, I think you’re onto something. The fact that Gang of Four is so
rhythm-oriented, whereas quite a lot of English music, even when it’s
guitar-oriented, doesn’t have a lot going on in the rhythm section. It’s not
so much rock music as guitar pop.
The reason Gang of Four did well in America is exactly why Paul
Weller’s stuff has never done well there. Because it’s the opposite of Paul
Weller. I’m not being critical here, but Paul Weller’s stuff, in all its guises,
has never been anything to do with groove. It’s always been quite jerky.
Whereas Gang of Four, even at its most fractured, was always about
groove.
I think what those American post-punk and alt-rock bands found in
Gang of Four was a template for a new hard rock that wasn’t cock rock.
That’s what they were looking for: music that was hard without being
macho or oppressive.
I think that’s right. Bringing together the hardness of guitar music with the
groove of what is essentially from a black music background. Although
with Gang of Four we were almost funky by default. We weren’t trying to
emulate Funkadelic or James Brown, although those were people we
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After Entertainment you did Solid Gold, and you hooked up with this
producer, Jimmy Douglass, who had produced this hard-funk American
outfit called Slave. And nowadays he’s Timbaland’s sound engineer and
right-hand man. But the idea was you felt the grooves and the bottom
end on Entertainment hadn’t been good enough, and you wanted to sort
that out for the second album.
Jimmy had difficulty coping with us. It was very funny really. EMI flew
him over, because they were relieved that we’d consented to have somebody ‘professional’ come and co-produce the album. He came along to
rehearsal and we played six songs for him. We stopped and turned round
to him and said, ‘Well, Jimmy, what do you think?’ And he said, ‘God, it
all just sounds so English.’ Obviously he was thinking, ‘What’s happened, how come I’ve been parachuted here onto this strange planet with
aliens playing this strange music?’ We had played six very different and
varied songs, but it all sounded from planet Mars to him. But he was
great. Very encouraging. ‘What We All Want’, he got us to pretty much
make it up in the studio. From a producer’s point of view, it’s always easier when there’s new ideas to work with than ones that have been kicked
around for a while. It’s harder to have an effect with those ideas, other
than to tinker with them.
You’re a producer now, right? Who have you worked with?
I co-wrote all the songs on the Michael Hutchence album, and produced
most of them. And I’ve produced the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Jesus
Lizard, Boss Hog, Bis . . . Right now I’m working on some new songs,
under my own name. They’ll be stripped down, hard and funky. I don’t see
much of the other guys in Gang of Four. After Shrinkwrapped, Jon King
just quit the music business completely. He’s now in business. Dave Allen
had his own label in LA, then he went to an internet music company, and
then on to something else. Hugo Burnham was involved in various areas
of the music business. We’re in touch, but I don’t see much of them.
[Postscript: four years after the interview, the original line-up of Gang of
Four re-formed on the back of the post-punk revival, played some blistering shows, recorded Return the Gift – an album of re-recorded versions of their classics – and at the time of writing are working on an
all-new album.]
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liked. But before Gang of Four I couldn’t decide whether to be a drummer
or a guitarist. So inevitably the whole thing was very rhythmic.
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DAVID BYRNE
Talking Heads, singer/guitarist
When did you become aware of music?
Everyone probably goes through the thing of realizing there’s more than
your parents’ music and Thomas the Tank Engine – ‘Ooh, that music’s
talking to me.’ That happened to me in the mid- to late sixties, a pretty
open time musically. So not only was I hearing stuff that seemed directed
towards me and my friends, but it was all over the map. Anything
seemed possible. It seemed like you could make music out of anything,
as long as it adhered to a vague pop-song structure, so it was a wild sense
of freedom. That’s what caught my attention.
Didn’t you do your own musique concrète experiments as a kid?
Yes, inspired by things I’d heard about, whether Cage or Stockhausen or
Beatles or whatever. My dad had a little reel-to-reel tape recorder, so,
aged sixteen or so, I’d record things and take the tapes and cut it up,
reorder the bits and turn them upside down. It was the most wonderful,
trippiest thing I’d ever heard! At the same time my dad helped me modify the little tape recorder so I could sort of do multitrack, sound on
sound. I could put down a track in a very primitive way, listen to it and
play along with it, and that would get recorded on the other side of the
stereo. You could never mix but you could layer sounds. I got completely
fascinated by that and I started recording other people’s pop songs that
way.
Before Talking Heads, there was The Artistics, a name that waves the artschool banner pretty forcefully.
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Did you get kicked out of Rhode Island School of Design?
I wasn’t. I dropped out of school and then lived on the periphery of the
community. I was still making art. At one point, the day jobs I had were
just the worst – lifting toxic chemicals or working as a short-order cook
at a diner on the shift from midnight to 4 a.m., when everyone who came
in was high and belligerent. So at one point I thought, ‘Boy, maybe I
shouldn’t have dropped out, maybe I just need that degree so I can get a
real job.’ So I showed them the art I was doing. They didn’t kick me out;
they just said, ‘We don’t teach this stuff. You should move to New York
and have a go at it.’ The stuff I showed them was photo-conceptual stuff,
not that different from what was happening in New York. Fake photographs of flying saucers and I’d do questionnaires that I’d pass out
anonymously. A lot of it was text-based art.
Didn’t you also do some far-out performance art that, in the spirit of that
time, involved physical injury, or at least discomfort, to yourself?
I did one where I shaved. I had a long beard and I shaved it off on stage,
while a friend played accordion and his girlfriend held Russian cue
cards. Because I didn’t have a mirror it got to be a bloody mess. That
wasn’t the intention, but it ended up being that way.
In something I read you’re quoted as saying that in the mid-seventies
going to the cinema was as exciting as going to a rock show. Or more
exciting.
At one point it was the cinema, at another point it was the downtown
experimental theatre. I felt a surge of this whole way of doing things that
I didn’t know existed. When I first saw some of the films of Fellini or
Godard and American independent cinema of the late sixties and early
seventies, it was just like with pop in the sixties – it can be anything, it
doesn’t have to follow the crap formula. When I moved to New York, I
started seeing things like the Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Richard
Foreman. They were all doing this non-narrative theatre that was a collage of music and text and stylized movement. None of it was logical or
linear. It had that same attitude – high–low, everything mixed together –
as pop in the sixties. Things you never thought it would be possible to sit
there and enjoy, boom, they did it! Sometimes there were dismal failures.
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Chris Frantz should get credit for that one. I think he thought it was
tongue in cheek. That’s what he had in mind – this ironic art-school
band.
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But when it worked you’d think, ‘Look what you can do!’ I absorbed
some of that and it influenced what I was doing on stage in Talking
Heads later with the big suit. I absorbed a lot of that stuff growing up
and then in New York, and it filtered into our music in little bits.
The first wave of New York punk bands based around CBs and Max’s
Kansas City were pretty steeped in rock romanticism and living on the
edge. Patti Smith and Television were coming out of the sixties, and
before that the Beats – looking and living bohemian. Whereas the
Talking Heads had a straighter-looking and more detached approach.
Some of the bands were really continuing the rock’n’roll archetypes, sonically and with the rebellious attitudes. The stage postures and the guitar
pyrotechnics. I thought, ‘This isn’t saying anything new. It’s a sloppier
version of Rolling Stones.’ The gestures were not being thought about,
they were just inherited. Like, ‘This is the attitude that comes with the
rock-band territory, the clothes and the pose you need to take on.’ I just
thought, ‘Let’s see if we can just throw all that out, start from square one
and see what happens.’ Which would be walking on stage in your street
clothes and singing with no affectation, in a kind of unromantic but passionate way. I thought having no image was a way of getting to ground
zero. After a while I realized trying to have no image is, of course, having an image. You can’t escape from it. As soon as you step on a stage,
it’s about artifice. So I thought, ‘I need to find other things to draw on
that aren’t clichéd.’
‘Unromantic but passionate’ is a good description of your approach to
lyric writing, which has an objective quality: songs that are written from
the point of view of characters, or are language exercises using methods
and processes. Or they just deal with non-rock’n’roll subject matter, as
signposted in the album title More Songs About Buildings and Food.
Although, come to think of it, I don’t think you ever did do a song about
foodstuffs or eating . . .
I think I used other characters and other points of view, as well as almost
abstract ideas in the text. I felt at some point the challenge was to take
something that was lyrically purely structural, had no emotional content
whatsoever, but then invest the performance with leaps of emotion. And
it worked! I might’ve sounded like a lunatic, but it worked.
All that non-rock’n’roll-ness of image and approach was mirrored sonically in your deliberately thin, wiry guitar sound.
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Post-punk was a great boom period for innovatory approaches to guitar
playing. Andy Gill of Gang of Four told me they had a whole list of
things to avoid: solos, valve amps, certain effects . . .
Did they have the list tacked on the wall?! Yeah, we wouldn’t have
noodling solos. I wasn’t so specific as to not use a valve amp, but very
rarely did we use distortion. For a long time I used guitar pedals, but I
only used them rarely and to make a big point, so that it was the sound
of that particular song, but not the signature sound of the band, which is
what a lot of people do – have a slightly altered pedal guitar sound
through everything they do.
That approach cleared a lot of space for the bass and for the keyboards,
which is very much a funk/disco approach to the hierarchy of instruments in a band’s sound. How early did Talking Heads get into disco?
Pretty early on. Even when we were hanging around this art community
in Rhode Island we’d occasionally go out to discos. When we moved to
New York around 1974, we’d occasionally go out to discos, and our
record collections tended to reflect that. There’d be Velvet Underground
and Roxy Music, but also Barry White, Parliament-Funkadelic, The
O’Jays. We always thought there was really cool stuff going on in the discos. When dance clubs started doing the early remixes, they weren’t radical by today’s standards, but the idea of altering a song, stretching it and
chopping it up was really exciting. And it was all happening in the dance
world. In the pop world, the song was sacred – ‘Don’t touch it.’
In an interview in the late seventies you declared that black danceproduction techniques constituted a bigger musical revolution than
punk.
Oh yeah, and I would still agree with that. At that time people didn’t
want to hear it. Our song ‘Life During Wartime’ even got misconstrued
as anti-disco because of the line ‘This ain’t no disco.’ In a lot of places
there was a real sense of, ‘Take your stand, are you with the rockers or
those fags in the dance clubs?’
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In those days it was a Fender Mustang that had a Gibson pickup on it. I
just wanted everything to sound very clean and precise, like a little welloiled machine. I thought it would make everything transparent, all the
working parts would be revealed and visible, nothing hidden in the murk
of a big sound. Somehow that seemed more honest. It seemed probably
more arty as well.
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Talking of gay avant-garde dance music, weren’t you friends with Arthur
Russell?
Early on we asked him to help us out on a version of ‘Psycho Killer’ – an
acoustic version with him playing cello. He started doing these vaguely
disco-type songs, and he asked me to play guitar, so I’d play a little of my
funk-disco scratch guitar. Arthur was quite a thing! He was obviously
completely outside the world of downtown artists and poets, yet he
would make these pronouncements guaranteed to provoke. He’d say
that what he really listened to was Abba and Italian pop music. He’d
play me some Italian pure pop, perfect in every way, building to a
crescendo, and he’d say: ‘That’s it, they’ve nailed it.’
After the first album you started to get into disco-like production with
More Songs About Buildings and Food. There’s textured drum songs
and ‘tinted’ basslines.
That record was actually a little bit more what we sounded like live. The
first album was more of a cleaned-up studio version. More Buildings was
pretty much live in the studio, but the mix was like a performance. You
had half the band members popping the instruments out and moving the
faders up and down. Nowadays a computer will remember all that, but
in those days mixing a record was done as a performance.
The ‘future-forward’ tracks on More Songs, in terms of looking ahead to
the next album, Fear of Music, are probably ‘Found a Job’ and ‘Warning
Sign’, because they’re the funkiest and most vividly colourized. But on
Fear the prophetic song is the last one, ‘Drugs’. It’s trying out the methods that would underpin Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts, where the band generates all this material which then gets
stitched together at the mixing desk.
‘Drugs’ was one of the ones where we’d tried recording the song
before, with just the band. It was called ‘Electricity’ at that point. But
it didn’t quite work. So we recorded another version of it, and between
Brian Eno and myself we kind of deconstructed it. Took a lot of the
instruments out. There was the live band recording, and then we
started taking stuff out and replacing them with other things and other
sounds. Replaying bits. The song was torn down to its basic elements
then built up again with new stuff. It was kind of what was going to
happen with Bush of Ghosts and Remain. But the difference was that
with ‘Drugs’ there was a song form and structure to begin with, lyrics
and everything. But with Remain I soon enough realized that I could
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Is ‘Drugs’ anti-drugs?
No, it’s just a song about altered consciousness. I decided I would try and
hyperventilate as I was singing. So I’d sing a verse and then run round in
circles in the studio until I was completely out of breath, and then I’d say,
‘OK, I’m ready for the next verse!’ I’d be just catching my breath the
whole time. That seemed really appropriate.
Did you ever do that song live?
We did the earlier version live, but then it got abandoned. There were
layers of different sound that would’ve needed an extended band, the
way some of the Remain in Light songs were done with extra players.
Eventually I would even do some of the Bush of Ghosts stuff live, like
‘Help Me Somebody’. I would sing the sampled preacher parts. It sort of
worked.
So 1979, that was when the whole born-again, fundamentalist surge was
kicking off big time in America, the moral majority rallying behind
Reagan?
It must’ve been. It was everywhere. You’d turn on the radio . . .
Nowadays it’s more Howard Stern-type shows, but back then there were
so many evangelists and motivational speakers all over the radio dial.
We’re now accustomed to the evangelical vote being the electoral base of
the Republican Party, but it was quite a shock when that backlash got
under way in the seventies, a time when most people assumed things
would just keep on getting more and more permissive and progressive.
Politically it seemed like a big reaction. But there was a contradiction
within itself: the ecstatic aspect. Some of it was declamatory fingerwagging, but there was also this ecstatic thing. So the text was sometimes saying the opposite to what the performance was. The text was
saying, ‘Thou shalt not,’ while the preacher’s performance was this
completely sensual, sexual thing. I thought, ‘This is great – the whole
conflict is embodied right there.’
The most puritanical forms of evangelical Protestantism seem to have
the most orgiastic church services – all that holy roller stuff, the shaking
and swooning and talking in tongues.
They can’t completely deny it, so it comes out another way.
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write lyrics to a structure. I didn’t have the lyrics written before going
in.
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Was there a sense in which you envied that form of extreme release? Your
average liberal, WASP-y type is actually pretty repressed, or at least
undemonstrative in their day-to-day conduct.
Oh yeah, but I also identified with it because it seemed very similar to a
wild rock concert. Or a disco. The parallels were obvious to me – the
ecstatic release and trance-like feeling, the communal feeling where
everyone gets swept up. I thought, ‘This is using the same techniques and
process, but they developed their own language, their own musical and
gestural grammar. It’s parallel and maybe I can learn something from it.
They’ve been doing it longer than I have.’
So you were trying to come up with a form of quasi-devotional release
for secular, postmodern people?
Yes. Who obviously couldn’t feel like they could have that in a Baptist
church. But taken out of the sacred context and put in a secular context
they could completely identify with it.
With Bush of Ghosts, did you actively go searching for the samples?
No, the search didn’t have to go far, you just turned on the radio. We
started collecting cassettes of these incredible performances. Sometimes
Brian and I would hear things on records, whether it was the Georgia Sea
Island Singers or some Arabic records. Things ripe for sampling because
there was no backing track, so the vocal is isolated and you can cut that
out. Some of the sound of the record was born out of necessity because
the voice recording was so bad – like there’d be so much radio static in
between the voice bits, and that ended up pushing the texture of the
track in that direction so it sounded like it was meant to be that way.
Sometimes a whole song would be born out of misusing a piece of equipment until it made some peculiar sound.
Wasn’t Jon ‘Fourth World Music’ Hassell meant to be part of the Bush of
Ghosts team originally?
Yes – we’d all hung out together and exchanged records. What we were
listening to was field recordings. The idea was, we would hole up and
make a fake ethnographic record, with the sleevenotes and everything.
We’d invent a whole culture to go with the music. It diverged from that
path pretty early on, though.
Bush of Ghosts in some ways was like training for Remain in Light . . .
I wasn’t thinking of it that way, but that’s what it ended up being. We
were both very excited having discovered we could work this way. It’s
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Did you have to come up with a whole new set of approaches to lyric writing? Lyric shards, chanted catchphrases, a stream of media-overloaded
consciousness . . .
Yeah. I was also realizing that this music that was kind of groove-based
implied a whole different social and psychological thing – much more
ecstatic and trance-like. I realized I couldn’t think about the same things,
or at least not in the same way, if I was going to be true to what the music
felt like. After Fear of Music, where I’d done a bit of recording the music
first and putting words to it later, I took the leap and said, ‘OK, I won’t
go in with any lyrics at all.’ That meant I had to write words to fit the
music. If I was in a neurotic or tense state of mind, it might not be suitable for the music because the music might not feel like that. I had to
write in response to the music. Which was fine, because by the fourth
record I’d exhausted all the things I’d had to say anyway. Often a band
starts up and they have this well of stuff that wants to gush out, an initial burst of material. Remain was a good time to start with a clean slate
again.
Most of the songs don’t have narratives, except for ‘Seen and Not Seen’,
the spoken-word story about a guy changing his face by power of will.
And then ‘Listening Wind’, which is the second Talking Heads song
about terrorism.
Yes. It’s just moved from the Symbionese Liberation Army and BaaderMeinhof, with ‘Life During Wartime’, to Paris and Algeria, with
‘Listening Wind’.
Were you trying to write from inside the terrorist’s experience, understand their point of view? Empathize, even?
Yes, which for me was quite easy to do. The point of view of someone
being swamped by American culture, their lives and culture destroyed,
their power of response is so limited compared to the might of the global
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loads of fun, and you never know exactly what’s going to happen –
which is part of the fun of it. So we thought, ‘Let’s take it to the band and
say, “Let’s make more of a pop record this way.”’ Everybody was up for
it – maybe slightly suspicious, but OK. On Fear of Music there were
quite a few songs like ‘Life During Wartime’, where the track was
recorded without words and then I just wrote a tune and words on top
of the track. So I realized I could do that and that if we continued our
Bush of Ghosts methodology, I could eventually write words over them.
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powers, it’s pretty easy to identify with that. Especially for someone who
fancied himself as being the underdog in the music world.
‘The Overload’ is the one track that sticks out like a sore thumb on
Remain. It’s great but it’s nothing like anything else on the record, this
drone-guitar trance rock that’s incredibly slow-moving and foreboding.
Is it true that this was inspired by reading about Joy Division but never
actually hearing the group?
It’s true. That’s what I thought they would sound like, based on the
reviews. I was disappointed when they didn’t!
You said that Tina, Chris and Jerry were up for the whole Remain,
deconstruct-the-band concept – slightly guarded, maybe, but ready to
give it a go. Did that change during the process of making the record?
I won’t say they were dragged into it. I think everybody was pretty
enthusiastic about cutting the tracks. But then the process of taking
those tracks and forming them into songs – less people became
involved. Obviously if you’ve played your bits there’s not much more to
do except sit around the studio. People got tired of that after a while.
Those who weren’t involved in the next part of the process probably felt
a little bit left out. The more traditional way of recording is where the
band plays the whole song and hears what it is and that’s it. But with
Remain they were playing tracks and having no idea where it would end
up. Their part will still be there but the track’s vibe may be completely
different.
Were they actually surprised by the end result of Remain?
Sometimes. A little bit, I think. There was no feeling that they didn’t like
it, but I think there was a feeling that it had gone beyond their control.
Which was probably unpleasant. And that was difficult – not during the
making of the album but afterwards, when it came to talking about
what’s next.
And there was a dispute over the credits too, right?
Mmm hmmm – over all of that. The dispute part’s maybe not that interesting, but what is worth thinking about is the idea of how much do the
various instrumental bits and arrangements contribute to what a song is?
Especially to what a recording is. You could easily argue that the same
song interpreted by two different musicians has a completely different
feel because the texture changes. You could argue that texture and
arrangement and groove are as much the content of the song as melody
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So in traditional song publishing, the person who comes up with the
killer bassline or drum part, elements that can be a huge part of a pop
record’s appeal and memorability – like Ringo Starr’s drum roll on
‘Come Together’ – doesn’t get a songwriting credit or any of the publishing money?
Probably not. But also you never know, it may have been John Lennon
who said, ‘Do it that way.’ But with someone like James Brown, what
else is there but a bassline, a drum part and him singing, ‘Yeah’?
How did you resolve the issue of publishing shares and song credits on
Remain?
We apportioned credits for arrangements, giving musicians some sort of
acknowledgement that the arrangement was integral to the track. It’s
very confusing. And it brings up issues of authorship – what have you
actually written, and what is the result of a confluence of a group of people at a particular time and place having recorded something? Like for
jazz musicians – take those Miles Davis albums from the seventies. I’m
sure those tunes are all credited to Miles. But he’d just come in with a
few chord changes or a four-bar melody and say, ‘Let’s go.’ So all these
issues are still with us. They’ve never been properly resolved – not just
within Talking Heads, but between musicians as a whole.
Well, it’s kinda appropriate that these issues became fraught with
Remain because of the central role of Brian Eno. He has had a longstanding obsession with textures. And he’s a strong believer that sound in
itself – both specific timbres and the formulation of a distinctive,
instantly recognizable ‘group sound’ – is the essence of creativity in pop
music. By the time of Bush of Ghosts and Remain you and Eno had
developed an intense friendship and collaborative relationship, right?
We probably both thought that we had a lot of interests in common,
within pop music and without. Art stuff or philosophical things.
Cybernetics. We had a surprising number of things to chat about. And
we had musical things to gain from one another – each one could offer
something slightly different to the other. So we were mutually beneficial
and co-dependent in a way.
You being more of a traditionally skilled musician and he being the
proud non-musician?
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and lyric. Traditionally, according to the copyright laws, it’s the top-line
melody and the lyrics. That’s it.
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Brian plays surprisingly well. He downplays it a lot.
And sings well too – his backing vocals are all over Remain in Light.
He downplays his vocal ability too!
I’ve never met him, but he seems like an attractive person, in the sense of
here’s this mind that’s incredibly alert and curious about everything.
Which would be infectious, presumably.
He’s also very articulate, a good talker. Which maybe is a natural gift,
but it’s cultural too. Americans sometimes pride themselves on being
inarticulate.
Having been raised in America, but actually being Scottish by birth . . .
. . . I’m somewhere in the middle!
By the end of Bush of Ghosts, which was started before Remain and then
completed after Remain was done, had this hugely fertile collaboration
between yourself and Eno burned itself out?
Not yet – Brian played on quite a few of the tracks on The Catherine
Wheel. He co-wrote a few of them. So he was still around. But we’d done
what we were doing and neither of us knew where to take it after that.
The Catherine Wheel was almost like a coda to Remain/Bush of Ghosts.
The interest in African music is still strong. You even had the anthropologist John Chernoff playing percussion on the record.
He’s an African drummer and ethnomusicologist. Brian and I had both
read this wonderful book he wrote, African Rhythm and African
Sensibility, which talked about how people’s attitude to groove and
rhythm worked as a social metaphor. So, as much just to meet the guy, I
called to see if he wanted to play.
On that album the stand-out track for me is ‘Cloud Chamber’, which
sounds like its title – eerie gaseous clusters of texture. That seems very
much the continuation of the ethereal yet sinister dreamscapes on side
two of Bush of Ghosts.
Those sounds are pots and pans and things like that. This was around
the time when studios started having digital echoes and digital delays.
You could hit a button and capture a sound. It was essentially a sampler,
but you couldn’t do anything with it – just repeat a sound endlessly. So
we sometimes used sounds like that as the textural basis for a track. On
‘Cloud Chamber’, we took the sound of pots and pans and gave it this
incredibly long digital reverb to stretch the note way out.
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On Remain, ‘Cross-Eyed and Painless’ has that rap-like section about
facts just twisting the truth around, while the preacher-based songs on
Ghosts like ‘Help Me Somebody’ drape spoken-sung cadences across
hard-funk grooves. Had you heard the very early New York hip hop by
that point?
Maybe a little bit. When Brian and I were doing Ghosts, we were out in
Los Angeles and we met this woman Toni Basil, who later had that big
novelty hit ‘Mickey’. At that time she was working with this street-dance
group, The Electric Boogaloos, who were just incredible. And she’d
worked with a similar group called The Lockers. She’d seen these people
doing amazing dances in clubs and put some of them together. She was
going to do a whole show of choreography based on these street dancers
and their popping and locking. Brian and I thought it was the most
amazing dancing we’d ever seen. In a way, some of the music we were
doing we thought was slotted for her to use in a television programme
with these dancers. It never happened. But in a funny way I think some
of what we were doing was influenced by the hip-hop dancing, but not
so much by rap itself.
Toni Basil did the choreography for the ‘Once in a Lifetime’ video, right?
I wanted to do something with the Electric Boogaloo dancers, so I said
to her, ‘If I give you a budget, can you do a video using those dancers to
“Cross-Eyed and Painless”?’ We did that. But the fact that none of the
band is in the video – that one was too much for MTV. Then I realized
that ‘Once in a Lifetime’ was going to be a sort of single. I forget how it
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On the Talking Heads best-of anthology that came out in the early
nineties, you said that you and the other members began to suspect that
Eno had a game plan to turn Talking Heads into his backing band.
To some extent. Not in a conscious way. Around that time Talking
Heads were really fed up with me and Brian and our ideas. They were
like, ‘We’re in a band, we want to go on tour.’ So I probably thought,
‘OK, I won’t push it down their throats any more. We’ll use what we’ve
learned through all this, but I won’t be quite so disruptive about it in the
immediate future.’ I started to feel that side of things would have more
of an outlet if I was doing a score for a film or a dance company. For better or worse, it pulled some of that arty stuff away from Talking Heads.
Partly my choice and partly there was this disgruntled resistance happening in the band. So in response I said, ‘OK, I’ll find another outlet for
that experimentation.’
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worked: I think I said, ‘You direct me, but I’m going to do the choreography,’ or something like that. She would watch and say, ‘No, do that bit
before that bit,’ or ‘Don’t leave dead space between moves.’ I would
come up with different moves I’d seen from churches.
The ‘Once in a Lifetime’ video got a lot of play from MTV, and it’s one
of those staples that has been played on MTV and VH1 ever since – one
of the few videos from that time that still stands up. The song was a chart
hit in the UK, but not in America, despite the tons of MTV exposure.
Warners never even released ‘Once in a Lifetime’ as a single in the US!
Remain in Light was our worst-selling record in America. It was perceived as being too funky for the rock stations, and of course the R&B
stations didn’t want to know about it either. The album was well
received by the press, but radio wouldn’t touch it.
Talking Heads have always had really interesting arty promos. And there
was a little period when MTV had started out and it was mostly British
groups, but hanging in there and representing the American art-into-pop
thing you had Talking Heads and Devo and a few other people doing
interesting promos. Everything else made by American bands was
straightforward and rather dull. So were you originally excited by MTV?
It was great. It was like what I imagine the early days of pop singles were
like. You go record the song, and a month later you’ve got a 45 in a jukebox and on the radio. That’s what the early days of MTV felt like. You
had a song, and that was the excuse for doing a vaguely experimental
film thing as cheaply as you possibly could. And MTV needed stuff desperately. So if you gave them something that fit their parameters in terms
of length, boom, you got it on TV. You didn’t have to tour or build up an
audience. That seemed wonderful at the time. It allowed all kinds of
music to be heard that weren’t getting played on the radio. Things would
get heard first on MTV, and then radio would start playing it. MTV was
less restrictive at that point in terms of styles of music.
Of course, all that changed.
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JAMES CHANCE
The Contortions and James White and the Blacks, singer/saxophonist
You’re synonymous with New York City, but you’re not from there,
right?
I come from Milwaukee. It’s an industrial town, mostly German and
Polish. I wasn’t in the industrial part of it. I came from a pretty middleclass family. Went to Catholic schools. My father worked for this school
district as a business manager, controlling the budget. When I was fifteen, we moved out to the suburbs because the school had moved out
there.
When did music enter your life?
Aged seven I did piano lessons with these nuns at school. That was torture. The first music I got into as far as enjoying it was all the British
bands – The Animals, Rolling Stones – plus American garage bands from
that period and things like The Rascals and Mitch Ryder. I heard all the
black soul too, but I didn’t get into all that stuff so much until later. I
started taking piano lessons again at age sixteen, but this time from a guy
in a music store. He taught me how to play standards and a bit of stride
piano. I didn’t understand what improvisation was at that time. A few
years later I started listening to modern jazz, starting out with Coltrane,
then into all the free jazz, Ayler, Bird, Mingus . . .
After high school I went to a liberal art school in Michigan. Didn’t
know what I wanted to do really – the only thing I enjoyed was playing
the piano. Then I went back to Milwaukee and a guitarist friend of mine
was enrolling in this music conservatory that had a jazz programme, so
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I decided to do that too. After a year I decided to play the alto sax. I went
to this music conservatory for about three years and I was in this rock
band called Death that started out playing Stooges and Velvet
Underground covers, then later on started playing original stuff. There
was a guy who played Fender Rhodes piano, but he got a real dirty distorted sound out of it and played like a cross between Cecil Taylor and
John Cale. It was a really good band but sort of wrong place, wrong
time. This would have been 1972–3. I also had a free-jazz group, the first
one in Milwaukee. It’s not a big city for jazz.
So is that what brought you to Manhattan – looking for a jazz city?
I moved at the very end of 1975. I was just totally fed up with Milwaukee. The rock band had broken up. The singer – one of my best
friends – had killed himself. I had a year to go at the conservatory but
was just so fed up and I’d been reading the Village Voice, having been
obsessed with the idea of living in New York for ages, and seen all these
ads for CBGBs. It had pictures of The Ramones and Television, and it
just looked like there was some kind of scene happening. I really was
more into playing jazz, though. My ambition was mostly to make it in
jazz.
So being conservatory-trained, do you know your music theory and technique and all that heavy-duty learning?
I know theory, but as far as the sax goes I picked it up pretty late. Most
horn players start when they’re younger. I had some teachers but I’m
really pretty much self-taught. I don’t have a legitimate technique at all.
When you got to New York at the end of 1975, the scene around CBGBs
and Max’s Kansas City must have been at its height.
It was going pretty strong, but I also hung out a lot at the jazz clubs.
There was this whole loft-jazz movement in New York. The free-jazz
guys had lofts in Soho and other places, and they put concerts on.
Did this scene include people like James Blood Ulmer?
He was around but not playing that much when I first got there. There
were a lot of people from St Louis, like Joe Bowie, who later started
Defunkt. I befriended him.
Ulmer and Defunkt both did this three-way collision thing of jazz, funk
and punk, albeit the latter more in terms of aggression and attitude than
an actual musical component in the mix. But pretty similar to The
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Lester Bangs wrote that controversial essay ‘The White Noise
Supremacists’, mainly about racism on the New York punk scene but
also looking at a kind of musical self-segregation, the way New Wave
had severed itself from the blues-based tradition of rock.
Actually, Bangs took some quotes from me for that piece, out of context,
calling me racist – which wasn’t true at all. The only thing I objected to
was the mystification some people put on black music, this attitude they
take where it’s almost like a religious thing. To me it’s just music. All
music has its own technique. The Ramones couldn’t play Charlie Parker,
but Charlie Parker couldn’t play a Ramones song.
The confrontational thing you got into with The Contortions, goading
the audience and starting fights, did that come from Iggy in The Stooges?
Yeah. And it just kind of came naturally. I was really into dancing. In the
Midwest everybody danced – that was a big part of going to see a rock
band. But when I came to New York, it wasn’t like that at all. There was
no dance floor at CBs or Max’s; everybody tried very hard to be cool,
and I didn’t like that. And then when The Contortions started, the original audience was these artsy people from Soho, and they really had this
attitude of like, ‘I’ve seen it all, impress me.’ At one gig, a benefit for this
art magazine X, there were all these people actually sitting on the floor.
And that just really enraged me. There was no stage – I was on the same
level as the audience – so I just started walking into the audience and
kicking people to make them get up. And they got up and got out of my
way, most of them. And then it kind of went on from there. I always had
the idea that there should be a theatrical element to what I was doing.
Not just musicians standing up there playing. I wanted to take it on to
another level, have something to provoke people.
Your stage presence is like some ungodly hybrid of Iggy and JB. Had you
seen James Brown perform live?
I’d seen some clips on TV. The thing that got me into James Brown was
that record ‘Superbad’, where you had these really free sax solos, real
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Contortions’ three-way crush-collision of Albert Ayler, James Brown and
Iggy Pop.
My big influence on sax was Ayler. And then blending that with some
R&B sax players, like Maceo Parker. The original New York scene
wasn’t very influenced by black music at all. Bands like The Ramones
were aggressively white.
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out-there sax playing like you’d get on a Sun Ra record. That just blew
me away. But when I first came to New York, I was really trying to make
it in jazz. I got a few gigs in these lofts, and most of them you had to pay
to play there, put up the money and hope you made it back at the door.
But I could see after a while I just wasn’t going to make it in jazz. For one
thing, I was the wrong colour.
So it was felt strongly that jazz was black people’s music? Even in 1975?
At the time, yeah. Not so much now. There were just so many great jazz
musicians in New York, and the black ones just got more attention.
Also my whole attitude and persona just didn’t fit in with the expectations of the jazz audience. Most of the people who came to see jazz were
still in the hippy era. I really liked the music but I didn’t necessarily like
a lot of the people that went to the jazz clubs or that whole scene. I felt
more comfortable hanging out at CBs or Max’s. I started thinking I
should try to do something that could get over to that audience, without being commercial. I just started thinking, ‘What can I put together
that they would like?’ That’s when I went back to James Brown. I
thought, ‘If I could get something with that kind of rhythm and amp up
the energy even more . . .’ Because we played really fast in the early
Contortions.
But the first rock band in New York I was in was Teenage Jesus and
the Jerks. I met Lydia Lunch at CBs. She was from Rochester, New York.
Only sixteen, just come here, no money or anything. She ended up staying with me for a while. At that time you could come to New York and
get an apartment in the East Village for about $100 a month. I had one
of those, on 2nd Street between Avenues A and B. It cost $110 a month.
Nowadays it must cost about $2,000.
Lydia was your lodger? What was she like in those days?
Very wild. Me and Lydia more or less lived in those clubs. We were there
every night practically. Another of the first people I met was my first girlfriend when I came to New York – Nancy Arlen, the drummer from
Mars. She was also a painter and she lived down in Tribeca. She introduced me to these artist bars down there where the drinks were very
cheap. So I’d go there for a while and then to CBs late. I didn’t want to
pay for entrance, so I would come in for the last part of the last set. If
you had enough attitude, you could get in for free.
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So were you and the other bands formulating the No Wave concept by
this point – the next step beyond punk rock, a revolt against the firstwave CBGBs bands?
There was this week-long festival thing at Artists Space, this loft. It had
all the bands that would be No New York and quite a few other new
ones as well. That’s where Brian Eno heard all these bands and decided
to do the compilation. Originally he was going to do more bands, but it
got whittled down to the four. I’m not sure who came up with the title
No New York, but I think No Wave came from that. Maybe a journalist
came up with No Wave. I never felt like I was part of any real movement
with those other bands, because my music was always much more
danceable and not as arty.
Well, it’s true that the other bands took little discernible influence from
black music, but you did all share this kind of extremer-than-thou attitude.
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ment in the early stuff is entirely your sax playing, and it’s distinctly at
odds with the rest of the sound.
Lydia’s guitar playing was rhythmic but atonal. There was this Japanese
bass player and this guy Bradley from Cleveland, who played a marching beat using a snare drum and one cymbal. Teenage Jesus was very
severe and minimal. Lydia wanted it even more minimal and after a
while she decided she didn’t even want my saxophone. That was when I
started to put my own band together.
The very first version of Contortions wasn’t even recorded. It was that
Japanese bass player, another Japanese friend who played drums, and a
guy called James Nares – a British guy, an artist, on guitar. He played
almost like a toy electric guitar, like something you’d buy for a twelveyear-old kid. Then I found this girl Pat Place. I had her play slide guitar;
I got that idea from Mars. If you have someone who can’t play guitar, if
you give them a slide it’s much easier for them to make some interesting
noises. You don’t have to learn to make chords or hold down the strings
with your fingers. This version of Contortions played the same songs
that we did later, but much more atonal and noisy sounding. Then the
two Japanese guys went back to Japan, and Nares decided to quit. There
was this band called The Screws, a kind of R&B band, and I got the guitarist Jody Harris and the drummer Don Christiansen from them. I also
had another girl, Adele Bertei, who played keyboards. She quit fairly
soon – she only played on No New York.
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There was definitely an attitude I shared with them of wanting to take it
further. The punk bands were really conservative – especially the English
ones. I liked the pure energy of it, but the actual music . . . it was standard three-chord rock. The New York bands were much more original.
The original CBs band each had its own self-contained thing, its own
concept – Ramones, Suicide, Talking Heads, Television. It wasn’t this
amorphous movement like English punk, where it had this sound that
almost all the bands shared. But still, the New York punks were all fairly
conservative as far as their actual music was concerned – they stuck to
regular chords. We really wanted to explode all that.
But I always wanted to keep a danceable beat. I was very gratified
when that audience accepted me too, which I don’t think it ever did so
much with DNA or Teenage Jesus. I didn’t want The Contortions to be
abstract. I wanted it to be danceable. But at the same time I wanted to
put other elements on the top of it. My songs always were in a key, they
had some kind of tonal centre, even if they didn’t have regular chords.
The songs didn’t have chord structures; the way I wrote most of them,
they had interlocking parts. Which is an idea I more or less got from
James Brown. Each part had its little melody, its own melodic integrity,
and it would start with the bass and just build up in layers.
Did you write every single part of the songs and tell your band what to
play?
Pretty much so. But they were free to interpret them; they had a certain
part and they could interpret it. And they had solos at certain points.
How come Eno was even on the scene, checking out stuff at the Artists
Space festival?
He was living in Steve Maas’s apartment, before Steve opened the Mudd
Club but while it was being put together. And this girl Anya Philips, who
became my manager, she originally was the one who kind of came up
with the idea for the Mudd Club. She talked Steve into the idea. She was
going to manage the club, but they had a falling out, so she decided to
manage The Contortions. And she was actually Lydia Lunch’s manager
for a short time.
What was her background?
She was a full-blooded Chinese. Her mother was originally from Peking
and she had to move to Taiwan to escape the communists when she was
a child. And her father was a general in Chiang Kai-shek’s army, but she
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The Mudd Club was meant to be the anti-Studio 54, a discotheque for
punks . . .
I didn’t really go there very much, because Anya had this big falling out
with Steve Maas. They became big enemies. I played there a few times,
but it was after she died. She got cancer and died in 1981.
How old was she?
Twenty-eight.
So you boycotted the Mudd . . . Where did you hang out then?
We didn’t hang out that much, because Anya got sick in 1979, right
around the time our first records were coming out on ZE. But around
then it went from being just CBs and Max’s to all these new clubs, like
Hurrah’s. The whole scene kind of exploded. Hurrah’s was one of the
ones that started more based around a dance concept. People weren’t
into dancing so much. But then me and The B-52’s really got a lot of people dancing again.
Going back to No New York, what was Eno like to work with?
The whole thing was done in, like, one day. He didn’t have much of a
budget. It was really pretty casual the way it was done. I didn’t have a
phone, so some people in the band just knocked on my door and said,
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was an illegitimate child. Then her mother married an American serviceman, and she grew up partly in Taiwan and in different army bases.
Anya was one of the people who really started that whole New York
scene. She was a real presence on the scene. Everybody knew her. Just the
fact that she was behind my music made a lot of the more established
people accept it.
Anya was a photographer, a fashion designer. She designed some
dresses that Debbie Harry wore, and it was she who more or less put my
whole image together. We would find the clothes in thrift stores, but
there wasn’t anybody really dressing like that at that point. I started
wearing tuxedos and white dinner jackets and put my hair up in a pompadour. That was a real revolutionary thing when everyone was dressing
in leather and torn jeans. We were trying to do something much more
elegant. But I would also wear these sharkskin jackets that were kind of
like what soul singers wore in the sixties. But then some of Anya’s ideas
were closer to punk. She designed these dresses that were made of
stretchy stuff, and they weren’t sewn at all; they’d just be tied together
with strips of cloth.
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‘Hey, we’re doing it right now.’ And we just went and did it. Totally live
in the studio, no separation between the instruments, no overdubs. Just
like a document. I didn’t really see Eno too much after we made the
record. So it wasn’t this great creative collaboration, like Talking Heads
or all these other records he’s made.
He didn’t get the Oblique Strategies cards out, then . . .
Nothing like that. Just, ‘Go do it, that’s it, goodbye.’
How did you meet Michael Zilkha of ZE?
He just introduced himself to me one night, probably at CBs or Max’s.
He had this label he was starting and wanted to sign The Contortions.
And he wanted me to do a disco record as well. But he said, ‘It doesn’t
have to be a commercial disco record. Do whatever your idea of a disco
record is. Here’s $10,000, just do it.’ And he didn’t come to any of the
sessions; he just more or less trusted me to do it. What I came up with
was different from most people’s ideas of disco, but he liked it. That was
James White and the Blacks.
So it was a studio entity?
Mainly. But we did it as a live act, using The Contortions as a rhythm
section and adding on other things – horns, back-up singers, dancers – so
it became a sort of revue. We did quite a few shows like that in New
York, but we could never take that on a tour. Later on I started using the
two names – James Chance and The Contortions, James White and the
Blacks – interchangeably.
Buy the Contortions and the James White album Off White came out
at the same time. That was the idea. And there was a big reaction to this
disco idea. A lot of people on the rock scene were very threatened by
that. A lot of people were threatened by me, by the disco idea, by the jazz
idea, by the James Brown idea. The whole thing of bringing black music
in so upfront. To tell you the truth, some of the people were pretty racist
to begin with.
In England there was The Pop Group talking about funk and PiL with
‘Death Disco’, but you were the first American punk-type person to say,
‘Disco is cool,’ right?
The first one in New York, anyway. There was this almost organized
anti-disco thing. Disco was at its peak. I liked the idea of disco more than
the actual music. I would listen to those records and find some element I
liked, but I wouldn’t like the whole record.
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Was she like your Yoko, in their eyes?
You could say that! They would look at it that way.
You were actually going out?
Oh yeah, we lived together. Although she was actually the manager
before that. It was something that happened very quickly after she
became my manager. They had this attitude that, ‘Oh, she’s just your
girlfriend.’ Which wasn’t true.
From your close creative partnership with Anya Philips, to playing with
Adele Bertei and Pat Place in Contortions, and going back to being in
Lydia Lunch’s early Teenage Jesus – you’ve worked with a lot of women.
That was part of the scene from the beginning. It wasn’t just female
musicians – it was non-professional musicians, people who had never
played before. That was the idea: find someone that looked like they
should be in your band and then figure out what they were going to play.
If they didn’t play anything, you found something for them to play. It
didn’t really matter if they were female or male; if you saw someone and
liked the way they looked, they were in. I just looked for people that
were right.
‘Contort Yourself’ – which was on both albums in different versions, full
Contortions frenzy and then more streamlined disco style – is something
like the James Chance manifesto. Or perhaps mission statement mixed
with would-be dance craze – like the Twist, the Mashed Potato and so
forth.
The way that name Contortions came about . . . I was in this free-jazz
big-band thing on the loft scene. Most people would sit on the floor.
That was one of the things I hated about that scene. And we did a gig at
Environ, which was used as a dance studio in the day, and you had to
take your shoes off when you went in there for the show because it had
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Who’s that striking-looking, strikingly attired woman on the cover of
Buy the Contortions? That’s a pretty radical bra she’s wearing there.
Her name was Terry Sellers – a good friend of Anya’s. She lived with her
for a while before I started living with Anya. She was kind of a dominatrix. That whole concept for the cover was Anya’s. She took the pictures,
and the thing that Terry is wearing is one of Anya’s fashion creations. It’s
all tied together, because she couldn’t sew.
The whole break-up of the original Contortions was an unfortunate
thing – some of the band had problems with Anya.
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shiny wooden floors. I hated that because I liked the whole back-in-theold-days idea of the jazz club. So I walked out into the audience, and
everybody moved away from me, and I jumped down on my knees and
blowed right in some girl’s face. Totally freaked out this audience. And
this critic Robert Palmer wrote a pretty scathing review of the show,
because this band really had some of the worst elements of free jazz
going on. But about me, he said, ‘A certain saxophonist in this group
was doing a contortionist act instead of music.’ He didn’t mention my
name. But that’s where the name The Contortions came from. And then
doing ‘Contort Yourself’ seemed an obvious move.
The James White and the Blacks album, especially the track ‘Almost
Black’, plays with the whole concept of the white negro – the hipster
who identifies with the black experience.
That song came from having a lot of experience with being a white jazz
man in New York. There were certain black guys who had such an
antagonism towards white musicians, or towards me anyway, that
they’d physically attack me. I got a lot of hostility when I tried to make
it as a jazz musician. Which is funny, ’cos in Milwaukee I got on really
well with black musicians and played with a lot of them at these black
after-hours clubs. But in New York it was different. And then going the
very same night to CBGBs, you’d hear people in punk bands talking
about ‘niggers’.
Were you friendly with The Lounge Lizards? They were on the jazzpunk, sharp-dressed tip.
That was a funny thing. John Lurie used to more or less follow me
around in the street. I think he borrowed the way he dressed from me.
When I first met him, he didn’t look so dapper at all.
Lurie ruined it for himself and The Lounge Lizards with that quip about
playing ‘fake jazz’.
Well, that was kind of what they were doing. I didn’t think it was such a
bad description. They didn’t have the chops of a real jazz musician, but
neither did I at the time. I do much more now.
Your lyrics are uniformly bleak, nihilistic, corrosively cynical. Like the
couplet, ‘I only live on the surface/I don’t think people are very pretty
inside.’
Well, that’s basically the way I feel. There’s not much more to say.
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Did you go against the downtown bohemian grain by talking about
‘slick’ as something you wanted to be and sound? About how you
wanted to make lots of money, and didn’t see yourself as an artist but as
a businessman?
I just didn’t make any bones about the fact that I liked making money.
Which was a thing that bothered some people. But if you look at the
actual music, it was more the actual image that we were trying to be slick
with. I think we were trying to take some very uncompromising music
and create an image around it that would maybe get it over. Rather than
water down the actual music. That was a factor in the original
Contortions breaking up – they got the idea I wanted to go commercial
or something. But you get to a certain point and you realize you’ve got
to try to widen your audience in some way.
So what happened with your career? You seemed poised for some kind
of bigness, and then in the early eighties it all went off the rails.
I had a big falling out with ZE for a while, just a bunch of bullshit. That
created a situation where, after those two albums, nothing was happening. Then I did Sax Maniac for a label called Animal that Chris Stein from
Blondie had. I’ve always thought that record was underappreciated.
The sense I get is that the No Wave into mutant disco period – that
whole golden age of downtown clubs like the Mudd and artists wanting
to be in bands – started to fade in the early eighties. For a bunch of reasons.
About ’82 or ’83 it started going down the tubes. One thing that changed
the club scene, they changed the drinking age back up to twenty-one.
That really put a damper on things, just economically. All of a sudden
half the audience couldn’t get in the clubs. Also, the whole scene really
revolved around live music – everybody went to see bands. Somewhere
around ’84 that totally changed and that era of the mega-nightclub
started up, where music was just one minor element all of a sudden. It
was the club itself that was the thing. And the whole club scene became
controlled by people who had a very different sensibility.
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Still?
Basically. But you might be surprised at the kind of music I listen to now.
I really like ballads. I wouldn’t call it sentimental music, because if you
get beneath the surface of them, they’re not sentimental. They may be
romantic.
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So it was people dressing up, and DJs instead of bands, and maybe the
occasional club act doing a PA and miming to their hot track?
Yeah. And all these sex-oriented acts.
Did DJs kill the live band, because it was cheaper to have a resident DJ?
In the early eighties a band could actually make a good living playing in
these clubs. I was making pretty good money. At this time you could play
for a whole weekend – you’d play Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and
you’d play two or three sets a night.
And you were like a proper show band, right?
Especially when we had the James White and the Blacks set-up – with the
Disco Lolitas backing singers, a horn section, girl dancers.
Didn’t you want to start your own version of the Cotton Club?
We never really did that fully; we did that in pieces. The idea was a thing
where we were playing at one club all the time, but we were never able
to achieve that.
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LYDIA LUNCH
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, singer/guitarist
Where are you from and how did you come to be in New York in time
for punk?
Rochester, New York. Which is the birthplace of Kim Gordon, Wendy
O’Williams and Emma Goldman. It’s semi-industrial – Kodak and
Xerox are there, but it’s also full of suburbs. And ghetto. Kind of akin to
Detroit, with some of the problems they had in the sixties with race riots
and gangs. But not that far gone. Every ethnic ghetto you could ever
imagine. I lived in an ethnic ghetto and I tried to survive adolescence by
going to live with relatives in the suburbs. But there was far more trouble there, so finally I figured it was time to go to the source of all trouble. I was sixteen.
Did New York live up to your romantic expectations?
I had been to New York for the first time when I was fourteen, and it was
damn romantic – we’re talking New York Dolls and just before The
Ramones started, around 1974–5. New York was a fucking wacky place
at that point. I knew I had to get there. So I literally ran away again at
sixteen. Some hippies took me in – there were still hippies in those days.
I met them at a club, and they let me stay at their loft near Max’s Kansas
City. Kitty Bruce, Lenny Bruce’s daughter, was moving out and they let
me stay in her loft.
You started off wanting to be a poet, not a singer.
It was harsh poetry. Only in the loosest use of the term could it be called
poetry, because it was short and blunt. But I would corner Lenny Kaye
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and force him to listen to my poems about patricide. And he tolerated it,
which was nice.
Did you think Patti Smith was cool? She was mixing poetry and electric
guitars, calling it ‘Rimbaud and roll’.
I loved the first Patti Smith album. ‘Piss Factory’ was her best record,
and as soon as Horses was out she was over for me. It became too trad
rock, too hippy. But I literally hated everything. The whole goal of creating Teenage Jesus was, as Sonic Youth put it later, to kill your idols.
Everything that had influenced me to that point I found too traditional,
whether it was The Stooges, Lou Reed’s Berlin, Patti Smith. It was fine
and good for what it was, but I felt, ‘It’s got to be more radical. It’s got
to be disembowelled.’
I was such a coarse, harsh, bitter, frightening person. I was one of the
youngest people on the scene at the time. People like Patti Smith and
Lenny Kaye were probably ten years older than I was. They must have
been, ‘Who is this terrifying monster?’ I was a beast, I see that now.
Do you regret it, then?
Hardly at all! People like Chris Stein . . . I thought Blondie were the
worst band I’d ever seen at the time. People of my ilk laughed at them.
But of course we appreciate them more in retrospect and they’re two of
the most down-to-earth people. But I remember Chris coming up to me
after a Teenage Jesus gig at Max’s, stammering, ‘I-I-I really like Teenage
Jesus.’ And I was like, ‘SO?!!!!’ But that didn’t stop him from trying to
befriend me. And I respected that.
I hated almost the entirety of punk rock. I don’t think No Wave had
anything to do with it and I resent it when people try to paint it as the
same thing. There’s a massive difference between what punk represented
and what No Wave represented. My goal was never to repeat myself and
certainly not repeat what had influenced me. I would have hoped I’d
influence people to make music you’d never heard before, instead of trying to copy the same licks.
No fan of The Strokes, then . . .
Oh! Don’t mention them. What a bitchslapping I’d give them. I love history but I hate nostalgia. If No Wave truly had influence, music today
would be more psychotic, more outlandish, more dissident, more personal.
For all you No Wavers, that first wave of CBGBs bands – Ramones,
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Teenage Jesus, Mars, DNA . . . there seems to be a Year Zero impulse, a
desire to raze rock history and start again from nothing. Dismember and
defile the corpse of rock.
I was so rebellious, and more than anything I consider myself a conceptualist. I feel more akin to Marcel Duchamp than any musician ever.
From Teenage Jesus and Beirut Slump – which were the most diametrically opposed sounds – on to doing 8-Eyed Spy and my Queen of Siam
album, I wanted to contradict not just everything that preceded me but
my own music. It was purposeful and schizophrenic, which I guess sums
me up. Contradictory, contrarian, conceptual. I consider myself a journalist of my own historical hysteria, but I think that’s something people
have not understood about what I’ve done and the body of my work.
I’m hard-pressed to think of any precedents for Teenage Jesus and the
Jerks. Maybe Yoko Ono, vocally, just in terms of the screamed extremism.
I can’t insult Yoko Ono because as an oddity she’s spectacular and her
art was very controversial and insane. I loved her concepts but I never
really liked her music. But who ever said the point was to like it? Same
with my music: I never said the point was to like any of it!
Is it true that no one in Teenage Jesus had ever played instruments
before?
We started with a bass player from Japan who was too musical, which is
why he had to go. Bradley Field had never played drums and said he
couldn’t, so I literally took him by the hand and pounded out the
rhythm. I couldn’t play guitar, but that wasn’t the point – I developed my
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Television, The Heartbreakers – were way too traditional, right? Tied up
in the fifties and sixties.
Exactly. I loved those groups, but that was exactly what I had to rebel
against. My most popular outfit, 8-Eyed Spy, came to a crashing and violent halt all too quickly because I thought it was too traditional. It was
becoming too popular. People loved that band, and I fucking hated it.
The night I quit it was the most people we’d ever had at a gig, and it was
the look in people’s eyes that drove me to it. I didn’t want them to look
at me with a false sense of understanding. I’d rather be hated for the
right reasons than loved for the wrong reasons. One of the first songs I
wrote for Teenage Jesus was called ‘Popularity is So Boring’. Not that we
had any threat of becoming really popular with an eight-minute set!
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own style which suited the primal urgency I needed to evacuate from my
system before I exploded like a mini-nuclear-power plant. I did have a
strict way of rehearsing: I would literally beat them with coat hangers if
they made any mistakes at a gig! So we rehearsed ad nauseam and we
were pretty fucking tight. It’s pretty fascist sounding, and I was the fucking dictator.
And the drum kit only consisted of one snare and a cymbal?
Yeah, and the snare would break at every gig. Literally, our longest set
was thirteen minutes. When you’ve only got one drum, you’re gonna
beat that motherfucker as hard as you can. Teenage Jesus only came into
full throttle when Jim Sclavunos joined as bassist. Before, we had this
Japanese bass player and James Chance, and the minute James started
mingling with the audience was when I suggested he start his own band.
Because I didn’t think Teenage Jesus should mingle with the audience,
even if it was to attack them. ‘Don’t touch those bastards, let ’em just sit
there in horror!’ When Sclavunos joined, it went to where it should go.
In Hysterie, the anthology of your early work, you call Teenage Jesus
songs ‘short fast sound stabs’. There’s this stentorian aura and starkness
of sound that reminds me of the early Siouxsie and the Banshees, circa
Scream. Did you feel any kinship?
I found them far too pop at the time, yet the lyrics too dark, in a Stephen
King way. I loved the guitar work on their records but I found the
Banshees just not deep enough. I don’t want to say pointless, because as
a cultural signifier they were hugely influential, but I don’t think the
influence has done us any good – I’d feel awful if I was in Siouxsie’s
shoes! I don’t see my progeny anywhere, so I’m guilt free!
You also described Teenage Jesus and your music in general as ‘an affront
to the world’.
It was pretty atrocious – tight, horrible, painful to play and to listen to.
It speaks of my condition at the time, my general anger and hatred and
bitterness for everything. I was a bitter little banshee – ho ho ho. But not
without a sense of humour.
And concurrent with Teenage Jesus, there was Beirut Slump: more
amorphous and oozy and abstract.
Where Teenage Jesus was fast and stabbing, with Beirut I wanted to
make a sound like a slug being dragged across a razor blade. It was really
the ugliest horror-movie soundtrack. Again, we’re dealing with people
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Anguish, abjection, hatred . . . these are the primary emotions in your No
Wave-era music. Where did all that come from?
The cancer of birth. It was rooted in the culture, the times, the trauma of
childhood – and just needing to release the valve. I wasn’t born mad but
I got mad real fucking quick. It’s weird for women to get that mad. I wish
there was a way to teach it, getting that angry so early and being able to
work through it. I’m not cancer-ridden now, I’m not bitter now – I’m one
of the most well-adjusted, satisfied people. I have tools to deal with the
bullshit, that’s been the benefit of my entire career: going on twenty-five
years of public psychotherapy! You have to know who the enemy is and
kill them in your mind before you can get on with it, and that was an
effective way for me to release my bitterness early on. I’m poor, but I’ve
never had a job and I’ve never had one lick of corporate ass. My popularity has been linear my entire career; it’s as if the faces have changed
but the body count remains the same. That’s perfect. Because I’m only
speaking to probably three people in the audience anyway. There’s an
intellectual and sexual minority who need to hear what I do, and that
hasn’t changed. If I had it my way, it’d be back to the salon . . .
Indeed, you’ve talked about seeing yourself as primarily a writer, that
there was little investment in music per se – you just saw it as a handy
vehicle.
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who’d never played music before. Vivienne Dick, who went on to make
films, played keyboards. We had Sclavunos on drums, and the bass
player was the sister of the singer. They were two weirdos from the backwoods of Florida: Liz and Bobby Swope. All of Bobby’s lyrics were
quotes from bums on the subway. I wrote the music and was doing slide
guitar. The biggest influence on my playing was China Burg of Mars.
They were the first No Wave band – and one of the weirdest and most
startling groups. To this day I’m still friends with China Burg, or Conny
Burg. Later we did The Drowning of Lucy Hamilton record. But it was
Conny who invented that No Wave style of slide-guitar playing. Who
wanted chords, all these major progressions that have been used to
death? I still don’t know a single chord on the guitar. There are many
other sounds to be made. A slide, a knife, a beer bottle . . . Glass gave the
best sound.
Beirut Slump rehearsed for a year and only played three gigs. But the
group gave me a great sense of joy. It was again an attempt to make a
horrible din based on the pain of existence.
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It was a particular tool to get across the emotional impact. But if spoken
word had been more readily available in 1977, then I’d have done that.
There was very little of it then or even in 1982, when I started doing spoken word. Spoken word has always been more important than music
because it’s the direct point. There’s not the luxury of music. In your
music you can hide. But with spoken word there’s no escape.
As a kid were you more into reading than listening to the radio?
The radio was never important to me. The Stooges, Berlin, they were
very important to me, but literature made a bigger impact: Henry Miller,
Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, the Marquis de Sade, Hubert Selby
Jnr, Pessao. And the bible. I don’t look down on music, but I don’t ever
find it as important to me as the best of the books. Reading is a solitary,
onanistic indulgence. There’s nothing I love more than being alone in
silence. And if there’s going to be the sound of someone else’s voice, let it
be translated through my mouth and my head.
A lot of the most interesting music made during this period was by people
who came from non-musical backgrounds or were doing non-musical art
forms simultaneous with being in a band. They arrived at music with a
certain conceptualist detachment.
The collective of people in No Wave came from very diverse backgrounds with very diverse interests and a greater understanding of literature and art history, and so you could disembowel and reconstruct.
There were a lot of art-school dropouts. A great mingling of diverse
energies. As opposed to genres of music where it seems people come
from a similar background. I can’t stand it when you hear a band and
you know exactly what’s in their record collection.
The post-punk music in Britain seemed a lot more overtly political,
whereas in America – especially New York – the sensibility was more
bohemian: about an extremism of expression and of lifestyle.
It was much more about personal insanity than political insanity. In New
York at that time rents were cheap. Giuliani wasn’t breathing down your
neck. It was a very loose time. You could get by. There wasn’t much to
fight against except tradition – where you came from, what your parents
were. You were thrown into this adolescent/adult funfair and left to figure it out. I think that’s why there were so many types of music coming
out of New York.
Suicide were part of No Wave for me. They were my first friends in
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Very quickly it went from No Wave bands getting a little bit of attention
from magazines like Soho Weekly News to Eno scrambling to put
together No New York. But I gather you think he did a horrendous job
producing that record.
Eno was always very kind, even though I was such a monstrous little
tyrant at the time. I did think the production of Teenage Jesus was awful
and that Robert Quine of The Voidoids did a far better job when he
mixed our singles. But the rest of No New York sounds fine. As much as
I insulted Eno at the time, he was always very kind to me. He probably
found me a cute little oddity. I’ve always loved Eno – I’m glad he exists
and respect what he did. It’s wonderful that he of all people got something like No New York happening.
Did that record document a real sense of camaraderie between the four
bands – Mars, Teenage Jesus, DNA, Contortions?
All of the bands rehearsed in this loft I had on Delancey Street with
Bradley Field. That quadrant of music was so indicative. There were
other great bands at the time, sure, and at first there were going to be a
lot more bands on the record. I did have some influence, in saying, ‘If
you’re gonna showcase the genre . . .’. I did suggest that these four
groups were the most extreme of what was going on. I thought it might
have been our only chance to get something out there.
Were you friends with James Chance?
Oh yeah. On and off.
But you didn’t get on with Anya Philips, his manager/lover?
No. Basically it was the heroin divide. I didn’t do heroin, and that put a
big divide between me and a lot of people in that era. I was never a
junkie, and if you’re not one of them you’re definitely an outsider. Not
that I didn’t do drugs or drink, but I was never addicted to anything. And
that can be frowned upon if you’re not as fucked up as they are. Which
is fucking perverse! That split me with James Chance. I just don’t have
the junkie gene. It seems really fucking boring. I was sick enough without making myself sick. I did like to get fucked up. Did huge amounts of
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New York. Oh, the early Suicide shows, what fucking beauty! Alan
Vega, what a hero. Alan Vega at the time was doing these giant junkheaps of neon art. Martin Rev had a son who was older than I was, so
he kind of adopted me and looked after me. Gave me vitamins. What
better parents could you have than Suicide!
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barbiturates. I drank a lot and I did cocaine and acid and mushrooms.
But I had too much to do. I had a new concept every year and I had to
support myself. Most of the people I knew were on heroin, not just in
New York but later when I moved to London and hung out with The
Birthday Party. It was so tedious and duplicitous. I was always amazed,
though, how much work people could actually get done! That they could
create masterpieces under such toxic conditions.
You once declared that William Burroughs was totally overrated.
Not as a personality. He was an incredible historical figure. But his writing was piss poor 90 per cent of the time. I love what the Beats stood for,
what they did as a lifestyle – they inspired me, in a sense, to live as a
writer, that you write about what you live. But I found the writing overrated. It’s shitty writing. I need a really direct, brutal stab in my eye when
I’m reading. I want Cormac McCarthy.
After Teenage Jesus and Beirut you did 8-Eyed Spy, which was more
inviting and groovier, with this swampy, bluesy, southern feel. Covers of
Creedence Clearwater and Bo Diddley that suggested a reconnection to
American rock’n’roll. An unexpected direction!
It was my idea to do ‘Run Through the Jungle’, but as a spit in the face
to American music. I mean, I love Creedence, John Fogerty, even early
Springsteen – now. The bluesy, swampy thing was OK, but it was the
pop element and the bad jazz that I didn’t like about 8-Eyed Spy. It just
wasn’t weird enough for me. ‘Dead You Me Beside’ – if we had gone in
that direction I would have been very happy. That was the best song 8Eyed Spy did because it was groovy but just weird – less structured and
more interesting. Ugly love songs for ugly people.
The imagery is literally visceral – all bodily horror and abject interiority:
‘My guts in knot constant snot gut rot . . . dead me you beside/ripping at
my insides.’ You were a big fan of reading medical textbooks, right?
That brings me to my favourite TV show. I love The Operation show.
The inside of the body is like a different planet, a landscape you can
never inhabit but inhabits you. When I was young, I thought I might be
a doctor, but dropping out of school ended that career. I had a lot of
physical discomfort at that time, so just living in my own body was
enough to cause those kinds of lyrics to coalesce. Physical pains and
operations and discomfort – I had growing pains until I was, like, thirty.
Part of it was probably toxic pollution from where I grew up and mal150
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On Queen of Siam there’s still that hideously voluptuous imagery of disintegrating bodies in songs like ‘Mechanical Flattery’: ‘I turn around
backwards and off slides my face . . . My torso melts it flows out my
shins.’ But where the early stuff was a straight assault, the music on that
record is simultaneously seductive and alienating.
It was letting the sick little girl out to play. I was pretty young during
Queen of Siam, so it was like encouraging the evil sickly little girl to
come out. A seductive murderess.
That was a time when people were abandoning rock and looking elsewhere – to the future, with synthesizers, or to the pre-rock past, with
ideas from cabaret, Broadway, lounge. And on Queen of Siam that’s
what you were doing – No Wave meets showbiz. How did the idea of
getting Billy Ver Planck to do the marvellous jazzy orchestrated arrangements come about?
I had been watching a lot of afternoon cartoons like Courageous Cat,
and the music was always so fantastic. Billy Ver Planck did the music for
The Flintstones. I told him my ideas and then he translated them. But he
hated the end result because we massacred his compositions. Cut them
down, put Bob Quine all over them. ‘You call that singing, with those
horrible words?’ That was the most expensive album I’ve ever done, but
still only $17,000, including Billy and the whole orchestra.
I love ‘Lady Scarface’, one of the most swinging, Nelson Riddle-like
arrangements, and then there’s your singing and lyrics, which have an
almost Cindy Sherman-like aspect, playing games with persona.
I was just trying to create a film that had never been created – a mini-film
in a song, a female detective . . .
Talking of personae, a big thing during that post-No Wave moment was
doing cover versions – almost trying on identities like costumes. On Siam
you covered ‘Gloomy Sunday’.
It was a Billie Holiday song written by Leiber and Stoller. Originally it
was banned until they added some lyrics, because it was a song about
suicide. So in my version I left out the lyrics they’d been forced to add to
make it a happy ending.
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nutrition – the poverty diet. Plus emotional trauma, which will make you
sick one way or another. Surgical invasions over and over to find the
source of the disease.
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It was Michael Zilkha’s idea that you should record an album of more
approachable music, right? How did you hook up with him and ZE?
He found me. He was very excited about the scene at the time. No one
had ever approached me who was so enthusiastic. He seemed to get
where it was coming from and didn’t want to manipulate it, just wanted
you to do what you did. Which was fantastic. That didn’t stop me from
threatening to throw him from his seventeenth-floor office if he didn’t
pay me on the spot what he owed me. And he did. That’s why he still
lives, why he now has solar-powered windmills all over the country!
And then you started a new group, 13:13?
After Queen of Siam I went out to Los Angeles for about two years. I
was just done with New York. I did the poetry book Adulterers
Anonymous with Exene from X. And I wanted to do something that was
more psychedelic and, again, the most opposite to Queen of Siam you
could imagine, so that was 13:13. I happened onto Dick Stemmy, a brilliant guitarist, and found Cliff Martinez, an amazing percussionist. But
we never toured: we were slated to tour England and were en route, but
they started annoying me so much. These spoiled California boys started
whining about everything. I was used to doing everything as tightly, as
quickly, as cheaply as I needed to, and they weren’t used to it. So I just
said I’m going to Europe on my own.
While I was in New York on our way to the aborted 13:13 tour, I saw
The Birthday Party play. When I’d moved to Los Angeles, I’d lost interest in music. There was just Joy Division, and then I heard The Birthday
Party records and they were the first things I’d been excited by for a long
time. They happened to be playing in New York while I was there, and I
just ran up and pledged myself to them. Rowland S. Howard and I hit it
off instantly. I just said, ‘I’m coming to London.’ Me and The Birthday
Party did the The Agony and the Ecstasy/Drunk on the Pope’s Blood
split live record. Going from really orchestrated, disciplined music, I
then had to take the opposite extreme once again and do something that
was created on the spot. Agony and the Ecstasy was my first foray into
what I call ‘illustrated word’. That was Steve Severin on guitar, Christian
Hoffman on drums and Murray Mitchell, who’d been working as a
roadie for the Banshees. We did a few shows and then put that to bed.
Then I did ‘Some Velvet Morning’ with Rowland Howard, covering
Lee Hazelwood, and the Honeymoon in Red album with The Birthday
Party. That’s when I started rowing south! It was all mediating Cormac
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No Wave was long gone, but it was like you’d found a whole different set
of allies – Birthday Party, Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell, Einsturzende Neubauten – a cluster of like minds that music journalists dubbed ‘sick
noise’. And soon the children of No Wave, like Sonic Youth and Swans,
arrived. You’re like a moving target of hypercreativity all through the
early to mid-eighties, popping up here, there and everywhere: writing
fifty one-page plays with Nick Cave, teaming up with Thirlwell, Cave
and Marc Almond to do a kind of ‘sick noise’ cabaret revue called the
Immaculate Consumptives, making ungodly noise with Thurston Moore
. . . But never sticking with one thing for long.
This is just my natural schizophrenia. If people were more free within
themselves, they’d have more sides to show. I don’t understand how any
musical group could exist for more than a year or two. It’s like brain
death to continue on and on.
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McCarthy, Tennessee Williams, Harry Crews, Wiseblood, Night of the
Hunter . . . This bittersweet sickness, but underneath it’s like a rotted
swamp.
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STEVE SEVERIN
Siouxsie and the Banshees, bassist
Seems like the sharpest people out of the original punk scene were making their excuses and leaving as early as the first months of 1977. Didn’t
you yourself say something like it was all over when The Damned first
played?
That was kind of true. When The Damned played, it was like the first
elements of the pantomime horse coming in. Punk was already getting
uniform and predictable. That whole brief period before people like The
Damned came along, before we even played – it didn’t even have a
name.
Did you have a strong initial concept when you formed?
The original Banshees idea was a pure musical democracy. There was no
lead instrument – not the voice, not the guitar, which usually dominated.
Everybody occupied their own space, melodically and rhythmically. I’ve
never seen the bass as a supporting instrument at all; I always think of it
as a driving instrument. That’s what was very different about the early
Banshees stuff. You cannot sit there as a singer-songwriter with a guitar
and play those songs in a pub; it’s not buskable, because the instrumentation and the way it’s played is crucial. A big inspiration for that was
Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, who I saw at the Royal Albert Hall in
the early seventies. It blew me away. I’d never dreamed that instruments
could be played that way before.
One of the most interesting things about the Banshees is the way you’ve
excelled at being both a singles group and an albums band. Some of the
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The Banshees never had any truck with that side of punk which was
about ordinary blokes getting on stage, the side that related to Stiff
Records and pub rock.
Oh no, we hated that. I never understood where that do-it-yourself ethic
came from. It was so patently obvious that not everybody could do it.
You had to have a modicum of talent. And an original idea. But for one
moment the floodgates opened and everybody had their five minutes,
put their single out, and then disappeared back to what they were destined to do in the first place. It was so diverse at the beginning. Under the
umbrella term ‘punk’ you had Wire, Buzzcocks, Throbbing Gristle, This
Heat . . . They were so obviously not using The Ramones as an identikit
for what they were doing.
Wire and Buzzcocks were the two bands that we felt somewhat kindred spirits with at the time. They seemed to share this naivety about
song structure. Wire especially, every song seemed to have a different
format to it, just to make it different. What they shared with us was the
fact that the concept was more important than the ability; you can hear
both bands really striving to get to the level of being strong enough to
put across their ideas. But the writing is strong enough that you can get
away with it. One of the things I still do to this day is, I never practise.
Never have. I like being stretched. If I know how to play too well, I get
lazy.
My friend Chris Scott wrote a piece on incompetence for our fanzine
Monitor, and he talked about Scream-era Banshees and how you could
hear human beings struggling with musical instruments. And he said that
this physicality created a thing-like quality in the music, as though the
sounds were objects – lumps of metal in your living room. Whereas later
on, when the more conventionally accomplished John McGeoch and
Budgie replaced John McKay and Kenny Morris, the Banshees became
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best work is the singles that weren’t even on the albums. But the albums,
equally, have all been cohesive listening experiences.
That would be the mixture of influences – liking people like Cluster and
Neu! and Can, but also loving T Rex and a whole generation of good
singles. The two main people we all loved, Roxy Music and Bowie, did
great singles and great albums. We saw the single as the calling card. Our
first single, the A-side, ‘Hong Kong Gardens’, was the most commercial
song we’d written to date, but the B-side, ‘Voices’, was the strangest
piece of music we’d written to date.
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more about ‘atmosphere’. (Like ‘a sofa’ is how Chris described the later
Banshees sound, and it wasn’t intended as a compliment. Me, I like a
nice-looking sofa!)
The physicality was very important to us then . . . We grew up playing
live; there wasn’t a kindergarten period where we were learning to play
Clapton riffs in our bedrooms. So we were struggling, trying to find a
way of mastering the instrument to make your ideas come across. With
the first album we’d been playing those songs for two years and so there
was one way of doing them: playing live in the studio. It was only later,
when we had more time to explore the studio, that we started writing
songs in the studio, based around some of the sounds we could create in
the studio. But the first two albums, The Scream and Join Hands, are
live, physical albums.
By the time we get to 1982 and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse it’s almost like
a totally different band. That album is very much a studio confection,
lushly textured and voluptuous-sounding, a world away from the cold,
stark severity of Scream and Join Hands.
Just better drugs!
Oh, had you all plunged into a psychedelics phase?
My psychedelics phase had been over by about thirteen years or something! But Siouxsie and Robert Smith were doing quite a bit. They were
discovering it for the first time. Kiss was a lot about me and McGeoch
thinking about The Beatles and the Stones circa Beggar’s Banquet. We’d
done Juju, and that had been so focused, and now we were onto our ‘second album’ as that incarnation of the band, so we could do anything.
The whole record started with the lyric for ‘Cascade’. I wrote this poem
and then honed it down to a lyric, and I felt really odd about it, like, ‘Is
Sioux going to sing this?’
The lyrics with their imagery of moisture suggest that you were consciously proposing the melting of the Ice Queen Siouxsie.
I was aware that we were moving on. Not so much changing the band
and Siouxsie’s image but tapping into things that were already there but
not exposed. Kiss came out of a mixture of things. I was reading latenineteenth-century decadent stuff, like Baudelaire and Huysmans’
Against Nature. But also Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company,
where the imagery is very lush, sensual and exotic. That decadence and
sensuality corresponded with everybody else feeling the same way in
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Mike Hedges had a good 1982: as well as Kiss, he produced The
Associates’ Sulk, another psychedelia-tinged banquet of deliriously sensuous sound. An important figure?
Yes. Mike was one of those engineer/producers who had tons and tons of
ideas and was open to experiment.
‘Painted Bird’ could almost be a purpose-built anthem for the emergent
Goth Nation as represented by a hefty contingent of the Banshees audience – all about using style and flamboyance to ‘confound that dowdy
flock’.
I don’t think Siouxsie meant it like that. It’s one of the few songs that’s
taken directly from a source, Jerzy Koszinski’s book of the same name.
But yes, you can read that into the song, and ‘Fireworks’ similarly can be
read as a manifesto.
What did you think of the whole Goth movement?
It’s very obvious why as a phenomenon it wasn’t something we really
wanted to get attached to. And a lot of Goth purists wouldn’t put us in
their pantheon of Goth gods, simply because we’re too diverse musically.
Goth was reacting much more to the way Siouxsie looked. To me, what
people nowadays call Goth is someone like Marilyn Manson. I can see
why he’s a very necessary force in the world. I can’t stand his music but
I think he’s articulate, intelligent, and I think Middle America needs him.
England and Europe don’t, but there is a point in every thirteen-yearold’s life when they need someone like that to latch onto. For me it was
Bowie. A much more intriguing proposition, because there was so much
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terms of instrumentation. Like, ‘Why not try some flute here?’ We were
playing with other people’s expectations of what the Banshees were, and
also tapping into an English heritage of whimsical psychedelia – Kevin
Ayers and Syd Barrett. ‘Green Fingers’ is quintessentially English psychedelia. It’s not American or kandy-kolored.
A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, it was a strange time really because we felt
we had complete creative freedom. We just felt we could do anything and
get away with it. Mike Hedges, the producer, owned the studio, so we
could pretty much go in and stay there as long as we wanted. So we
pretty much wrote it all in the studio. We were also, in the background,
getting divorced from our first manager. So it felt like there were no constraints of any kind in terms of where we felt the band should be going.
We kind of felt the audience would go with us wherever we went.
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more ambiguity. The other thing about Bowie, on account of him being
such a culture vulture, was that you’d find out about other stuff through
him: Burroughs, or The Velvet Underground and The Stooges. And that
was because he was stealing from them! I didn’t know anything about
Iggy and The Stooges until Bowie mentioned them. He was totally educational. But I can imagine if I was twelve today I might be a Marilyn
Manson fanatic. I could possibly be quite evangelical about it. I mean,
what are the alternatives? Travis?!
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NIKKI SUDDEN
Swell Maps, singer/guitarist
You and your brother Kevin – Epic Soundtracks, to use his stage name –
grew up in Solihull.
I was born in London, but my parents moved to Solihull when I was
eight. It’s a nice middle-class suburb of Birmingham, roughly six miles
from Birmingham town centre. A world apart really. Roger Moore used
to have a house there.
When does pop music start for you?
I heard T Rex, ‘Jeepster’, in 1971 – and that was it. I thought I should
buy a guitar. Got an acoustic for £6 – almost unplayable, took so much
pressure to hold down the strings. Then an electric guitar, just as bad. It
took me about a year to learn three chords. Epic decided he wanted to
play drums. David Barrington would come around to our house, or vice
versa, and we’d record what we thought were albums.
Interesting that you were doing this pre-punk, because the impression
everyone gives of the early seventies is of ‘ordinary kids’ being too intimidated by prog-rock virtuosity to make their own music. But it felt perfectly accessible to you?
But until Desperate Bicycles did their first single we didn’t realize you
could actually go book a studio and make a record. We thought only
major labels could hire them. Which seems ridiculous now. So we sat at
home making albums on reel-to-reels.
It was like a fantasy band.
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I always thought it was what I was going to do, music – I couldn’t see
anything else. As soon as we realized we could book a studio, we booked
one for the next week and went in and made ‘Read about Seymour’. It
just took off from there. That was 1977, so there was a five-year gap
between where we were just learning to play. I started writing songs
because I couldn’t play anybody else’s. That’s the main reason! And the
only reason I ended up singing is no one else in the band wanted to! I’ve
got tapes of early Swell Maps that have as much power as The Sex
Pistols, but my vocals are incredibly camp because I was in the Marc
Bolan phase, and also incredibly out of tune. We used to set up recording studios in the house when my parents went on holiday, or have them
at Jowe Head’s house. We didn’t have a band, we had lots of different
bands: Epic and myself, Epic and Jowe, me and Jowe. And we’d make
different albums, all on cassettes, with cover art, booklets, all that stuff.
So forming a band was not an immense stumbling block . . . it was the
concept of putting out your own records. But independent labels and
private-press releases have quite a history – it’s sort of strange that
knowledge faded away, until The Desperate Bicycles.
They just did this single with the ‘It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it’
slogan. They did four singles, none of which are very well played but had
a certain enthusiasm. It was a guy called Roger Stephens, who was a
school teacher and about twenty-eight, and another guy called Danny,
who was about fourteen. We went and booked a studio, Spaceward in
Cambridge, which used to advertise in the back of Melody Maker. £150
a day for a ten-hour day. We booked it for a day. I had some money
saved, and I think my parents lent us the rest. We had enough to do a
2,000 pressing, which was a bit over-optimistic. We sold 750 in the first
nine months. Then I rang up Peel’s producer John Walters to see if we
could get a Peel session. Peel had played ‘Read about Seymour’ about
twelve times over fourteen shows when it came out. Walters phoned us
back and said, ‘Can you do a session in three days?’ We did it up in
London, and we were walking past the Rough Trade store the next day
when one of the guys there asked, ‘Have you got any of the single left?’
I said, ‘About a thousand,’ and he said, ‘We’ll take the lot.’ The money
we got from the sales of the single went into recording the album.
‘Read about Seymour’ – a lot of people assume it’s about Seymour Stein
of Sire Records.
I met Seymour a few times, and he was like, ‘Thanks for doing the sin160
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The first Swell Maps gig was at Barbarella’s in Birmingham, Boxing Day
1978. So what was it like, having had this long phantom-band existence
with albums in editions of one and then having ‘Read about Seymour’
out for over a year, finally to actually perform to an audience?
We weren’t supposed to play. We went on after a band called The Scent
Organs. That was Roger Taylor, who went on to be one of Duran Duran,
and Jonathan Hodgson, who went on to be The Cult Figures and did a
couple of singles on our label. We just asked to borrow The Scent
Organs’ equipment. There was a twenty-minute slot, and we said, ‘Can
we play?’ Epic had shoulder-length hair still, and people in the audience
were jeering at him for having long hair. I remember shouting at them
that Joey Ramone had longer hair than we did.
We didn’t do another gig until April 1979, at the Crown in
Birmingham, on the same bill as Dada, which featured John Taylor, later
of Duran. My mother was in the same church group as John Taylor’s
mother. It’s like if I’d been around in the sixties and known the Stones
and The Beatles.
What was the Rough Trade milieu like? Was Geoff Travis the supportive
and fatherly figure of legend?
I played him the tapes when we had done the first album, or half of it.
And he said, ‘Nikki, I want to release this, but we haven’t got any money.
We’re almost bankrupt.’ The Stiff Little Fingers album hadn’t come out
then. He said, ‘I don’t care if we go under, I want to release this album.’
He took us for a big signing meeting in Mike’s Cafe in Portobello Road.
Bought us a cup of coffee each. I thought, ‘OK, this is working for the
big time.’ It’s been downhill ever since! Mind you, when I signed to
Creation, Alan McGee took me to a Wimpy! Geoff seemed really enthusiastic and genuine at the time, but after the Maps broke up he didn’t
give us any encouragement at all.
What did you think of all that hippy-ish, right-on aspect to Rough
Trade? The collectivism, the meetings, the rota for chores . . .
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gle,’ and I said, ‘It wasn’t about you!’ There was a column that Marc
Bolan was doing in Record Mirror then, and he talked about this guy
Seymour Stein, who was king of the mods in the mid-sixties. That’s why
it’s ‘Read about Seymour’. But I’ve no idea what the song’s about basically. It’s one of what Epic used to call my Van Dyke Parks lyrics – semi
cut-up ideas.
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Epic and I both worked in the Rough Trade record shop for six months
or so. We used to get 120 to 200 quid a week cash, no tax or anything –
not bad money in those days, enough to go out every night. But I got
sacked for being rude to the Rasta customers. They would come in and
they wanted to hear all the reggae pre-releases, six minutes long each,
and you knew they were never going to buy anything. After a while I got
fed up and put everything on for half a second. And they complained to
Geoff or someone, and I got the sack. This was early 1980. Geoff had
this thing where he thought it wasn’t right for bands to work, they
should be creating music all the time. Forgetting it was quite useful to
have some money to live on!
Travis explained to me the 50/50 profit split, after costs are made back,
between Rough Trade and its bands in terms of it being a relationship of
equals, with the label supporting and enabling the artists.
The 50 per cent thing is good if you sell a lot of records. Then you do
make more money. But if you don’t sell any records, they don’t pay you
anything. I’ve done a lot of 50 per cent deals and they usually work in
my favour because I sell records. But if you don’t sell any, you get nothing. There’s no advance to live on.
So you had to labour in the Rough Trade paddy fields.
Until A Trip to Marineville, our first album, which sold about forty or
fifty thousand. That put the band on a wage of £28 a week. Because that
was the maximum you could pay yourself without having to pay tax.
Rough Trade offered to front the money to record the album, but we
said no. We were very idealistic, and it meant we retained the rights to
the tapes. We recorded Marineville starting on 29 December 1977 and
did three or four days, and then we carried on doing it whenever we had
money to go back in. It cost about £500 in total. Studio rates were about
£4.50 an hour, and the four-track tape cost £4 a reel. So it was pretty
cheap. It was self-produced, the album, but we always worked with the
engineer John Rivers, who I still work with. Even on the first day he was
saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, that’ll destroy it, it won’t work,’ and we
said, ‘Try it.’
On my copy it says, ‘We advise the listener to play it at four different
speeds.’
I always used to like playing singles at 33 and albums at 45. Just to see
how they sounded.
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I was impressed by how well they’d aged and how much you did with a
few chords. There’s a lot of interesting space and atmosphere in many of
the tracks. The minimalism, the metallic textures, the monochrome
sound palette – it reminded me a bit of Wire.
I never liked Wire but Epic did. He liked The Fall too, and I never liked
them either. But I did like Scritti’s first EP. The trouble with punk is every
band started playing so fast, so the only problem I have with Swell Maps
is that it often sounds like Buzzcocks.
Another thing that reminded me of Wire was this askew approach to
lyrics. Like they’d write about things that had never been a subject in
rock before, such as cartography. And you’d have all these songs with a
military-history theme.
There’s a lot of songs about the Spanish Succession wars, the Battle of
Blenheim. The eighteenth century was fascinating to me. I was always
interested in military history, not political history. I used to love Biggles
when I was a boy.
And there was a member of the group actually called Biggles.
That’s Richard Earle. He was known as Biggles Books for some reason.
I chose Nikki Sudden ’cos I wanted a name like Tommy Steele, Marty
Wilde, Georgie Fame – a pop-star name. My real surname is Godfrey.
Neither Epic nor I liked our surname. Epic was a member of the
Armored Fighting Vehicles Society. We were into war games – everyone
was at that age. Thunderbirds was a big influence. We always wished we
could use Barry Gray – the guy who did the themes to Thunderbirds and
all the Gerry Anderson series – to do orchestrations of our tracks. I’d say
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Do-it-yourself was obviously key to Swell Maps, but did you also
espouse a deliberate anti-virtuosity, amateurist ethos? Didn’t you make a
point of never rehearsing, to avoid becoming too professional?
It wasn’t that bad. We used to learn the songs in the studio; it comes out
fresher that way. And we only did fifty gigs, over about a year, and that
was enough. The incompetence stage wasn’t so much that we couldn’t
play well but that my singing was so out of tune. And Jowe’s backing
vocals were incredibly out of tune – out of tune with me, out of tune with
himself, out of tune with everything! We’ve got live tapes of Swell Maps,
and people keep asking if they can issue them, and we just say no –
they’re embarrassing! But we always thought we could play quite well. I
think the records stand up.
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our biggest influences were T Rex, Can and Gerry Anderson. Which isn’t
a bad combination. Trip to Marineville was the name of an episode of
Stingray.
Tell me the inspiration for some of the songs. Like ‘Dresden Style’?
There was this fifty-year-old woman I used to know, this white-haired
white witch. I used to fancy her and she used to fancy me as well. She
tried to get me into bed when I was seventeen, but it didn’t happen.
That’s the line, ‘Don’t try sucking my soul out.’ But the song title is from
war gaming. We used to have this friend who used to paint all his figures
with gloss paint, and everyone referred to them as Dresden style, like the
china.
Ah, nothing to do with the strategically and morally questionable firebombing of picturesque German towns then. How about ‘Let’s Build a
Car’?
There a line in there about how ‘all the girls in Manchester couldn’t build
a car’, which is about all the girls in Manchester I knew. It’s a jumble,
like Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or ‘Subterranean Homesick
Blues’ – ‘a long string of vomit coming out’ is how Dylan put it. Words
used to jumble out of my head. There’s a song on the second album,
‘Whatever Happens Next . . . ‘, where the first half of each line is from a
book about fighter pilots and the second half of each line is from an Enid
Blyton book.
Now, I’ve done my research and I read somewhere that you and your
brother were assaulted by skinheads after leaving Rough Trade one day
on your way to a gig supporting Gang of Four. Attacked with your own
instruments. It sounds really horrible.
That was all because of Jowe, actually. We were supposed to be playing
with Gang of Four and Red Crayola at Aylesbury Friars, and being
Rough Trade they didn’t organize anything, so we had to get on the
train. Earlier that day Jowe had got bored and had bought some plastic
water pistols. And we didn’t realize this until months afterwards, but
he’d been firing them at skinheads walking up and down the street. Jowe
got hospitalized with a couple of broken ribs. I got a couple of stitches in
the back of my head. And Epic had been hit around with his bass and
ended up in hospital on a drip.
Ah, I thought maybe because of the Gang of Four connection these
National Front goons had attacked you for being commies.
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On the second album, Jane from Occupied Europe, Swell Maps’ avantgarde side came through with the use of unconventional instruments:
concrete mixer, typewriter, eiderdown!
That was ‘Big Maz in the Country’, the B-side to ‘Let’s Build a Car’.
We’d done the backing track and were doing overdubs, and we used this
eiderdown as damping on the piano. The electric typewriter was a home
recording that Epic and Phones Sportsman [David Barrington, founder
member of Swell Maps] had done with the mic inside the typewriter, hitting the keys and screaming at the top of their voices. We were trying a
lot of the same things The Beatles had done – independently, not really
knowing anything about their techniques. And doing it on a much lower
budget. I was just trying to make records that sounded like T Rex, and
Epic was trying to make records that sounded like Can. When Epic got
into Scritti Politti, it was like he didn’t want to do songs any more; he
just wanted to make things up. It was a battle to actually record my
songs. I was the one who wrote all the songs basically. Jowe wrote one
token song on each album, just to shut him up basically. My songs sold
the albums and the singles. When we did the last single, ‘Let’s Build a
Car’, they wanted to put ‘Big Maz’ as the A-side, just an instrumental,
but I managed to overrule them.
As part of your anti-professionalism credo, you split up after two albums
to prevent it turning into a proper career, which it was on the verge of
becoming.
It wasn’t my decision. I asked Richard why he thought we broke up, and
he thought we were getting too successful. We were supposed to be doing
an American tour and a big pop festival in Holland, and he was just
scared of that. It was becoming bigger than they’d wanted it to be. Also
doing gigs was getting really hard, because Jowe was at art college in
Manchester, Epic went to art college in Portsmouth, which he dropped
out of after six months, and Richard was at art college in Bristol.
Meanwhile, I was working at a tourist souvenir shop in Oxford Street.
So we’d hitch from different parts of the country.
So it all just disintegrated.
Epic and Richard went into the studio to do a single afterwards, and
Epic and Jowe went into the studio and made an album together. But the
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No, it was the water pistols basically. Jowe didn’t tell us for two or three
months after.
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trouble is, we’d never played with anybody else, and you don’t know how
to go about finding other musicians. It took me a while before I did that.
But everyone carried on doing music, except for Richard, who now builds
antique cars. Epic and I are the only ones who made some sort of career
out of it. Epic went on to play in Crime and the City Solution and then
These Immortal Souls. And he played on two of The Jacobites albums
that I did with Dave Kusworth. And Epic and I had solo careers too.
What did you think when many of the people who’d been exalting the
do-it-yourself messthetics thing went ‘new pop’, that whole big shift that
took place in 1981?
What can one say really? Orange Juice – for God’s sake. Music for
wimps. Like the Sarah Records label.
But surely a lot of those C86, shambling-type bands looked back on
Swell Maps as heroic ancestors?
Yeah, The Pastels used to love Swell Maps. I liked Stephen Pastel personally, but as a band they were just so amateurish for the sake of it. It
just didn’t interest me at all, that direction. I had really gotten into the
Stones in 1979. Bought all the albums in one day in Soho Market.
Oh yes, before even Jesus and Mary Chain you were one of the first postpunk people to start talking about rock’n’roll as a positive thing again.
The trouble was, all these people came along who thought music started
with Joy Division. As soon as I got into music I was interested in the
past, because Marc Bolan would go on about Chuck Berry or Robert
Johnson. If you’re not aware of what’s happened in the past . . . I mean,
if you’ve never heard Muddy Waters, you’re never going to be able to
make rock’n’roll.
But that was a huge part of the post-punk era’s rhetoric – down with
Chuck Berry! We oppose all rock’n’roll!
I never had any truck with that. It just seemed gratuitous.
You were also one of the first people to dress rock’n’roll again, as if you
were in The Faces. But what did you wear in Swell Maps?
I used to wear leather trousers from about ’77. I’ve always had the same
dress style. I started wearing scarves in 1978. There’s not many pictures
of Swell Maps, but we always looked good. Who wants to see a band
that looks like a bunch of plebs? People always want to live their fantasies out through someone else.
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You’ve released loads of records and show no sign of stopping. It’s like
this is your life, you’re going to rock until you drop.
What else am I going to do? I can’t imagine working for anyone. Right
now I’m writing a book on Ronnie Wood. Seventy thousand words
about Ron leaving The Faces, joining the Stones and doing his first two
solo albums. That’s my ideal description of the palatial rock lifestyle:
Ron making his solo records in the basement of this mansion in
Richmond, The Wick, that he bought off Sir John Mills. Ron wrote ‘It’s
Only Rock’n’Roll’ with Mick. I still love the Stones. I’ve got about three
thousand Stones bootlegs.
[Postscript: Nikki Sudden passed away on 26 March 2006. RIP.]
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In David Cavanagh’s book about Creation, he says that you felt it was
your job to hip Alan McGee to stuff from rock history he didn’t know
about.
McGee did say to me, and to Epic, that Epic’s record collection was the
cornerstone on which Creation Records was built. Which embarrassed
Epic a bit, because he couldn’t stand anything on that label apart from
Primal Scream. At that point McGee had never listened to the Stones or
Rod Stewart. I’d prod him, and a few days later he’d be like, ‘Nikki,
you’re right: Emotional Rescue, it’s a great album.’ And I’d be, ‘Alan,
you really should go back a bit further with the Stones.’ I had some influence on Creation. But not enough.
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JOHN PEEL
Radio One, DJ
People sometimes refer to ‘John Peel bands’ as shorthand for a certain
kind of wilfully eccentric post-punk do-it-yourself weirdo outfit. And
you were the great champion of independent label and self-released
music of all sorts. But long before punk you ran your own indie label,
Dandelion, putting out groups like Tractor and Stackwaddy and
Medicine Head.
We were less independent than some of the independent labels. We’d
been funded initially by CBS. Then by Warner Bros, and then by Polydor.
And made none of them virtually any money! An involuntary revolutionary gesture. We started in 1969 with a woman called Bridget St John.
We were very fond of her music and nobody was interested in recording
it. The major labels get a lot of stick but they did experiment in those
days. They had these loss-leader imprints on which the occasional interesting record would appear.
So when there was an eruption of tiny indie labels and groups putting
out their own records after punk, were you very excited?
I suppose I did get very excited. And still do. I’m a great sucker for cheerful amateurism. Also these were singles rather than LPs. In the seventies
groups had stopped putting out singles – people like Led Zeppelin
thought it was beneath their dignity. So it was rather wonderful. And
you’d get these stroppy lads from places in Lincolnshire that you’d have
to look up on the map who’d send you records. It seems pejorative to be
described as ‘provincial’, but I’m provincial and quite proud to be so. I
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It was like a flood of creativity was unleashed, and beyond that, an even
bigger flood of just activity – not necessarily that creative or musically
original, but empowering for the people involved.
Then, as now, you could only play a percentage of what you wanted to
play, whereas in the early seventies as a DJ you played almost everything
you’d got. Punk opened the floodgates; just the sheer volume of stuff
increased dramatically, and it’s been increasing ever since.
There’s various outfits and various records from your show during the
period 1979–82 that particularly stick out in my memory. Like The
Cravats.
I liked The Cravats because – and these things shouldn’t affect you really,
but they do – I liked this bloke who was in the band, called The Shend.
He’s now an actor and he was just such a nice bloke. In fact, his card
used to say ‘The Shend – a decent bloke’. After The Cravats he was in
this group The Very Things, who did the old music-hall favourite ‘When
Father Papered the Parlour’ and a song called ‘The Bushes Scream When
My Daddy Prunes.’
Another single on heavy rotation on your show was ‘There Goes
Concord Again’ by The Native Hipsters.
That was one of those records where you put it on and you thought, ‘In
a week this will be fantastically irritating . . . but, until then, let’s play
it to death.’ It’s a much requested record on these shows I do in
Germany.
Then there was ‘I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher’ by Notsensibles.
The thing that a lot of people writing about punk and post-punk rather
miss is that a lot of the stuff was rather funny. I always use that
Notsensibles song as an example of why you couldn’t take it all terrifically seriously. History is rewritten almost as soon as it happens, and
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like the DIY idea where if you got the bass player to sell his motorbike
and you knocked over a few phone boxes you could generate enough
money to make a record. People did, and an amazing number of them
were really good.
Another thing I liked was that a lot of the people were almost entirely
without ambition. Once they’d made a record, that’s as far as they
wanted to go. We called a band once who’d done a Peel session and we
said, ‘How about doing another one?’ They said all they ever wanted to
do was a session with us – just the one.
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punk has become a rather serious and po-faced business. We used to go
to gigs and laugh like a drain from start to finish. You could go to the
Roxy and Vortex and have a genuinely entertaining night out. And not
just with the guys trying to be deliberately funny, but if you went to
something like a Slits gig. I would argue that the two sessions The Slits
did for us were amongst the best out of the thousands that have been
done. A Slits gig was a joyous event. They clearly couldn’t play, but they
were just carried along by the enthusiasm of the audience and their grim
determination to get to the end of the number by any means. It was that
kind of inspired amateurism that I found attractive.
Mind you, there was some bloody sombre stuff around in those days and
on your show: Young Marble Giants’ ‘Final Day’, for instance.
Yes, it wasn’t all a laugh a minute. It was nicely balanced really.
Killing Joke’s ‘Psssyche’ got a lot of play. Now that’s quite an apocalyptic tune, Jaz Coleman frothing at the mouth, almost literally, about the
sinister Controller and nuns getting fucked. Then they turned into a kind
of Gothick metal group, didn’t they?
People are entitled to change, and if my taste doesn’t go with them . . .
well, it would be outrageous of me to suggest that people remain in
poverty and misery just to satisfy some artistic desire of mine! But the
early Killing Joke stuff I really did like.
The Fall were an absolutely central band for you, but does anyone really
know what Mark E. Smith is on about?
If you go round the Tate Modern, it’s up to you to make up your mind
what the work’s about, and it’ll probably be very different to what the
artist thought when he did it. You don’t have the artist sitting under the
painting. And so it is with The Fall. I don’t really want to see explanations and accounts of what it is the tunes are about. And there’s nothing
that says that if you do good work, you need to be a nice bloke. And
from what I know, Mark E. Smith is quite a prickly bloke. I’ve only met
him a few times. If you go to a rock gig these days, you sometimes feel
even if the artist died, the show could carry seamlessly on to its conclusion. With The Fall, you can go to a gig and they can be disastrous. We
went to one in Cambridge a few years ago, and the air of malevolence
was almost tangible. It was a really scary night. But if you’re a Fall fan
you treasure that as much as you treasure the opposite kind of night.
Mark was in a terrible mood: he kept storming on and off, barking a line
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Was there a point where you felt like the DIY thing had gotten out of
hand? Like with the whole cassette-label boom, that it had degenerated
into people faffing about and wasting theirs and everybody else’s time?
I can’t remember ever playing anything that I thought was bollocks.
More than a drop in quality, it was that improvements in technology
made it possible for almost anybody to make a competent demo tape.
There’s not much fun to be had from all of that because they’re all a bit
grey. The things that amused and amazed me before just didn’t happen
any more. Like we used to get regular tapes from a guy singing along
with Cliff Richard’s records. I tried to convince the BBC that we should
book him to do that in the studio, but they said there’d be copyright
problems. He was just singing the tunes to the best of his ability, which
was pretty minimal.
There was a moment there when everyone was talking about New Pop
and trying to compete in the charts. Didn’t you get some flak from Alan
Horne of Postcard for encouraging the emergence of a post-punk ghetto?
And Paul Morley, who’d been showering you with praise in 1979, started
to get critical of the Peel show by 1982.
Alan Horne attacked me – not physically, but he was fantastically hostile
to me when I met him once.
In that period – 1978, 1980, 1981 – it wasn’t just your show, though; the
whole evening spread of Radio One from six o’clock was pretty impressive. It got steadily more adventurous through the night until it was your
show. But it seemed like you were something of a moral figurehead for
the other DJs, the ones who did the early-evening slots.
Kid Jensen was the best. He was such a nice bloke, and we called ourselves the Rhythm Pals. People like Mike Read and Janice Long as well.
Things you discovered would filter down into their shows, like Laurie
Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, which then became a huge hit.
I did start that one. I’ve never set out to set up some kind of indie ghetto.
I know that indies are not necessarily morally superior to major labels.
Major labels are long-term investment organizations whose intention is
to make as much money as possible out of their artists. So when people
like The Clash sign to CBS and then immediately make a record like
‘Complete Control’, I think they’re either fantastically stupid or being a
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here and there and storming off again. Obviously there’d been a big row
between him and the band.
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bit hypocritical. And equally, some of the people running indie labels
over the years have been fairly unscrupulous and unpleasant people.
In those days Radio One didn’t really have any rivals for the pop audience, certainly on a national level. On a local level there were a few commercial stations, like Capital, but mostly radio was a state-controlled and
state-funded thing.
Yes, it was state-funded, but we didn’t have gauleiters telling us we’ve
got to play Sham 69. The trouble with independent radio stations in
most cases is that they all very quickly turn to compromise out of sheer
necessity. And ended up in a lot of cases aping the worst qualities of daytime Radio One.
No, you misunderstand. I was leading up to suggest that your show, if
anything, made a good argument in favour of state control of the airwaves. In a weird way, beaming Notsensibles and Native Hipsters into
every corner of the nation was an extension of the Reithian concept of
the BBC.
I still think if Lord Reith wasn’t already dead he’d have died if he heard
one of our programmes in the punk years! But the thinking behind the
show was kind of Reithian. I do feel like I’m carrying on some kind of
great BBC tradition. It’s only when the show is contrasted with the daytime programming that people start to see it as something like the
Baader-Meinhof of British broadcasting. It’s really not that extreme. If it
was just being weird I was after, I could certainly have made it a good
deal weirder.
In those days you could only really find out about post-punk and the
outer limits of music through tuning into your show or picking up the
music papers every week.
It was a strange period in music papers, because the bulk of writers were
reviewing themselves. It didn’t tell you much about the music! I was into
the fanzine thing, but only as a guide to what was worth finding out
more about. If you got two fanzines from Chesterfield saying a band was
good, you knew it was probably pretty good. Unless the guy who did the
fanzine was in the band.
What continued reverberations from that period after punk do you still
see today?
The do-it-yourself idea, it’s like the splitting of the atom: you can’t
unlearn it. A lot of the people who made dance stuff in the nineties went
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Talking of dance music, I’m always amazed by the range of stuff you
keep tabs on. So I was sort of surprised and yet not surprised to learn
that you were a fan of happy hardcore and had been playing it on the
show.
My son Thomas was into it, and the rousing stupidity of happy hardcore
was just great, although they seemed to have stopped making it.
What do you reckon of all these bands coming through that consciously
echo the post-punk period, like Life Without Buildings?
I’m not too knocked out by them. They sound a bit precious. On the
whole the Americans seem less self-conscious about admitting their own
heritage, whereas British bands try to pretend they don’t have any history or influences. That just seems baby-ish to me.
Hmm, I dunno . . . see, what I find so exciting and also, in a way, charming about all that late-seventies post-punk strangeness is precisely the
groups’ strenuous attempts to create music without history or roots.
I agree, but I think it’s the kind of thing you can only do once in a generation. It was The Ramones more than anybody else: it just didn’t
sound like anything you’d heard before. It is great when you get something and you think, ‘I don’t know what these bastards have been listening to.’
[Postscript: John Peel passed away on 25 October 2004. RIP.]
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through a punk or post-punk period, and that’s how they knew it could
be done, putting out your own records.
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ALISON STATTON
Young Marble Giants, singer
What were you doing when you joined Young Marble Giants?
I was seventeen and had just started a two-year training course at the
University Hospital of Wales.
In one interview the journalist flicks through your record collection and
finds ‘Devo, Kraftwerk, Bowie, Eno, Ultravox, Bolan, Duane Eddy, Tom
Waits . . .’. That’s an esoteric and, for the most part, not very rock’n’roll
selection.
Yes, all very un-rock. Any influences I had were particularly related to
the voice. Older siblings played a full range of sixties pop singles. I can
remember being mesmerised by the church organ in the Scottish
Presbyterian church on a Sunday, and can still hear the detail of a
dropped hymn book echoing or a stifled cough when it stopped and
silence fell once again. Then there’s the music one’s parents listen to – in
my case, Orkney fiddle and accordion music, swing bands and crooners
. . . It all somehow settles itself into your musical psyche, whether you
want it to or not! It’s always been the points of sound in silence that get
my attention most of all: the ticking of the clock and crackle of the fire
in Mr Morgan’s parlour, the rain on a window pane or an owl at night.
Those are the sounds that have an exquisite intensity for me.
Was there anyone in particular that influenced how you approached
singing?
I’ve just played with what’s naturally there and been extremely lazy, with
no training or attempts to do anything different.
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One of the best songs on Colossal Youth is ‘Eating Noddemix’, which
you co-wrote with Philip Moxham, Stuart’s brother and your boyfriend.
How did you come up with the lyrical scenario – the alternation
between the girl going through her daily routines (munching a Swiss
cereal bar, doing her make-up), while simultaneously various horrific
accidents (a train crash, a collapsed building) are taking place without
her awareness? And then at the end you do that brisk, business-like
voice-over – it could be a policeman or ambulance person, or a TV
reporter maybe – which cuts from talking about the tragedy to discussing their TV-viewing schedule for the night ahead without any
change in tone or emotion.
Just one of those moments when you realize we’re all preoccupied with
the mindlessness of the everyday routine, not realizing how precious
every moment of this existence is, and meanwhile elsewhere people are
meeting an abrupt end to it all. Death comes without warning. I hate the
voice-over bit at the end, but basically it’s looking at how people who
face these realities on a daily basis adopt a matter-of-fact, hardened distance to it all. We can’t stay in that vital space for long without anaesthetizing ourselves in some way.
Colossal Youth was a best-seller in the context of the independent scene:
it sold 27,000 just in the immediate first year of its release, and more
over the years. Given Rough Trade’s fifty-fifty deals, did you actually see
some dough out of it?
Enough of it to wish I hadn’t frittered it away! I seem to remember a
phase of eating out all the time. But I lived in a squat at the time and
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Your guitarist Stuart Moxham once complained, when NME readers
voted you one of the best singers of 1980, ‘But Alison’s not a singer! She’s
someone who sings. Alison sings as if she was at the bus-stop or something. A real singer sings with more control.’ He seems to have missed the
point about what was so attractive and unusual about your style – its
undemonstrativeness and seeming lack of stylization.
I admire a trained voice or ‘real singer’, someone who can belt it out and
you never doubt they can hit any note they want to, but I have always
loved the exposure of a naked human voice and all its frailties and the
individualness that comes with that exposure, that honesty. It adds a tension, yet it also makes me feel more connected to the person singing. In
a way, I have always felt very exposed as an untrained voice, and comments such as those were always painful.
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certainly wasn’t going on expensive holidays and investing in offshore
banking! Let’s just say it earned a meagre living.
Young Marble Giants were infamously tentative, introverted and physically static on stage.
Out of all of us Stuart was the most animated and had the best rapport
with the audience, but even that was limited. This takes me back to the
human factor, however. We were all exposed and stripped back to the bare
bones, both in an audio and a visual sense. I’m sure sometimes people held
their breath from start to finish at a concert. I know sometimes I felt I
wish I could. You could sometimes hear a pin drop between songs. Which
takes me back to my fascination with minimal sounds coming out of the
silence.
So what precipitated the split? Stuart starting The Gist, with himself as
vocalist?
Stuart and I had already gone way past our sell-by date, and he was the
songwriter with the confidence to vote with his feet. It was the best thing
for all of us. The good thing is, I’m really fond of Stuart now, but that
might not have occurred had we not had that space and distance to grow
up in.
No regrets? Thoughts of what might have been if you’d stuck together?
None at all. We might have all gone doolally!
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GREEN GARTSIDE
Scritti Politti, singer/guitarist
As a teenager growing up in South Wales, you formed a branch of the
Young Communist League at your school. That sounds like a fabulously
hardcore thing to do, by today’s standards. But in the early seventies,
when a lot of union leaders were Leninists (and with South Wales being
such an NUM stronghold), presumably communist was simply a normal,
acceptable thing?
It wasn’t, actually. To begin with, there was just me and Niall Jinks, the
bass player. We formed a branch of the Young Communists, and after our
inaugural meeting Niall was beaten up quite badly. That was the beginning of years of violence. No, there weren’t communists around, and it
was a peculiar thing to do. When I got to Leeds Polytechnic later on,
there’d be Marxist summer schools at London universities. You’d go and
meet other Young Communists. But that was once I got out of Wales.
What kind of political background did you grow up in, family-wise?
Right-wing Tory, really. Working-class Tory.
So being a communist was a strident statement?
It was. It got into the local newspaper, and Niall and I were named, and
it didn’t go down at all well with the extended family. It heralded the
beginning of a decline in my relationship with my parents. I didn’t see
them for years and years. We fell out big time.
So what was the musical analogue of being a Young Communist? You
were really into English folk. Was there a correlation between being a
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communist and loving traditional music – folk as the people’s music?
Definitely. At that point, at school, the twin things I was into were Martin
Carthy – his solo albums are really astonishing. And then the other thing
was Henry Cow. I first heard both of them on John Peel. It was that predictable thing of being attracted by more challenging music. In Wales, for
a while, we lived in a fairly remote bungalow. It was this brand-new
town, Cwmbran. We lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, and beyond that
there were the hills – or ‘mountains’, as we called them – and the other
way there was just acres of estates leading to a town centre where nothing much happened. So I would tape the Peel shows on a Saturday, and
for want of anything else to do, I would listen to that tape every night or
day until the following weekend. And the thing that stayed with you, I
found, was the challenging stuff. The music you found most difficult on
the Sunday by the next weekend had become your favourite.
One of the consequences of being a new town, though, was that there
was a fairly broad mix of people at school. New towns were places people used to relocate to. That’s what Niall, the bass player in Scritti, had
done. He came from Kent, so he was the most exotic thing I could imagine!
What was Niall like? Very political?
Yeah, his parents were CP people. Or at least his dad was.
See, it’s things like that that have given me this idea that being a communist wasn’t that unusual in those days. Richard Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire,
his parents were communists, and he had a Young Communist badge!
But growing up in Sheffield, where hardline socialist politics was normal, everyday, even mundane – he described going to the Young Communist League events as almost like going to Sunday school – he reacted
against it and got into Dada.
Well, I didn’t ever have that because it wasn’t my personal home experience. Also, there was nothing about the sense of communism that I got
from Niall that wasn’t wholly comfortable about it sitting alongside surrealism. I didn’t feel at that point that there was any impediment to the
imagination involved in undertaking the business of learning about
Marxism. I was already primed, and possibly not surprisingly, by the
experience of growing up in South Wales, which was pretty harsh. A
sense of inequality was formed pretty early on and supported by all the
evidence around, both domestically and in the broader community
around me.
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There was a sense of rigour about what they did, of thinking hard not
just about the music but about political issues. In the rather slack context
of the mid-seventies, that must have been quite bracing.
Bracing’s a good word. It was astringent. Frightening at times, and difficult. That was what attracted me in the beginning – the difficulty.
Was there a similar attraction in studying art at Leeds Polytechnic? The
poly’s art department was quite radical – lots of conceptual art, critically
driven and theoretically informed video and performance stuff.
I’d got interested in conceptual art when I was at school. When I went to
look at art colleges, Leeds was the most – for want of a better word –
radical. Of course, it wasn’t really remotely radical, but at the age I was
then it was quite appealing to wander round the art college during that
year’s degree show. There was one room where a chap was making himself vomit, and in the next room someone was shooting budgerigars with
an air rifle. It was fantastic!
When I started my work at college – or my lack of work, depending on
how you look at it – I stopped painting and started writing, so they were
going to throw me out. This was broached fairly frequently! But somebody at the poly had the good idea of letting the people at the Leeds
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Henry Cow were a bit Marxist, right? And later became the prime
movers of this Euro-rock movement, Rock in Opposition?
Later on I got to know the people in Henry Cow, because at college I
started promoting gigs for things like the Young Communists and would
ask them to play. And Chris Cutler, the drummer, his father was Party.
When I was at Leeds, they would kip on the floor of our place and play
gigs. Fred Frith’s father was the headmaster of a school in York, and
Henry Cow used to rehearse there. Not during school time, but when it
was the summer holidays. And we were invited along to their rehearsals,
which was an incredible privilege.
I can remember when we did the first Scritti single and had stamped all
the labels by hand on the kitchen table of the squat in Camden, and we
put the squat’s address on them. And almost by return of post, it seemed,
the very day after sending it out, Chris Cutler sent his copy back to us in
disgust. He told us we should leave making music to musicians. I can
remember arguing about it when punk started. Henry Cow came up to
Leeds, and I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, this is just the fucking bomb,’ and
Cutler was like, ‘This is appalling rubbish!’ So that was the end of that
really! But Henry Cow were fantastic, I thought.
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University Fine Art department read what I was writing. So Tim Clark
was roped in to adjudicate as to whether I was writing just complete gibberish and bullshit to get away with it or whether I had anything sensible to say. Anyway, he helped me stay there. But by that point I’d started
a sort of counter-curriculum. I had got in with some members of the Art
and Language group, and I’d organized visiting lectures. So I’d get people to come to Leeds Poly and lecture. It got very popular. People like
Patrick Nuttgens [the first Director of Leeds Polytechnic], who was the
head of the whole thing, ended up at the last few events we did. It got
very politicized and interesting. I was encouraging all these lecturers and
artists from Art and Language to come and basically say that what was
going on in our faculty was a crock of shit and that everybody was wasting their time!
When you switched from painting to writing, was this based in the belief
that ‘before I create anything as an artist, it’s imperative that first I have
to work out what is actually valid’?
I think that’s fair. It sounds completely ludicrous now! Or does it? It was
a conclusion that was fairly easy to come to, though. I mean, you know
what British art colleges were like, right? I’m sure they’re even worse
now. All the clichés are true. You’ve got the randy old lecturer who’s got
scant knowledge about art really. All these kids are basically left to their
own devices, to get on with this god-awful stuff that they haven’t spent
any time really thinking about. If you tried to have an informed discussion with any of them, you were on a hiding to nothing. I just thought,
‘This is fucking nuts! Somebody has to be asking some questions about
what it means to be doing this, what it means to be in this kind of institution, in this country, at this time!’ So that’s why I stopped painting and
started writing.
You met Tom Morley at this time? Did he always have dreadlocks?
Yes, he was at college too. He didn’t have the dreadlocks until we squatted in Camden. His hair was that kind of hair. He had a white ’fro, when
I first met him.
Marc Almond and Frank Tovey – Fad Gadget – were both at Leeds Poly,
doing performance-art stuff, right? Did you know them?
Yes, Marc and Frank, they were both at Leeds. But I was a bit sniffy . . .
Because they were into performance art?
Oh, I don’t know, I’d had my moments of performance! I did a . . . oh
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You’ve spoken about the transformative moment of going to your first
punk gig, when the Anarchy Tour – the Pistols, the Heartbreakers, The
Clash, The Damned – hit Leeds. About going into the venue as one person and coming out again afterwards a totally different person.
I think Leeds was the third date on the Anarchy Tour, and they’d been
prohibited from playing in Nottingham the night before. You think back,
and occasionally you’re reminded that you’ve made these claims about
these Damascene moments in your life. But I wouldn’t mind still describing that gig like that, in those very strong, revelatory, life-changing,
clichéd terms. I was fucking astonished.
Prior to seeing the punk bands, had you been on a more musically proficient Henry Cow-type trip, learning your chops and all that?
What I’d really learned to play by then was some traditional folk songs.
Niall could play the fiddle, and he knew a bunch of morris tunes. I could
play a couple of jigs and reels fairly badly! We weren’t really playing seriously.
After the Anarchy show did you form a band immediately?
I think so. I remember I was the one who persuaded Tom Morley and
Niall Jinks to blow the last of their grant on a drum kit and a bass guitar. We played one gig in Leeds as The Against, supporting this one other
punk band in Leeds at the time, SOS.
Did you apply the same sort of thing you’d done with your artwork –
thinking very hard about it – to the initial conceptualization of Scritti,
before actually making the music?
There wasn’t a simple agenda, but there would have been lots of thinking about it. Because that was a lot of the pleasure. It’s just a pleasurable
thing to do – to sit around talking and thinking about things. We were
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blimey! I did some completely pretentious piece when I first got there. It
was called something like ‘Fox Logic’, and it was about the deaths of
Ludwig Wittgenstein and William Kimber [concertina player of the
Headington Quarry Morris Dancers and the prime instigator of the
morris-dance revival]. Kimber died in Oxford the same day that
Wittgenstein died. So it was just all this stuff about the First World War,
English traditional things, men, villagers dying, patterns, abstraction, language . . . It was a massive wank, really! That was my brief bit of performance. And I enjoyed it for a while. But I guess I was more snooty and
sniffy about people’s musical interests than I was anything else really.
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possibly much better at that than we were at making music. There were
lots of different forces at play: music’s relationship with language, which
was a bit like art’s relationship with language, and there was the whole
political dimension of the linguistic turn in philosophy, that point when
language became a subject of philosophy. The political dimensions of the
turn towards language interested me a lot. Then there would have been
music and its role in identity formation. That was something all three of
us had personal experience of – how important music had been growing
up, to who we were. There was also a lot of that Gramscian talk around
at that time, talking about culture and ideology in a more straightforward Marxist-y way. And finally there was the whole punk thing about
control of production and distribution, getting up and doing it yourself.
So these were all separate but seamlessly contiguous areas.
And you’d be exploring all these different issues and theories simultaneous with the more practical stuff, like learning how to use an amplifier,
how to string your guitar?
I paid no attention to how to set up an amp! Partly because we were antirock in a way. Rock was too solid, too strong and too sure a sound. All
its mannerisms and gestures and conventions were strong, solid and
sure, and we wanted a music that wasn’t strong, solid and sure, because
we weren’t strong, solid or sure. It wasn’t until we started supporting the
Gang of Four, and Andy Gill would tell us, ‘This is how you get distortion on an amplifier, this is how loud they can go . . .’
By early 1978 Scritti had moved down from Leeds to the Camden squat.
Had you chucked in your art degree?
I completed it. I got a 2.1.
So they decided text was valid, then, as artistic practice!
That’s all my degree show was – an awful lot of writing. I was told I
didn’t get a first because I’d never attended any of their lectures, which is
absolutely true.
What was Camden like in those days?
It was pretty grotty. The squat was in a little terrace. Some girls from art
college had gone down and squatted the year before and tipped us off
about this place in Carol Street. It didn’t have a bathroom. It was pretty
rudimentary. The band Skrewdriver lived a few doors down. We were
Young Communists and punks, and there was an awful lot of violence.
There was violence on an almost weekly basis. Like every time you went
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There’s a load of commune-style bands in rock history – Jefferson
Airplane, Faust, Amon Düül – bands that lived together in squats or big
houses. But Scritti is unique, I think, in being a collective that involved a
large number of non-musicians who were on an equal footing with the
musicians.
We used to have meetings at the house attended by people who were
going to be in their own groups, or they were fans or just friends. And
maybe of an evening twenty people or so would attend. Some of whom
went on to make their own records, people like The Janet and Johns or
Methodishca Tune. Most of these people just made one or two singles.
And people like The Desperate Bicycles would come around to the house
and talk about things. There was a sense of community amongst certain
bands at the time, and around Rough Trade, with bands like The
Raincoats. A sense of community and a shared feeling that . . . the unexamined pop life wasn’t worth living. Let’s put it that way!
These people in the collective who actually didn’t write Scritti’s songs or
play instruments, did they still actively contribute in terms of ideas and
thinking out what the band was about?
It wasn’t like everybody would come in the rehearsal room when you
were figuring stuff out, but everybody expressed their opinion. It didn’t
seem strange to me. Before punk the only band I’d actually been within
sniffable distance of was Henry Cow, and they were always reading and
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to see a gig. We’d travel in fairly large groups, of five or six, and we’d
walk, say, all the way to Stoke Newington to see some band, and then
walking back at whatever time of the night, you’d be attacked. You’d be
attacked on the London Underground, or you’d be attacked if you were
out selling Challenge, the Young Communist paper. I was doing some
part-time work at the Communist Party headquarters in Covent Garden,
and there were letter bombs while I was there.
So I remember a great deal of violence. But also a lot of fantastic fun,
which came from that business of putting your home address on your
record sleeves, which meant that you did get the disaffected public
schoolboys and French hippies and Italian Euro-communists turning up.
They would bang on your door. The squat was open house, and we’d be
going out to gigs most nights, and you’d come back and you never knew
who would be there, and you’d stay up all hours talking about whatever
books were of interest or someone had maybe bought a new pre-release
dub thing. Good times!
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talking. They walked it like they talked it. It was a whole life. It wasn’t
about a career in music.
‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ was the first single. Was that inspired by what was
going on in Italy in 1977?
I’d read a book, Red Bologna, around the time I wrote that song. I guess
if I had to draw the essence of the song out of thin air really quickly, I can
remember there was this idea of the ‘bloc’, the ‘historical bloc’, coming
from Gramsci’s idea of hegemony. And Bologna at that time was a city
under communist control, and I was interested in certain ideas of Eurocommunism. As for the skanking bit, that was just what filled our house
twenty-four hours a day – non-stop dub and lover’s rock, really.
In Bologna, though, the communist mayor was the one who actually
tried to suppress the more radical Il Movimento people, who in 1977
were rioting in this really carnivalesque fashion, taking over the city centre. Was ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ inspired by those people, the radicals who
were even more left-wing than the establishment Communist Party? Or
were you just struck by the fact that it was possible to have a whole city
in northern Italy that was communist-controlled?
At that time we were going to meetings where various young European
communists were talking, and there were people in Italy who were setting up radio stations – they were nominally communists but they were
pretty wild, do you know what I mean?
Oh, you mean Radio Alice, Il Movimento’s pirate radio station.
Yes, Radio Alice – things like that.
So that’s what you’re talking about when you’re singing in ‘Skank’ about
how Scritti are busy working on developing some reasons for political
hope – ‘a Euro vision and a skanking scope’?
Yes, yes, yes. Please don’t remind me of any more lyrics! It might lead to
me dying of embarrassment.
You mentioned that Rough Trade was a really cool milieu, a fertile cultural zone.
For me it was the spot. And at the time I was also promoting Young
Communist gigs. We did one of the first Fall gigs in London, with John
Cooper Clarke. I even put on Sham 69 and Aswad on a bill together at
Highbury! And these things were always done with Rough Trade’s active
support. Unofficially. But Rough Trade would give us all the stuff to
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So the official live debut of Scritti, at Acklam Hall, only a few hundred
yards from Rough Trade, took place in late 1978. And you only had four
songs written at that stage, so you had to repeat the entire set, to please
the punters?
We just played them twice. No problem. I should commend that to people more often, because by the second time you play something it’s a little familiar already. It went down very well. It was terrifying. And that
was already the beginning of the end, because of the stage nerves and
panic-attack stuff that later afflicted me. I used to get terribly, terribly,
terribly nervous.
But didn’t you do things like make songs up on the spot at Scritti gigs?
Which would have been even more anxiety-inducing, surely.
We did a lot of making stuff up on the spot. In some ways that was less
nerve-racking. The idea came from a mixture of things. I was never convinced that there was any simple correspondence between the formal
aspects and the political dimensions, but I did get less interested in
chords and structures for a while. But making stuff up, again, was pleasurable. In all that we’ve talked about, the theory and the practice, there’s
a central hedonistic streak in it all. It was pleasurable to struggle to make
these things up on stage, not always successfully.
Talking about the nervous strain, the Peel Sessions EP is something that
you once described as ‘a really ill record’. And that’s what it sounds like
– almost like the music is shaking itself apart. There’s a sense of a group
of people living on the edge of their nerves. And a vein of paranoia and
despair in the lyrics, like ‘Hegemony’, where you can’t see any way out of
hegemony’s mindlock on your consciousness.
That’s all true. I was not well physically. There was that whole thing of
making a music that was trying to be expressive of the stresses of being
– this’ll sound wanky – the stresses of being spoken by the language that
we were being spoken by. But at the time time we were trying to be analytical of it, to look inside it. And those were hard things to pull together.
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make the show more appealing. If you needed to borrow any record
decks, or if you wanted to sell badges or singles at the gig and make a bit
of money on that, Geoff would help out with that. I’m not sure one had
any gauge of how remarkable that was at the time, because working
with Rough Trade was our only experience of what a record label was
like. It wasn’t until later that I discovered how anomalous that was.
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There was a bit of despair and paranoia. But there might even have been
some pleasure in the despair. That’s a dangerous thing to say, and a
whole other –
No, I know exactly what you mean – how there’s a certain buzz to contemplating this totally bleak, apocalyptic, ‘no way out’ scenario. A revelling in it . . .
Except it can tip over into making you properly depressed and completely inert and deeply unwell and unhappy.
‘OPEC-Immac’ is one of my favourite songs on Peel Sessions. It’s got a
really odd structure to it; it’s Scritti music reaching this point of near disintegration, but it still retains the haunting melodic beauty. The lyrics are
very fractured too. There’s this spoken-word part, only semi-audible, but
you sound very fraught and insistent, like maybe you’re having a neartearful argument with someone, desperately trying to get your point
across, to make yourself understood.
I think Niall was saying some of that, and so was I. Again, it was expressive of that whole thing about language and identity. But Scritti was also
a group that was . . . we partied very hard. As they say nowadays! We
were always pretty poorly. We were kind of cheese-sandwich vegetarians
for years. What does that account for? It’s a kind of scratching, collapsing, irritated, dissatisfied music. I was listening to some music the other
night, on 6 FM or whatever it’s called, BBC 6, their alternative-rock station, and I was struck by all the new bands: there was no trepidation. I
had no sense that these people were playing with anything that they were
slightly frightened of – either in themselves or in the music. No sense that
they were going anywhere where they weren’t sure where they would
end up.
With so much of the music of that period, but especially Scritti, there’s
precisely what you’re talking about: a feeling of precariousness. A real
sense of anxious struggle, people grappling with these deep doubts and
exorbitant hopes: where do we go next after punk? Punk had restored
everyone’s belief in the immense power of music, but that almost became
a burden, because then you had to locate the correct path, the righteous
way forward.
I think you’ve put that very succinctly. Because of what was happening
politically at the time, and also because of what had seeped out to us
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Talking of all that French critical theory, on the sleeve of Peel Sessions
there’s the pages from that imaginary book ‘Scritto’s Republic’. To me as
a sixteen-year-old, that was like a window opening out onto a whole new
world. Language as a cage, the prison-house of consciousness, grammar
structuring the reality you lived within; language as a problem rather
than something transparent, a tool that you could use in a simple
empowering way. Being introduced to that idea was mind-blowing. You
wrote that text, right? It’s a really eloquent piece of writing. What was
that influenced by?
I don’t know what I was reading at that point. Whatever cropped up.
Whatever turned up at the squat, when someone would say, ‘Have you
heard of this person?’ A useful thing was Compendium, the book store
in Camden. Compendium was a really important spot.
Was that the first place in the UK to have the early translations of French
post-structuralist theory?
One of them. I’d started on that stuff in the university book shops in
Leeds. But Compendium was an important place for a lot of people; its
name comes up often, talking to people since.
The ‘Scritto’s Republic’ text ends with this little Warwickshire folk
rhyme, a ‘counting-out rhyme’: ‘Vizzery, vazzery, vozery vem/Tizzery,
tazzery, tozery tem/Hiram, Jiram, cockrem, spirem/Poplar, rollin, gem.’
Testifying to the sense-shredding power of folk speech! Of course, at the
time it would never have occurred to me in a million years that you’d
have been into traditional music.
Years before I actually did a lot of research into Welsh traditional things,
at the national archives in Cardiff. I was looking into a Welsh tradition
called the Murray Flwyd, or the White Mare, which is when the skeleton
of a horse is exhumed and taken round the houses at a certain time of
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tion. We didn’t understand fully what was going on with Deleuze and
Guattari or Lacan or Kristeva, but there was a lot of intellectual stuff in
the air, and music became an interesting case in point for a lot of these
ideas. But there was also a whole running fight with the BNP. And
beyond those things there was just something we’d grown up with: the
power of pop music. We all knew about that latent utopian possibility in
the music. A transformative power, what would later be called ‘counterhegemonic’. So there was a real sense of that potential in music and a
real interest in talking about it. It was also a massively romantic project.
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year. Basically you had to join in with the people that came around. They
were menacing, it was anarchic, and you entered into almost an MC battle. The people outside had to come up with a rhyme, and you inside had
to come up with a rhyme to match it. There was a sort of contest-cumorgy. It sounded good to me!
On 1979’s 4 A Sides EP, there’s one particularly beautiful piece of music,
‘PAs’. I love the sinuous melody, the sheer groove of the song. But lyrically that again addresses the issue of language’s relationship with power.
It’s a song partly about fascism, right? The myth that it could never happen here, in the UK, the land of moderation, whereas you’re saying, well,
no, it could happen here. All that’s needed is the right circumstances of
economic collapse and mass unemployment, and then ‘the language’
could ‘shut down’ like it did in Germany in 1933, Italy in 1920. But
while the lyrics on ‘PAs’ and other 4 A Sides songs like ‘Bibbly-O-Tek’
and ‘Doubt Beat’ are incredibly complex and ‘heavy’ with dread and
uncertainty, that EP is the first time that Scritti really sound like pop
music. Scrambled pop, in the case of ‘Bibbly-O-Tek’, with its simultaneous vocal melodies and collapsing groove, but still . . . Now, I wasn’t
going to admit this, but in the summer of 1980 I was all set to write you
a letter, advising you to just go for it, do all-out pop music.
[archly] Well, what an insightful young man you were!
I never wrote the letter, but it was songs like ‘Confidence’ on 4 A Sides
that made me hear that pop potential. Also I’d probably picked up on
people in the music papers talking about ‘pop’ and the notion of infiltrating the mainstream. In hindsight, though, it’s really clear there’s this
poppy melodic element even in the most fractured Scritti stuff – a
Beatles-y/Bolan-y thread.
There weren’t many people then who picked up on that, but it was certainly there, a history of listening to things other than the obvious. But at
that point I was getting fed up with the whole indie thing anyway. There
was a concurrence between getting a bit fed up when indie became aware
of itself and became something definable with its own set of conventions,
and the tail end of disco. I woke up to funk and R&B. I’d grown up in
South Wales with a strictly white-bread kind of diet. It might have been
left of centre and hugely influenced by black music, but I didn’t know
that. I didn’t know where the black music was in Henry Cow. I didn’t
know where the black music was in anything. I hadn’t found the funk.
So that was a total adventure, discovering how all these questions of
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On 4 A Sides, with ‘Confidence’ and ‘PAs’ you really hear these soul and
funk influences kicking in.
I suppose so, although it’s a completely calamitously inept dabbling in
that area. That was interesting from a musical perspective, the way that
you can actually learn to listen, you can learn to understand the funk. In
those days I recognized some of the surface features of it without grasping much of what was going on inside it.
Early in 1980 came the famous nervous collapse you suffered following
a gig supporting Gang of Four. Did you think you were dying?
Yeah. It was the whole ambulance with the sirens going to the hospital
deal. We weren’t living too healthily . . . I think maybe if I’d known what
was going on, I’d have gone for some help with the panic-attack thing.
Everything from the drinking to the speed to . . . It’s like, yipes, the very
thought of it now makes me feel . . . weak!
Was there a sense too in which you were also thinking too much? That
all the worrying about the right path to follow had made you ill?
There’s something that certainly happens – and it happens to me – where
the querying of the significance relatively of various things seems to contaminate your whole life, to a point where you might describe it as mental illness. I don’t think I’ve ever had it that bad, but there’s definitely a
continuum. It’s nasty when you do, on a few occasions, reach that point
of finding minutiae overburdened with potential significance.
And then your family rescued you.
They did a bit. They got me a place in Wales, to recuperate. I was never
kind of deliriously bonkers, though. But I did go back to Wales and I got
it back together in the country, man!
And while you were recuperating you wrote a whole book in order to
convince the band that it was ideologically correct for Scritti to go in a
more poppy direction?
It wasn’t quite a book, but there was a lot of it. I would have never
thought of just announcing that I now wanted to make a different kind
of music. So I sat down for months and months and wrote screeds of justification. There was that sense of having to have it understood and
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music and identity and the body and power were reinscribed in the
whole black popular-music and dance culture. That was a whole other
way of thinking and feeling about these things.
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approved and thought through. And I started listening to black music
that I’d heard before but never listened to before.
Coinciding with all this was a kind of deconstruction-triggered loss of
faith in the idea of Marxism as a blueprint and a road map for utopia.
Was there a point at which you actually handed in your Communist
Party card?
I was active in the Young Communists at the same time as I was having
trouble with the whole idea of the scientific status of the ‘science of history’ that Marxism purported to be. But that didn’t seem to mean that I
had to leave the party. I presumed that those conversations would be had
within the party and the ground would shift. I was working in the same
building as the Marxism Today people, all that crew, some of whom
were very bright and very interesting. But that didn’t happen. There just
wasn’t a possibility that any serious discussions about Marxism were
going to go on inside the Young Communist League or the Communist
Party. So I just stopped going.
‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, first aired on the NME/Rough Trade cassette compilation C81, was the first thing we heard from the new pop Scritti. When
it came out as a single ten months later, the B-side was this gorgeous slice
of melodic funk, ‘Lions After Slumber’. Where does the title come from?
‘Lions after slumber/unvanquishable number’ – that’s Blake, isn’t it?
[Shelley, actually.] I think it’s the slumbering proletariat – that’s basically
what he was writing about.
The lyrics, though, are more like Whitman’s idea of ‘I myself contain
multitudes’. The idea of the self as a population of heterogeneous desires,
impulses, states of mind, bodily attitudes, fleeting perceptions, fetish
objects . . . ‘My body and my sex, my gaze and my helplessness/My letter,
my sugar, my homework, my walk/My records, my smile and my struggle/My reflection, my eyelid, my fragility, my discretion . . .’
If I had to say something about it, it’s just a little relativistic hymn. It’s
anti-singularity. It would mean that I am made up of a million . . . not
points, but intersections. Something . . . something completely fucking
stupid like that!
How did Tom and Niall and the rest of the collective respond to the new
direction for Scritti’s music?
Tom and Niall came to Wales and stayed in the cottage for I don’t know
how long. Long enough for everyone to read what I’d written and digest
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So do you reproach yourself, then, for what happened with the original
Scritti members?
Oh, I’d reproach myself for the whole fucking enterprise. I don’t know
what to say, other than that Niall was one of the fantastic influences on
my life, and continues to be. But you drift apart. Things fall apart!
From ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ onwards there was this process where it was
gradually revealed that, even in the earliest days of the collective, you
were always the main musical figure in terms of writing the songs. There
was a lot of interesting discussion circulating around the core group,
feeding into what you were doing lyrically, and in terms of conceptualizing the project. But in practical terms, musically it was you, right? The
songwriter. And so, effectively, the leader.
I genuinely didn’t think of myself as the leader of anything. It just felt like
something we were doing. There were just a lot of bright, funny,
dynamic, interesting people around. There were various reasons why me
being the songwriter didn’t seem in itself particularly privileged. I don’t
think we would have let it be. I wasn’t quietly going to bed at nights
thinking, ‘I’m the one that’s writing all the songs.’ That really would
never have crossed my mind. I knew that I wasn’t any cleverer or anything else than any of the people around me.
With the third single of the ‘new pop’ Scritti, ‘Asylums in Jerusalem’,
there’s another great B-side: ‘Jacques Derrida’. Given your massive love
of hip hop now and your teaming up with MCs on Anomie and
Bonhomie, what do you reckon on your own rather jejeune attempt at
rapping midway through the tune?
[explodes with laughter] Oh my God, I’d forgotten. Oh my God. [slowly
pulling himself together] Well, I guess I’m laughing, so as long as I don’t
have to actually hear it, the idea of it is . . . funny.
In the rap section you go on about ‘Desire is so contagious/I want to eat
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it. I really didn’t know which way it was going to go, or what people
would make of my writings. And although the big shift was accepted in
theory, I think the lived practice of it didn’t sit well with Niall particularly. The radical gesture of the move to pop was not as wholeheartedly
embraced by him. And there came a point where we were playing with
two bass players – one who could do the funk stuff, and Niall, who
couldn’t. And I guess from then on it became a kind of untenable position. But that possibly had a lot to do with how badly I handled things.
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your nation state.’ ‘Desire’ was a big buzzword at the time, sort of drifting over from journals like Semiotexte into the hipper end of pop culture . . .
Yeah, desire was all over the place! Desire was . . . everybody was writing about it, thinking about it: what was it, where was it, what should
we do about it.
I loved Songs to Remember at the time, and doubtless this wasn’t your
intention at all – indeed, you’d have considered it a huge shortfall in
terms of what you wanted to achieve – but it was a big student fave. All
through the autumn and winter of 1982 you’d hear it played in a lot of
students’ rooms. But I imagine you had your heart set more on people
who buy their records at Woolworths. The difference between Songs to
Remember and the third-stage Scritti of Cupid & Psyche is that by that
point you seem to have perfected this style of lyric-writing where the
words can pass for a love song but they have little mind bombs inside.
Songs to Remember, though . . . it’s difficult to know what your average
pop consumer would have made of a song like ‘Asylums in Jerusalem’.
From the title on down it’s not really your typical pop ditty. It’s got something to do with Nietzsche, right?
‘Asylums in Jerusalem’ was Nietzsche’s thing about the preponderance
of desert prophets, of seers and sages. They were Jesus’s competitors, and
they went into the desert and sat atop forty-foot poles and had visions.
There were so many they had to build asylums in Jerusalem to house
them. But you’re quite right, I did go from doing that kind of thing to
writing songs that weren’t called things like ‘Asylums in Jerusalem’.
After Songs to Remember you remodelled Scritti again as a production
company, centred around you as frontman and songwriter. How did the
connection with David Gamson and Fred Maher come about?
With Gamson, I went into Rough Trade one day and played Geoff
Travis some of what I’d started to write, and it had obviously got a
black American New York influence, and he said, ‘You should hear the
stuff this kid in New York has done.’ Gamson was still a schoolboy – he
was at school, or maybe it was Sarah Lawrence College, the equivalent
of sixth form – but he’d made a track at a local studio, and Geoff had
picked it up. And then they sent David by mistake – in typical Rough
Trade fashion – a test pressing not of his song but of ‘The “Sweetest
Girl”’. So he got to hear that, and his twin passions were . . . he was
Anglophile, so he liked the whole Robert Wyatt thing, but he also knew
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Working with guys who weren’t from that Communist Party/art-school
background, Scritti Mark III became much less about theory and more
about the technicality of making ultra-modern, super-precise, state-of-art
dance music. A very involved and intricate process.
Yeah, Cupid & Psyche took a long, long time and an awful lot of money.
That record was interested in exploiting all the new technology at the
time, and it was also about expressing those really black pop influences,
the world of sixteenth notes and syncopation. A whole new language of
talking about music for me. I had never spoken of bars and beats or anything before in my life. So there was a certain exhilaration in discovering
that and being surrounded by musicians who could do that. But at the
same time, as big an influence – although it was never expressed – was
hip hop, which was what we were doing by night. And I didn’t stop reading and writing when I moved to New York. I was avidly reading whatever I could – philosophy – and making notes about it and its
relationship with dance music or whatever.
Cupid & Psyche, some of the ‘love songs’ on it, especially ‘A Little
Knowledge’, offer quite a bleak vision of love: ‘Now I know to love
you/Is not to know you.’ Which sounds related to Lacan and the idea
that there’s no such thing as the sexual relationship, that you can’t actually relate to anyone. A terribly gloomy view of human love and relationships.
I’m very much in love now.
Oh, you are? Great!
And very happy too.
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Parliament-Funkadelic. He’d grown up with black radio stations in
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GINA BIRCH
The Raincoats, singer/bassist
What brought you to London? Art school?
I did foundation in Nottingham, which is where I was brought up, and
completely fell in love with conceptual art – land art and all these kind
of odd things that I hadn’t really known about before I went to art
school. When I was looking for which colleges to apply to, we came
down to London and ended up at a Sex Pistols gig quite by chance. I had
actually applied to Leeds but at a friend’s urging checked out the Fine Art
department of Hornsey College, which was in Alexandra Palace. And
there I fell in love with this muslin curtain room, with a diary at the table
in the centre of it. I was seduced by this concept, I don’t know why, and
had to change plans and come to London.
If you’d gone to Leeds you might have ended up in the Gang of Four or
The Mekons . . .
Or Delta 5. I might have trod a parallel path. When I got to London,
though, the art-school thing got sidelined, because a handful of us got
completely besotted with what was going on at the Roxy. When you’re
eighteen, you can be very passionate about something, to the exclusion
of all else. My art-school friends ended up making clothes for The Clash.
And within a month of moving here I was living in this street,
Monmouth Road, in a squat.
Was the whole street taken over by squatters?
It was a mixture of squats, GLC properties and a couple of housing
trusts. This end of the street, some of the houses had been burnt out and
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Was this street a hotbed of artists and musicians?
Well, there was Richard Dudanski, who had played in The 101ers, the
group Joe Strummer was in before The Clash, and later he was in PiL.
Richard was married to Palmolive’s sister. There was Neil Brown, an
artist friend of mine who was at Hornsey, and he had these bands The
Vincent Units and The Tesco Bombers, and organized lots of shows. But
there were also artisan types – a wood-carver, someone who painted railings in Hyde Park. Some of them had been there for fifteen years when I
moved in. And now I’ve been living here for nearly twenty-five years.
Westbourne Grove and Ladbroke Grove were pretty edgy areas in the
late seventies.
Fairly scuzzy, yeah. There was that crossover from hippy to punk. People
would gather at the Tea Room, which was a cafe and squat, lots of
brown rice, but punks could be found there. That was on Great Western
Road, down near the canal. The 101ers lived at 101 Elgin Avenue, a
street that was a hotbed of hippy activity.
So what prompted The Raincoats to form?
Passion and jealousy! I had seen The Slits play. I went to what I think
was their first gig, in Harlesden, and was just completely besotted. I was
bowled over by The Clash and the Pistols and Subway Sect, but when I
saw The Slits play, I was absolutely sick with jealousy. Motivating jealousy: ‘I would have loved to have done that.’
Had you never thought of being in a band or making music?
No way. We never even went to gigs. I had a few records – Prince Buster,
Ziggy Stardust, Sgt Pepper’s – that I knew inside out. And when I first
came to London I found a copy of The Velvet Underground. Until I saw
The Slits, I had no thoughts of playing an instrument. It was the combination of the energy, the look, the attitude. I was completely bowled
over. Ana DaSilva had had a similar experience with Patti Smith, Ana
being more poetic than me! We used to go to the Roxy a lot and we were
in art school together.
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were literally uninhabitable. The one we lived in was not a pretty sight.
People would say, ‘We’re making a post-holocaust film, can we shoot in
your house?’ We had mushrooms growing out of the toilet wall. But
there was a rehearsal room in the basement. When the Swell Maps came
to town, they used to stay on my floor, and so did Young Marble Giants.
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Did you look like punk rockers?
We had a punky look. We put sugar in our hair and made it stand up.
You’d buy those big galoshes and strange trousers with zips in and old
mohair sweaters with holes in. We had a look that was . . . somewhat at
odds with the world. People did shout things on the street.
What did punk feel like as an emotional sensation? Anger or more like a
positive, galvanizing energy?
I had a feeling that the world was changing. I really thought there was a
revolution going on and I felt very lucky to be alive and at the epicentre
of it. I can’t remember whether it was anger or not, but it was this kind
of wild, unfocused energy.
I associate The Raincoats with Rough Trade and this phase where the
culture shifted from destructive energy to constructive – like, now we’ve
let loose this cleansing blast of rage, what do we build in the space we’ve
cleared?
It’s funny, this post-punk thing, because The Raincoats were post-punk,
but on our first tour, in 1978 I think it was, it’s punk rock as far as I’m
concerned. But we were listening to a lot of odd music as well, thanks to
Richard Dudanski, who had a fantastic collection of world music –
Eskimo chanting, South American stuff. Richard was quite scathing
about punk actually, because his singer, Joe Strummer, had been taken by
Bernie Rhodes and Mick Jones. And he found it very odd that Joe had to
completely deny his past and lie about his age.
The Clash were kind of whipping boys for post-punkers, weren’t they?
They represented the relapse into traditional rock’n’roll and American
musical values.
Yes, PiL to me made more interesting music than The Clash. I only ever
owned The Clash’s first album, as I’m sure many people only ever owned
The Raincoats’ first album – that initial splash of energy was very much
the signature of the time.
I love the first Raincoats album, but Odyshape is my favourite.
That was our weirdness, wasn’t it? We gravitated towards strange, winding, splodgy journeys. At that point I was going out with Dick O’Dell,
the manager of The Slits and Pop Group, and he was into Ornette
Coleman and Miles Davis and gamelan music. My basslines were getting
more and more sprawling and all over the place.
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It’s like the antithesis of that Chuck Berry line in ‘Rock’n’Roll Music’:
‘Any old way you choose it/it’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it.’ Well, you
lost it, just chucked it out and did something else! Did you see the drums
as a decorative, textural thing?
With Palmolive, she had lots of tom-toms – tiny little toms, so although
it was quite tribal, it wasn’t always driving the music along. It was like
we were all clattering along together. I like playing to a drum loop now,
because I find when you’ve got a structure, you can break away from it.
But when there is no structure, it’s really hard, because everyone’s kind
of building their own structure, and sometimes it works and sometimes
it falls apart. So in many ways it was very difficult for us. We rehearsed
for hours – you probably couldn’t find a band that rehearsed more than
we did – and we always fell apart live. And we were trying not to fall
apart, but we always kind of pushed ourselves a little bit beyond where
we were capable of going.
When you formed the band, did you have a conception of what it should
sound like? Prohibitions and avoidances?
They were kind of givens. No, you didn’t have solos. But then we would
have something that one could interpret as a version of a solo. There
were kind of punk rules that you adhered to, and a very anti-heavy-metal
ethic. But when that became de rigueur, to have a nice heavy-metal guitar solo was rather radical as well. It was an interesting time musically.
All the reggae and dub stuff was going on. The Slits worked with Dennis
Bovell, and we actually did a 12-inch single with him too.
Was reggae’s bass-as-melody approach a major influence on your playing?
The first bassline I ever learned was ‘Funky Kingston’ by Toots and the
Maytals. I thought that was the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard. The
reason I liked reggae was because the bass did hold a melody and a
rhythm at once. And it was clear. It kind of sat up in a space. I like to
hear space between the notes. I really like that kind of emptiness.
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Odyshape, it’s totally un-rocked. All rock has been removed from it!
Yes, it unravelled completely. I don’t know quite what happened there,
but it was the antidote of the first album. Palmolive had left and we had
a series of drummers. And sometimes the drumming was put on after
we’d finished the tracks. Robert Wyatt came in to play on ‘And Then It’s
OK’, I think, and he was like, ‘Where’s it going now?’
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One thing that comes across with The Raincoats’ music is a feeling of
collectivity. Often you seem to be singing in unison, these slightly ragged
harmonies.
We should have done that more, I think. On the first two records we all
three sang, and then by the third one Vicky Aspinall decided she wasn’t
going to sing any more.
How did Vicky and her violin come into the picture originally?
Palmolive put a notice up in Compendium Books: ‘Female musician
wanted: no style but strength’. Palmolive was very obsessed with Tymon
Dogg, this local busker who lived in a squat and was friends with The
Clash and who played violin and sang all these mad songs, like ‘Dog Shit
on My Shoe’.
So it wasn’t because of being Velvets fans that you wanted a Cale-like
violin texture in the sound?
I had their album and loved it but never dreamed that we could have
anything to do with that. It was later on when Mayo Thompson came to
our rehearsal room – he talked to Vicky and all of us about the way the
violin was used in the Velvets. He said, ‘Listen to John Cale and the
drones.’ For Vicky, it was a revelation. She’d been playing since she was
five and had done music at York University. When her friend Caroline
brought her to see us, she thought we were terrible! She didn’t want to
join. But Caroline encouraged her to do it. I think Vicky was always
ambivalent about it.
Did you have to untrain her?
She had to relearn. And it annoyed her, because she’d come from a very
specific type of training and way of thinking. Ana was very anti-lessons
– she wanted to be much more free-spirited – and I was caught between
these two schools of thought. I happened to find myself being the negotiator, but probably an explosive negotiator! It was difficult.
Mayo Thompson told me that he found The Raincoats so interesting precisely because of that mix of intuitive, untrained musicians like Ana and
yourself, and then this much more conventionally accomplished player in
Vicky. He co-produced The Raincoats’ debut album, right?
To me Mayo was a profound influence and a bit of a hero. I thought he
was fantastic musically. He was very complex politically. And he was
great fun. He was brilliant for us on that first album, that first single, and
in a way it was a shame that we didn’t continue to work with him. We
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So you tried to be democratic in your actual sonic practice? Whereas
most bands have a dictator in them, or two dictators constantly clashing.
I know. I remember we were absolutely shocked when one day it was
announced that Green was going to be the leader of Scritti Politti, that it
was no longer a democracy. We did operate a kind of democratic situation. I don’t think we really realized that we were embarking on something that was that tricky. I think we just assumed that it was the right
thing to do.
It sounds like the way you operated as a band paralleled how Rough
Trade was run.
Oh God, yeah. I remember going to one or two meetings at Rough Trade
where they’d decided that the meetings should have all the people who
work there and all the bands on the label. I remember crowding into this
tiny room. Just nothing got discussed, nothing got done. A nice idea, but
it didn’t work out.
Was Green Gartside a key figure in the Rough Trade milieu?
I think so. He was very well read, very smart. But also a fragile character. I remember him breaking a string at a gig and him saying, ‘Can one
change the string?’ He had a group of people who would kind of run
around him.
When Raincoats formed, what kind of feminist ideas were floating
around that informed the group?
When Ana and I started the band, there was a very kind of asexual thing
going on. For other people in punk there was a much more sexual thing
going on, like Siouxsie’s rubber and leather fetish image. Viv Albertine
wore tutus and skirts when she performed in the band, and that was kind
of cute and funny. I had this great big orange spotty dress. Ana would
put tribal marks on her face. It felt like punk gave you the space to be the
person you wanted to be. Then Vicky joined the band, and she was from
a much more feminist perspective, in this all-women band called Jam
Today. She was much more informed ideologically. Ana and I had a more
kind of intuitive sense of what we wanted. Vicky turned up and said,
‘Well, actually these are the issues at stake here.’ Vicky was the one who
in an interview would say, ‘The Raincoats are a feminist band.’ And then
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were kind of all over the place; we had this idea that the person who
wrote and initiated the song should kind of have the final word on its
production.
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the next interview we’d be asked about feminism. So we had a lot of discussions about what feminism meant to us. As a consequence I read a lot
of dreary feminist books – there was a lot of dreary writing going on at
the time. And I wrote some depressing songs at the time as a result. It
wasn’t particularly joyful, reading a book on women’s position in the
world. Sometimes you need to look at all the bad stuff in the world, but
then you need to move on from it.
My big feminist friend at university said that in a certain sense her life
was ruined by becoming a feminist, because it was only through becoming conscious that she realized that something that had happened to her
as an underage teenage girl had technically been rape. Up until then she’d
thought of herself as precociously mature. So there’s a certain eternal
truth to the notion that ignorance is bliss. But was there a sense in which
The Raincoats, and post-punk in general, were reacting against the
aggressive masculinity of punk rock? Because punk could have a bit of a
misogynist streak sometimes.
There was that element, but there were also things like Mark Perry’s
‘Love Lies Limp’ and Dan from the TV Personalities and the Swell Maps
guys. Lots of very sweet men. Wimpy, they were called, but to me they’re
the cool guys. Somebody like John Lydon had a bit of both going on –
there was a sweet gentleness to him, as well as his Richard III aspect. But
The Raincoats, we were an odd band. Ana is Portuguese, eight years
older than me, did a doctorate in language and a dissertation on Bob
Dylan. Then there’s Vicky, the classically trained violinist and politically
aware feminist, and Palmolive, the Spanish ex-hippy drummer. So we
weren’t like four friends, in the sense of a friendship where you pick people because you have something in common. We were all quite disparate
characters. Fate had conspired to bring us together.
Tell me more about the records, particularly Odyshape, which I adore.
To me it’s up there with Metal Box and the better bits of Flowers of
Romance as a record that takes the post-punk drive to un-rock rock as
far as it could go while still being . . . listenable!
It’s funny, because I can’t listen to it. I want to redo the vocals. I just want
to go and correct all the mistakes. And it is absolutely full of them. But
for all I know, you might like the bits that make me cringe.
My favourite track is ‘Only Loved at Night’, where the drums are not
driving the song but more like a parallel pulse to everything else.
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There’s a definite parallel, I think, between Odyshape and Flowers of
Romance, where Lydon and Levene famously dragged all these peculiar
old instruments out of the cupboard. But I don’t think the results were as
delightful as Odyshape.
We found little organs and odd little instruments at the market and junk
shops. I bought a balophone, this Mali instrument that’s got gourds
underneath it and beautiful bits of wood and misshapen holes.
Was that the beginning of that thing where people started looking outside the West, the early days of what would be called ‘world music’?
I don’t know. I remember going to the first WOMAD, when there was
nobody there and it was brilliant. There was a Balinese gamelan workshop and a belly-dancing workshop. I don’t know if people were really
looking to world music around that time. I think we were, but not really
that consciously. You’re making a record, and you go into a shop and
you see something and you think, ‘Why not?’
Odyshape came out in the swansong phase of post-punk, 1981, just as
the New Pop was coming through. Suddenly, being accessible and poppy
was the goal, and the old ideas about independent labels as bastions of
integrity and purity were being challenged. Rough Trade itself became a
lot more strategic and marketing-conscious, trying to score hits with
Scritti and Aztec Camera . . .
The audience changed. There was a change in business strategy as well.
I think things changed for all sorts of reasons. Scritti Politti declares
Green’s the leader. Things started to shift.
But New Pop seems in retrospect to have involved a step backwards in
terms of women in pop. You had some striking and ‘strong’ female performers, like Annie Lennox, but it was back to the format of the female
as front person, with the music being done by the band, or in
Eurythmics’ case, the guy. You had the girls in The Human League, just
back-up singers.
Yeah. I mean, after The Slits and that whole era there was nothing interesting really until Riot Grrrl. Madonna and Annie Lennox – they were
icons in a way. But they were more the hero than an inspirational force.
Whereas you saw The Slits and that made you want to be creative. You
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That’s one of the songs I played guitar on. Vicky plays bass on that song.
Ana had just bought this kalimba, a thumb piano, and wrote this beautiful tune.
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see Annie Lennox and, wow, she’s brilliant, she sings fantastic. But
there’s that real distance. It’s much more the showbiz model.
But then you later had a bit of a postmodernist New Pop-type moment
with Dorothy, you and Vicky’s post-Raincoats band. Signed to Chrysalis
Records and based around a kind of post-feminist idea of playing games
with archetypes of female glamour.
Yes, Dorothy was my showbiz moment! The main thing behind it was
Cindy Sherman. I just thought her photographs were fantastic. I liked
the thought that each picture told a certain story and had a certain look.
She could be a professor or someone really glamorous. Judith
Williamson had written a fantastic article on Sherman’s work in Screen
magazine, about this idea that when you wake up, you decide what
you’re going to wear, and that decides what person you’re going to be
that day. I really liked the fact that you could put on this item of clothing and throw off your personal shackles – all the kind of introspection
that went into lyrics like ‘she looks embarrassed’ on Odyshape – and just
be whatever character you wanted to be. And it was very liberating to
be, you know, a sex kitten if you felt like it. For our press shots, we based
it on this photograph of Joan Crawford where she was signing these
glammy photographs of herself. I liked this idea that you can construct
whatever image you wanted. And in many ways that’s what Annie
Lennox and Madonna did.
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MARTIN BRAMAH
The Fall, guitarist; The Blue Orchids, singer-guitarist
In the beginning . . .
I was born in 1957, in Openshaw, central east Manchester. Very
Coronation Street, but all demolished in the sixties. Slum clearing. When
I was seven we moved to Prestwich. The Fall were Prestwich, and Joy
Division were Salford boys, which is just down the road from Prestwich.
But it seemed to mean a lot at the time.
Was it a class thing?
We both thought we were the real deal. Joy Division felt their workingclass credentials were impeccable, and we felt the same way! We shared
the same rehearsal rooms and did the same gigs but we never spoke to
each other, because we were rivals! I think they’re great now, but at the
time The Fall and Joy Division were contending.
When did you get into music?
The first singles I bought were Slade and T Rex. Bowie was a big influence on everybody in 1972–3, and then he introduced us through his
interviews to Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. From there we got into Krautrock,
Can and Neu!, and Beefheart and Velvet Underground. At the time it
seemed very underground; no one seemed to know about it but us.
That’s what drew those elements of what became The Fall together – a
common interest in obscure music. I remember when I first met Mark
Smith he was listening to The Doors. I had thought initially The Doors
were a band like Bread – some American soft-rock band!
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Did you immediately become friends with Mark?
He was always Mark, always as he is perceived now – even before he created the persona. Naturally a strange person to try to get to know. I
knew his sisters before I knew him. Aged sixteen, I was around at his
house visiting his sisters, and I was interested in the music that was coming out of the front room. He was sitting there with his girlfriend Una,
who ended up playing keyboards for us. He’s the kind of guy you skirt
around initially. Very wary of people and quite aggressive, but obviously
quite eccentric as well. He was this kid who wore a black leather jacket
with a Nazi swastika armband – before punk rock! He’d walk around
Prestwich like that, more to make a statement than anything. It was just
perversity. He wasn’t a fascist or anything.
Weren’t members of The Fall actually communists at one point?
We weren’t a political band in any way that made rational sense. We
were just kicking against the system that was imposed upon us. If Mark
wanted to piss people off, he’d be a Nazi. It was a heavy Jewish area,
Prestwich. Lots of wealthy Jews there . . . But Tony Friel, the bassist, was
a member of the Communist Party. And there was that socialist ethic.
But Mark Smith himself was never CP?
Not as such. He’s not one for joining clubs. He’s contrary by nature. He’s
always bucking the trend. He’s like, ‘You think you’ve got an answer but
it’s not necessarily so. You’re kidding yourself. Wake up and check out
this angle.’ His natural impulse is to upset you and disturb you, which is
what I liked most about him – but it does make him hard to work with!
The Fall had that song, ‘Hey! Fascist’, right? Not a fraternal greeting but
a put-down!
It was originally called ‘Hey! Student’! Mark hated all the students in
Manchester. At that point we had the biggest student population in
Europe, but then when we did Rock Against Racism Mark changed the
lyrics to ‘Hey! Fascist’ because he thought it might go down better that
way.
Was Mark’s objection to students that they were square and middlebrow
in their music taste?
Because he didn’t go to university, I suppose it’s the inverted snobbery of
the working-class kid sneering at the privilege of students. It’s just
teenage kids thinking it would be funny to make a statement. It seemed
irreverent.
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So you were this gang of friends into weird music, and then you became
The Fall?
We were already writing together before we discovered The Sex Pistols.
We had a musical empathy. Felt we had an insight into music. And were
obviously pickled in all kinds of drugs. Taking a lot of LSD and magic
mushrooms and really exploring music. We’d be in Mark’s attic, reading
poetry and making noise on instruments. We were all non-musicians. But
we didn’t have a drummer and at the time it was impossible to conceive
of doing gigs locally. What The Sex Pistols did was make us realize we
could do it. Up until the Pistols, all the bands that played gigs came from
out of town. They’d play at the Free Trade Hall or the Apollo. We’d turn
up and sneak in the back door or sometimes pay for a ticket. But when
the Pistols played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, we thought, ‘We’re as
good as that.’ So we immediately advertised for a drummer and threw a
set together. I met Pete Shelley at this club called the Ranch Bar and told
him we had a band, and he and Howard Devoto and Richard Boon, their
manager, came to see our first gig at Northwest Arts. So the next gig was
supporting The Buzzcocks.
Up in Mark’s attic, you were reading poetry?
We thought we were beatniks. We liked to dress in black, and we loved
the Velvets. We loved the idea of Beat poets. Reading Burroughs and
French existentialists, Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats. We were writing poetry because we weren’t writing music to start with. We all wrote
words then. Bursting with talent, we were!
And you were already exploring psychedelics?
That was the culture in the clubs in mid-seventies Manchester. The sixties hippies happened, and by the seventies it was a way of life. There
were a lot of casualties around, but we were the next generation of kids.
We saw all the hippies who’d blown their brains out and we felt we were
wiser than that, but we were attracted to the experience. We learned
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You mentioned Tony Friel, The Fall’s original bassist . . . How did you
come across him?
We went to the same secondary school. I met him when I was twelve, and
I was attracted to him because he was this eccentric kid who got picked
on a lot, but he had this wild imagination. He’d always be in the corner
of the playground telling these wild stories and scribbling in notebooks.
A crowd of people would gather to listen to his mad flights of fancy.
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from the kids who were older than us, people like John Cooper Clarke.
He was ten years older and from that sixties generation. When we discovered him living down the road from us in Prestwich, we started hanging out together.
The Fall’s name comes from Camus, so despite being anti-student, you
were far from anti-intellectual.
Not at all. We thought all your originality was knocked out of you at
university. We were keen to learn what was interesting, but we didn’t
want to be force-fed. We’d all rejected what little education we had. I
played truant whenever I could. But I was being primed to be factory
fodder. We were fired up and keen to find out things for ourselves.
Initially we were called The Outsiders, also from Camus, but then we
realized there were three other bands called that. So we chose The Fall.
It was Tony Friel’s influence; he was reading Camus. Mark’s idea for a
name was Master Race and the Death’s Heads. If he had got his way, history might have been very different!
Didn’t the name The Fall also embody a kind of concept or attitude? It
has evocations of decline, the decadent phase of a civilization, but also
the intimation of comeuppance – the mighty being toppled. The schadenfreude of watching the powerful being brought down.
It’s hard to define the concept of The Fall. We were trying to get to the
bottom of things and express what was really bugging us. Mark was the
one with the real vision, and that vision quickly became The Fall, but initially it was a real melting pot. It was like a poetry group at first. We used
to share our innermost feelings in words and play our favourite albums.
Mark bought a guitar but couldn’t play it. I was already singing in
another band, so the first line-up of The Fall was me singing and Mark
playing guitar. It quickly switched because Mark was writing these mad,
well-observed lyrics. Our early stuff sounded American, but Mark
picked up on how to make Manchester interesting.
In Manchester music generally there’s long been that northern patriotism
thing: down with the effete, wanky south. Especially London.
It was more about expressing ourselves and getting the uniqueness
across. We loved what was happening in New York. For me as a guitarist, Tom Verlaine was a big influence. And we loved the stuff in
London too. But we didn’t want to imitate it. Mark managed to embody
our angle on what was relevant. Some bands stumbled when they tried
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As a guitarist, did you have any particular ploys?
I was a self-taught player. Tony Friel was a better musician than me, so
he gave me some of the rudiments: how to make a barre chord . . . I was
into discord, getting away from the regimented and the sterile. We were
inspired. We knew instinctively that we could do it, and we wanted to do
something different and make a primal statement.
So the first actual released thing by The Fall was on the Live at the
Electric Circus compilation, and then there was quite a delay before the
first EP, Bingo Masters Break Out!, got released on Mark Perry’s Step
Forward label. How did you hook up with them?
We’d already recorded that first EP by the time of Electric Circus, but it
didn’t get released for a year. I’m a bit vague about the Step Forward
connection. Mark was managing The Fall, along with Kay Carroll, his
girlfriend. It was a London-based label, owned by Miles Copeland. By
then I was kind of just the guitarist in the band. I just turned up and
played.
So was that why you ultimately became frustrated and left, with Mark
taking over and The Fall becoming his band?
The Fall had been together for two or three years, but it was a very
intense period. We’d done a lot of work and received a lot of attention
from the media. It was becoming very much Mark’s thing. I was sick of
the way we were being treated as a band. What was initially a collective
became a dictatorship. I felt full of confidence and ideas and was keen to
do exactly what I wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I think Mark’s a
genius, but he was making it very hard for me to work with him! Mark’s
not a musician, so he couldn’t literally tell me what to play. He could
only tell me what he didn’t like. But he had a vision of how he wanted it.
But it wasn’t so much about the music; it was more how we were being
treated as people on a daily basis.
And your last contribution to The Fall was writing three tracks on the
second album, Dragnet?
I wrote three of the songs that went on Dragnet, but I didn’t play on it. I
left after Live at the Witch Trials.
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to politicize punk, but Mark saw that was silly and limited. We tried to
leave that behind and explore the music from before punk that was more
diverse. We listened to a lot of dub reggae and a lot of German music.
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And by that point all the original members had left, apart from you and
Mark?
We all left for our own reasons and at different times, but when you look
at it now there wasn’t much of a time lag between. Una Baines left about
a year before me. Karl Burns, the drummer, left somewhere in between.
Tony Friel was the first to go. Tony left when Kay became the manager,
because he thought it was a bad idea. He felt he’d invested a lot in The
Fall. He’d come up with the name and he was the musician in the band,
and in his view he was teaching us how to play the bloody instruments.
He left because his freedom was infringed. And he went off to form The
Passage with Dick Witts.
You know what, I think it was initially me that suggested Kay manage us. She was a friend of Una’s and she was hanging out with us, and
she seemed level-headed. She was a bit older than us. At the same time,
Mark was starting to go out with her. It became a bit of a Yoko and
John Lennon scenario. The girlfriend affirming his genius. Mark needed
that encouragement, so I’m not saying it was all bad. But it’s the typical
girlfriend-interfering-in-the-band scenario. But we didn’t all gang up
and leave. At the time we all thought it was for individual reasons.
So was it tough for Una, having gone out with Mark, and now he’s dating her friend, and the friend is managing the band?
It was Una’s decision they broke up. Mark was more hurt by that. When
I first met them, Mark and Una were a real item – first love, teenage true
love. They were an inseparable item. Then we formed The Fall, and Una
started seeing other people. She was off everywhere doing things, and
she kind of left The Fall thinking it wasn’t an important thing.
Una was a bit of a feminist, right?
She was quite important in feminism in Manchester. She knew a lot of
the people who were making moves in what was seen as a very underground thing at the time. There was a real alternative press back then –
things like IT magazine – and feminism was a big part of that. Una was
a fiery character who would argue with anyone about that cause. We
were always picking arguments, and Una was always up for arguing on
behalf of women.
So after The Fall you quickly formed The Blue Orchids with Una. Did
you have a vision of what you wanted to do?
We were continuing a theme. There were three people from The Fall in
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Did you see Blue Orchids as the vanguard of a new psychedelia? Music
for ‘heads’?
You can’t play down the influence of drugs on Blue Orchids and The
Fall. The first drug we got into was strong LSD. Pot-smoking seemed
lame back then – hippy guys who sat around stoned and did nothing.
We were anti-drugs at first and thought we could reach the psychedelic
thing without the drugs. But in a club someone gave us some
microdots, when we were about sixteen. The next day we went to
Heaton Park and dropped it and spent the whole day on LSD. Heaton
Park is a stately home, the nearest thing to a common in Manchester.
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The Blue Orchids: me, Una and Eric McGann. Eric McGann was and
still is a bosom buddy of John Cooper Clark, and he was the musical
force in The Curious Yellows, which was John Cooper Clarke’s first
band, before he had The Invisible Girls backing him. Eric is a very
obscure but crucial ingredient in that whole Prestwich scene. When we
lost Tony Friel, Eric became The Fall’s bass player. He was twenty-eight,
and we were nineteen or twenty. So Eric was turning us on to stuff.
Initially Mark really got on with Eric, but I don’t think he got to play on
anything that was released. He got dismissed from the band because he
wouldn’t play on a John Peel session. He didn’t like this guy who was
driving the van! This driver guy had packed some congas on board and
had declared his intention to play congas on the Peel session. And he was
wearing a Hawaiian shirt. To Eric, it was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ He
wouldn’t get in the van, so Mark said, ‘Well, fuck you,’ and we just went
off without him! That was Eric’s brief contribution to The Fall. But I
liked him, so Eric played guitar and bass in The Blue Orchids. But he
took the stage name of Rick Goldstraw. And in James Young’s memoir
of playing with Nico, Eric is the character called Echo. After Eric left The
Blue Orchids, he looked after Nico for quite a few years, when she was
living in Manchester.
It was John Cooper Clarke who thought of the name The Blessed
Orchids. Eric misremembered it as The Blue Orchids and suggested it to
me. It sounded very sensitive and esoteric, and I was trying to run away
from punk rock’s crudeness. John Cooper Clarke envisioned The Blessed
Orchids as this gang of haemophiliacs who are brought up on a council
tip. So it’s the weediest gang in Salford, these Catholic haemophiliac
orphans. The whole idea had this bizarre working-class Gormenghast
feel . . .
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And then we discovered psilocybin mushrooms were growing in Heaton
Park for free. Someone told us that there were fields of these mushrooms. So from that point we were kind of pickled in magic mushrooms
and LSD. We just made it our own. It was a free source of entertainment.
We’d be munching these things and sitting in pubs and seeing the world
in a strange way and getting ideas for songs about our local environment. The Fall was like Coronation Street on acid.
Every drug seems to have its particular interface with sound, a way of
distorting and enhancing your musical perceptions. What was special
about magic mushrooms?
The effect on us was that it added an element of . . . eerie. Like it was
putting us in touch with our ancestors – a lost voice, a strange pagan
Celtic flavour. The LSD gave you the sixties psychedelic experience, but
the mushrooms gave us a darker slant on things, awakening things in our
soul that were forbidden. Wicca kind of stuff. Druidism as a lost knowledge. When it comes to the history of Manchester, people only talk about
it as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. But if you look at paintings of Manchester before that, people were walking around in bare feet
and clogs. It was a strange backwater.
Your lyrics in Blue Orchids often seem like ‘pagan poetry’.
I stole a copy of The White Goddess by Robert Graves from the local
library when I was a teenager. It’s a treatise on the lost lore of the Druidic
poets. The idea of shape-shifting fascinated us in The Fall. The traumatic
experiences we were going through on mushrooms made us feel like misfits. How do you relate this to people you meet in pubs? You can’t
rationalize it, so you write crazy songs. Something’s gnawing at your
chest. Mushrooms and LSD created our sense of being outsiders. We had
a vision we had to impart. It was a shamanic thing and Mark was the
catalyst initially, but Blue Orchids tried to perpetuate this theme. We
didn’t try to sound like The Fall, but we tried to stay true to this vision.
But we also tried to make Blue Orchids a democracy, because The Fall
had become a dictatorship. Initially everyone was credited with writing
everything, even though I was in fact writing most of it, with Una writing some of the lyrics.
Some of the songs, like ‘Sun Connection’, are outright mystical, in a pantheistic, everything-even-the-lowliest-blade-of-grass-is-God kind of way.
I was interested in religion for its ideas, but I’m not into dogma. I didn’t
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The first single was ‘The Flood’, released in November 1980.
‘The Flood’ was like a mission statement for Blue Orchids. It was really
about handling the rush of all these psychedelic drugs, the flood of emotions and impressions. It’s kind of a Pop Art song. I loved Pop Art; it’s
Zen nihilism in a way. Andy Warhol’s dumbness. Intellectuals would say
reams, and he would just scratch his head and agree. I loved all these
ways of avoiding saying something, and you end up saying something by
avoiding rational statements. ‘The Flood’ is the rush of paradox you get
when you experience these strong drugs that were such a detrimental
influence on my youth!
And what was the flip side, ‘Disney Boys’, about?
I’ve often wondered! Una wrote those lyrics. It was really about drug
dealers, in a way. It seems to be about going to someone’s house, and
they give you something, and it’s great until the effects wear off and they
put you through the mangle. It’s like the love affair with drug culture.
But Una had this thing that Disney was an American Nazi creating propaganda for the American dream. But the lyrics are really about paying
money for drugs and getting ripped off!
You and Una were married by this point?
We got married in October 1979. And we had a daughter in 1980,
Morgan – we got the name from the Arthurian legends. Una and I split
up in 1985, when the original Blue Orchids folded. Una was Mark’s
muse initially, and there was a year between them splitting up and she
and I getting together. So it’s not like I stole her from Mark. But she kind
of was a catalyst in some ways. She’s a very fiery person and very argumentative, so she was a great stimulus to have around. But Una was very
highly strung and she did have two serious psychotic breakdowns in that
period. When she left The Fall, she had a year when she went completely
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want a mediator between me and the source. I had a vision of everything
being stripped away, all the symbols and the definitions . . . that the primary sources in life were like the sun, a divine being that’s there every
day staring at you. I could appreciate all the cultures that worship the
sun. ‘Sun Connection’ was a particular trip where I saw the sun as a living, sentient being that was aware of me on a profound level, and that all
these words for gods and deities were just ways of describing what was
under our noses. But they’re rock lyrics at the end of the day, not a new
religion!
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psychotic and anorexic and lost a lot of weight. So it was this thing
where your wife’s involved in the band but she’s also in need of psychiatric help. We were really scared of social services and mental hospitals.
Una had been a mental-health nurse before she got into music, so she
didn’t want to end up on the other end of that scene. The Blue Orchids
did a big national tour with Echo and The Bunnymen, and that was the
point where Una had to go into hospital, so she missed that tour. For
months I was having to look after her and try to keep the band together.
The price you pay for doing too many drugs. They were the inspiration
and the bane of our creativity in the long run.
What was it like working with Mayo Thompson as producer on ‘The
Flood’ and the second single, ‘Work’?
He was older than us and a real music buff, like a professor of avantgarde rock. He was really sensitive to us. We must have been a nightmare
in the studio at the time because we were just a live band; we got
together and tried to reach this transcendent moment. In the studio we
were just novices – we had no idea how to make a record. So basically
we just had to play live in the studio, because it was the only way we
could play. The first single, we turned up at the studio, Cargo, in
Rochdale, and we were all speeding, and me and Una had taken mushrooms. The Fall were doing those drugs, but not at the studio. By The
Blue Orchids, we were at the studio, tripping. So there was an element of
chaos and confusion surrounding us that was really disturbing to people
who tried to turn up and do a day’s work around us! Una was in a very
fragile mental state by then, and Mayo was very sensitive to all this and
he did his best to put it on vinyl for posterity. I remember when we did
the final mix of ‘Disney Boys’ Mayo Thompson was actually weeping,
because he thought he’d managed to capture this thing in the studio
against the odds. But he was also weeping with the trauma of being with
us for a couple of days! We sucked everyone into our full-on trip and it
became very emotional for everyone there.
The Greatest Hit, the debut album, came out in 1982, and it was a big
success, at least in terms of the indie charts.
We were playing live a lot and we had a proper fan base of people who’d
seen us, so there was a buzz. There was a phase in 1981 where the press
said we were gonna be the next big thing, the English Talking Heads, but
we didn’t live up to that. We were taking all kinds of drugs that are bad
for your mental health, and the band started to fragment. We started
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There’s a sort of subtitle to the album – it’s The Greatest Hit (Money
Mountain). What were you getting at there? A sort of ‘turn on/tune
in/drop out’ ethos for the eighties? Slackers unite and refuse to ‘climb the
money mountain’ . . .
I was interested in the idea of money as an abstract concept. Money is so
intrinsic to us it’s like part of creation, but it’s not. It’s man-made. I
thought money was the great Satan, and international bankers have
probably proved me correct. So I was just juxtaposing opposites: the
spiritual quest (the holy mountain) versus the material game.
‘Low Profile’ also seems like a manifesto.
That lyric was written by Una. She’d been reading a lot of the books I
was reading, and there was a strong influence of the Russian mystic
Gurdjieff. ‘The Sly Man’ – that’s the idea of keeping your head down, a
way of getting by in life. We were speaking to people who were like us:
fellow outsiders who maybe feel isolated, saying, ‘Keep a low profile,
keep on keeping on.’
‘Dumb Magician’ always struck me as an attack on Thatcher’s enterprise
culture, but listening to it again recently I suddenly thought maybe you
were jibing at your label mates on Rough Trade, like Scritti Politti and
Aztec Camera, as careerists trying to ‘get their foot in the door’ of mainstream pop.
It’s questioning our own vision. We think we’ve seen the way to pull the
strings, but it’s taking a step back and saying, ‘Hold on, that’s hubris.’
The song had a double meaning: the magician is made dumb by his own
knowledge. The lyrics generally are about seeing behind the scenes and
paying the price for your actions. You can do what you want, but
there’s always a price to pay for what you do. ‘The only way out is UP’
– that’s a simplistic statement, but it was like saying, ‘Rise above this
clever vision, keep your head above the temptations to manipulate the
material.’ It’s hard to define.
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working with Nico, which brought the extra thing of heroin. Darker
drugs came into play. I got disillusioned. The important thing was to
work together, so I stayed loyal to people who were too into drugs, and
that depressed me, seeing friends fall by the wayside. It had been a very
intense period from The Fall and being thrown into the spotlight when
we were eighteen, right through to The Blue Orchids. It was kind of a
non-stop roller coaster.
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And ‘A Year with No Head’, is that about dissipation, a literally wasted
year?
I was following my own whimsy. It was free association. It’s like letting
go of the intellect and the rational. The second verse gets deeper. ‘I was a
credit to the force’ – that’s from Star Wars. The Jedi thing is based on
Taoism and bits and bobs of different cultures. It’s a Hollywood-trash
religion, and that appealed to me!
So far my song interpretations have been fairly off-base, so I’m guessing
‘A Bad Education’ is not in fact a critique of the failures of the stateschool system!
That was influenced by Gurdjieff again. ‘A Bad Education’ was an intellectual statement, rejecting what is supposedly a good education. ‘I’ve
read too many books, seen too much TV.’ It’s saying education is bad
and I reject it. The education system is a mechanical thing that is running
down because people are teaching by rote from dusty books, and a lot of
it is misinformation. History is selective because there’s an infinite number of things happening right now.
After the album there was an EP called Agents of Change. What’s ‘The
Long Night Out’ about?
That’s about my heroin experiences with Nico. It’s all about a love affair
with the juice of the poppy. Nico moved to Manchester, and we were
introduced through a mutual friend. She was part of the holy trinity of
Velvets, Bowie, Iggy. I couldn’t believe she was in town. She was lying on
this double bed, eating oranges and Turkish Delight – that’s all she lived
on. Eric and I were ushered into her presence. She needed a backing band
for working live, so we were the support band doing our own set and
then we’d come on again as her backing band. It was great. But heroin
was thrown at us for free. Some of the band became addicted, and that’s
why the first line-up of Blue Orchids split in two, with one half continuing with Nico because they were into heroin. I’d overdosed myself and
stopped taking it, so I stopped working with Nico to escape the scene.
On the Agents EP, the sleevenote declares that the contents were
recorded under ‘extraneous influences’, i.e. in altered states of consciousness. Which reinforced and articulated the sense of Blue Orchids as renegades, totally against the grain of early eighties pop culture, when New
Pop groups adamantly opposed drugs and the whole vibe of the time was
totally demystified and non-mystical.
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Ah, see, that’s interesting, because for me Blue Orchids are a band who
were both behind of their time (harking back to psychedelia) and ahead
of their time (harking forward to rave – if not sonically, then in your attitudes). Blue Orchids anticipated Happy Mondays in lots of ways, I
think. ‘A Year with No Head’ sounds like something Shaun Ryder might
write!
When I wrote ‘Agents of Change’, it was an in-between time. People
weren’t sure what was happening. For my part I was trying to be the next
thing that was happening . . . but it didn’t happen! And when acid house
came I was torn, because I was thinking in those terms of the simple beat
that would make people move, but also thinking of going totally
acoustic, doing folky songs – trying to get back to something more natural and eternal and campfire-like. And I did have an acoustic band for
a while. But Happy Mondays were hanging out at some of Blue Orchids’
later gigs. And Tony Wilson once said there’d be no Happy Mondays
without The Fall.
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I was just pursuing what interested me, but it was at odds with the way
things were moving. Maybe the word ‘contrary’ applies to me too. I’m
fascinated by mysticism. To some people the word ‘mystic’ is a dirty
word, but that makes me use it more. ‘Agents of Change’, the song, I
wrote on the way back from the Arben, this underground cinema in
Hulme, which was this high-rise estate. It had been taken over by people
who showed underground movies that weren’t on general release. It
wasn’t illegal, but they were stretching the rules. They had a cafe and a
bar. People smuggled drugs in and watched movies. I saw Meetings with
Remarkable Men, a movie about Gurdjieff’s life. I was living in Moss
Side at the time, near Hulme, and I started writing the song on the way
home. It was trying to define this new vibe in the air, which wasn’t punk
and wasn’t hippy. It was trying to be optimistic about something tenuous
but new that might be filtering through. The Next Thing.
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LINDER STERLING
Ludus, singer/graphic designer and artist
After growing up first in Liverpool and then in Wigan, you arrived in
Manchester in 1974 to study Art at the poly. Did art school appeal as a
way of avoiding the conventional career path, to have a space to think
and discover yourself? Or did you have a real vocational drive to create?
I was the first member in my family to have education beyond fourteen,
so it was all very unknown territory. I was encouraged by career offices
or parents to go and do commercial art – what’s now called graphic
design. The intent was that you would come out of three years invested
in it with a job at the end. When I got to art school, it wasn’t nearly as
glamorous or exotic as I hoped it would be. It was quite an anticlimax.
Did you find like minds there?
Not particularly. It was quite heady and liberating to suddenly be
allowed to do art five days a week, but I didn’t find those kindred-spirit
people until a couple of years down the line.
What was the, um, topography of bohemia in pre-punk Manchester?
If there was any sense of bohemia, it would all be geographically located
in the south of the city – places like Didsbury. But any sense of bohemia
was coming from the generation before mine, the fallout of the hippy
years. There was people around like Alberto Los Trios Paranoias doing
fairly satirical, witty stuff. But it did feel like that previous generation.
The small group I was in was listening to Bowie and Roxy and going to
gay clubs. We had no conception that what we were doing was in any
way bohemian. Heading towards 1976, there was a tiny circle of late216
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When did you get a sense that a new thing was happening? Ripples from
CBGBs in New York? The first Patti Smith album?
No, it really wasn’t until going to the Sex Pistols concert at the Lesser Free
Trade Hall in the summer of 1976. There’d been a slightly earlier one
which had maybe twenty-two people. By the second one, which I went to,
there was maybe forty-eight people. But from that point onwards my life
changed. That’s the date when all the molecules assemble.
Did you really stumble upon the gig almost by accident?
Yes, I had absolutely no idea who The Sex Pistols were. I wasn’t a huge
reader of the music press. It was one of those weird intuitive things
where you say, ‘OK, I’ll go along and see what happens.’ There was an
amazing sense of something incredibly new and incredibly . . . yet still
trying to take its shape. Still in process. And I was taken by The
Buzzcocks just as much as the Pistols. There was also a certain expectation in the air. A collective sense in the audience of waiting for the new.
Of witnessing.
Did you start almost instantly to know this handful of people who
would make up the Manchester punk scene?
Virtually overnight. It happened in the summer holidays, and when I
went back to the poly in September of ’76 the transformation was complete. As I entered what was my final year, I did feel like I’d been through
some strange initiation ceremony, and I returned to my fellow students
feeling very separated out.
Had you already been dressing unusually?
I had been into the whole look of huge red stilettos and quiffs. All that
second-hand American clothing. Which was still very brave in the north
of England. But then when you suddenly went punk . . . The first time I
ever wore bondage trousers in Manchester, people did just stop in the
street in a really ugly way. It was particularly scary for women, because
punk clothing was sexually provocative – all these bondage garments
and fetish clothes. Never underestimate the power of the first pair of
bondage trousers that Vivienne Westwood made – it was beautifully
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night clubs doing bits of Northern Soul mixed into bits of Bowie and
Roxy. An eclectic mix, but no sense of a scene or even a centre you
longed to get to. Whereas people who were in London at that time who
I talked to, there was a sense of a centre or an in-crowd you wanted to
belong to. That didn’t exist in Manchester.
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crafted and subtly subversive. And the strap at the knees – people just
couldn’t tolerate it. I wasn’t stupid; I didn’t dress inappropriately for the
dark streets of Manchester late at night. But just that one strap on the
bondage trousers would be enough to ignite all sorts of fairly foul intent.
There was continual abuse, from all age ranges and both sexes. This
really amorphous hostility. And lots of people I know were victims of
really horrendous physical violence. I was beaten up.
One thing I find so weird about punk is how swiftly the key figures
moved on. Like Howard Devoto quitting Buzzcocks at the very start of
1977. When did that sense of disillusion and impatience to get to the
‘next thing’ start within your peer group?
The original punk thing ran out very quickly, but the fallout, as we
know, went on and on and on. But in its initial purity, punk was probably just six months or so. I can date it clearly, because one of the obligations of doing a degree was that you had to do a dissertation, and I did
mine on punk. So I know that by May ’77 Woman’s Own magazine ran
a big feature, ‘DIY punk for your daughter’, and the same month Miss
Selfridge had punk stuff on display. It didn’t take much to work out that
it had already gone mainstream and become diluted and something other
than itself. In terms of my crowd in Manchester, at the time I was living
with Howard Devoto – and Pete Shelley lived down the road – and when
you’re living twenty-four hours with somebody, it’s hard to think when
something precisely happened. But with Howard being so articulate, it
happened early – this sense of ‘It’s not right, it’s not right.’ But of course,
what will be right? That’s never easy to answer. Maybe all of us have
been trying to work it out ever since.
So you and Howard were an item? Live-in lovers?
Oh yes, for two years. From whenever the Pistols concert was in 1976 to
a couple of years afterwards. Hence that incredibly lucky period of my
life when I was around that fantastic circle of people. At the time I guess
I took it totally for granted, but now with the luxury of hindsight I can
say, ‘Wow, I was truly blessed that I shared my life with those people.’
In a piece recalling those days, you said the flat had no light!
There was not any natural light, no!
And you’d be reading Huysmans’ Against Nature.
That would be Howard. It was quite a heady mix of stuff, so we’d be
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Who were the big feminist writers for you in those days? You once said
The Female Eunuch rearranged your molecular structure!
When I was sixteen and I found that in Wigan, I couldn’t believe it. I’d
seen Germaine Greer already on The Kenny Everett Show, so I knew her
as a comedienne. I didn’t know anything about her politics or writing.
That actually made her attractive, that she could be a comedienne, could
be witty. Later I was suspended from school because I had brought in the
first issue of Cosmopolitan, which had Germaine Greer’s husband as a
centrefold, and the headmistress somehow learned of it. After finding
The Female Eunuch when I was sixteen, I just went through the whole
list, from Betty Friedan to Kate Millett to . . . As I read each author they
would refer to other writers, so I went through the lot. And in the same
shop they had Spare Rib magazine, which was the only feminist magazine in the UK. That put me in touch with the whole New York women’s
art scene and the West Coast. So growing up in Wigan I had this sense
that somewhere out there were these amazing women doing these
absolutely glorious confrontational acts, like Carolee Schneemann. But
there was nobody else I knew at school and nobody else I knew at poly
who was remotely interested in feminism. Morrissey was the first person
I met who had the same kind of hunger for those ideas.
Were you one of that select group who got hold of the situationist
anthology by Christopher Gray, Leaving the 20th Century?
No, for some reason situationism totally bypassed me. It never really
grabbed my imagination, although I was exposed to it a lot – people
were always talking about situationism. It seemed to be a real boy thing.
With McLaren, or Factory in Manchester.
Situationism does have an intellectual machismo aspect, in that it’s about
as extreme as you can go politically. Radically uncompromising. They
could be pretty fucking severe, the situationists, but they did have a
whole other aspect to do with play – the rediscovery of the ludic. With
your band being called Ludus, I wondered if it came from those sixties
ideas of ‘playpower’, or even from that history of play by Huizinga,
Homo Ludens?
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uous exchanging of books. Howard was reading lots of the symbolist
poets and he was studying philosophy. Pete Shelley would be reading all
sorts: Colin Wilson, lots of science fiction. And I was looking at sexual
politics and religion. We’d swap books all the time.
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I wish I could say that’s exactly where it came from, but sadly, no. How
I came up with the name was . . . I’d been to see the movie Carrie and
thought there’s something glorious and fantastic about that film. It was
a time when I’d been very much looking at all that menstrual imagery
and taboo stuff. And there’s this fantastic book called The Wise Wound
by Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, two poets, that came out in
1978 and was very influential on me. The first book ever purely on menstruation. Part medicine, part anthropology, and they did a whole chapter on Carrie. And I remember buying the trashy little novel of the film,
and the first line was ‘bloodsports’. To name the group I wanted to use a
dead language, a language that wasn’t around, so ‘bloodsports’ loosely
translated into Latin is something like ‘ludus cruentus’. I just kept Ludus
and thought, ‘That sounds like nothing else around – I’ll have that.’
What was your interpretation of Carrie, psychosexually?
It’s years since I’ve seen it, but I remember there were amazing scenes
where she’s sort of pelted with Tampax in the shower by the other girls
because she has her first period. She’s bleeding and she has absolutely no
idea why that should happen, and the girls all laugh at her because she’s
all naive and innocent. And there’s this peculiar, demented mother, and
the amazing shot at the high-school prom, with the prank where all the
blood falls on her. All this playing with blood I just found very intriguing. This film seemed to be playing around with this repressed curiosity
about females and all things bloody.
So this stuff to do with female abjection and taboos about the female
body, it related to the kind of artwork you were doing. Like the photocollaged ‘biomechanical chimera’ pieces that fused together female nudes
and household appliances. That interface between sexuality and commodity fetishism.
It was all very holistic . . . organic . . . It didn’t feel premeditated. When
you actually go to work, you shut up the intellect. There was never a
sense, especially when I was young, that I thought, ‘Hmmm, I’ll go consider this issue and make a photomontage about this, or I’ll write a song
about it.’ With the luxury of hindsight you can look back and say, ‘Of
course, that was bound to happen – I was feeding on those issues.’
There’s still a lot of work from that period that’s never been seen. I was
very prolific, but I could rarely find a venue for it. It was a mixture of the
work being explicit and uncomfortable, but also just I never quite knew
how you plug into systems – gallery systems or record-company systems.
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In terms of photomontage, did you have inspirations?
There was this big Heartfield exhibition that Savage went to. But I’d
arrived at photomontage almost in isolation. When I made the first
pieces, it really was in absolute innocence. I had no real historical awareness of this really potent method of making images.
So making The Secret Public, did you have one pile of naked females
from porn mags and another pile of domestic appliances and so forth
from women’s magazines?
Not even porn really. There was one pile of men’s magazine imagery and
another pile from women’s magazines, going from fashion mags like
Vogue to really mundane magazines like Family Circle and Woman’s
Own, as well as catalogues of furniture. A fairly heavy arsenal, and the
only common denominator was ‘women’. It wasn’t that difficult to start
making those montages. They were almost like you were doing a jigsaw
but you’d lost the box top – but if you work long enough you will find out
where the sky is and where the tree goes. Because I’d spend the evening
cutting and cutting I’d end up with a table full of eyes and mouths and kettles and irons and limbs. In those tungsten days, days without light, sooner
or later you’d just find the right pieces, and they’d make the right pictures.
I never thought about the name New Hormones until I read about one
of your songs being about ‘hormonal victory’, and I suddenly thought,
‘What an interesting name for a record label!’ Did you have anything to
do with it?
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So when did you hook up with Jon Savage and do The Secret Public book
of collages – the second release on New Hormones, almost a year after
Spiral Scratch?
We met in 1977. Jon was interviewing Howard Devoto for Sounds, and
we fairly instantly became friends. It was just a really peculiar circle of
people. There was a real sense of being a gang of cultural misfits,
whether because of sexuality or because of – with Barry Adamson in
Magazine – colour. Jon and I became friends very quickly. And I’d gone
through this natural progression from painting and drawing to photomontage. Jon had been doing some at the same time. It was in the air at
that time, ‘Let’s self-publish.’ If you didn’t have access to systems, do it
yourself. So New Hormones published The Secret Public. And people
wouldn’t take it because of its content. It wasn’t just making the work, it
was ‘How do you get it distributed?’
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No, it was an idea that Richard Boon and Howard had had for a few
years, before I met the two of them. But they never had anything to apply
it to.
Was it related to the idea of a ‘third sex’?
Very much like that. And I think Pete Shelley really began to look at that,
to start living that, exploring the possibilities of sexuality. When punk
happened, the really important sanctuaries for punk – in Manchester at
least – were the few gay bars in the city. Nowadays ‘gay bars’ and ‘gay
clubs’, that’s a concept that slips off our tongue easily, but in those days
they were really hidden away. One was called the Ranch Bar and was
owned by a famous drag queen in Manchester called Foo Foo Lamar.
When I went there, a lot of the kids were really young, maybe fifteen or
sixteen, and a lot of them were from north Manchester, not the
bohemian south of the city. They were real northern Mancunian working class and by the age of sixteen they’d done every permutation of sex
and were just totally bored of it. Not remotely interested. Peter, Howard,
myself, Jon Savage, we would go to these clubs for refuge. They were a
really important sanctuary. There was another one called Stuffed Olives
and another called Dickens – a really awful name! Very Carry On. You’d
have all these transsexuals and transvestites coming in from all those
weird northern towns like Rochdale and Oldham. Very little money, so
they’d just pinch their mum’s dresses and wear nasty cheap wigs. There’d
be these overweight lumpy transvestites and then a few punks. But somehow there was absolute harmony. We all coexisted very happily.
And I think now, many years later, when you have within Manchester
history this dominance of Factory, I think it’s a little dangerous, because
the Factory story is mainly white, male, heterosexual. It’s one group of
people’s histories, but I think there’s other fantastic histories.
Do you think it was quite a masculinist little culture, Factory? There
weren’t many female artists on the label, especially early on.
I think they were just very unconscious about that whole area: gender
and sexism. It wasn’t something to be considered or discussed. Just not
part of the Factory mentality.
Have you seen 24 Hour Party People?
I didn’t go and see it. I saw an early shooting script, and Morrissey and
I were in it, and our lines were so abysmal I just got hold of a legal
friend to write a really scary letter saying, ‘I have to be removed from
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Well, I’d be interested in your take, as one who was there. It’s a curious
film – very entertaining on one level, but on another, something of a travesty. You get little sense of the artistic seriousness of Joy Division, or
indeed of Factory itself. The whole thing is a romp. Very light-hearted
and suffused with a sort of aimless hedonism. There’s a constant running
joke about pot-smoking, which everyone is doing constantly.
You were asking about bohemianism in Manchester, and I said it was all
located in Didsbury. And Factory grew out of that. Wilson and the others were coming out of that Didsbury post-hippy scene. And there was a
heavy druggy element to it, in the sense of people smoking joints almost
continuously. My lot didn’t do that really. So that aspect of the film
sounds true to reality. There was that incredible drugginess around
Factory. But not in a remotely glamorous way. In a quite tedious way.
Wasn’t there talk of Ludus recording for Factory?
We were supposed to be the second or third release. But because Richard
Boon was very slowly setting up New Hormones, we thought, ‘No, we’ll
be loyal and record with New Hormones.’ But I made – or rather, I didn’t
make – FAC 8, the menstrual egg timer. I have the working drawings of
it still. It’s a kind of abacus, and you’d be able to count the days off on
your menstrual cycle and there’d be these weird kind of bloody bandage
beads. [Description in a Factory newsletter of the time: ‘A four-bar abacus, seven beads to the row, final five blood-soaked lint.’] I did lots of
working drawings. I have this interesting piece of paper from a meeting
with Tony Wilson where he’s crossed out the words ‘egg timer’ and written on top, ‘Factory egg timer’. We need say no more. It was never made
but it had a catalogue number, FAC 8. A few years ago I bumped into
Alan Erasmus from Factory in New York, and he said, ‘Oh, somebody
sent me a menstrual egg timer a few weeks ago, saying it was an original.’ And I said, ‘Oh, Alan, I never made one.’
Erasmus was a key member of the early Factory team, right?
He was, and when I bumped into him, a book had come out, and he was
pissed off about being written out of history. If Alan some day wrote his
own book about Factory, that would be fantastic to hear – the Alan
Erasmus version. He was the third party but kind of written out of the
story most of the time.
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this film.’ So I was removed from the film. And I haven’t seen it. Maybe
one day.
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So what was Richard Boon, the guy behind New Hormones, like?
He studied Fine Art at Reading. And he and Howard were very good
friends. He almost by default ended up managing Buzzcocks, simply
because there was nobody else around in those days. On the whole, he
managed them very well. And he started the record label New
Hormones, and various people – Ludus, Diagram Brothers, Dislocation
Dance, The Tiller Boys – were on it. But there was always a tiny amount
of money, and we’d always have to wait very patiently for our turn to
record at the studio. And there was always a tiny amount of time to
record in. Richard had modest ambitions for the label, but there was
only so much money, so it couldn’t be that grand. Factory had far more
money to throw around.
Was there rivalry between labels in Manchester? You had Factory, New
Hormones, Rabid, Object . . .
There wasn’t any between Richard Boon and Tony Wilson. Richard is
such an amicable person anyway. Maybe between some of the groups
themselves there was some sense of rivalry. It’s a tiny city, Manchester.
The Greater Manchester area is quite large, but the cultural city of
Manchester – it was a tiny little world. We all rehearsed in this one building off Deansgate; the owner was somebody called T. J. Davidson.
There’d be Buzzcocks in one room, Joy Division in another. It was an old
mill. Absolutely freezing. And we were all there in our obligatory lateseventies huge overcoats. In the winter the guitarists couldn’t play guitar
because it was too cold. It wasn’t even remotely glamorous. Just freezing
cold and horrible.
Did you have anything to do with the Manchester Musicians Collective?
Not really. It was all a bit self-righteous and worthy. Boys with big foreheads and huge record collections. We didn’t fit in there.
I only recently heard Ludus for the first time, the compilation that LTM
put out, The Damage. Somehow my preconception was that it would be
fairly abstruse music, so I was surprised by how poppy it was. How
enjoyable!
The subsequent reissues will be more abstruse. But for the compilation
James at LTM put the more poppy stuff out first. Danger Came Smiling
will be coming out, and that’s an album on which I refused to sing. I do
everything except sing on that one.
Is it primal screaming?
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That’s interesting, because in some ways improv seems like the most
masculine genre of all.
There’s only Julie Tippett and Norma Winstone in that scene really. Yes,
it was incredibly male, lots of big lumpy sweaters and facial hair, but
beneath all that there’s some fantastic sounds. With Ludus, it was more
and more wanting to push myself past my comfort zone. And then finding a soulmate in that mission with Ian. We knew that if we wanted to,
we could craft these tiny songs, but also we could push it out in another
direction. Until the sets became totally improvised. And it must have
been hard going for an audience, and we did, in fact, empty quite a lot of
places fairly quickly.
Some of the screamy stuff you did in Ludus made me wonder if you were
a fan of Yoko Ono?
Well, let’s go right back to childhood. When I was six or seven, I liked
The Beatles, and as I was hitting adolescence Yoko came in. And I was
absolutely fascinated by Yoko. It was always very difficult to find out
anything about her. Things like Spare Rib helped me find out more, and
I collected everything by her – Fly and all the other records. She was
hugely influential. A lot of the stuff I did I was taking from Ono and
from a Polish singer called Urzula Dudziak. All the women who used
their voices as instruments: Norma Winstone, Meredith Monk, Yma
Sumac, Annette Peacock.
So there was this counter-canon of out-there female performers you
latched onto?
I’ve always had what I call ‘my sisters of vision’. They’re really necessary.
But I had to work really hard to find them all. They’re what Patti Smith
would call her adopted spiritual ancestors. I really cherished them
because I think I was very hungry for inspiration. Just had this voracious
appetite.
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All sorts of stuff. When Ian Devine, my main collaborator in Ludus,
arrived in Manchester, within weeks he was taking me off to see people
like Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, all this fantastic British experimental
music and improvisation. After punk I found that was the next most
exciting thing – seeing strange people with beards doing circular breathing and keeping saxophones going for four hours. I did find something
genuinely exhilarating there. Danger Came Smiling came out of that
seedbed.
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Often with avant-garde movements they tend to be male-dominated, but
there’ll be a couple of really interesting women in there, like Leonora
Carrington with the British surrealists.
And, of course, because they’re in the minority they become a tiny bit
more fascinating. Some of those women, obviously their class helped –
Carrington was from a wealthy textile family in Lancashire.
Is all this in some way the background to the pun that is ‘Misstress
Piece’?
That’s our take on ‘masterpiece’. And we did a piece for John Peel that
instead of being called ‘Penis Envy’ was called ‘Vagina Gratitude’. When
I was sixteen in Wigan, there was a rock festival, and they had Grateful
Dead and were selling Oz. And I got the ‘Cunt Power’ edition of Oz,
which was edited by Germaine Greer, and the back page of it was all
slang for female genitalia. So for that Peel session I just read out all the
different slang. We had a saxophone player who tried to make the sound
of a Tibetan thigh-bone trumpet.
Well, the weird stuff is great, but so is the poppy Ludus stuff, and as I say,
I was surprised how accessible it was. And joyous. Almost a sunshine
sound. A common denominator for both the challenging noisy stuff and
the euphoric pop is that it’s all ‘non-rock’. The drums frisk and tumble in
this way that’s definitely not your standard rock propulsion.
Yeah, we had a piece that had twenty tempo changes. The first drummer,
Toby, was a fantastic drummer. He would come up with these amazing
rhythms.
And there’s an interesting mixture in Ludus of light-jazzy, ‘suave’ sounds
with much more ungodly, free-form noises.
I knew that because the lyrics weren’t your average pop lyrics you could
be quite saccharine-sweet sometimes. Get away with an almost Doris
Day delivery, because the words were working against that. There was a
kind of aural montaging going on maybe, Yoko Ono juxtaposed with
something much sweeter. With Ludus I had this internal palette of voice
options, and then Ian would be next to me with all these weird tempo
options. Maybe at times the two of us should have been a little more disciplined with songwriting. But there was just this insatiable curiosity.
You moved to Belgium for a while, and one thing that fascinates me is
the cult obsession that the Belgians had – well, not the entire race, but a
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Didn’t you get into Reichian therapy? Is that where you’re breaking
down your ‘character armour’ as inscribed in your muscular postures
and rigidities?
Exactly. And there’s orgone boxes. I made an orgone accumulator cushion in my Ludus days, so you could sit on the box comfortably. That was
all coming from Reich and going to the reference section in Manchester
Central Library. A lot of people were investigating Reich then. And there
was that very peculiar, mysterious film, WR – The Mysteries of the
Organism. I remember going to see that in 1979 or ’80. Reich had died
that peculiar death in prison, shrouded in mystery. He was a hero for
quite a few of us. But I did all the Reichian stuff really because I was
often horribly depressed, and that would really curtail my life and my
activity. Becoming aware of the Red Therapy group in London and getting their pamphlets, and the whole thing of ‘Your illness is a weapon,
use it.’ So I managed to find this one Reichian therapist in Manchester
and had the most amazing expansion of consciousness after just one session. Radical changes in the body. Just fantastic, and I would have done
it a lot longer, but the therapist went back to Germany.
Do you feel that the post-punk era had a definite moment of fading
away? There seemed to be a transition from ‘independent’ meaning all
kinds of adventurous, un-pop music, to ‘indie’ meaning a specific genre
of song-oriented guitar music, largely rooted in the sixties. The scope to
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ing about Les Disques du Crépuscule and their worship of Factory. But
it went beyond Factory to people like yourself.
I lived in Brussels for almost a year. Ludus was going to do the Big
Album for Crépuscule, but this very peculiar chemistry developed that I
think affected a lot of us who were there. Because Tuxedomoon had
moved there, and there were people like Anna Domino. We were all
there to do our Big Album, but there’s this peculiar soporific atmosphere
about Brussels. Crépuscule had this club called Interference, this really
beautiful bar right on the Grand Place, and Ian and I lived there. And the
label had big expectations of us, but there was something about that
level of comfort . . . And a real sense of disconnection – very subtle, just
a sense of, ‘Oh well, maybe in a few weeks’ time.’ Everything seemed to
slow right down. Go into slow motion. The intent was very pure on both
sides. Crépuscule wanted the groups to make amazing albums, and we
all wanted to make amazing albums. We just couldn’t create there. We
really fell apart.
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do really challenging things had faded. Was that one of the reasons you
went back to visual art?
Yes, and also when I did the Haçienda show in late 1982 where I wore
the dress made out of cuts of meat and the dildo, I did feel like I’d taken
live performance within that arena as far as I could! With the luxury of
hindsight, that would be a kind of marker. And also Ian and I having
gone to Brussels to do the Album. But it fell apart. We fell apart. I didn’t
have the energy to start a new musical collaboration with anybody. So it
felt like the right time to walk away from this. And I had absolutely no
regrets. I think I’d have been really miserable if I’d tried to carry on making records and trying to do performances within the climate that it had
become.
Didn’t you get really deep into bodybuilding around this time?
After the Reichian therapy and releasing this amazing bodily fluidity, I
started looking to the States – things like Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs and peculiar muscle mags. There was a temptation to treat myself
as a found object. ‘Can you sculpt flesh? What can you do with the
body?’ I began to do very intensive bodybuilding in this little gym in
Moss Side. It was a really liberating period when I’d stopped performing,
and I didn’t read books for a while. A golden time when I was working
out a lot and dancing. It was the tail end of Ludus and the beginning of
all that electro music coming in. So I’d work out every morning at 8 a.m.
and go out every night dancing, to black clubs like Legends, at a time
when maybe there’d be two other white faces there. It was a secret world
where nobody knew me. So there was a sense of sanctuary or retreat.
Finally, is it true that you’re the subject of ‘Wonderful Woman’, that great
lost early Smiths B-side?
There’s various rumours. So who knows? I don’t. I do know ‘What Do I
Get?’ was written about me. Because Pete Shelley told me so.
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STEVEN MORRIS
Joy Division, drummer/New Order, drum programmer
You grew up here, in Macclesfield? It doesn’t look like a heavy industrial
town. It’s like a commuter town almost.
It is now. It used to be a mill town. It all went, over the years. Now
there’s four or five clubs in Macclesfield and you can go and see bands.
You could never do that back then – you had to go to the Free Trade Hall
in Manchester.
What were you into before punk happened?
All sorts of shit. I was an avid consumer of vinyl through school. I used
to frequently buy records because of the sleeves more than anything. I
used to read ZigZag and buy the stuff they said you had to listen to: West
Coast stuff, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Byrds. I was also very into
Van Der Graaf Generator and Peter Hammill. Kraftwerk, I liked them.
Krautrock in general.
Did the German groups influence your approach to playing drums?
Yeah, they did. I could go on at length about Jaki Liebezeit being a great
drummer. He played quite differently. But to be quite honest I never
wanted to be a drummer. I wanted to be a guitarist. But there was a
bunch of lads at school who were into The Stooges and Velvet Underground. The older guy had White Light White Heat with the original
black cover. Which really impressed me, ’cos I had the white one. At
school I remember my predecessors would all wear ex-RAF greatcoats.
You had to have one of them, and you had to have plastic sleeves to put
your albums in, and you’d be walking about with either Best of Cream
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or Deep Purple in Rock. And they all had long hair like Neil in The
Young Ones.
Did you define yourself against them?
Against, really. ’Cos I thought it was shite. And even later, Led Zeppelin
– bollocks. Anyway, this older guy used to go on about Iggy and The
Stooges, and I thought he was making it up. Frank Zappa, yeah, but
nobody’s called Iggy – don’t be stupid. One place, strangely enough, I
found that was really good at getting vinyl nobody else had was the
record department at the Kendall Milne department store. I found The
Stooges in there, the first album produced by John Cale. I put it on and
it was so incredibly loud. And I thought, ‘Right, this is what we want to
do.’ So we got a band together and we wanted to be everything that
punk turned out to be. We just wanted to make a load of noise. This is
yonks before Warsaw. Anyway, that’s how I got into playing drums. I
wanted to play guitar, but they had too many guitarists already, so I had
to play drums. So I wanted to play drums like the guy out of Can.
So as you developed your style were there things you consciously avoided
doing?
When I got into drumming, my school of drumming was, ‘Buy a lot of
drums and try and hit them all,’ like Keith Moon used to do. But I
couldn’t do it as well, so it ended up sounding like the Glitter Band. Then
the band folded, and I just carried on playing the drums in my bedroom.
Until punk happened, and then it was like, ‘Bleeding hell, anyone can be
in a band.’ The argument that stopped us getting us anywhere when we
were the school band was, ‘We’re just farting about here, no one’s ever
gonna take us seriously.’ And I was like, ‘Can’t we just be in the garage
and make a lot of noise,’ but it was always, ‘No future in it.’ Suddenly
punk came along, and I was like, ‘That’s my point all along: we can go
in the garage, make a noise and we can even make a record!’
I got a job . . . well, not really a job, but I started writing for Record
Mirror. I used to get these shit gigs to review, like Smokie.
What, you mean you were one of ‘us’ – a music journalist!? Wait a sec,
though – how come Joy Division had this anti-journalist thing, then?
The anti-journalist thing really stems from one interview. With Dave
McCullough from Sounds. It was the first interview we’d done, and he
came into it with one idea of what we were like, and he wouldn’t let it
lie. Rob Gretton, our manager, had got this plan too. He said to Hooky,
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That is a classic inexperienced interviewer error, where the green young
journalist comes along with a totally fixed idea, and instead of listening,
imposes his ideas, and you end up with a deadlocked conversation. I did
that a bit at the start.
It was very much a thing that happened as part of punk. There was this
political wing of it that was looking for statements. It was journalists
who manufactured that, I think, and some bands went along with it.
Basically you’re just an entertainer, you’re making music, not telling people how to vote. That’s when punk started getting a bit stupid, when it
got politicized.
So you weren’t interested in the anarchy side of punk, or the socialistworker side of it?
Actually, my grandfather was an anarchist: he wanted to blow up the
gasworks! But no, I wasn’t interested in that, just the general anarchy of
genuine mayhem, getting pissed.
With Manchester and Sheffield, I think it’s precisely because the cities
had such strong left-wing traditions – the Chartists in Manchester, the
Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, the trade-union movement – that
the punk and post-punk that came out of those cities wasn’t into agitprop or preachy political lyrics. Manchester music was more existentialist than political.
Like Joy Division, yeah. But Joy Division was kind of left out of the
Manchester punk scene at first. Nobody would give us a gig. The reason
they wouldn’t give us a gig was there would always be a fight when we
played, all these kids from Salford. But we were kind of not part of the
Manchester scene at all. Which was good: all we could do was rehearse
in a bleeding warehouse for months and write songs. It was like us and
them, they’re doing that and we’re doing this. We didn’t feel we were
part of this so-called Manchester scene, and didn’t want to be part of it
anyway.
So you started out as Warsaw and were pretty punk rock at first.
Yeah, dead thrashy. And then it slowed down a bit. Got starker.
When did you first feel like the magic began? Like, ‘Oh, we’ve got something special here.’
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‘Don’t open your mouth. You just sit there and be dark and mysterious.’
So Dave McCullough thought we were holding something back.
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We’d just written ‘Transmission’ and we did this gig at the Mayflower.
We did this sound check and played ‘Transmission’, and everybody
stopped to listen. And we were like, ‘Ah.’ We knew it was good, but
when everybody else – including the other bands – stopped, we thought,
‘It’s really good.’ Then when Rob got Tony interested and got us
involved with Factory, we thought we must be doing something right.
Our contemporaries were Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle.
You felt an affinity?
Yeah, although I’m not sure if it was for the music. I went to see
Throbbing Gristle a few times and it was kind of . . . unpleasant, but it
was kind of what I wanted to do when I was in school, to make an industrial noise. Ian liked them. I always remember his big thing was,
‘Throbbing Gristle get £5,000 for a gig – bloody hell that’s what we
should be doing.’ I was like, ‘Ian, they don’t get any gigs, they just say,
“£5,000 for a gig,” and then someone’s daft enough to think, “They
must be good, so I’ll get the money off a student union and put them
on.”’
Were you just taken with the idea of Throbbing Gristle, of that level of
extremity?
Just the ideas. Making the audience’s ears bleed. Which is a bit art
school, really. But at the time I must have liked it. Now it seems a bit
contrived.
So you had this rivalry with the rest of Manchester, but you were in the
Manchester Musicians Collective, right?
Oh yes. The MMC with Dick Witts. The Spherical Objects. It was a ruse
to get a gig. The only good thing that came out of it was I got to see
Derek Bailey at the MMC. He is a fucking mad guitarist. That was
another lot I was into. Not so much the Company free-improvisation
stuff, but Nucleus and all that lot. The first three Soft Machine albums,
Matching Mole and Robert Wyatt.
Why did you have such an obsession with central Europe and the
Eastern bloc? Before Joy Division you were called Warsaw, and isn’t it
true that you called yourselves Gdansk and also Pogrom?
That’s bollocks. No, we called ourselves Warsaw after ‘Warsawa’, the
Bowie track on Low. It was more the look that was a bit eastern
European. Rob Gretton used to cut our hair so we looked like we just
came out of prison camp or something. We did this tour of Europe and
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Joy Division, though, suggests an identification with the victims rather
than the perpetrators, right?
It was more the flip side of it than being the master race. For me personally. The oppressed rather than the oppressor.
You got tons of flak for having that name – and other things like the
cover of An Ideal for Living – but in some ways it perversely encouraged
you to stick with that imagery.
Yeah! Because of the kind of people we are. It kind of became a perverse
joke. We knew we weren’t Nazis, but we kept getting letters in the NME
slating us for harbouring Adolf Eichmann in the coal cellar or something! It was a bit naive really to think we could get away with it. We
were very naive about that sort of thing and did think it was just a bit of
a laugh, and couldn’t see the possibility that you could actually be
offending some people. It never entered our heads. And then calling
yourself New Order . . . Tsk tsk tsk! Despite the fact that that was definitely the New Order of Kampuchea.
Yeah, big difference – it’s another mass-killing dictator, Pol Pot!
Fair enough, but it’s different. It was better than Khmer Rouge. That was
another candidate.
So you were saying that it was other people’s reactions to ‘Transmission’
that got you thinking you were onto something . . .
That we were any good. Two things about post-punks . . . when you
were punks you had to hate disco, with a vengeance. And disco became
a big umbrella thing, and really what you did hate was The Bee Gees and
anything that was in the charts. But with post-punk, it became OK to
like disco.
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we were all freshly shaved, and Ian used to wear this blue rubber mac
that made him look like something out of eastern Europe. How long
were we Warsaw? About a year. That happened because we were trying
to get a gig yet again. I was ringing up the agents, and there was this
band called Warsaw Pakt, the first band to record an album in twentyfour hours. Everyone was like, ‘Oh no, they’re going to be big. You’ll
never get a gig with a name like that.’ So that’s why we changed the
name. Joy Division was because Ian had that book, The House of Dolls.
We used to get quite a few things out of books. Not that we were trying
to make a statement, but it was just a good word. It eventually backfired
on us because then we got the whole ‘fucking Nazis’ stuff.
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So did you start listening to disco and think, ‘Actually, that’s really rhythmically interesting?’ And it actually affected the sound of the band?
Yeah. It was 1979, and when we were doing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’
there were two records we were into: Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits and
‘Number One Song in Heaven’ by Sparks. That was the beginning of getting interested in Giorgio Moroder. Especially ‘I Feel Love’. And there
was another one, ‘I Fell in Love with a Starship Trooper’: I remember
going in a transit van to King’s Lynn with Ian and hearing it and saying,
‘It would be good to do one like this, wouldn’t it?’
What did you like about that electronic disco sound?
It was all sequenced. It was the beginning of getting interested in
mechanical possibilities, using drum machines and sequencers to make
very repetitive music like ‘I Feel Love’.
I can hear that kind of feel coming in already with ‘She’s Lost Control’:
it’s got that Jaki Liebezeit thing but it’s even more locked groove – a
mechano-disko feel.
That track came from a complete misunderstanding. If you look at the
cover of the British edition of Can’s Tago Mago, they’ve got these things
that look like radiators. And on the record itself is this mad Bontempi
rhythm track on the song ‘Peking O’. And I got it into my head this was
the secret of sounding like Can – to get a drum synthesizer. So I duly got
one. And thought, ‘Well, you can make funny noises with it, but it
doesn’t sound much like Can though! Obviously you’ve got to work at it
a bit.’And around that time there was this hit single by Marshall Hain,
‘Dancing in the City’. It was the first of those disco records that had syndrums in: ‘boo-boo-boo-boo’. The drum riff of ‘She’s Lost Control’, it’s
just a Phil Spector beat really. A Doctor Who version of a Spector beat.
Did a lot of Joy Division songs start with the drum track and then build
up from there?
That’s how we used to do it in those days. We’d start a beat and then just
jam. And Ian was good at picking up bits, saying, ‘You play that four
times.’ The great thing about Joy Division was you could write a song
very quickly. Ian had all these lyrics and he’d just start singing on top,
and all of a sudden you had a song.
So the vocal melody was the last thing to emerge . . .
You’d just be sitting around playing, and he’d come out with a song. And
a lot of people underestimate what Martin Hannett did, because he took
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What, never?
I liked Martin. But the others didn’t. I could see what he was getting at.
He would say to me, ‘I’m trying to do West Coast stuff,’ or ‘I’m trying to
go for an Elektra sound’ – a modern version of all those Elektra records,
’cos they had a real ‘boom-tizz’ sound. What he meant was busy stuff at
the top end, then the bottom, and a bit of space in the middle. But all he
would say is, ‘Boom-tizz,’ and I would say, ‘I know exactly what you
mean, Martin.’
I find it fascinating how pop musicians develop a private language to
describe these indescribable things, because often the things that rock
musicians or electronic musicians are doing is stuff that you can’t notate
on a score, so there’s no established terminology or jargon.
You can’t write them down.
Like Eno with his ‘stick insect guitar’.
Snake guitar, yeah. But we never developed a vocabulary like that. That’s
the weird thing. To this day we never really talk about music or what
we’re doing. We just do it.
Was it as frustrating working with Hannett as it’s depicted in 24 Hour
Party People? Was he really that obnoxious?
He was. But in the film he comes across as a bit more loutish. He was a
bit more subtle than that. But he was a bully. It was mind games more
than shouting. His thing was, in the studio, for the energy to work, there
had to be a certain tension. And it was his job to create it.
What’s the most annoying thing he ever did? There’s that story about
making you dismantle the drum kit because of this rattle only he could
hear.
That story happened at the beginning of New Order, when we did
Movement. His big thing, and I can see his point, was separation
between the instruments. Normally you’d set up your kit in the studio
and play it. But his point was, you’d get some cymbal bleeding through
into the bass drum. He didn’t want that. He wanted to achieve total separation. Which is why on drum machines you get separate outputs. He’d
say, ‘What I want you to do now is go in and play the bass drum. Just the
bass drum, nothing else.’
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the songs and took them somewhere else. And we weren’t very keen on
where he took ’em, to be honest.
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That must have been agony!
I’d end up with my legs back and blue because I’d been tapping them
quietly to do the snare and the other bits of the kit. And then he’d be like,
‘Now you gotta do the snare drum.’ And then, ‘Now you got to do the
hi-hats.’
It must have made it incredibly protracted, the recording process.
And it all sounded very disjointed. ’Cos you’re used to playing with all
your arms and legs moving at once.
So the idea was he wanted to get a pure signal and wrap a different
acoustic ambience around each element of the drum kit?
What he wanted to do was get raw sound, completely dead, raw sound,
and then he’d put those sounds in a space that was in his head. Put them
through his boxes that make them sound like they’re in train stations.
And that’s what he did.
It sounds like he was trying to turn you, a human being, into a drum
machine because the technology for a really good drum machine wasn’t
quite there yet.
Yeah, he was. But I went along with it – I could see what he was doing.
He’d spend ages over his controls. Bang, bang, bang . . . Hours on end.
What about the bit in 24 Hour Party People where you’re drumming on
the roof and everyone drives off and forgets you?
That’s a load of bollocks.
So every record you had to do the drums in this disjointed way?
Ah, now you’ve got me questioning my memory. Actually, it was more
on certain tracks that he wanted to do it disjointed, usually things that
he considered to be singles, like ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and
‘Transmission’. But he did make me take the drum kit to pieces. It was
when we’d been to America as New Order, just the three of us. Got all
this gear, bought a new drum kit and got it into the studio and started
doing Movement, and it was like, ‘No, there’s a rattle.’ He made me take
every spring out of it. To be fair, I don’t think he wanted to be there at
that point. It was after Ian died.
Did he have a special connection with Ian?
Yeah, kind of. He just didn’t want to be there, that was the feeling you
got. Him making me take the drum kit to pieces was an excuse for him
not to do anything. We could never do anything with that drum kit after
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What’s the story with Hannett using digital delays and all this state-ofthe-art gadgetry?
Well, you did the sound and you’d get a repeat after it, basically! Martin
went and bought an AMS, which was made in Burnley. A delay line. You
could do reverb with it and stuff like that. Another thing you could do
with it was you could feed a sample into it. It was the first sampler,
shortly before a Fairlight. We did it a few times – put a noise into it and
hit a switch, and it would play back the sound you’d put into it. We used
that quite a lot on Closer. It was his box of tricks and he’d paid a fortune
for it and he brought it to the studio, so we had to use it!
You guys became real gear-heads later on, in New Order.
One of the things at that time that convinced me that machines were
going to be the future was seeing Stevie Wonder on The Old Grey
Whistle Test. It was the early eighties and he’d got the first Linn Drum
machine and it was fucking brilliant, a really funky beat, and I was like,
‘I want sounds like that. I’ll get one of them.’ But they were like the cost
of a house then, so I stuck to this little Roland box. We were trying to do
stuff on the cheap and we didn’t have any money. No way we could
afford the Linn. Then we met this boffin mate of Martin’s, who was also
called Martin, and he helped us. He and Bernard made this little
sequencer. Bernard had already made a synth out of a kit at the end of
Joy Division. It can be heard being famously out of tune on the Still rendition of ‘Decades’. This horrible noise.
There’s some detuned, faded-sounding synths on the Closer version of
‘Decades’, along with weird drum sounds, like big sheets of metal clapping together listlessly.
That’s my drum synth again. There’s drum sounds which are just getting
this drum synth and putting it through the shittiest fuzz pedal you can
imagine. And it sounded like Hendrix: you just hit ’em and it makes this
horrible noise. Brilliant. That’s on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, where it sounds
like a pig being slaughtered in the background.
All this messing around with new equipment and sounds . . . was making
Closer an enjoyable experience, then?
No. For emotional reasons more than anything. The thing with Ian, he
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that, it was just shat. He’d buggered it up. Taking all the springs out and
replacing them with bits of kitchen roll. It didn’t rattle, but you couldn’t
tune it.
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was having an affair. Wait for the forthcoming Ian Curtis Experience
film. The Hollywood angle is, ‘He’s a loser. Where’s the happy ending?
The guy’s a jerk.’
Was the whole album session suffused in an atmosphere of tension and
dread?
It was really. I can remember Ian being really unhappy with the sound of
Closer. He actually at one point said, ‘Oh my God, it sounds like
Genesis.’ But you’re never happy, never happy.
Really?! Joy Division, New Order, this vast, tremendous body of work –
there’s not one track where it sounds great, just perfect to your ears?
There’s always something that could be better about it. The trouble
nowadays is knowing when to stop, because there’s so much more you
can do. So you do it. There’s nobody to tell you when to stop. Back then
it was done when Martin says it’s finished. And we were like, ‘I don’t like
it,’ but he was like, ‘Too bad, it’s finished.’
‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was a particularly difficult track, right? You
had to remix it several times and then put two slightly different versions
on the single.
That was the classic example of Martin and his fucking techniques.
The music sounds kind of itchy and raw, uncomfortable in its skin – especially the way the drums skitter in this feathery sort of way.
I was totally pissed off with that one. The kit wasn’t right, and then he
wanted me to do dum dum dum, and then another bit of the kit, bang
bang bang, and it went on all night. It was the ultimate of that Martin
thing of recording each bit separately, and at the end of it I was seething.
So when I say it sounds uncomfortable, we’re actually hearing your suffering on that one.
Yeah, yeah, you can definitely hear that on ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
Did he do the same sort of mindfuckery with the other members?
That’s his whole thing about tension. Hooky and Barney, they’d be whispering, ‘Tell him to turn the bass up,’ and the other would be, ‘No, I told
him last time, you tell him.’ Then one of them in this stammering voice
would be, ‘Can you turn the bass up?’ Chris Nagle, the engineer, would
be having a good laugh about it. Hannett and Nagle were like a double
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Wow, that’s amazing, because that is precisely the vibe you get off the
music, this incredible frigidity – you can almost picture Ian’s breath condensing in the cold air as he sings. But this wasn’t just a ruse by Hannett
to get that vibe, it was actually necessary for Nagle’s diabetes?
No, Chris had to be cold. There was a reason behind it.
The sound on Unknown Pleasures and Closer, it’s full of cavernous
space, almost like dub if it hadn’t been invented in Jamaica but come
from somewhere non-tropical. Dub from the Lake District or the steppes
of Siberia.
That’s the other thing we listened to a lot, dub. There was a whole series
of records by Scientist – Scientist Meets the Space Invaders, and all that.
That was kind of the feel but obviously we’re not from Jamaica! So it got
a little bit warped.
If the band had produced itself would it have been more live-sounding?
A fuller, noisier sound?
It would have been rocking. When we did the songs live, the guitar was
dead loud. And then we’d go in the studio, and Martin would put the
guitar through a Marshall Time Modulator and it would sound like this
little scratchy sort of sound. We used to call it the Marshall Time Waster.
He just spent ages fucking around with this device, making things sound
shite. An example is this track on Movement called ‘Senses’. There’s a big
tom-tom riff on it, but Martin put it through the Marshall Time
Modulator and it sounds like coconuts with matchsticks.
It sort of suppresses the sound?
It just made things sound tiny. You can do other things with it, but that’s
the effect Martin wanted.
I wonder how many other bands there are out there who’ve made alltime rock masterpieces but are secretly disappointed with them! Or is it
the case, after all this time, that you can listen and hear it as great?
Now you can listen to it and think it’s very good. But when you’re doing
it, you can’t. When you first got it and listened to it, all you could hear
was the things you didn’t like about it. You could never approach it the
way you could approach another record in the record shop that you
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tings: ‘Desert’ and ‘North Pole’. And for him to continue to function you
had to have it set on ‘North Pole’. For his diabetes. So we’d be shivering
at the back.
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weren’t involved with. It takes a long time to get to the point where you
can put it on and listen to it like you would to anything else.
But, c’mon, ‘Atmosphere’ . . . I find it hard to believe anyone involved
with that could be dissatisfied with it. It sounds like nothing else in rock
history!
No, I’ve got to say, ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Dead Souls’ – no complaints
about them whatsoever!
Was that sound what you envisioned when you all wrote the song?
It’s so big. And the reason it sounds so big, so thick – to be horribly boring and technical – is that it was done on a sixteen-track, two-inch tape
recorder. Normally it would be a twenty-four-track, two-inch tape
recorder. If you divided the two-inch tape’s width, each track of the
recording is given approximately the width of the tape in a cassette of the
sort you’re recording this interview on. But being divided between sixteen tracks, rather than twenty-four, there’s that much more space. So,
particularly on the drums, you got a really big sound. It was just an accident. It wasn’t a choice. We recorded ‘Atmosphere’ at Cargo and that’s
all they had: a sixteen-track, two-inch tape recorder. Just one of those
things. The one thing I remember was the bell sounds on the record . . .
You mean those shimmery, glassy sounds like icicles tumbling down or
something . . .
Yes. That is a tambourine, balanced on a pair of scissors and put through
effects. There was an AMS delay – it fed back into itself – and then it’s
just me going ‘ping’. And the rest of it is a box going round and round
on a delay. That was a lot of fun. ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Dead Souls’, the single with Sordide Sentimental, that was a record we were really happy
with.
It must have been really difficult trying to carry on after Ian died. Did
you never think about stopping?
No. It was just like, ‘We’ve got to carry on.’ No question of stopping.
There wasn’t even a ‘This is what he would have wanted’ moment. We
just carried on. And it was very difficult.
Did you have a go at being the singer?
Oh, everybody had a go at being the singer. On that tour of America we
were all singing. That was the hardest thing. You’d kind of force yourself. The only thing we kept were the last two songs that Joy Division
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When I spoke to Tony Wilson, he said that was an incredibly inspired
decision because she was excited and fresh and full of positive energy.
And it kept it all a family thing.
Yeah. We did this session with Kevin Hewick – I think this was Tony trying to be ‘Oh, here’s a singer for you’ – but it didn’t work.
It must have been very hard to move on, sonically.
Movement wasn’t painful to me, it was more awkward. It was only at
the tail end of that, with ‘Everything Goes Green’ – which isn’t even on
the album, but we did it at the same time as Movement – that we found
a direction again. That’s the beginning of bringing the drum machine in
and pressing the start button.
A lot of drummers would be threatened by new technology, but it sounds
like you embraced it. For a lot of drummers, playing rhythm is very much
a physical, hands-on thing.
It was a bit of a vogue then. Everyone wanted a drum machine. So I
moved in there and mastered it before anybody else did. You don’t feel
threatened by it. It becomes what you normally do. Something that’s
hard to play, you can program it!
One story is that you got all got into electro and Italodisco because you
desperately needed to cheer yourselves up after Ian, and that music was
very perky and peppy!
We had this friend, Mark Reeder, that we’d met when we went to Berlin,
and he’d send Bernard these tapes of Italian disco music. It was irritatingly catchy but incredibly cheerful. Reeder’s got his own label in Berlin
now, doing trance. In the early days of New Order we used to listen to
his Italodisco tapes on the way to gigs.
Was it also the case that by going danceable and electronic you would
shed the following of gloomy young men in raincoats that had gathered
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wrote, ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’. Everything else was shut
behind us. And we were like, ‘What do we do now?’ The obvious thing
would be to get another singer in, but we thought that it would be like
carrying on Joy Division with another singer. So I said, ‘Let’s get Gillian
in to play keyboards, and sort the singing question as it goes along.’ She
and I’d been going out. I’d known Gillian for ages. When we rehearsed
at T. J. Davidsons, the band she was in rehearsed down the road. They
were called The Inadequates!
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around the band? There were also an awful lot of Joy Division copyists
coming through.
It was non-stop Joy Division clones. And it is true we were trying to get
rid of the raincoats. We hadn’t invited them anyway; it was just Ian’s
fault for wearing a sodding raincoat. They thought we all wore raincoats
and were miserable bastards. And we weren’t. There was a bit of perverse glee about doing something new and ‘Them bastards in raincoats
aren’t going to like this.’
You’d also started going to New York and encountering the club scene,
which must have been refreshing and invigorating. Clubs that weren’t
shitholes stinking of piss.
Shiny surfaces. Hurrah’s was one of them, and Danceteria. Ruth Polski,
our American tour manager, was involved in both of them. Area was
another one. It was unbelievable.
Discotheques, but not in the English sense.
Not in your Sharon and Karen sense. They were cool discos. But not
Studio 54 either. The other thing we used to do in New York was just listen to Kiss, the radio station. All that Sharon Redd, ‘Can You Handle It’
kind of stuff. Peech Boys. Half the time we used to just stay in the hotel
listening to the radio. Tape the radio.
Coming to New York in the early eighties, was that when you discovered
the joys of dancing?
No, we didn’t dance, didn’t dance!
You just admired the music as music, as new sonic architecture.
Yeah, and it had a good beat. You’d see people dancing to it. But it takes
Ecstasy to make a white man dance. Contemporary with that stuff was
Sugarhill and Grandmaster Flash and all that early hip hop. That was
another thing I’d do – buy anything that came out on Sugarhill.
Going to New York a lot, was that where the idea of the Haçienda, a
New York-style club in Manchester, originated? Which you guys partly
bankrolled.
Partly?!
Whose idea was the Haçienda?
Nobody will put their hands up to that one, so let’s just say it was a fait
accompli. We decided, ‘We’re going in on this club, so where are we
going to do it? On Whitman Street there was this boat showroom. When
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He never told you!
He never did. It was doomed from the word go because it was so big.
Initially, those Haçienda gigs . . . Every time I went, it only had a dozen
people in it. It couldn’t carry on like that. If it hadn’t been for acid house,
I don’t know what we’d have done! It’s not an indie club. Indie bands
didn’t like it. The club was a bit too bright.
So did it finally make money when acid house blew up?
No. That’s the trouble. It lost so much money that by the time it eventually became ‘the legendary Haçienda’, it would never, ever make back
the money it had lost. I thought we should fucking close it, just go bankrupt, do it now. But Rob Gretton said, ‘No, if you close it you lose everything. As long as you keep it open there’s always the possibility you’ll
make it back.’ You’re always looking for the silver lining. But there
wasn’t any! So yeah, we spent some of the better nights of our lives in
there, and it was nice to be a part of it, but knowing what I do now I’d
rather have the money! It fucked up New Order because you’d spend all
your time worrying about the fucking Haçienda and going to meetings,
and you never sat there writing songs any more.
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I first saw the inside, I thought, ‘What’s going on? Fucking hell, it’s massive! A bit bright, innit? Not really a disco!’ Because Factory and us had
become successful out of doing something, we foolishly believed whatever we did would be successful. Like, ‘Yeah, we’re businessmen now.
We’ve got loads of money, what are we worried about?’ Our deal with
Factory was fifty-fifty, so Tony felt obliged that the spending on the
Haçienda should be fifty-fifty. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell us that until a
long way down the line! He told us, ‘I put one hundred grand in, but fifty
grand of that was yours.’ ‘What?! How long you been doing that?’ ‘A
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RICHARD H. KIRK
Cabaret Voltaire, multi-instrumentalist
You were born in Sheffield. And still live there.
1956. Born and bred in Sheffield. All of us were – me, Chris Watson and
Steven Mallinder.
What was the first music that made an impact?
When I was six, I remember The Beatles and the Stones. Then football
took over as my obsession, but when I was thirteen I got into the whole
ska, bluebeat, Tamla thing that white working-class kids were into.
That’s when I first got to know Mal – from going to various church-hall
dances.
Weren’t you actually skinheads for a while?
We weren’t members of the National Front or anything horrible like
that, but yeah, we were into the music and the fashion and haircuts. It
was a very mixed racial thing then. A lot of West Indian kids were into
that. After that came glam – Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, the early Roxy.
Then getting into stranger-sounding music. Even on a Deep Purple
album, where there’s a weird synth solo, and then you’d find out that
whole albums were made up of that kind of thing. Faust, Tangerine
Dream.
Roxy were particularly big in Sheffield. There’s a theory that it was so
grim in Sheffield that you’d get all these people dressed up for those
bands, wearing all manner of weird and wonderful stuff. I suppose it
was some kind of escapist thing for people who worked in factories.
That era in ’73 when Roxy were really at the cutting edge . . . just lis244
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Eno’s I’m-a-non-musician thing anticipated punk.
Yeah. Our first-ever gig in 1975 was almost like some kind of a punk
thing. We were there to make this noise. We didn’t really know what we
were doing, but we knew that it upset a lot of people to the point where
they attacked us. We knew then we must be onto something. Mallinder
got a bone in his back chipped. But the people who attacked us ended up
with the nastier injuries, because a lot of people came to see us, including some very dodgy people who took it upon themselves to take our
part of the argument. It’s all very blurred now. Everyone was very drunk.
Is it true you were beating off the stage invaders with a clarinet?!
That kind of started, and then someone else grabbed my clarinet and
started hitting someone with it. Everything just went mad. There was
probably no more than one hundred people in a room in the university.
The guy who promoted the concert had told them we could play rock
music and, of course, we couldn’t, and I think that was the problem.
We did one or two other strange performances at that time. We’d
hooked up with some people in the University of Sheffield music department because they had the VCS 3 synthesizer, the same one that Eno
used. We wangled our way to have access to it and we met this guy, Bob
Dickinson. I’m not sure if he was a student or a lecturer. But we did a
performance in the Arts Tower, a lecture theatre, interpreting this bona
fide classical composer Jean-Yves Bosseur. We were asked to interpret
the piece ‘Exhaust’ he’d done. So we just made a tape loop of someone
saying, ‘Exhaust, exhaust,’ and laid some music over that. And we had
some film loops running that started melting. And they were freaked out
and we didn’t get invited back to the after-show party. With the involvement of the same Sheffield music department people we submitted a
piece of music on tape that was shown at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
in 1976. That same year we played a concert at the Lord Derby
Grammar School, in Bury, near Manchester. We played at ten in the
morning at assembly and did this fifty-minute piece called ‘Mars 1958’.
Well, we started, and then four minutes into the performance they pulled
the plug on us and someone set the fire alarm off.
And then punk came along. As the Pistols took off, we had started
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tening to Eno talk in interviews about how anyone can make music
because you don’t need to learn an instrument, you can make music with
a tape recorder or with a synth. That was the inspiration that really got
us started.
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booking rooms above pubs and doing self-promoted gigs. It got a bit
weird because if you weren’t punk, you couldn’t get work. We’d hire the
room above the pub, claim it was a mate’s twenty-first birthday, then put
out xeroxed flyers. We sent tapes to Jon Savage and to Throbbing
Gristle. And because we got hold of a copy of Spiral Scratch we sent one
to The Buzzcocks’ manager Richard Boon. We did some shows with The
Buzzcocks, including this live show with John Cooper Clarke and The
Slits at the Lyceum. A complete fucking nightmare, just full of crazed
punk rockers. We got covered in spit. An iron bar was thrown at
Buzzcocks. Savage and Geoff Travis came to that gig. Not long after that
we started making some records.
The standard story about Sheffield is that it’s grim. But Andy Gill, the
NME’s Sheffield correspondent in those days, told me it’s actually a
beautiful city.
The thing about Sheffield is that if you jump in a car, within ten minutes
you’re out in Derbyshire, the Peak District. So that’s beautiful, but I
wouldn’t say the inner-city part of Sheffield was beautiful. That’s where
I lived with my parents – the east end of Sheffield. You could look down
into this valley and all you could see was blackened industrial buildings.
At night-time, in bed, you’d hear the big forges crunching away. There’s
some nice parks, but the city centre and east end aren’t pretty.
Another part of the myth of Sheffield is that it was this post-industrial
wasteland, with steel mills closed down and derelict factories. But apparently it was still pretty bustling in the seventies, with a fair amount of
jobs and money floating around.
Towards the end of the seventies people started to lose their jobs. And
then obviously in the early eighties, once Thatcher did her bit, it was
totalled completely. But the main thing in the seventies was that there
weren’t really places you could go. I remember lots of parties at people’s
houses, but not that many clubs where you could go hear the music you
wanted to hear. It was all very much disco.
As a kid of, shall we say, unusual leanings, how would you amuse yourself in seventies Sheffield, then? You guys were crazy for Dada.
That was a big thing. Or more situationist-type stuff. We’d do mad stuff,
like go out in a van with tape loops playing out the back, or go into pubs
just playing some weird stuff. We were just trying to wind people up.
That’s what we started out trying to do more than anything. But we
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That’s interesting, because there’s that stereotype of Cabaret Voltaire listeners wearing shabby grey overcoats, but it sounds like you were quite
the stylists. Didn’t Mallinder have a whole room full of clothes, a giant
wardrobe?
I’m not sure I remember that, but we were well into fashion. I was also
into xerox art and mail art. Genesis from Throbbing Gristle was into
that whole mail-art circuit. I was quite arty anyway: I used to get white
fabric and make screen prints, or just paint it and make it into a shirt.
And we’d go down to London to McLaren’s shop Sex, which was called
Let It Rock initially. We’d look at what was happening there, and if we
couldn’t afford to buy the stuff we’d rip it off or copy it. Do our own
take on it.
Were there physical risks involved in looking like that?
Definitely. That was part of the wind-up. You’d walk into a pub and the
whole place would go quiet. We’d go into a pub and order a Babycham,
when everyone else was drinking bitter. Just for the shock value of it.
You were dicing with death because there were some real meatheads
around.
You briefly attended art school in Sheffield, right?
I did just a one-year foundation in sculpture, but I couldn’t get to do the
degree I wanted in Sheffield, and in the end I didn’t want to leave the city
because I was getting too involved with the band. So I did a year at
teaching college, which was a nightmare. The tutors decided it would be
better if I left. I was very relieved, and went back on the dole.
So in the early days the Cabs’ base was the attic in Chris Watson’s house.
We studiously went there Tuesday and Thursdays every week for two or
three hours. And we’d do three or four compositions, or ‘experiments’,
in an evening. We didn’t have a way of writing down music, so that was
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never had any notion that we could ever make records or anything like
that. It was all done for our own amusement.
In terms of things to do, the black music thing carried on with us being
into things like The Fatback Band, James Brown and Brass Construction,
and there were clubs where you could listen to that kind of music and do
the odd stimulant. We were very much into fashion and clothes. Buying
old clothes from army-surplus stores or Oxfam, customizing them with
paint. I think we stood out as much for the way we looked as much as
anything else.
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our form of notation: putting it straight to tape. That’s why twenty-five
years later I’m able to access all this stuff.
You’ve got this massive archive of ‘attic tapes’.
Yes. Cabaret Voltaire must have started late 1973. There was a whole
group of us originally. We knocked about with some older people. There
were one or two people who were involved in Cabaret Voltaire before it
became Cabaret Voltaire. Then they kind of drifted away. At one point
we got a guitar player and a bass player, but they were too proficient, so
we had to lose them! It wasn’t until ’74 that it became the nucleus of me,
Mal and Chris. That’s when these recordings date from. And then we did
the first live performance in 1975. At first it was like a weird informal
thing – this gang of mates who were interested in music, a bit of art and
a few strange books. Films too: there was Grave’s Theatre, where they’d
show a lot of the surrealist cinema, and also the Library Film Theatre,
where maybe there’d be a Cocteau movie on or all the Buñuel stuff.
‘Strange books’ – that would include Burroughs and Ballard?
Ballard came a bit later, more late seventies. I remembering getting The
Atrocity Exhibition and thinking it was amazing. But Burroughs was
really the main thing. And he had all this other stuff going on with Brion
Gysin – things like the Dream Machine and the sound experiments they
did. Like their short-wave radio cut-ups, which came out on Industrial
Records later as Nothing Here Now But the Recordings. They were
using the same techniques they used with words: cutting up bits of tape,
making loops, just to see what happens.
During punk Cabaret Voltaire’s music got less abstract, more riffy and
shouty. Things like ‘Nag Nag Nag’ sounded like The Seeds or Count Five
if they’d been Daleks. But in terms of punk’s impact on Sheffield in general . . . nobody there actually formed a standard-issue punk-rock band.
For us it was like, ‘Punk’s energy is great, some of the fashion is great –
but the music’s very rooted in early Stones and that kind of thing.’ That’s
where we begged to differ. We wanted that energy and the wall-of-guitar
sound, but we wanted to bring something new to it. Something electronic.
Your own guitar sound, on tracks like ‘Silent Command’ and ‘Seconds
Too Late’, is very different from the punk pack. It’s got this scritchy,
almost insectile quality. Echoey, but dry.
The first fuzzbox I used was custom-built by Chris, who was good with
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Later on, with things like ‘Sluggin’ for Jesus’, I can hear some Michael
Karoli from Can in your playing. This itchy funk feel.
I was just about to say the only guitarist I rated and respected, apart
from Hendrix, was Karoli. I’d own up to that, and I’m sure Mal would
own up to aping Karoli’s vocal style, which was very whispery and echoing. And I’m sure Chris copied Irmin Schmidt as well. Irmin had this
great technique where he used to karate-chop the keyboard. Which I
think Chris adapted at one point.
Weren’t you in some kind of joke punk outfit with Adi Newton, later of
Clock DVA, and Martyn Ware, later of Human League?
I have a tape of it somewhere. There was a punk band playing the university – it wasn’t Slaughter and the Dogs but something like that – and
someone said, ‘Do you lot fancy having a jam at this punk gig?’ It was
me, Mal, Chris, Adi, Martyn and Glenn Gregory, who’d go on to be in
Heaven 17. Probably Ian Craig Marsh as well. We did ‘Cock in My
Pocket’ by Iggy. I remember doing some vocals. Everyone was drunk and
just wanted to do something. See, we knew all those people in Sheffield.
Were you and the future Clock DVA and Human League people into
similar music and that whole constellation of reference points to do with
books and films?
Kind of. But I know the League guys were listening to things like JeanMichel Jarre, and it wasn’t until I turned them onto Kraftwerk that
things changed quite drastically. Martyn will back me up on that because
in interviews before he’s talked about going to a party I had where
Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express was played.
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electronics, being a telephone engineer. My dad was into tinkering with
radio and electronics and he had all these magazines which I’d inherited,
and in one of them Chris found this circuit. So nobody else had this
fuzzbox. Chris also built the first-ever synth that we used, from a Practical
Electronics magazine, where they’d be advertising these synth kits. My
guitar was a Watkins copycat, and it had a tape loop on it and five heads,
to get that kind of slap-back rock’n’roll echo. And I had loads of longer
and more sustained delay things. So when we played live not only was my
guitar going through that, but the drum machine went through it as well.
People keep saying to me, ‘You should use your guitar again,’ and I actually did recently and it was quite liberating after years of working with
computers and MIDI and sequencers. I almost started pogoing.
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Adi Newton was also doing the first Sheffield punkzine.
That was Adi and Paul Bower from 2.3. They were the nearest of all the
Sheffield bands to punk, but a bit too clever probably. Paul was a bit of
a character and it was he who got us Western Works. 2.3 were already in
there rehearsing and they wanted us to share the space. There were two
rooms there, and 2.3 got the biggest room and we got the other. It was
the old Socialist Workers Party headquarters. Paul, I think, was connected with them, but nowadays he’s quite a big figure in the Labour
Party. If you look at the old photos of the Cabs in the studio at Western
Works, just behind the mixing desk there’s a wall covered with all these
old socialist posters from the sixties and seventies. We left it there
because we thought it made a nice backdrop.
Well, that brings up the other big aspect of Sheffield’s legend: alongside
the grim industrial environment, the whole ‘Socialist Republic of South
Yorks’ thing. The bolshie council flying a red flag above the town hall.
I’d always grown up around that because my father at one point was a
member of the Communist Party. And I was a member of the Young
Communist League. For a little while I wore the badge when I went to
school, when I was fourteen or so. But I never took it really seriously. It
was a pose to some extent. There was a strong tradition of left-wing politics in Sheffield. All my family were Labour voters. It would have been
unthinkable to say you supported the Tories. Nowadays the Liberal
Democrats are running the council in Sheffield, but in those days it was
very staunchly socialist. And that’s why Thatcher hated us so much.
Do you think she pursued policies designed to destroy Sheffield, like she
had to take out the NUM and the GLC, because they were power bases
for the opposition?
I’m not a great person for this sort of stuff but I think if you looked into
it you’d find that was the case. Arthur Scargill was based in Barnsley,
which is a small town twenty miles out of Sheffield. There were a hell of
a lot of coal pits in that thirty-mile radius around Sheffield.
Do you think that maybe having left-wing culture as an ordinary backdrop to life allowed Sheffield youth to be irresponsible? In other parts of
the UK you might rebel by being hard left-wing, but if that’s what your
parents are into, you’d rebel by being into Dada and artistic provocation.
None of the Sheffield bands went in for politicking or agitprop.
Well, we wanted to be apolitical in the sense that we never wanted to
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How did you develop the rhythm side of the band? On ‘Walls of Jericho’,
for instance, the drums have this weird twangy quality. It’s all whizzing
and pinging sounds.
We didn’t want a drummer doing loads of stuff with cymbals; we
wanted something repetitive. And we knew you could get drum
machines. The first one we got was this Farfisa drum machine that we
bought from this dodgy-looking guy with a toupee who came up to us
in a music-instrument shop and said, ‘Look, lads, I’ll sell you one of
these – I’ve got one at home.’ Not only did it have all the beats but it
had all the little buttons on the top for individual drum sounds. For
1974 that was quite advanced. It turned out this guy was on the cabaret
circuit in Sheffield and had been on Opportunity Knocks, so he had all
this really cool equipment. He set us on the road with that one. It was
forty quid or something.
There’s an interesting tension in the Sheffield groups, which gets very
explicit with Heaven 17 later. On one side, there’s a firm belief in socialism, but running in opposition to that there’s the practical day-to-day
existence of the band as essentially a small business. Which captures
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indoctrinate people. We were about presenting the facts and letting people make up their own minds. And I remember when we brought out ‘Do
the Mussolini Headkick’, we’d get National Front people coming down
with the wrong idea. They thought we were fascists, and we got grief
about that. But we kinda liked the ambiguity. Even though we were actually fairly left-leaning in our outlook.
Initially we were just doing stuff because we had nothing to lose. We
thought we’d never get a record deal. There’s no point in trying to be
commercial, so let’s just go and upset people. One of the things that used
to really upset people was that we used to use a lot of voice processors,
like ring modulators, because we’d heard that on Doctor Who. The
Daleks spoke in these weird electronic voices. Some of the first synths
were designed to process instruments through the synths, as opposed to
just making pretty keyboard lines. So our thought was, ‘If we get this
kind of synth, we can put the guitar through it, the drum machine
through it, and something’s going to come out the other end that’s going
to sound completely odd.’ Just the idea of someone standing in front of
an audience speaking through a microphone and you’ve got this metallic
voice, you just didn’t get that in those days. It was something pretty
unique to Cabaret Voltaire at that time.
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something of the period’s ambivalence, the shift from the old ideas of
organized labour and having a job for life and being protected by your
union, and the new reality that was partly being imposed but also
embraced positively by some, where people have to become sharp business operators, nimbly surfing market forces. So in the Cabs’ case you
had your own studio and got to the point where you paid yourselves a
modest wage. But I guess having Western Works was more an impulse
towards autonomy than free enterprise. . .
Yes, we wanted the freedom to do what we wanted without some record
company trying to make us into something else. Having our own studio,
we could spend as much time as we wanted to. You didn’t have to be
beholden to a record company or a professional studio where you’re
watching a clock all the while because you’re charged by the hour. There
was no pressure. Having our own space was very important. It was a bit
like Andy Warhol’s Factory on a fifty-pence budget. A clubhouse,
almost, somewhere to meet where we could have a spliff and listen to
music. And then make our music, or get other bands in there.
How much did it cost to set up your own studio in those days?
The Revox mastering machine – which is a very high-quality tape
recorder that will produce studio-quality records – cost about five hundred quid back then. Chris was the only one who had a wage, from his
telephone-engineering job, so often he was the one who bought the more
expensive bits. He bought a Synthi AKS, and that cost him about £500.
Which was a fucking lot of money then. Most of the stuff Mal and I had
was junk: forty-quid drum machines, cheap guitars. It wasn’t until after
we did the first EP that we actually bought a multitrack recorder and a
small mixing desk. Rough Trade lent us the money to buy that. At that
time it was a toss-up between Rough Trade and Factory. We had done
stuff for their A Factory Sample record. Rough Trade were more
together, but we felt we had more in common with the people at Factory.
Then Rough Trade offered to advance us enough money to buy the fourtrack and mixing desk. ‘Silent Command’ was the first thing we did
using that. Then we did the debut album, Mix Up.
How did the relationship with Rough Trade go? You didn’t feel much
kinship with them, right?
We really hated Rough Trade. Originally Industrial were going to put
out our first EP, but they couldn’t afford to. So Genesis P-Orridge passed
the demo to Geoff Travis, and we rerecorded the songs and it came out.
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You were hurling out albums and singles via Rough Trade in that period
between 1979 and 1981. Voice of America seems like a landmark
release. Was that inspired by Reagan and the rise of the moral majority?
We went to America just after that. November 1979 was the first time
we went, so it was about a year before Reagan was elected. We spent
three weeks out in San Francisco; played some gigs there, and one in Los
Angeles. I remember the mood was about to change, and the same thing
happened in England with Thatcher. We were fascinated by America but
aware of the darker side of it. That’s when we got the vocals for ‘Sluggin’
for Jesus’, this crazy TV evangelist. We were staying with Vale from
ReSearch. The TV being on all night and there being so many channels
was a big novelty for us, because in England it used to finish at 11 p.m.
and there were just three channels. We just got locked into this guy
Eugene Scott, who was on every night with the most low-rent production. And he just demanded money, and basically the only reason he
wanted money was to stay on the air to ask for more money.
So ‘sluggin’ for Jesus’, that was Scott’s expression for ‘fighting the good
fight’ – which he equated with getting your chequebook out and sending
him a donation! ‘Sluggin’’ is one of my favourite Cabs tracks. It’s got that
Karoli guitar and a sort of mutated skank feel.
There’s also another nod to Karoli there because I play some electric violin on the track, which he used to do on quite a few Can tracks. And the
rhythmic feel is very reggae. That track was coming out of listening to
dub. I’d also found a drum machine in a shop in the east end of Sheffield.
It was like a guitar and amp combo, but on top of it there was a drum
machine built into it. It had glitter all over it, like it was a piece of technology for cabaret. Me and my girlfriend dragged this thing back in a
taxi. And you could drop certain parts of the rhythm in and out, which
was quite unusual, because most drum machines just had preset beats,
like the foxtrot or disco, and all you could do to alter it was speed it up
or slow it down. But with this you could actually mess around with the
rhythm – drop out the snare or bass drum or hi-hat.
The way Cabaret Voltaire used soundbites and found voices, in a way
that anticipated sampling, was pretty unusual back then. I can’t think of
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But we thought Rough Trade were too hippy-ish. There was that whole
Ladbroke Grove vibe. The good side of that was they were into dub, and
that’s where we did have something in common.
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anyone else who did it, really. Then it became a hallmark/cliché with
industrial music.
Well, that’s why we dropped it in the eighties. We were sick of it. It
wasn’t shocking or weird any more; it was the norm.
Three Mantras – was that inspired by the Iranian revolution?
Kind of. The whole Afghanistan situation was kicking off, when the
Russians went in. Then there was the American hostages in Iran. So we
were taking notice of all that. Red Mecca was kind of where that all culminated. It’s not called Mecca after the fucking Mecca ballroom in
Nottingham! ‘Western Mantra’ and ‘Eastern Mantra’ – we were trying
to make some kind of comment with that.
Oh, like a parallel between fundamentalist Islam and the Christian right
in America, this twin theocratic resurgence. Also running through a lot of
the music, from the very beginning through Micro-Phonies and beyond,
there’s themes of surveillance, secret agencies, paranoia . . .
Control. Which comes to the forefront when you start reading
Burroughs. But if you boil it down, we just hated any kind of authority.
And took the piss out of it. There’s a bit in Mick Farren’s Give the
Anarchist a Cigarette where he talks about constables, park attendants,
every kind of jobsworth . . . the whole authority system you’d grown up
with in the fifties and sixties. We were trying to say, ‘Think for yourself,
don’t be manipulated or controlled by the state or the church.’
The attention and praise that Cabaret Voltaire had started to receive
came to a head with Red Mecca in 1981. Deservedly.
I always say for the early phase of Cabaret Voltaire, it couldn’t get any
better than Red Mecca. So something had to change after that. Somehow
all the unrest in 1981 got into the music. There was trouble in a lot of
places, and we picked up on it.
Were there riots in Sheffield?
Oh yeah. Red Mecca was the last album of that first phase. And 2 x 45,
the next one. Chris Watson is on half of that, and then he decided to
leave. And then we decided to go into a studio in Manchester someone
told us about, and we were working with Eric Random and a drummer
called Nort, and the sound was moving more to dance music. 2 x 45 is
the transitional record between what we’d finished with Red Mecca and
what we started with the Virgin albums.
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Stevo seems quite a colourful character. To put it mildly.
He was only twenty-one when this all started. And because he’d got
artists like Soft Cell, he’d got record companies in the palm of his hand.
He was completely anarchic, completely open to things. So we signed to
Some Bizzare as a label/management scenario. And they took a third of
whatever we got from record deals, publishing. They were the buffer
between Cabaret Voltaire and Virgin Records. Stevo financed the
recording of The Crackdown, and on the strength of John Luongo’s
remixes of ‘Just Fascination’ and ‘Crackdown’ Simon Draper at Virgin
got involved. The Crackdown was written from scratch in Trident
Studios in London. Flood, the engineer, was involved, and we gave him
co-production credits. Then, with Micro-Phonies, we bought a sixteentrack studio and did it all in Sheffield.
Were you influenced by seeing New Order taking some of the ideas
they’d developed in the later stage of Joy Division and turn that into
dance music that actually worked in the clubs and took them into the
pop charts? Floor-friendly and radio-glossy, but still having the darkness
and the doubt.
Ian Curtis was a very big fan of the Cabs. We played with Joy Division
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You’d reached an impasse of sorts . . . Enter Stevo!
I think we met him in 1982. He’d been ringing me up. You’d hear this
Cockney voice going on about his Futurist night, and in the background
you’d hear his mum doing the hoovering. He invited us to play one of his
nights at this place the Porterhouse Club, a well-known venue halfway
between Sheffield and Nottingham. And then he invited us down to Top
of the Pops when Soft Cell got to number 1 with ‘Tainted Love’. If you
ever see footage of that, you can see Chris Watson in the audience with
his leather jacket. That was a great experience for us, watching this nerve
centre of the British pop establishment. We started to think maybe this is
not a bad way of getting through to people. We saw the potential.
Around this time we were setting up Doublevision, our video label, with
Paul Smith, who went on to do the Blast First label. And somehow Stevo
had been contacting Paul Smith and saying, ‘I’d love to put the Cabs in
a studio in London with a ten-grand budget.’ And as a kind of bribe he
lent us £5,000 to set up the duplication part of Doublevision. That made
us totally autonomous: we had a small set-up where we could run off
five videos at a time. So we decided to give the whole Some Bizzare thing
a go.
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on numerous occasions and had a lot in common. Ian had always
wanted to record at Western Works. So maybe out of respect after he
died, New Order came to Sheffield for a few days and tried out some
ideas. Some of the tracks ended up on Movement or as singles. We were
very close with Joy Division and subsequently with New Order. And we
were influenced by them, and I dare say they were influenced by us. For
instance, Barney, when we played live with Joy Division, he’d be very
interested in what electronics we were using.
It was New Order’s manager Rob Gretton who first drew my attention
to ‘Planet Rock’ one drunken night in the Haçienda. I used to carry a little notebook around with me and I remember writing down the track’s
name. Then I got the record and thought, ‘Fucking hell – it’s Kraftwerk
but funkier.’ Then there was ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash, and a
whole bunch of other stuff. Another factor was that John Robey did a
remix of ‘Yashar’ for that scene in New York. He took quarter-inch tapes
of the remix down to the Funhouse to test them out on the audience.
Hearing what he did with ‘Yashar’ was a big catalyst in terms of realizing, ‘Well, we can strip this music back and maybe change a few things
and it’s going to work in a club.’
We’d always been into dance music, but we weren’t actually trying to
make it. Now we were, because the technology was there. Around Red
Mecca I’d bought a synth and a sequencer. Then we got the Roland 808
drum machine, the same one Arthur Baker used on ‘Planet Rock’. We
embraced that sound of the drum machine and sequencer locked
together mechanically.
Did it open up a chasm in the band, with you doing all the music and
Mal becoming just the vocalist?
When Chris left, I absorbed a lot of that, the technological and programming side. Mal became more the frontman and lyricist. The weird
thing going through all the attic tapes for the retro box is how there’s
just as much of Chris’s and my voices as there is Mal’s. It was only
around 1977 that Mal became the main vocalist. He was the only person we knew that didn’t have a broad Yorkshire accent. In a weird way,
we didn’t want to be tied to Sheffield, so we wanted someone with a
more neutral accent. It wasn’t that he was from somewhere else, I just
think he’d gone to a better school than me or Chris. Taught by monks
or something! Looking through the old tapes, I also realized I’d forgotten that I had actually written the lyrics to a lot of the stuff, even when
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Quite a few of your contemporaries in the industrial scene went in a
danceable direction in the mid-eighties: SPK, Clock DVA . . .
I think maybe they followed us. We were trying to get away from that
whole SPK area.
And they wouldn’t stay put – they kept following you!
Exactly. We just wanted to leave that behind. We got tired of the whole
industrial thing. Too many people were doing this dark music with voice
cut-ups. We felt we could either stop or do something else. So we became
a different band, almost.
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I hadn’t sung them. So the roles were more blurred with early Cabs.
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ALAN RANKINE
The Associates, multi-instrumentalist/music director
How did you meet Billy Mackenzie? Were you from different worlds,
socially and musically?
My family consisted of a school inspector and a headmaster, whereas
Billy’s father was gypsy! That strange juxtaposition of where we were
from fuelled our tension and chemistry. The first time I saw Billy, he was
in some real cod-funk band, but his voice bowled me over. The band I
was in needed a new singer, so Bill came down to Edinburgh from
Dundee. He arrived in a taxi wearing straight-leg trousers. I had an
Afghan coat and flares and hair down to my arsehole!
In that same week when I saw Bill and his band, I’d seen The
Stranglers. I’d never seen anything like it. That was a monumental
moment. I had been buying records by T Rex, Free, Rod Stewart, Led
Zeppelin. 1973–4 was a period of just genuine muck, the most selfindulgent racket you ever heard – Tales from Topographic Oceans. So
you can see why people said, ‘We need something new.’
The band I was in, Mental Torture, did cabaret songs, Burt Bacharach,
cover versions, and then they’d do one night of progressive nonsense. I
thought, ‘This isn’t sexy, this isn’t groovy.’ When Bill arrived, he immediately dismantled the whole thing. Within ten days Bill was staying in
my living room and we were writing songs. And deconstructing the band
situation. The band started to get residencies in hotels. Part of the deal
was we got a room – for sexual entertainment, as well as a dressing
room. We were getting loads of groupies.
Bill was a fizzing mental flatmate. One time, he put the plastic kettle
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How did the musical chemistry between you work? Who did what when
it came to writing the songs?
I had played guitar since I was ten, and from fourteen onwards I was the
musical director in whatever band I was in. The arranger. Bill would
have this folder of lyrics that he’d had typed out by some girl – in
exchange for dresses or something. I could pick holes in the lyrics without taking away any confidence from Bill. Later on I backed off from
that editor-type role. Bill did virtually all the lyrics. The vocal melodies
were half Billy and half me. We were trying to do the same thing as
Bacharach and David, trying to play with emotions. It was like an actor
on stage, as opposed to a film actor on camera. The actor on stage has to
amplify to get the point across. Same with us. That’s why we threw in
everything but the kitchen sink. Recording, we never had enough time or
enough tracks. The instrumental parts were mostly all by me. Bill would
offer suggestions and make demands for something to be like this or
more like that. And I would know what he meant instinctively. We had
this way of working with a one-string guitar – Bill would do rhythms on
it, up and down. I would interpret that and turn it into chord shapes and
keys. But all the guitars, basslines and drum parts – that’s me.
We had a massive love of the grandeur of film themes. We admired the
way people could play on people’s emotions within a film or TV theme,
with no lyrics. We catalogued the whole thing, worked out what the
composers were doing. And then put those tricks and that language into
what we were doing.
The vibe on Fourth Drawer Down and Sulk often makes me think of
psychedelia, but if it had happened later. Not as an eruption within
blues-based or electrified folk music in the sixties, but as something happening in the heart of seventies pop – Abba, disco. So it’s hallucinatory
and disorienting, but held together by the discipline of pop.
There was a thing in our music of being free to do anything, without
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on the gas and it melted all over the cooker. You’d say, ‘It’s your turn to
do the dishes,’ and next thing you know he’s cut himself. You could
always tell there was an unsettled thing with him. He could never switch
off from what was going on in his mind. Bill could never just switch off
for an hour, unless it was a David Attenborough documentary.
Something non-human. He saw animals as being pure. They had this
grace and nobility he admired, and he didn’t see that in a lot of people.
Animals were no bullshit, no agenda.
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being an asshole tosspot. There had to be some sort of structure. We
didn’t like flabbiness or stuff where it was unnecessary and didn’t seem
to really serve any purpose other than just to fill the sound out. We
wanted every note to count, and to count in a different way and bring
out a different emotion. Whether that emotion was ‘You dumped me and
I fucking hate you,’ or ‘I dumped you and I’m fucking glad I dumped
you.’ Or, ‘I don’t understand my sexuality.’
Well, talking of confusion, there’s a feeling with some of the songs that
they’re new emotions, almost. Either that or they’re weird, mixed-up, inbetween emotions. Strange new hues of the heart.
I think there’s certainly a bit of that going on in Bill’s lyrics, with his sexuality being the way it was.
Was he omnivorous?
He was striving for the third sex. That begat a lot of things in him. You
could see the funny side of it, which was Bill would shag anything with
a pulse. But the serious side was that this guy was constantly questioning
himself. The guy had feelings as well; he wasn’t just a big shagabout. He
was always trying to come to terms with it, and that came through in the
lyrics. Like ‘18 Carat Love Affair’. In musical terms that was our poppiest record, but it was about a gay love affair and Bill trying to hide that
from everyone else. But you can read it the other way and say it’s about
an ordinary love affair and trying to keep it secret because other people
are involved.
In interviews in those days he didn’t talk much about his gay relationships. He referred to girls.
It’s the weirdest thing, I knew Bill was gay from the moment I saw him.
But immediately after that it just didn’t cross my mind again. When we
were doing the photo shoots for The Affectionate Punch, and the later
photo shoots too, all the iconography was there. But I was so caught up
in the music I didn’t recognize it. Even when we appeared on TV – this is
even before being on Top of the Pops – and Billy had the sixties airforce
pilot’s uniform, which was this big gay iconic thing, I didn’t recognize
then either. It just never occurred to me.
He was so open and uninhibited about everything else in interviews . . . I
wonder why he kept his sexuality ambiguous?
That was his private thing.
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Did he have sexual relationships with women as well?
Oh yeah. But again it was something that he kept quite separate.
Separate in terms of time and even in terms of geography – where these
people were. I accepted it and never gave it a second thought. That was
Bill.
So tell me the story about how you did the series of 1981 singles that
ended up as Fourth Drawer Down? The accounts I’ve read make it sound
like you were almost scamming the record company, Situation 2/Beggar’s
Banquet . . . doing the records for next to nothing and then making a tidy
profit.
We got money from our publishing company to record demos and paid
a hundred quid for studio dead time, recording always between 9 p.m.
on Sunday and 9 a.m. Monday morning. Then we sold the masters to
Beggar’s. And I must stress there’s nothing illegal about doing that! At
that point we were in London and we were trying to support the band,
which was four of us, not just Bill and myself: there was Mike Dempsey,
the bassist, and John Murphy, the drummer. We felt responsible for these
people.
So you weren’t pulling the wool over the eyes of the label?
No, no. It was just we weren’t telling them we were making these records
so cheaply. It felt like a scam to us. In the cold light of day, it wasn’t. So
we did that every Sunday for about ten weeks. And coincidentally in one
single night we demoed ‘Party Fears Two’ – which we’d written back in
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Perhaps a bit like – and this is a ghastly comparison – Freddie Mercury,
where it’s totally obvious, right out there on the surface of the performance and the clothes and even the group’s name, Queen. But even with
all that, quite a few people don’t pick up on the gayness. And partly that’s
because the artist never talks candidly about what his sexuality is.
It’s dead obvious if you look at the facts staring you in the face, but
almost never discussed. Bill would sometimes disappear from the studio
for six hours at a time, and I’d think to myself maybe he’s off walking
around Camden getting ideas for lyrics. Or just clearing his head from
the studio pressure, because with the intensity of these type of recording
situations, it’s always going to be on the singer, that pressure, because
they can’t hide behind an instrument. But y’know what, maybe Bill was
out cruising for six hours! I don’t know! I never thought about it in these
terms. There wasn’t even a nod and a wink.
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1978 – and ‘Club Country’, and we played them to our publisher the
next day, and he said, ‘This is what’s going to get you signed.’
One thing that struck me listening to Fourth Drawer Down again –
you’re a really superb guitarist! Do you feel you’ve ever gotten the credit
you deserve? You came up with an unusual sound that actually ranks
well with your peers during a period when a lot of innovative stuff was
being done with the electric guitar. This is around the turn of the seventies into the eighties: John McGeoch, Keith Levene, Bruce Gilbert . . .
I would consider myself one of that group, yeah. There was a definite
time around ’79, ’80, ’81, where people like myself and The Edge,
because of the set-up of their band – just a bass player, a drummer and a
singer – the guitarist virtually had to carry the can for all the sound textures in the music. There was a lot of good people doing that.
There was also this modernist confidence abroad that it was possible to
make new sounds with the guitar. That you didn’t need to repeat Chuck
Berry or all those tired, worn-out, blues-derived chord progressions. Or
all those textures associated with sixties rock, whether it was Byrdsy
folk-rock jangle, or fuzztone, or wah-wah . . .
It was almost the opposite, Simon – it was about doing anything but
that. That if you went anywhere near those old ways, you’d get your
knuckles rapped. Not by Bill; you’d rap your own knuckles for falling
back on that. It all comes back to that sense that anything was possible.
Actually, that’s the same ethos probably as when The Beatles did
Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s.
Were there any earlier guitarists you admired whose playing hinted at
how to get beyond the blues-derived thing? Neu!’s Michael Rother was
doing stuff that felt totally fresh and European. And there was Fripp’s
sound on ‘Heroes’ . . .
You would listen to what these guitarists would do and think, ‘How did
they get that sound? How can I slot myself in here without sounding like
that?’ But another thing was just trying to get that guitar, using the most
basic of non-digital analogue effects, to make the biggest sounds you
possibly could. Not to be stadium-rock sounding but just to back up
what Bill was trying to do vocally. You’ve got to remember he had no
one harmonizing with him. There were no backing vocals. He was carrying the whole thing, so it was about me trying to do everything in a
textural sense possible to back him up. I just used to go for a Roland
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There’s a clean, cold European quality to Associates music that’s redolent of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and all the things he was drawing on – La
Dusseldorf, Edgar Froese, Cluster. The supreme example of that is ‘A
White Car in Germany’: not just the title or lyrical references to Munich
and Dusseldorf, but the sound of it.
There’s a hell of a Germanic thing there. Bill got that from Kraftwerk
and Conny Plank. He liked the starkness. That Teutonic thing never left
him. ‘A White Car in Germany’ is all about trying to get unusual sounds,
especially unusual sounds on the drums. If you listen to the vocals on
that, there’s these amazing vocals, some of which were literally sung
through greaseproof paper and a comb!
Oh, right, the sound where you can’t work out if it’s guitar or voice?
It’s a guitar and a voice, but the voice has literally been sung through
greaseproof paper and a comb. It was used again on ‘Kitchen Person’.
And on that song Billy also sang some of the vocals down one of these
vacuum cleaners that had the long tubing! You get all these glockenspiels
and vibraphones on the Fourth Drawer Down tracks: it’s us using the
xylophone in a way that hadn’t been done before, like the manic way it’s
used in ‘Kitchen Person’.
‘Q Quarters’ always makes me think of The Third Man. Vienna, immediately after the Second World War. Shadows and spies.
Yeah, it’s a pretty dark song. That track was definitely filmic in that type
of way. And lyrically that’s just Bill letting rip with this imagery. The
stuff about washing down bodies in the morgue, that’s from Bill’s
grandma. She did that during World War Two. And then there’s this
fairly simple atmospheric backing to go with the lyrics. It doesn’t really
travel anywhere harmonically but, ooh, the feeling there . . . I’ve heard
dogs howl to that song. Run out of the room and cover their heads with
their paws!
At that time we felt a freedom because, after doing our debut, The
Affectionate Punch, we’d parted company from Fiction/Polydor. We
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Space Echo and turn the damned thing up full. I’m sure it was the same
for a lot of people – The Edge, Charlie Burchill of Simple Minds, Will
Sergeant in The Bunnymen. You just had to try to make a wall of sound
without sounding like you were doing a punk thrash. So degrees of subtlety would creep in. Post-punk was the little-by-little creeping back in of
subtlety. Just giving the song a chance to breathe.
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weren’t signed to anyone, just doing the singles for Situation 2. And we
felt safe because we’d already done the demos for ‘Party Fears Two’ and
‘Club Country’, and we knew we’d get signed on the basis of those
songs. So we were totally free to do mad things.
Fourth Drawer Down has the cover imagery of you two in the swimming
pool, while The Affectionate Punch had you both lined up in the starting
position for a running race. The Associates had this thing about physical
fitness, the nobility of athletic contests, right? A natural aristocracy of
vigour and agility.
Coming out of punk, where you had to be nine stone and vomiting all
the time, phlegming up every bit of mucus that was in your body . . .
there was a reaction against that. Bill had been a very, very good runner;
I had been a very, very good tennis player.
Was the idea sort of ‘rise above the decadence of rock’? A healthy mind
in a healthy body? Nietzsche had this whole thing where he said that
physiology and nutrition, achieving an equilibrium of the nerves and
glands and vital fluids . . . that was more important than any philosophy.
You could junk the whole of western thought if you just got it right in
your own body.
That’s another way of saying, ‘What goes in is going to come out.’
Everyone knows if you go on a bender for four fucking days, you’re
going to feel shit for about another six days afterwards. With us, it was
a thing of trying to be . . . not superior, but trying to rise above the shit
and the nonsense that was and is the music business. The iconography of
all those cock-rock bands . . . it’s just such a load of pish. There was quite
a lot of that going on still in those days.
So tell me about that period when The Associates were pop stars. Three
big hit singles, but in quite a tight period of time: nine months of 1982.
Yes, it was from January to September of that year. It was just as you’d
expect: a bit of a roller coaster. Lots of ups and downs, emotionally.
Because suddenly all these constraints were put on you. Some bands did
seem to do what they were told, just go along with it. But Bill was . . . I’ll
give you an example. You know how it is, bands have to do stuff like
catch the plane in the morning, fly to Holland, do a TV show, stay the
night in the Rotterdam Sheraton, then fly back the next day. Sometimes
you’d fly back the same day. But if Bill didn’t want to do one of these
poxy TV shows where you’d just walk on for three minutes, mime and
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I vividly remember seeing ‘Party Fears Two’ on Top of the Pops in my
student common room. I had no idea Associates were going to be on, and
indeed only had a faint idea what you were about, from reading the
music papers but never having heard your music. It was a complete
ambush. Love at first hearing. And sight.
So many people have said to me and Bill, it was like . . . the favourite
phrase was, ‘It’s like they’ve been beamed in from another planet.’ That
song just didn’t fit in to the Top of the Pops make-up.
That was your appearance from before the record had even entered the
Top 40, back when Top of the Pops would give exposure to songs from
rising acts. Didn’t ‘Party Fears Two’ shoot up a phenomenal number of
places? Go straight into the Top 10?
Yeah, it was wild. When we performed the first time, we were at number
47, I think. For our second appearance on TOTP, we got into doing stuff
. . . not deliberately subverting the whole thing, but things like me coming on in a fencing suit, dressed with my hair done up like a samurai and
playing a banjo. It made no sense because there was no banjo in the
song, and the song was fuck-all to do with Japan! Partly it was just a
response to the boredom of having to be there at the BBC studio from
half eight in the morning and not getting out until ten at night. And
always seemingly being picked on by the director or the producer to be
the first band to rehearse and the last band to record!
Sulk sounds so epic, so luxurious. Did it cost a fortune to make?
Actually, that album was only £33,000. We’d signed a licensing deal
with Warners, not an assignment of rights. So we had to pay our own
studio expenses. The advances were smaller, so we were responsible.
It does sound expensive, though. Voluptuously exorbitant. In one interview you described the sound as ‘thick’ and ‘dripping’. You said the concept was to start with a climax, then go further.
I don’t know any other way to describe it . . . When I was younger, I went
into my mother’s sewing box, and there’d be balls of thread that was like
red or white or black, and then below this ordinary thread there’d be this
thick, luxuriant embroidery thread: turquoises, lapis lazuli colours, purples. That’s what I wanted sound-wise. That’s what I had in my head. I
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then walk off, he would just conveniently mislay his passport. He was
feeling, ‘This isn’t creative, this is just whoring myself.’ Just didn’t see the
worth of it.
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never wanted Sulk to be just red, white, black or green; it had to be all
these luxuriant colours. Just the vibrancy of them, that’s how I always
wanted it to sound.
The sumptuousness of Sulk, did that involve loads of overdubs and mixing the record over and over?
We didn’t mix and mix again. Some songs we did very quickly, and then
we’d fine-tune them. Bill was never quite happy; he was always striving
striving striving to get it better. Working with a singer like Bill – and I’ve
never worked with one like him since, and I doubt I ever will ever again
– it’s just sheer luxury. Because you can just say to Bill, ‘That was brilliant, but let’s go again.’ And it’s not that there was a flat note or a word
wasn’t enunciated, but he would just do a different one that was not
markedly different but he would just add more to it. Not making it more
complicated but just taking it in another direction again. He would make
the whole song feel a different way. I’ve never seen or heard a singer that
could do that. From someone who’d only been working in studios for
three albums’ worth of music, in terms of the strength and the maturity
of his vocal that’s what you might expect from someone like a Bono
who’s been doing it for twenty-two years. Bowie could do that, he could
just tear the song apart, and Bill could do the same.
Is it true that there was recourse to helium to get the highest notes on
Sulk?
That’s an absolute myth. We brought that in as an absolute joke. I don’t
know how Mike Hedges, the co-producer of Sulk, got hold of it, but he
seemed to be able to get anything. And he got a tube of helium and we
just had a laugh, but it was never, ever used on recordings.
Was Mike Hedges an important figure in terms of making that record
what it was?
Mike was always a good engineer. In ’81 he was only in his mid-twenties,
a couple of years older than Bill and myself. He’d done a Cure record or
two; he was still learning, and he understood to go with the flow and
interpret what we were saying to him.
How did you communicate your more outlandish ideas to him?
Bill was always out on a limb, saying, ‘Make it sound like Egypt’ – like,
make it sound like it’s inside a sarcophagus. Or he’d say, ‘Make it sound
like grass.’ And then I’d say, ‘Make it sound like what Bill’s saying, but
make it sound more philistine.’ Meaning, dumbing it down. More tinny.
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Didn’t you do some crazy, Brian Wilson-esque things during the sessions? Piss in a guitar? Or is that another total myth?
No, no. Guitars were pissed in, yes. Drums were filled with water.
And then the drums were played?
Yes, but of course they sounded like absolute shit. But Bill just had to
hear what the bass drum would sound like full of water. And no matter
how much anyone told him, ‘Look, it’ll sound like shit,’ he had to hear
it.
And pissing in the guitar? My mental picture is you trying to record the
harmonics, set off by urine splashing on the strings. . .
Bill had brought in a guitar which he swore was a Gibson acoustic, but I
looked at it and felt it and played it and said, ‘This looks like a really bad
copy.’ Then Bill felt affronted because he’d got it from a music store in
Dundee and from someone he respected and trusted. So I pissed in it. But
it wasn’t to get at Bill. It was just a moment of madness.
One thing that threads the album and makes Sulk sound so highly strung
– this sort of anxious euphoria – is the drumming by John Murphy. On
‘Bap de La Bap’ especially it sounds more like firecrackers going off than
a beat!
What we did on that song and quite a lot of the songs on Sulk was take
away all the tom-toms and make the whole drum kit out of snare drums.
So there’d be a seven-inch metal snare drum as the snare and a five-inch
copper snare as one of the toms, and then maybe a real deep nine-inch
black beauty made out of ebony as another tom-tom. So it made the
whole thing really explosive. And then on the hi-hat we would use three
hi-hat cymbals on the bottom, to give a really heavy hi-hat.
So you were deconstructing and reinventing the drum kit, going against
all these normal ways of doing things?
We were constantly thinking of what we could do to make this sound
different, what can we do with the tools we’ve got – which was the
musicians. We were the tools. It wasn’t just for the sake of being different. But we’d look up lists of instruments and go, ‘What the hell is a
jangle piano?’ The next day this piano would suddenly arrive with all
these little metal bits. And that’s what we used on ‘Party Fears Two’, for
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You just got caught up in the whole thing and it just became a running
joke.
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the intro. It’s got a piano sound that as far as I know no one else has
used.
That’s why I always think of psychedelia with Associates. Because in the
sixties it was like music had been monochrome, and suddenly, with psychedelia, it went Technicolor. All these treatments and effects that created
a whole new palette of sound-colours. The kind of trickery you got up to,
it’s all very redolent of George Martin and the white-coat engineers at
Abbey Road trying to enable the Fab Four’s nutty notions.
Like with Hendrix using feedback as an instrument. We used to do
things like balloon guitar. We’d fill a balloon with water until it was the
size of a fairly small breast, so you could hold it in your hand. And then
you’d get feedback from your amplifier and use the balloon on the
strings to control the feedback. With a balloon you can immediately
move it and cover that note up and then ease off on another string and
let that one ring out.
Talking of psychedelia, were drugs a creative tool for The Associates?
Not in that sense. The first time I did dope I hallucinated. I didn’t smoke
much, and a woman came out of a poster on the wall and started shagging me. Then she turned into a tarantula. That was all just with pot. Bill
was much the same: if you were at a party where there was maybe fifteen
people all smoking dope and mellowing out, Bill would be up dancing
the robot with a fox fur between his legs, writhing about. He would be
totally freaking all these people out. Partly it was to get a reaction out of
them, but partly it was because the drug didn’t really agree with him.
There’s that story, though, about the two of you being hospitalized after
overdosing on amphetamines.
That’s true. We were so naive that we didn’t know the difference between
one gram of cocaine and seven grams of speed. So we snorted the lot and
ended up on heart machines for four days. With Bill opposite me, so we
were facing each other and I could see his read-out. His was 158, and as
soon as his would go up, mine would go up in a panic attack, and then he
could see my read-out and his would go up even further. It was a vicious
circle. The nurses, God love ’em, must have thought we did this every
weekend and weren’t just two green laddies from the back of beyond who
didn’t know what they were doing. So consequently our balls were up
inside our bodies and our knobs were the size of walnuts. They used to
give us a bed bath in the morning and say, ‘Morning, hot rod.’
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All part of The Associates’ cult of Europa?
Yes, another thing to do with turning away from the whole American
thing. When Bill and I were in the studio just messing around, we would
play old Bowie songs like ‘TVC-15’ and ‘Station to Station’ and ‘Fame’.
And then Bill would say, ‘Let’s do a Stones number,’ and we’d do
‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and Bill would camp it up. People would say, ‘Is he
taking the piss or just enjoying himself?’ That kind of music, the lyrical
metre of it is very rhythmic. But Bill’s melodies are not rhythmic – they’re
stately, they’ve got dignity to them. And you can tell that when Bill did a
cover version, like ‘Love Hangover’, that freed him up to camp it up for
six and a half minutes, because he’d got nothing to lose. Because it
wasn’t part of him and he didn’t have to worry about the lyrics, all he
had to do was feel it, so all of a sudden he was rhythmical in the way that
he sang. But Bill was very conscious that he didn’t want to get into writing songs that were too obviously rhythmic, because that would have
been too Americanized. It’s only in retrospect that you reflect on the fact
that you’ve got a whole body of work behind you and, ‘Wait a minute,
how come we haven’t got a song that’s really groovy? With some overt
sexuality to it?’ Billy was trying to move away from that, maybe thinking, ‘If I do that, I’ll be construed as Bowie-esque.’ If you listen to
Bowie’s rhythmic vocals, all he’s doing is ripping off Mick Jagger. Bill
was very conscious of not falling into that trap.
Isn’t ‘Nude Spoons’ about how Billy had this weird thing about cutlery
being really sensuous and erotic?
No, that was about an acid trip Bill had had, in his younger days, when
he was fifteen or sixteen. Apparently the spoons were copulating and
there was a war going on between the spoons and the plastic flowers in
the pot next to them.
The second big hit off Sulk was ‘Club Country’, which I’d always
assumed was a jibe at the New Romantics.
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My favourite song on Sulk is probably ‘No’. I always think of a castle
wreathed in mist. Billy’s vocal is gaseous, and there’s other sounds in
there that move like fog.
We used to play that song live in the summer of ’80, with just guitar.
When it came to recording it, you can just tell that the melody and the
harmony backing up the melody – it’s Russian. It’s a mutation from our
Germanic thing – going north and a wee bit east!
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I think you’re spot on there, Simon. It’s all summed up in that line, ‘Every
breath you take belongs to someone there.’ Billy was basically slagging
them off and at the same time saying, ‘I can’t be part of that. I can dip
into that for five minutes but then I’m bored.’ The lyrics were written in
the summer of 1980 but the single didn’t come out until May of 1982.
Bill and I had checked out the New Romantic clubs. We’d been down to
Blitz and to Billy’s, and we knew what was going on. But it was such a
load of tosh. Bill felt slightly embarrassed because in one sense he felt at
home there, because he wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of Dundee neds
and he didn’t feel threatened. But at the same time he could see the complete falsehood of it.
So why did the split happen? It was a shocking surprise for the fans,
given how The Associates were seemingly riding so high.
Our original record deal was for the world excluding America. And
because we’d had three hits we were getting offered the earth for
America. But Bill wanted to walk away from that. The Associates had
worked as a four-piece band, but suddenly we were about to tour as a
nine-piece, and that’s when it started to get flabby. Bill knew that, and
that’s another reason we cancelled the big world tour that would have set
us on the way to doing America and really making inroads there. Bill just
knew it wasn’t right, and I’ve got every respect for him for doing what he
did – it took a hell of a lot of courage. But at that time I was willing to
try and go through with it and iron out the problems, rather than let a
whole lot of people down – especially our fans.
Bill wanted to be creative; he didn’t want to get on the treadmill of
touring, writing, recording. It just wasn’t in him. He wanted to record
when he wanted and tour when he wanted. His idea of a tour happened
to be three days playing with six days off . . . That sort of thing was
unheard of. Only the biggest bands can afford to do that. But accountants were anathema to Bill. The bare facts of reality to Bill were mundane. He just wanted to be pure to himself. He couldn’t understand why
people couldn’t just let him be.
These things happen. All I know is I worked with one of the best
singers in the world.
What was the immediate aftermath of the split like for you?
It was fairly traumatic because it did feel like everything we had worked
for over the last seven years was just up in smoke. There was a period for
six months where it was just hellish. You felt lost and like you had no
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Well, my book ends in 1984, so I guess I should wrap up now.
God, I’m bursting for a pee now!
Where’s that guitar when you need it?
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purpose. But you’ve just got to carry on. Just do some songwriting, a bit
of production. I did all this stuff with dislocated Americans out in
Belgium – solo stuff by members of Tuxedomoon. And I did three
records of my own for Les Disques du Crépuscule. But I’ve got to say,
singers to me are a breed of people, and I’m not one of them. I did a little bit of stuff with Linder from Ludus, but at that point she wasn’t
focused on what she was doing. So I was dipping into everything that
Crépuscule was doing. And I moved lock, stock and barrel to Belgium
for two and a half years. Paul Haig would come across for a month at a
time to do various things. He’s a kindred spirit. I made several recordings
with Paul, including the album he put out on Circa in 1989.
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PAUL HAIG
Josef K, singer
The name Josef K is a dead giveaway: this band are literate. These here
are some arty, intellectual young men.
It all started with reading Kafka. We all read The Trial, except Ronnie,
the drummer, who just couldn’t be bothered. After that I read the complete works of Kafka, and then Knut Hamson and Camus and all that
existentialist stuff.
Did the existentialist sensibility – angst, weltschmerz, futility – fit the
way you saw the world?
Yes. That sense of alienation and feeling that real life was absurd. Josef
K all used to wear long grey raincoats. Apart from Ronnie, the drummer,
who wore yellow trousers. Which upset us quite greatly sometimes.
Yellow trousers and pointed blue suede shoes! He looked like a giant
banana. We were supporting Bauhaus in Edinburgh one night, and Ron
had been drinking a bit and he fell off his drum stool halfway through
the set. Went flying off. And we all looked round at him and went, ‘Tsk
tsk, that’s terrible, Ron – what’re you doing?’ But apart from Ron, we
just all seemed to dress the same. It was a feeling of the band being
united – us against the world. And we were all into reading.
Was that the norm with the Edinburgh post-punk groups?
There was a certain time when everybody on the scene – whether it was
us or The Fire Engines – was always reading. Davy Henderson would
always have a book in his pocket. And if there was one guy who would
always have a Penguin paperback in his pocket for effect, that would be
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Oh yes, their debut album had the Conrad-esque title Heart of Darkness.
Singer Ross Middleton studied structuralism at the Sorbonne, right?
Yeah. I’m sure he for one was actually reading the books. As for Orange
Juice, while we were reading Kafka, Edwyn Collins would be digging
into J. D. Salinger. That fits the way Orange Juice were a bit more jinglyjangly, whereas we were looked upon as a bit depressive. But actually all
the time we were just laughing. We used to have great fun. We’d have
orange-juice fights in the backstage area, flinging juice at each other.
Orange juice! Was that part of your whole anti-rock’n’roll, not-drinking
thing? Leaving the rider intact for the next band to polish off?
Malcolm and Davey and I didn’t hardly ever drink. But Ronnie would
pack his drum case full of any rider that was left. And if anybody came
backstage he would hog the booze and didn’t want anyone to have it.
Sometimes when we toured in Europe, Ronnie would be walking along
with bags full of Belgian or French beer clanking about. It’s true that
Malcolm, David and I were anti-rock’n’roll, but Ron was doing the
whole rock’n’roll trip. He’d get groupies. We never got groupies.
Instead you’d get pale young men coming up wanting to discuss the harrowing absurdity of existence.
Sometimes, yeah. When we played in Amsterdam, there was a big poster
throughout the centre of the city – ‘Josef K playing at the Melkveg’ – and
at the bottom of the poster it said, ‘Josef K: Depressi-Wave’. That
cracked me up.
I’ll tell you a funny story. It happened at the Tap of Lauriston, this pub
opposite the art college in Edinburgh. The Tap of Lauriston was kind of
the centre of the scene, where us and bands like Fire Engines and The
Scars and Metropack would hang out. Ronnie was having a pint of beer,
and I was having a lime and soda, and Malcolm and Davy were having
soft drinks too. And there’s two guys over at a table that keep looking at
us, and I thought, ‘They’re gonna do something.’ So eventually one of
the guys came up and sneered, ‘So, Josef K, do you suffer for your art?’
And then threw a pint of beer over me. I was so annoyed I just picked up
Ronnie’s pint and threw it back in his face. And he just left! So maybe
that arty thing was a bit annoying for people sometimes. But we weren’t
trying to be pretentious. We were just doing everything naturally.
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Richard Jobson from The Skids. Another Edinburgh group like that was
Positive Noise. They’d always have books on them.
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Your singing style relates to the idea of Josef K’s anti-rockism. It’s closer
to a crooner’s voice than a rock singer’s.
It’s a croon. If it’s like anything, it’s like Sinatra – but not as good, of
course! I can’t sing for shit! I’m a narrator of lyrical delivery, but I’m not
a singer and never have been. But I can deliver a song. Maybe I’m closer
to Lou Reed than anyone. He can’t sing for shit either. I never class
myself a singer. Billy Mackenzie was a singer. We all know that.
Billy and you were very close friends?
Billy was my absolute soulmate, off his head but in a good way. A very
eccentric character! We started to become friends really because Josef K
and The Associates played together so many times. There was a programme hosted by this terrible singer-songwriter, B. A. Robertson, every
Friday. I’m not sure if it was nationwide, maybe just Scotland. And one
time The Associates were on it, Billy with a sailor’s outfit on and Alan
miming acoustic guitar, and they did ‘Party Fears Two’. Afterwards B. A.
Robertson said, ‘Billy, you’re such a good singer, but who’s your
favourite vocalist?’ And Billy said, ‘Paul Haig.’ I couldn’t believe it. I
can’t sing for shit and here’s Billy saying I’m his favourite singer.
There’s specific Josef K songs I’ve always loved, without having much
handle on what they’re about, lyrically. Care to elucidate? How about
‘Endless Soul’, my absolute favourite? And ‘Sense of Guilt’, the runnerup?
The absurdity of being alive in a godless, vacuous universe. ‘Endless
Soul’ was really about that! ‘Sense of Guilt’ has more of a story. After I
left school, aged fifteen and a half, a year later I was working in my
father’s factory and I saw someone’s Daily Express. There was a picture
of two girls on the cover that had been murdered, and they were at my
school. Murdered brutally and found underneath a bridge in very bad
shape, cut to pieces and mutilated. Originally the song was called ‘The
Thoughts of Helen Scott’s Last Boyfriend’. It’s about someone who did
that murder and didn’t realize it because he was insane. It was quite
shocking for me when I found out about Helen being murdered because
I remember when we were kids at school I used to give her rides on my
Chopper bike. We were chummy. They had gone to a bar in Edinburgh,
apparently, and were taken away by two soldiers and then murdered.
And guess what the name of the bar is? The World’s End. That’s the last
place they were ever seen.
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Blimey. You can see from the photographs from that time that you were
pale and thin, but I didn’t know you had an eating disorder. Were you
really unhappy then?
Yes, but my music was keeping me alive. Writing that song helped a lot.
Where does the chorus, ‘Sorry for laughing/there’s too much happening,’
fit into the scheme?
Ah, that’s about being press darlings. It was all taking off in the music
press, and we never expected it and didn’t know how to deal with it.
Well, that definitely comes across in all those old NME and Sounds interviews, where Josef K are fabulously laconic and terse and you imagine
the journalist tearing their hair out. Paul Morley and Dave McCullough
basically have to froth out all this verbiage just to fill up their word
count!
We didn’t talk much, no! We were very shy and insecure. It wasn’t a purposeful thing, to create mystique – just the fact that we were painfully
shy. We were all about nineteen or twenty. It was all new to us and we
didn’t even want to be interviewed. So we were absolutely useless in
interviews. It’s only through doing literally hundreds of interviews over
the years that I’ve learned to be a bit more articulate.
How about ‘It’s Kinda Funny’?
Should I be telling you about this? I don’t know. I don’t mind talking
about it, but I always think it’s up to the listener what a song’s about. I
never wanted to push it down their throat. But OK. ‘It’s Kinda Funny’ I
wrote after Ian Curtis died. I was very upset because I loved Joy Division
and was really freaked out that he could take his own life at the age of
twenty-three. I thought how easy it was to disappear through the crack
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Blimey. How about ‘Sorry for Laughing’?
That was about how disabled people could stick together. About how
they could feel they have a friendship and camaraderie that so-called
able people lack. So the song is not saying sorry for laughing at disabled
people; it’s disabled people who are laughing at Charles Atlas ’cos he’s
such a stupid big macho git. It was really about anti-macho. At that time
I was almost anorexic. I went down to 109 pounds – and I’m six foot
tall. I was just depressed and I didn’t eat very much. Got obsessed with
looking at calories and what I was eating. But it’s a positive song and I’m
on the side of the disabled and the not so privileged. Because I was fading away to nothing at that point.
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in the wall. As I said in the song, the crack in the wall is through into the
next dimension, or death. It’s not a very happy song, but ‘It’s Kinda
Funny’ means you don’t have to be depressed about it. You can still
laugh about it. It’s just life. I suppose that’s one of the few messages I’ve
ever tried to get through in lyrical terms. Life can be shit, but it can be
good as well. We’re all in the same predicament.
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PHIL OAKEY
The Human League, singer
I don’t know anything about your upbringing or background.
My dad worked for the post office, and there was a policy after the war
of not promoting people without moving. So we moved every four or
five years. I was born in Leicester in 1955, then we moved to Coventry.
Moved to Leeds when I was five, to Birmingham when I was nine, and
to Sheffield when I was fourteen. My dad did quite well in the post office
and ended up being postmaster of the biggest area; there was no further
to go. He’d started as a counter clerk, so I’d say we were working class
made good. I’m the youngest of four brothers. My older brothers are
much older and they had the hard times. I was more or less spoiled. I had
everything I wanted. My dad was doing well, the others had left home,
so I lived really easy.
What first sparked your love of pop?
My brothers were my heroes growing up. And they were on every trend.
They would suddenly turn up with a crew cut. They had motorbikes –
and I was a motorcyclist for years and years. The middle one, Robert,
was a folkie and a really serious blues enthusiast. He used to just collect
everything. And probably put me off the blues for life. He would walk in
with Bob Dylan when he’d only made one album, and we had The
Beatles from the very start.
Everyone you’re interviewing for this book, they’ll say they don’t
know what they were doing until the night they went out and saw Roxy
Music. And then heard about David Bowie. Suddenly we thought there
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was something for us. There were hints of it before. In Curved Air. In
Yes, who were pretty glam. The bass player used to have fur cuffs to his
trousers and his jackets. Yes put on a bit of a show. Synths were really
big for us. Just the sound of them. We went to see Clockwork Orange –
we’d already been listening to Walter Carlos by then probably. And
Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Going to student discos and hearing ELP, we
would just stand there with our mouths open, going ‘I have never heard
a sound like that.’ ELP were terrible, awful rubbish, apart from when he
was playing the Moog – and then it was sublime.
Roxy to me will always be associated with a clothes shop called
Swanky Modes in London. When I had a job in a book shop, I went
down to London for the first time, to do training courses. Suddenly after
years of bland, denim-y boredom – all those groups with long hair trying
so hard to look masculine – Swanky Modes came out with the satin and
high heels and, most of all, the fake animal prints. They had been kitsch
since Jayne Mansfield, and suddenly it was so great to take that back.
That’s all bound up with Roxy for me.
Were you really into the clothes side of glam?
I think I wanted to be, but I was never good at it. Martyn Ware was trying to describe my look and he said, ‘It’s sort of untidy.’ I went to a party
with Martyn once after Roxy had come out and someone said, ‘Oh,
look, it’s Andy Mackay and Eno.’ And somebody else said, ‘No, it’s not,
it’s Andy Mackay and Andy Mackay.’
Was fashion a big form of expression in Sheffield?
It was. We were all hanging out with the art students – there’s a couple
of big art colleges in Sheffield. And with hairdressers. And transvestites
too. A lot of the guys in Sheffield dressed as women at that stage. Which
is probably why I’ve never got on with Boy George. ’Cos I’m like, ‘We’ve
got people like you in Sheffield. They’re funnier, and better at it.’
When we went to see Roxy, we’d get on the bus with Gloy glue and
glitter. You wouldn’t let your parents see it, but you’d put some glue on
and stick some glitter on your eyes and then go and hang around the
pubs in Broom Hill, which was a student area, before you went to see
Roxy. Martyn was probably more daring than me. I lived in quite a posh
suburb, and he was living in these flats with his parents in this part of the
town that had a bad reputation. He was going round with green fur jackets and high-heel shoes through the toughest areas of town.
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Was it in the back of your mind, wanting to be in a pop group?
No, I’d always thought it was a silly thing to do. Seeing Mick Jagger on
stage to me is ridiculous, and seeing him on TOTP having to do a pantomime thing . . . I thought it’s a bit sad. I never, ever thought I’d be in a
group. That’s why I ended up in Human League, I think. I didn’t have an
axe to grind . . . When I heard the first tapes from The Future, I could
look them in the eye and say, ‘Lads, I think you are fantastic. That is
great, you’ve got to get that on a record.’ Instead of saying, ‘My group’s
better than yours.’
At that point Adi Newton was in The Future, doing the vocals. Then he
got kicked out, and after an all-instrumental interval, Martyn and Ian got
you in as singer. Were you the main lyricist too?
Not really. One of the great things about the early League was how
incredibly competitive it was. Everyone was trying to beat everyone,
even within the group.
Oh, was there friction from the start?
There was always gonna be tension in a group that’s got me and Martyn
in it. Because we’re both pompous and arrogant.
Ian just kept his head down?
He’s subversive really, Ian. Never think that he’s as quiet as he looks. Ian
is sort of studious. And maybe because he would get stuck into something, you wouldn’t see him for a day and a half. He tended to do the
more complicated drum patterns, which is why ‘Being Boiled’, twentyfour years later, is on so many compilations. That’s because Ian really put
his heart into it. Martyn was more instinctive. Whatever he could do
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Did you know Martyn and Ian Craig Marsh before they formed The
Future?
I was at school with Martyn. I left school on my way to A levels. Did a
couple of terms but was just really tired of not having any money. I think
we just had a lot of friends in common. They were all at this theatre
group, the Meatwhistle. My girlfriend, who I married eventually, her
best friend was part of the theatre group. Martyn, Ian, Glenn Gregory
. . . I ended up doing two years in a book shop and I had every sciencefiction paperback you could get. More than anything, I was a sci-fi buff.
I got really into Ballard, Philip K. Dick. That was the most important
thing, I think. I did two years at the book store, and then four years at a
hospital.
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quickly, he would do, and because he was very talented, it sounded good.
And also because he’d never learned, he’d do the things you weren’t supposed to do, and then they sounded great.
None of you had any musical training, never played guitar or piano?
No. But Ian and Martyn were in a group called The Dead Daughters
before The Future, where I think Martyn played guitar and Ian was playing his hand-built synth. And before that was a group called Musical
Vomit. Very arty. It was a lot of the people from Meatwhistle, and they
did things like rush on stage with a mouth full of vegetable soup and spit
it out.
One of the seeds of this book is a quote I read a long time ago, in 1985,
where Martin Fry claimed, ‘I am a punk. I always have been and I always
will be.’ The idea was: ‘Don’t be fooled by the tuxedo and the string section on our records, ABC comes out of punk.’ I read somewhere that you
said Human League would never have happened without punk. But the
most interesting people who came out of punk – especially in Sheffield –
took it as an injunction to do something else, rather than keep on bashing out three-chord guitar rock.
We never even learned the three chords! We tried to find a way of getting
from the brain to the tape without ever having to read the Bert Weedon
song book.
But you were excited, and inspired, by punk?
Oh yeah. Although at the back of my mind I realized it was nothing new
in music. It was sort of skiffle really, but with an interesting new attitude.
In Sheffield there’s hardly any straightahead punk bands.
There were no punk bands in Sheffield at all! Punk in Sheffield grew out
of the Roxy thing: the same kids that were wearing fake animal prints
were suddenly wearing vinyl with safety pins through it. It just seemed a
natural progression. The punks in Sheffield were nice people. I only
found out afterwards that it was quite a tough scene in London, with
people getting beaten up.
Were you a punk in the fashion sense?
I did have the first zip T-shirt in Sheffield, ’cos I made it myself. I liked
punk but I resisted it. It was a bit intellectual for me maybe. The bands I
felt the most affection towards ever are probably Slade and The
Ramones – just the idea that there’s no pretension whatsoever.
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How did The Human League hook up with Bob Last and Fast Product?
Through Paul Bower, right?
I knew that 2.3 were getting a record put out by Fast, and Paul was very
supportive. Despite the fact that he had his own group, and they were
doing pretty well, he just said, ‘Right, I’m going to be your roadie, you
are going to do your first show.’ And he put on a boiler suit and got people on stage. I would never have gone on stage. I’m quite a shy guy, and
Paul made us do it.
What attracted Bob Last to The Human League? The fact that you had
concepts? Disciplined, anti-hippy?
He was as arty as we were, or more arty. Sometimes he’d release things
like a package of slogans with some orange peel in. I’m absolutely sure
that Factory was based on Fast. Tony Wilson just did a more slick job of
the same thing. And Bob was an architect. He was at college doing that,
and he came out of it in a very arty way. We were all against flab at the
time. We wanted directness.
Legend has it you made ‘Being Boiled’ for £2.50 – the cost of the tape it
was recorded on.
Yeah, but we had the tape recorder, the gear, blah, blah. It’s like saying
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The other thing is that while we say we came out of punk, I think that
at the time I really clearly thought, ‘We are going to be the new Roxy
Music.’ There was a band at the time in Sheffield called The Extras, and
they had the same idea, but they did it by having one guy be Bryan Ferry,
getting in a sax player like Mackay, getting in a synth guy like Eno. The
Extras said, ‘We’re going to be the new Roxy Music by being the same
as Roxy.’ What we thought was, ‘What would Bryan Ferry do now, if he
was coming out of art college and wanting to make music?’ That’s what
The Human League did – notice what was going on and what had
changed with technology.
Synthesizers suddenly got cheaper. What happened with us is we
walked past a music shop one day and they had a synth – the mini-Korg
700S – and it was £400. Instead of the £8,000 that a Moog would have
cost. So Martyn could go in and get it on HP [hire purchase]. One of the
things I’ve not mentioned is that when Martyn came to my flat to say,
‘Do you want to join the band?’ he walked in with Kraftwerk’s TransEurope Express in one hand and Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. It was
as straightforward as, ‘We can do this.’
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we made our video for two hundred quid. Yeah, but you bought all those
cameras first.
In one interview, explaining the lyrics about the slaughter of silkworms
and the voice of Buddha, you said, ‘I thought I was interested in
Buddhism but then I got the book and realized it was Hinduism.’ How
did you come up with that concept for ‘Being Boiled’? Surely the first
and only appearance of the word ‘sericulture’ in pop music!
I just used to like to read dictionaries. I like books. I was just playing in
an adolescent way for a few seconds with religion, which doesn’t really
suit me. I think it’s a load of old rubbish, in every way. I was more interested in the way that Philip K. Dick would interpret things. In some of
his books everything talks, it’s like everything’s got a spirit. Which is like
the Hinduism thing, but at the time I thought it was Buddhism. I was
totally confused. Often we would just get things off the telly. Watching
the telly with the sound off was a way of getting lyrics. Concepts. We did
a song called ‘Crow and a Baby’, and I was just watching children’s TV
one day with the sound turned down, and there was a puppet crow on it.
And that was it, and it turned into one of the nastiest songs we ever did.
It was about a girl I was going out with who had an abortion.
You were talking about Paul Bower and Human League’s first show.
Which was at the Now Soc, at the university?
Actually, we did our debut at Salter Lane Art College. That was the very
first one, before Adrian Wright joined. Some of the students put up some
TVs showing feedback with cameras pointing into them – a bit like the
start of Doctor Who. The gig was absolutely terrifying. I was just shaking and singing the same verses over and over. Well received, though.
Then we did a couple more – Now Soc and the West Street pub. We
didn’t get the TVs those times and the gigs were pretty poor. And that’s
why we asked Adrian to come and show some slides. We were rehearsing in a place where he was squatting. We were upstairs with the tape
recorders and the synths, and he was down there in the cavernous warehouse. He was at Salter Lane Art College and he had a Devo-esque interest in pop culture. Thunderbirds was one side of it, but he had a real
interest in people who manipulated the media to their own advantage: he
was absolutely fascinated by Hitler, to the point where some people
thought he was fascist. In fact, he was interested in the images and propaganda that Hitler used. That used to turn up on stage: we’d turn around
and look up and see a big Hitler projected behind us, and go, ‘Oh no!’
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Yeah, how did you come up with the lopsided hairstyle?
I saw a girl on the bus, but she was a hair model, with this version of a
Vidal Sassoon cut from the sixties. She was really gorgeous, and it was
an opportunity to go and talk to her and find out where she’d had it
done. I wanted people to be able to walk into the shop and say, ‘I saw
this group on the TV last night, the guy had long hair on one side,’ and
the shop assistant could go, ‘Human League, sir – here you are.’
Hairstyle as logo – very clever.
Although at that stage it was also like a badge. One of the things that
went wrong about the time of Boy George was, until he came along, if
the record cover looked weird, the record was going to be maybe a little
bit more progressive, have a few more elements that you wouldn’t quite
expect on a pop record.
So was it a tight little scene in Sheffield? Adi and Clock DVA, Cabaret
Voltaire, the Vice Versa guys, who turned into ABC . . .
I knew the Cabs and couldn’t help but have respect for them. I was very
competitive then and I hated anyone who might take our attention away.
But I thought the Cabs were completely great and for a couple of years I
saw every live show they did. They were as important as people say they
were.
And there were other little groups floating around, like I’m So Hollow
and Graph.
Graph were the ones who really rattled me. Because we were the ‘here’s
a cassette with some fantastic synth stuff on it’ group, and one day Paul
Bower brought in a tape and said, ‘Here’s someone else doing some
really great synth stuff. They’re called Graph.’ I had them marked for
death from that moment.
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We all saw that punk was a little bit artificial, and one of the things
that we were going to do was be straightforward with the covers and the
image. And say, ‘Let’s be really honest – this is showbiz. It really is. You
can’t pretend we’re subverting showbiz.’ Which I think is why Dare
worked – we had the pictures of the group, professional photography
and the name of the group very big. We’re going to do what we can to
sell it. It’s the music we care about, but if people can’t walk in the shop
and say, ‘I like that group I saw last night,’ it’s not going to get you anywhere. Which is partly why I had the haircut.
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Which you achieved by absorbing Ian Burden from Graph into the Dareera League!
Only completely by accident. His girlfriend was living in the squat I was
living in. We were booked to do a tour, but Martyn and Ian had left, so
we needed a player.
Did all the Human League albums have that line ‘just synthesizers’ on
them? A riposte to bands like Queen, who would have ‘no synthesizers’
on their albums.
I think they did. Dare has ‘still just synths’.
Sheffield was receptive to synths, obviously, but did you get hostile reactions playing elsewhere, when you materialized on stage and there was
no drum kit, just the keyboards? One tour, you had riot shields protecting the synths, right?
That’s all Ian Marsh. I think that was just to add that ‘What the hell is
going on?!’ factor. But people were chucking things about in those days,
and he did value his synth. A certain proportion of the audience were
supposed to throw things. We did our first tour with Siouxsie and the
Banshees, which was really dangerous. And touring with Iggy Pop
through Europe, people were throwing full cans of lager. I used to go out
in the suit I’d got married in, a black suit – I wore it every night – and I
had to have it cleaned every night because it’d be just covered in spit.
I meant to ask you about the name change – from The Future to The
Human League.
I never liked the name. I was really stroppy about The Future and made
them change it. But I didn’t like The Human League.
Getting the right name is crucial, isn’t it, for a band.
Only until you’ve sold a record. Then it doesn’t matter at all.
I wondered if ‘Human’ appealed because one of the things the band resisted was the whole Numan/Foxx-era ‘I wish I was a machine’ shtick. There’s
that song, ‘Blind Youth’, where the whole Ballardian thing is mocked, and
there’s that piss-taking line: ‘Dehumanization’s such a big word.’
That was more Martyn’s thought than the rest of us. He wrote those
lyrics. I probably agree with him, but that was a bee in his bonnet. He’s
a very optimistic sort of a guy. All art is human. It just is. But I think the
dystopian thing was good. Gary Numan got it better than anyone else:
‘Cars’ is the ultimate of that sort of song.
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After Dignity you left Fast Product for Virgin, but kept Bob Last as your
manager. Virgin was a progressive label that turned itself New Wave
quite deftly. But in a weird way Human League being electronic plugged
into their past with Tangerine Dream as much as their post-punk present
with groups like Devo.
The A&R guy was Simon Draper, and Virgin really was him. It wasn’t
anything to do with Richard Branson, who honestly admits he’s not
interested in music. What Virgin did, their MO, was look for an
upcoming genre and sign everyone they could get cheaply, and then
after two singles if it didn’t work they would throw them away quite
cynically. They’d done that with punk, with The Ruts and The
Members, and about the time they had us they signed Flying Lizards
and Devo.
Devo were quite important to us, and quite friendly to us, in the desperate period of the first two albums, when everyone told us we were
going to be the next big thing, but then suddenly we were selling no
records at all. We hung out with Devo a little bit, went to Paris with
them, and were quite inspired. But every time we thought of a new idea,
Devo would do it first. Ian Craig Marsh, a very lateral thinker, had this
idea for us all to wear boiler suits with clocks on them. We had it all
planned, and then we opened the NME and there were Devo in their
boiler suits with Devo written on them.
Do they maintain that Are-We-Not-Men facade all the time?
They did that for publicity. But when you end up in nightclubs in Paris
with them, they’re being quite ladsy. We were quite wet behind the ears.
We did two nights with Iggy Pop and Devo in Paris, hundreds of incredibly beautiful girls just hanging around, and I think it was Gerry Casale
said to me, ‘Which of these beautiful girls do you want to get off with?’
And I said, ‘Actually, I’ve got a girlfriend at home.’ And he just looked at
me and said, ‘You can have many girlfriends.’
You’re quite a moral person, aren’t you?
No, not at all.
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After ‘Being Boiled’ you did the The Dignity of Labour EP. Influenced by
the whole socialist culture of Sheffield, clearly.
We’re all Old Labour round here. But Dignity, that’s Martyn again. He
got the phrase out of A Clockwork Orange. It’s the mural by the elevator in Alex’s parents’ block of flats . . .’
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Oh, I thought the League had this whole thing about not going in for
rock’n’roll behaviour. Being into decency and dignity.
There were little bits of rock’n’roll behaviour. I’m a bit of a cowardly
person really. I thought I would be caught. I was always in long-term
relationships. All that having-an-affair thing is a lot of fun for a week.
And then a lot of hell for two years.
I never quite understood the groupie thing – it seems like it might be
quite wearing having sex with strangers all the time.
Oh no, it’s great. Absolutely great. But there aren’t any ‘strangers’. They
come back to you afterwards. You get attached to them.
On those first two albums for Virgin, Reproduction and Travelogue, the
lyrics are uniformly really interesting. Who wrote ‘Almost Medieval’?
I think I ended up doing most of that lyric. That was written before I was
in the group, the instrumental part of it, and the title was ‘Almost
Medieval’. I always think with a song, once you’ve got the title you’ve got
most of it anyway. ‘Almost Medieval’, it’s directly taken from Ubik, this
wonderful book by Philip K. Dick where time keeps slipping backwards.
I love ‘The Black Hit of Space’.
That’s me again. It’s from that popular-science area, where you read
about things in quantum physics that are impossible to believe – like if
you’re travelling at the speed of light you can see the back of an object
not the front, or things getting so heavy you can’t even see them. The
lyrics are that elementary Sunday-colour-supplement version of quantum physics.
There’s a slight sense with that song that secretly you’d have just loved to
have written a pop song so remorselessly, mind-numbingly contagious
that it swallowed up the rest of the records in the charts until there’s
‘nothing left but it to buy’.
Oh yeah! We did one called ‘Dance Like a Star’, which was incredibly
banal. It went down really well at concerts. One of my very favourite acts
is KC and the Sunshine Band – majorly banal lyrics but sung so sincerely.
Around Travelogue you had that idea for the fully automated tour.
Supporting the Talking Heads, but the band members wouldn’t be on
stage at all, they’d be in the audience watching. Was that too radical for
its time?
Yes. We’d been in London and we were coming back on a train with
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So you provided the tour people with all the materials to execute it, but
then they chickened out?
We might even have sent Adrian to do it. I can’t remember. But did you
know Talking Heads tried to do it themselves? Tina Weymouth got pregnant and they talked about trying that concept themselves. They might
even have done it. It’s always contributed to my entire contempt for
Talking Heads. I think they’re absolute rubbish. I quite like Tom Tom
Club.
There’s a great quote from you: ‘To me a live show is what you do
because you can’t get on TV.’
I’m just wondering if I said that, because when you’re the singer people
attribute quotes from the whole band to you. That sounds more like
Martyn than me. But I love live shows, I really do. What we do now is
just pantomime. But when it works it’s great. What I really like is making new records and playing to people who like innovation. And what
The Human League are doing now is playing to people who don’t want
innovation. We do it for money. We run a studio over the road from here.
I get quite a lot of money from song publishing, but Joanne and Susanne
never got any money from songwriting. The last album we did, Secrets,
just completely flopped, the first one we’ve done where that’s happened.
It got such good reviews, and it’s the LP I wanted to make for twenty
years. And we did it too late. We were trying to explore and use the same
gear as we did on Travelogue.
I thought Secrets was great. Why do you think it failed?
My analysis is that people are tired of seeing me and the girls on TV
together. It’s quite an exciting, modern sound, and then these three faces
pop up on screen and people think, ‘Oh, we’ve seen these three before.’
We haven’t had a story since 1981. We do interviews, and people ask,
‘When did you meet Joanne and Susanne?’ And I go, ‘Oh, that was
1981.’ And we’ve settled down and just made music, instead of getting
into drugs and nursing our fathers through cancer. One of us ought to
shoot another of us. Then we’d be fine for a few years.
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Martin Fry. And it stopped at Leicester, which was the first night of the
Talking Heads tour. And a load of people who’d evidently been to the
show got on the train and were talking about it. And so we said, ‘Oh,
what were we like? Were we any good?’ And they were, ‘Oh no, you
weren’t on.’
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You’re playing a show with Heaven 17 soon, so it sounds like things are
amicable now. But at the time the split with Martyn and Ian was acrimonious as hell.
About as acrimonious as you can get without physical violence. But
that’s going to happen – you put so much hope into things. I had very
clear images of myself with the lads on TOTP at number 1. Photos flashing of ourselves with our arms around each other. And when it goes
wrong, it’s very hard.
You were one of the very first groups after punk to talk about pop as this
cool, positive thing. You talked about wanting to be like Abba. But there
was an awkward phase with the first two Virgin albums when you were
talking ‘pop’ but not actually being at all popular, resulting in huge tension in the group about what to do next.
The real tension as far as I can remember was that myself and Ian were
really happier to do the publicity side of it than Martyn was. The real
blow-up came about because he didn’t turn up for a photo session. I said
to Bob Last, ‘We’re going to have to have a meeting about this. I’m getting myself ready for photo sessions, and Martyn doesn’t even bother
turning up.’ But from there Bob sort of engineered a split out of it,
because Bob thought myself and Martyn shouldn’t be in one group. And
I think he was probably right.
That was pretty perceptive, on the management level, to see that where
there was one, unsuccessful and unhappy group, there could actually be
two successful ones. But the actual breaking up must have been awful.
Everyone thought myself and Adrian were gonna be the failures. We
secretly went and begged Ian to go with us as well. Got him in the toilets
at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert, promised him anything to go
with us. But he wanted to stick with Martyn. And we just thought we
would fail. The first record we did after the split, ‘Boys and Girls’, wasn’t
very good, because no one could play or anything.
So the feeling of vindication when you beat them to the charts with ‘The
Sound of the Crowd’ must have been sweet.
That lasted about five seconds. Whenever you do well, you just think,
‘Well, what’s going to happen next week?’ Almost the worst days of our
lives have been when we’ve been told we’re number 1. Something
always goes really badly wrong. I remember smashing the phone after I
was told we were number 1 in America. It’s so much to live up to. If you
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Well, I’ve often thought the music industry is a giant machine for generating misery. Nearly everybody who enters it fails; the few who succeed then have the struggle of maintaining it and not falling into the
‘Didn’t you used to be . . .?’ category. But Human League had a really
good run. It wasn’t just ‘Don’t You Want Me’, there was ‘Mirror Man’,
‘Fascination’, and a few years later that second US number 1 with
‘Human’.
We’ve done great, by any judgement. But I’ve got to say, the first person
who said that to me was a psychiatrist, when I went through my depression period about six years ago. No one had ever sat me in a chair and
said, ‘Look, you’ve done really well, you’ve kept going on in a really
hard industry.’ Everyone else had said, ‘Where’s your next hit then?’
Is it true that the girls were into all the Futurist/New Romantic music but
weren’t particularly fans of The Human League?
They were Japan and Gary Numan fans. And considered outsiders at
school because everyone liked metal and they liked Numan – and they
dressed like it, in black with red ties and black trainers. It was all sort of
accidental, them joining the group. We had to do a tour of Europe
because we were contracted to do that before the split. We’d divided our
debt to Virgin, so we owed £50,000 and Heaven 17 owed £50,000. But
if we didn’t go on the tour, our side – the side that had kept the name
Human League – was going to be sued. We would just lose everything.
We’d got Ian Burden to play bass for us, and we were looking for something else. I’d just gone into a massive Michael Jackson phase. Off the
Wall had just come out, and I remember sitting vaguely drunk in a cocktail bar, hearing ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’ and thinking, ‘That’s
fantastic, that’s the way music’s going to go – high voices.’ And, ‘Do I
know anyone who sings falsetto? No. Get a girl then.’ We auditioned
four people but Joanne and Susanne, being friends from school, could
look after each other. When you’re on the road, there’s always going to
be some sort of romance going on. So take two girls and let ’em look
after each other.
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want to make a load of money out of pop, be number 3 a lot. Like New
Order did. Or The Cure. Because when you’re number 1 you’re everybody’s; nobody really cares about you any more. Everyone and their
grandma knows about you, so nobody wants to wear your badges any
more.
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Martin Rushent – what was he like?
We try and find him occasionally. We know it would be bloody stupid
for us to ever work with him again, but he’s so lovable, diplomatic and
clever. But a Tory – a complete Tory!
Oh yeah, he’s like the archetypal self-made man. When you worked with
him, he’d just built his own recording studio in the grounds of his
Berkshire home.
Yeah. But just a great bloke. Very interested in science and the future.
Got himself a bit confused in all that by the end of working with us.
When he started with us, he was doing the traditional producerly thing,
which was to use your ears and decide what was good. And by the end
he was programming everything into the computers and not believing it
was right until it was programmed. Which in a way is absolving your
responsibilities. That’s where pop is at the moment. That’s what’s wrong
with it.
It’s interesting that you worked with him, because he wasn’t associated
with electronic music at that point. His famous clients were the poppy
end of punk: Stranglers, Buzzcocks, 999.
He got Visage together. I don’t know that he produced the album in the
end, but they were living in his house while they made that record. And
he did Pete Shelley. And I think we were very lucky that Pete didn’t make
it as big as he deserved to with Homosapien. But at that time maybe
homophobia was still big enough that if you came out with a record
called Homosapien . . .
Was it the proto-synthpop stuff he did with Shelley that caught your ear?
No, it was 999. That was why I went with him. Homosapien wasn’t out
then; he was doing that just before us. Martin’s very good at getting a
controlled power. If you listen to an Altered Images song . . . everyone
thinks they’re sort of frippery, but if you listen to the power that is contained in those records. There’s something great Martin does with guitars and distortion. The Stranglers stuff was wonderful.
‘Sound of the Crowd’ would have been the first Rushent-produced song.
We’d done ‘Sound of the Crowd’ in the studio, me and Ian Burden. And
it just wasn’t all that good. Simon Draper said, ‘I’ve got a guy here – we’ll
go tart it up a bit.’ And I was on the phone with Martin, and I have got
this thing where I just give up, and I had a little five-minute conversation
and I said, ‘Let’s just not bother, we won’t bother coming down.’ Even
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When ‘Sound of the Crowd’ came out so good, was that the point at
which you knew, ‘We’re onto a winner here’?
Oh no. And I think Martin would have happily walked away. I don’t
think he was impressed with the record. And I still think it’s one of the
maddest records that’s ever got in the Top 20. It’s just odd. The whole
thing runs on the tom-toms, but they’re synth tom-toms, and it’s full of
very odd screaming sounds. I think we got the hit from the publicity we
had, from touring and from Joanne and Susanne joining. But it was only
when it was successful that Martin said, ‘I wanna do more.’
And then ‘Love Action’ . . . I mean, what can you say about ‘Love
Action’, it’s just . . .
I can say it never got a chorus.
You’re right. I really like ‘Don’t You Want Me’ but ‘Love Action’ is more
amazing because, in conventional terms, it’s not as well-made a song.
‘Love Action’ is just weird.
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though he’d been perfectly diplomatic. Which is one of the things about
a great producer: they are diplomatic. But Martin managed to persuade
me to come down. And I don’t even know why he did it, because he
wasn’t impressed with us or the record, even after we’d made it. One of
the first things he said when we came in with ‘Sound of the Crowd’ was,
‘Well, we’re going to throw away everything you’ve done and we’re
going to do it right from the start.’ And he persuaded us into doing that,
even though we didn’t want to do it.
Martin had done engineering for years – Shirley Bassey records. He
knew what pop was. One of the things he could do was take your mad
sounds, and they were still mad sounds but he could put them in a place
that made them pop. I don’t know how he did it. Really horrible things
come out of synthesizers, and that’s what I like about them. But somehow Martin could make them work within a pop context.
But also Martin had been a drummer. He’d drummed on records and
sung on records. They used to do those Top 20 cover records, on
Hallmark. Martin did all that. So he could do most of the things that a
band could do. So now for the first time we had a proper band. Before
then we had four people who fiddled with a lot of things. Suddenly we
had Martin, who was drummer, Ian, who was a bass player, and Jo Callis
came in and he was a guitarist and knew about chords. We actually had
a conventional band, just playing less usual instruments.
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I don’t really like it, I don’t think. But I think we got away with it. We do
it now at the start of the set. But I always thought of it as a failure.
Really? I love that record – but I see what you mean: it’s a fantastic pop
record but not necessarily a song that someone could busk, which you
could easily imagine someone doing with ‘Don’t You Want Me’.
It’s funny you say that, because people don’t succeed with that. A lot of
people have covered ‘Don’t You Want Me’, but we’re the only ones
who’ve had a hit. And that makes me think we’re just not conventional
‘good song’ writers. Somehow we gave a package that worked.
‘Love Action’ was originally two different songs compacted together.
The choruses were about Emmanuelle, the film. And the verses were sort
of confessional nonsense, how I was feeling at the time. So there’s not a
single sentiment in the song I would agree with now.
Circa Dare you’d be going on about wanting to be like Abba. Which
seems like nothing now but in those days was a striking stance.
I always say one of the absolute key moments of my life was when I
was into progressive music, into Led Zep III and Chicago and The
Flock. And one day we were bunking off a lesson and sitting in the
assembly hall at school, and Martyn Ware looked at me and said,
‘Actually, I like Slade.’ And I looked at him and thought, ‘You’re
admitting you like Slade.’ ’Cos in those days you didn’t admit you
liked pop. I lived in a set of people that hated Tamla Motown. We were
into progressive. No one in our school admitted they liked Tamla. Or
Abba.
It’s hard to believe anyone could ever not like Abba.
It’s funny, that was the stance. And I almost think we were a huge part
of that changing. And one of the great things that Martyn could do
would be to pull out a cover version that saved us at live shows. Like
‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’. That was a key moment for us, supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees. People wanted to kill us and were
throwing things at us for three numbers. Then we did ‘You’ve Lost That
Lovin’ Feeling’, and from then on they liked us. It’s almost impossible to
remember, but the concert-going audience hated pop. To cover Iggy Pop,
‘Nightclubbing’, that was fair, but to cover Gary Glitter . . . But ‘Rock
and Roll, Part Two’ was the first dub record. Wonderful records Glitter
made with Mike Leander.
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After you got massively successful it seems like you got confused . . .
We’d achieved everything we’d set out to do. That was the thing –
‘What’s my mission now?’
So the only different thing for you to do was to have a bit of electric guitar on a record and do a political song? Result: ‘The Lebanon’. Not to
diminish your true response to what happened in the Lebanon, but was
part of it that when you got famous and wealthy you started to get pangs
of guilt? Like, ‘Now we’ve got this platform, we should do something
responsible, say things of “substance” . . .’
Oh no, I don’t think so. I’ve always been quite clear about that: that if
you want to do that you can – but art’s art, and it doesn’t really have
anything to do with what’s going on in society. It doesn’t matter; you’re
only responsible really to the few people around you who are part of
your business. With ‘The Lebanon’, I was baffled. The real idea of the
song was that they came on TV and told you something really incredible
and horrible, and they didn’t say what you could do about it. Here are
these people in these camps, and while the Israelis stood round, the
Christian militias, who are supposed to be Christian, just shot women
and children. There you go, next item on the news. And you sit there and
think, ‘Do we vote for somebody? Do we send money?’
Hysteria seems like a muddled record. Rushent left halfway through,
right?
I think we just went barmy. Really. What do you do when you’ve come
out of living for nothing over a chip shop in Sheffield and your only
dream at all is to get on Top of the Pops, and suddenly you’re number
1 in America? It’s just really baffling. We had ten terrible years. The
only thing I can say that was good about it was I was going out with
Joanne. Until 1986. That was very enjoyable. But artistically we were
just completely lost. We were very lucky to fall back on Jimmy Jam and
Terry Lewis with the next album, Crash. To be part of what was going
to be a very important strand of ongoing innovation in soul music. I
thought they were the soul version of us. That was why I wanted to go
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Was Glitterbeat in your minds when you made ‘These Are the Things
That Dreams Are Made of’?
Yeah. He was a really big influence. Gary was always lovely to us: we
went to lots of his concerts; he did great shows from which we pinched
loads of ideas. I did sleevenotes on one of his LPs in America.
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with them. No, it was Adrian Wright’s idea really – he liked The SOS
Band.
Some of your Sheffield contemporaries seemed to have an equally difficult time in the mid-eighties – ABC, Heaven 17 . . . After Thatcher’s reelection in 1983 it seemed like New Pop, whatever it had started out
meaning to be, had very clearly turned into the soundtrack to affluent
complacency.
It became acceptable to aspire to living well, and because of Miami Vice
and things like that everyone wanted to be American. Which meant people did white soul. I tend to put the blame on ABC, which sounds like
I’m against ABC, but I’m not – I really think their important album,
Lexicon, is wonderful. But so many people looked at that and thought,
‘We can do funky stuff and wear expensive watches and lord it over people.’ That was the lurch that disturbed me. What I’d hoped was that the
direction that we were certainly part of, typified more by Gary Numan
and John Foxx, would be the way we were going to go. Exploring the
problems of alienation.
And a more European sound. But instead you got a legion of British
groups trying to make a diluted version of black American music.
We weren’t that good at it because we weren’t trained. We hadn’t been to
church for the whole of our lives. So it just went a bit horrible, I think.
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MARTIN RUSHENT
Producer
Tell me about your musical background before punk. You worked with
ELP, Yes, Gentle Giant . . .
I started in the business around 1967 – Advision Studios, London, as
a tape op. A job that no longer exists due to computerization and digital recording but which meant I was sort of general assistant to the
sound engineer – a trainee sound engineer, effectively. I worked with
Advision until about 1976, and during that period of time worked
with everybody from T Rex to Shirley Bassey. Did film music, TV
advertising, the whole bloody lot. Then I went freelance as a sound
engineer and built a small studio in the garage at my house in Henleyon-Thames, Oxfordshire. Then Martin Davies, head of United Artists
in the UK and who I’d worked with on Shirley Bassey records, said,
‘Come work for UA.’ He said Andrew Lauder, the head of A&R, had
a brilliant pair of ears, but his signings never seemed to get anywhere
because the records didn’t sound the way he wanted. So they gave me
a big office, and one day I heard Lauder playing something that really
caught my ear: The Stranglers. We went to see them live, and Andrew
was like, ‘We’ve got to capture the raw energy.’ So I went in and
recorded Rattus Norvegicus in a tiny little studio in Fulham in about
four days total. It just sold like crazy, and I did three more albums with
The Stranglers.
You coined a New Wave production sound that’s very audible on the
Stranglers and Buzzcocks records you made at UA. Especially with
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Buzzcocks, there’s this fantastic combination of raw and gloss. It’s like
noise-with-a-sheen.
Buzzcocks live was a big fucking wall of sound. After ‘Orgasm Addict’,
which we’d done at the same place The Stranglers’ Rattus Norvegicus
was done and hadn’t worked out quite right, I moved them to Olympic
Studios – a fucking great room, and very live. And I set them up with no
screens between them or anything, like on stage. Even put John Maher
up on a drum riser. I close-mic’ed everything, and I also had a lot of
ambient mics all around the room. So when it came to the mix, I had a
lot of options for how I could make them sound. I sometimes doubletracked guitars to make them sound smoother, but not to the point
where they lost the edge and the rawness.
When did you make moves to set up your own label, Genetic?
We’d had a pretty good run at UA with all these different bands, and I’d
started producing outside of my deal with Generation X and others. I
decided that I wasn’t seeing much of my wife or family. I’d earned a
whole load of money a few years ago, so I found a great place out in
Berkshire and decided I would become a rock gent with a swimming
pool, tennis court and my own studio. That was Genetic Studios, and a
real nightmare it was. Andrew Lauder and Martin Davies had left UA to
set up a company called Radar, and they offered me a deal to have a little production company/label through Radar. So they helped me build
the studios, but nonetheless it was a massive financial strain. I was still
laying the wood in the floor when The Human League walked in.
Wasn’t there a point where Joy Division nearly ended up signing to
Genetic?
I had just built the studio, and one of the people working around me
said, ‘I just had this interesting tape sent to me by a Manchester band
called Joy Division.’ So I went and saw them in this tiny club and I
thought they were fucking brilliant. They came down to London and
were very keen to sign a deal with us. And I said, ‘Look, before that let
me take you into the studio for a few days, record some stuff and see
how we get on.’ We did about six tracks, ‘Ice Age’, ‘Transmission’, a load
of the early stuff. But coincidentally with all that, the Radar deal was
running into trouble with WEA. So I ended up going into this bloke’s
office at WEA who’d been appointed to tidy up the Radar/Genetic situation. And he said, ‘We may well decide to dump Radar but keep you to
your deal. It all depends on what you’ve got and whether we like it.’ I
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So were you really excited by the whole Blitz Kids, New Romantic scene?
I loved all that. The Blitz club was under my office. I used to go in there
all the time. It was a step back to glamour and Bowie. I remember seeing
Spandau down there for the first time, and they just blew me away. They
were all wearing tartan kilts and odd clothes and hair. This band was
creating its own fashion thing, but the music was brilliant. And trying to
become part of the Blitz was not easy. You didn’t just get in. It became
just the hippest place on earth.
Did you get dressed New Romantic-style yourself?
No, I never did. I’d gone right through the punk era with a beard!
Martin’s fashion statement is, he’s the most unfashionable person you’re
ever likely to meet. I wear what I want to wear, and if you don’t like it
you can fuck off!
Phil Oakey told me that the one record that should be brought up in any
discussion of the birth of synthpop is the one record that never gets mentioned: Pete Shelley’s Homosapien. Which was produced by you.
Buzzcocks had split, and Pete came down to the studio to do demos. I’d
started to use some of this new electronic gear I’d bought, and we came
up with the album Homosapien. Which we thought was a bunch of
demos. I said to Pete, ‘I’ll punt these demos around and see if I can get
you a solo contract.’ Bang, everybody’s coming back, wanting to release
the demos.
You mentioned all the new electronic gear you’d acquired. What was the
state of the art with synthesizers and drum machines around the time
you started working with The Human League?
The Roland MicroComposer – that was the magic machine. Not much
more power than a bloody modern calculator! Instead of playing music
on a keyboard, you could program it in and then link it up to what
would now be regarded as a very primitive synthesizer, and it would play
the tunes. When you first did it, it sounded really shitty. But if you really
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said, ‘I’ve got some really good things – a handshake agreement with
Spandau Ballet to sign to me, I’ve got Joy Division, I’ve got Visage.’ Half
of Visage was Ultravox and I had the demo of ‘Vienna’. So they were my
four acts. But he didn’t like any of them. He told me I should be producing things like The Angelic Upstarts! So I just walked out and the whole
thing fell apart. And I said to all the bands, ‘Go find your own deals,
because this is going to take a long time to sort out, this mess.’
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got into it and read the manual and studied what it was capable of doing,
and then brought your engineering and production skills along as well,
you could end up with a bass sound and a style of playing that no one
could play. That gave me the breakthrough. But it took me fucking hours
and hours. I spent a year virtually non-stop doing Dare and its sister
album, Love and Dancing, the remix album. It just took me for ever.
There’s a Human League track called ‘Hard Times’, with all these complex brass riffs. Programming all the brass took me two days, and to
record it all took a further three. But it sounds fantastic, even to this day.
Today it’s a piece of piss. Any twat could do it, because of the power of
the computers. That’s why there’s so much shitty music nowadays.
When you say you could do things that ‘no one could play’ . . .
Getting all the little inflections and bends and tonal changes, in a live
environment . . . you couldn’t do it. Not played so tight and rhythmically. One of the things about The Human League – which at the time
was novel but isn’t now – is the ultimate precision of the playing. It was
like fucking clockwork. Here’s a track that’s rock bloody solid, but
there’s enough feeling in it so it doesn’t sound like Kraftwerk. It actually
sounds like humans playing it, but it’s like a metronome almost. When it
hit the dance floor, this thing was right up people’s backsides!
The other big new force in pop music was the Linn Drum machine,
right? Which had just come out at the start of the eighties and was
incredibly expensive.
Yeah – a couple of grand. And tough to program. All sorts of bollocks if
you wanted to copy patterns. Nowadays if you want to do it, it’s up there
on your computer screen. You click on it with your mouse, move it
where you want it to go, loop it . . . Actions that take two seconds now
could take a minute back then, which is thirty times longer. That may
not sound much, but when you’ve got 20,000 actions to do in the production of an album, it’s a lot of fucking time. The Linn Drum was good,
but we didn’t always use it. Sometimes it was not quite the right sound.
‘Sound of the Crowd’ is little bursts of noise that I made myself and triggered on the MicroComposer, a technique I’d learned doing Homosapien. But sometimes the noise settings would change because those
analogue synthesizers in the old days used to drift like crazy. So you’d
find that the pitch of your bass drum had changed, so the attack wasn’t
quite right. The Linn saved all that. You only got one sound of the bass
drum. The only way you could change it was to EQ it up or compress it.
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What state were Human League in when you first met them? They’d had
the trauma of the group splitting up, and most people considered the
guys who became Heaven 17 to be the musical talent. What was Phil
Oakey’s and Adrian Wright’s morale like?
Terrible. They had no real material, just bits of ideas. They had just one
song, ‘Sound of the Crowd’. I listened to the multitrack and said, ‘Well,
that’s going in the bin. We’re starting again.’ When we finished the song,
their morale picked up a lot because it did sound a hundred times better
than their demo. And we did a remix of it, which excited them – that
possibility. The next time they came down, they were in much better
spirits. They had a load of ideas and lyrics, and they threw the lot at me
and said, ‘Sort that out.’ And I sorted it all out for them, basically. A lot
of the riffs came from me, and I certainly was their drummer. I programmed all the drums. Did a lot of the bass work. And worked with Jo
Callis on the chords.
So you had a major creative input into Dare, rather than just producing
some fully completed songs that were handed to you. Hence the pic of
you and your sound engineer in the photo credits to Love and Dancing.
They had to do that – I did the whole of Love and Dancing on my own!
It was my idea and I spent about ten days putting it all together. I had to
fight terrible opposition from both the band and Virgin, because they
didn’t want to put it out. They wanted to sell it cheap. I never got any
writing royalties on any of it, but in retrospect I should have. Dare’s
good but Love and Dancing broke the mould and kicked off the whole
of the modern dance scene. There isn’t one effect or trick that you hear
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But the advantage of it was that what you put in invariably stayed the
way you wanted it to be.
We had a lot of tough times locking all this stuff together. We had all
sorts of complex bits and pieces built by my technicians at Genetic to
make one unit play in time with another unit. The Linn Drum and
Roland MicroComposer would have different time codes. So the bass
part would drift off from the drum track. We eventually managed to
build a box that would run off the Linn Drum code and would drive
everything else as well. And then it was all locked together. Later I was
invited to join the English panel to discuss the MIDI system, because I
was one of the most vigorous complainers, saying, ‘You’re all bringing
out all these new machines, but none of them will link together. You need
to come up with some sort of standard time code they all use.’
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in any genre of modern dance music that you won’t find on Love and
Dancing. Like the stuttering vocals. That’s the first record you’ll find it
on.
Is that you retriggering samples?
No, no. There weren’t samplers then. I actually did it by cutting up tiny
bits of tape. I made myself a special ruler which read out in milliseconds
how long a piece of tape was. So then I’d say, ‘OK, this thing’s at 120
beats per minute, so one beat is that long, a quarter of a beat is that long,
and so I want to cut that little piece of tape by this length.’ That would
be the first bit of Phil going ‘t’. And then I got another copy of ‘t’ and I
glued them all together and got the stutter effect: ‘t-t-t-t-t-t’.
Sounds like incredibly time-consuming, painstaking work!
There are 2,200 main edits in the master tape of Love and Dancing, and
there are another four hundred edits that involve those little repetition,
stutter effects. The first thing I did when I finished it was copy it onto
another tape, in case it fell apart. There was an edit every half second.
You couldn’t fast-forward it or fast-rewind it – it was too dangerous.
Was that the most exciting time of all for you, doing the Dare remix
album?
Making Love and Dancing was the most creative experience I’ve ever
had in my life. Something that has been difficult to top. I haven’t gone
anywhere near it since. That’s probably why I gave up record production
for so long. It’s like why astronauts go a bit loopy after they’ve got back
from the moon. You’ve walked on the fucking moon, what are you
gonna do now? I’d had this incredible experience with Love and
Dancing and made what I knew was a breakthrough record. Dare itself
was just fucking enormous. I’d won all the awards you could possibly
win. Walls covered with gold, platinum and silver discs. I suddenly felt,
‘Well, there you are, Martin. At sixteen you wanted to be a worldfamous record producer, but doing some really good work. And you’ve
done it. Now what?’
Going back to Dare . . . How did the creative chemistry in the new
Human League work? Because by then they’d recruited Jo Callis and Ian
Burden and the girls . . .
Jo I knew because I’d worked with his previous bands The Revillos and
The Rezillos. The bass player Ian was an unknown quantity. Good ideas.
We all got on very well really, right from the beginning. Phil was a bit
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Oakey was the least pop-inclined of all of them?!
I think he had a pop sensibility. Undoubtedly. But he had a vision for
what The Human League ought to sound like. And as the project progressed he came to realize that his bread was buttered much better on
what was happening than on his original vision. So the protests gradually got quieter until they faded away.
Did Susanne and Joanne have any creative role?
On Dare, the girls had very little creative input at all, at least when we
were in the studio. Whether they had any meetings away from the studio
where they sounded their opinions, I don’t know. They used to come
down for their shift on the days I asked for them, sung their bits, went
home. It’s when they didn’t do that any more that the trouble started.
Oh, so they got disillusioned, frustrated?
They felt they should have more say in what was going on. The problem
is, they were of limited creative talent. So rather than being a positive
addition they were a disruptive force. I used to spend varying amounts of
time getting the right bass-drum sound. I would spend two or three
hours perfecting exactly the right bass-drum sound so it fit the record
like a glove, and I might use three bass-drum sounds throughout the
song. You wouldn’t notice the bass drums changing – you weren’t supposed to – but it fitted that part of the record. I’d been working for about
an hour and a half on the bass-drum sounds for a track for Hysteria, and
Phil and the girls come in. Susanne says, ‘How much longer are you
gonna be on this bloody bass-drum sound?’ I said, ‘However long it
takes to get it the way I want it.’ ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you’re
thirty-odd years old, what do you know about what young people
want?’ Now, having just produced an album that sold banana-boatloads of records all over the world, I was a bit miffed. On top of that, I
was going through some pretty hefty personal problems of my own outside of the studio, in my family. The last thing I needed was to spend the
next nine months in the studio making the follow-up to Dare, arguing
with two girls who I didn’t feel had any right to be there, in terms of
being part of the creative team. They were there because they’d moaned
in Phil’s ear and demanded they’d be included. One day I just lost it.
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nervous that it was too poppy, but we just shouted him down every time.
I said, ‘Look, mate, you came to me, so I assume that’s because you want
hits . . .’
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Oh, so the girls had a big part in your actually quitting Hysteria halfway
through?
The major bust-up, we’d just finished ‘Fascination’ but we hadn’t
mixed it. Everybody wanted to write songs by that point because they
all realized you could make a lot more money if you wrote the song.
Some of them just didn’t write, period, and yet they expected to have a
song on the album. Everybody’s trying to get in on the writing, because
vast amounts of money were wending their way into people’s pockets
who never had it before. Everyone was off buying hi-fis and clothes
and motorbikes . . . And the girls were trying to be a part of every single decision made. It drove me up the fucking wall. I just wanted to follow the same modus operandi that created Dare. Why change a
winning formula, a winning team, by suddenly including people that
weren’t involved before? But secondly, I wanted to be a little more
adventurous musically than Dare had been. Looking at the success of
Love and Dancing I felt we could do a lot more remix-y type stuff as
part of the initial record. But everyone wanted to make pop records all
of a sudden. It was almost like a reverse situation between me and Phil.
Now Phil wanted it to be poppy a nd I wanted it to be edgy. I thought
that we had made the pop statement; now we want to break down a
few more barriers and progress and take our audience with us. If all
we’re gonna do is repeat fucking Dare . . . All these things came to a
head, my personal life was getting more and more of a mess, and I just
went, ‘Fuck this.’ Last thing I said to them was, ‘No amount of money
on earth is worth the nightmare that you lot have put me through.’
Slammed the door behind me. I had my sanity to protect, and I suddenly thought, ‘I’d rather go save my marriage than sort through this
bullshit.’
What a shame it all ended like that . . .
Well, we’re on good terms, we still speak now and again, and we all
speak highly of one another in print. It was just that I knew we’d really
done something. Because I’d been a record producer for quite a few years
before, I knew that we’d made an album that had truly broken the
mould. And I thought, ‘Can we actually do that again?’ Plus there was so
much programming involved that at times I felt like I was working in a
bleeding bank! I thought, ‘No, I’d rather leave Dare to stand on its own
than be involved in a shitty second album.’
Hysteria turned out to be disappointing, as a follow-up.
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How did you get on with Altered Images, your other great New Pop production project?
They were nice lads, and she was lovely. Really sweet. It was so much
easier than working with The Human League, because they were essentially a live band. They’d set up all their gear and put the track down,
and then Clare would sing, and then I’d process her voice up a bit, put in
a bit of synthesizer maybe. They were rinky-dinky pop songs, I know,
but they had a dark side now and again, Altered Images.
The singles especially really have a magic. I was playing them the other
day and they’re actually quite sad. ‘Happy Birthday’ is pure bouncy joy
but ‘I Could Be Happy’ and ‘See Those Eyes’ are really wistful and
poignant. I noticed also that you did some remix-y type stuff inside ‘See
Those Eyes’, dropping the instruments in and out . . .
Oh yeah. Some of the remixes I did of Altered Images got a lot of play
in the clubs. They’re good little records. My biggest regret is that I
didn’t shag Clare Grogan. I was trying to save my marriage. But I
should have done. If you interview Clare, will you tell her I said that?
Ha ha ha.
What was Bob Last’s role with Human League?
Bob was an important member of the team. He kept all the business
rolling. And I’m telling you, with Phil it wasn’t easy. And he dealt with
Virgin, made sure we were left untroubled to get on with it. I got on well
with him. When I said I’m leaving, Bob was gutted, because I think he
saw me as an ally. When the going got tough, me and Bob would sit
down with Phil and sort his head out. Bob left in the end too.
Bob Last said something to me that was similar to your comment about
the astronauts: at a certain point you’ve got as high as you can go, and if
you carry on it’ll just be diminishing returns. So after all the monstrous
success with Human League, Heaven 17, Scritti, he stepped sideways out
of band management and moved into the movie business.
The biggest mistake Human League ever made was touring. If they
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Yes. And it had nothing to do with me. The reality is, it might have been
even worse if I’d stayed involved! The rows would have just got worse
and worse. But despite the pleas – and there were a lot of pleas, going
right up to Richard Branson – I was like, ‘I’m telling you, without me it
might work. But I guarantee you, if you try and force me to do this, it
won’t work. My heart’s not in it any more.’
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hadn’t toured, they wouldn’t have lost so much money and they could
have focused on writing. They were born right at the beginning of the
video age, so they need never have felt it necessary to tour. Just make a
damn good record and a damn good video. They should have waited
until they had a stage show that was blistering and then gone out with it.
Touring is exhausting. Most bands run around the world trying to promote their records, but Human League got to number 1 without doing a
gig anywhere.
Looking at your position in the history of electronic pop, how would you
place yourself compared to your immediate precursors Giorgio Moroder
and Kraftwerk?
Kraftwerk I admire a lot, for just doing it in the first place. I’m a fan.
Giorgio Moroder was the king of the sequencer, really. That’s pretty well
all he did – sequencer, drums, and a wailing bird over the top. It’s a formula, and he milked it for all it’s worth. I wouldn’t put Moroder in the
same league as Kraftwerk. Really it was the technology that moved it on
to the next level. Instead of having a very simple sequencer, I had something that, although by today’s terms pretty primitive, in those days was
a quantum leap forward. I could make it play tunes, I could make it play
sweeps. And perhaps I had a little more musical imagination than
Moroder.
I had learned a lot about voicing instruments from Johnny Harris,
who used to be Lulu’s conductor years ago. I used to listen to the way
Harris would have various instruments doing various things at various
times, and I learned that the most important element of music is silence.
To me music is silence punctuated by bits of noise. As opposed to bits of
noise punctuated by silence. While that sounds like the same thing, it
isn’t. You shouldn’t be afraid of silence; you can use silence as part of
your music. It’s probably the most effective instrument you’ve got. That’s
what I learned from Harris. Don’t clutter your arrangements; keep your
parts simple and vocal, as though someone’s singing. You may be writing a string line or a brass break, but phrase it like a voice would sing it.
That’s what I applied to Human League’s arrangements. They’re very
simple, there’s lots of space in them, and all the parts, you can sing them.
Every bit sticks in your head and they’re all phrased so that you can sing
them. There are so many bloody little singalong bits! Giorgio Moroder
never did anything like that.
So Johnny Harris was a band leader and arranger?
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Being a producer involves a lot of psychology as well as technical expertise?
Oh yeah, it’s a complete mix of talents. To be a producer in the eighties
required a mixture of being an electronics engineer, a computer whiz, a
synthesist, a musician, a sound engineer, a diplomat, a psychologist. And
to be able to do it for eighteen hours a day every day. Wrap that lot up,
you’ve got a record producer.
After busting up with The Human League, what did you do next?
I worked with a few people. Billy Mackenzie, on ‘Waiting for the
Loveboat’. Spectacular voice, so charming, but too perfectionist.
Always wanted to do hundreds of takes. Never satisfied. I wasn’t overenthused by the idea of doing an album with him because it was hard
work, to be honest. I did Level 42. Odd things. My marriage fell apart
and I got very depressed. My divorce cost me a fortune and I had to
close Genetic as a result. Sell off my house. I went to work for Virgin as
an A&R coordinator-type person, flying around the world producing
records, which was not what I’d been led to believe the job would be.
Through circumstances I’d become a single parent and I wanted to be
with my children. So I gradually wound down the work. For a few years
I was doing nothing but bringing my children up. Then I opened a
nightclub and I did a lot of work helping local bands, giving them
advice. Getting the local scene in Reading going. I opened a club on
Greenham Common called Gush. The Prodigy opened it for us. But it
only lasted a month. So I’ve been living quietly with my darling second
wife, Keri, and my darling daughter, Amy, who’s six, and contemplating
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He used to be a trumpeter in the Ted Heath Band, then he became an
arranger and orchestrator. He worked with Petula Clark, Shirley Bassey,
Paul Anka, Tom Jones. All the big show singers. He’d do all the arrangements for their bands. He was their musical director, basically. He taught
me so much – not actually sitting me down, but just by watching him
work. I learned to read music by looking at his arrangements. I learned
tons of stuff. How to handle musicians. I used to copy the way he used
to talk to string sections. They used to do what I told them, which can be
quite hard. You’ve got twenty-four string players, and you want to get
them to play the way you want them to play. They’ve played with the
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and they’re not having this young dude
with long hair tell them what to fucking do! It takes a mix of charm and
abuse.
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the moment when I’ll be able to scramble together enough equipment to
make my own album. I will be singing, as I’m one hell of a singer. I used
to do all The Buzzcocks’ backing vocals on their records.
Basically, there’s three projects I want to do: the Martin Rushent
album; a new remix of Dare using all the modern technology now –
Love and Dancing 2; and then my autobiography.
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EDWYN COLLINS
Orange Juice, singer/guitarist
Now you’re a record producer with your own studio that you built yourself, do you find that music has become demystified for you? Does knowing how certain sounds get made, technically, interfere with your ‘pure’
response to hearing music?
It does. I think musicians and producers both listen to records in a different way: they pick apart things, listen to the bassline sound. It’s
depressing, because that innocence is gone. I can only hear records as a
whole if I’ve had a few drinks or it’s on in the background. Otherwise I
start dissecting it. But the genie was out of the bottle even in the
Postcard years. It doesn’t surprise me that Steven Daly, our drummer,
has become a journalist, ’cos he was the most analytical of the lot of us.
He’d say, ‘Ooh, I like this sound on this record, and maybe we should
take this sound from another record and combine them.’ All this was
pre-sampling. And this was when we were making all those primitive,
naive-sounding Orange Juice singles.
Orange Juice seem like the reaction against post-punk – against the darkness and angst of Joy Division, on the one hand, and also against the
demystification side of post-punk. You staged this return to the love
song, to romance. A whole different language to what the previous set of
groups, like Gang of Four and Scritti Politti, were using. Much warmer,
full of wit and tenderness.
We used to stay with Scritti Politti in Camden. Green was very naive
about black music then. He would have to ask me silly questions like,
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‘Who’s Hamilton Bohannon?’ This is late 1980, before the first Orange
Juice album. Later on, Green became obsessed with hip hop, but in those
days they came from that Virgin Records, Canterbury-scene thing.
Robert Wyatt and Hatfield and the North. They were pastoral hippy
types. We shared the same producer, Adam Kidron. Scritti were nice people, but Green had done an interview for NME with Ian Penman and it
was a battle of the pseuds, really. And Green reckoned he’d won! They
were talking about Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss, structuralism and
semiology. It was stupid. I don’t think it was useful, as far as it didn’t pertain to anything they were trying to do musically. I had a completely different background to his. I never went to university, and that was a
conscious decision. I went to art school. But not even that really; it was
a design college. I’d met people like Green at my school, who’d taken
their liking of progressive music to the nth degree, and there was this
intellectual one-upmanship. Green was a very competitive intellectual.
James Kirk, our guitarist, was very quiet but he was self-educated and
understood Green’s frame of reference completely. He just chose to
remain schtum. Steve Daly was more verbose, so Green would patronizingly refer to Steven as ‘the bright member of Orange Juice’. To me, theory and semiotics were no use to songwriting; the only thing that was
any use was just decent literature – plot lines, characters, the way people
use language. Literary criticism, you can’t take anything from it; it just
seemed a waste of time. Hanging out at the Scritti squat, that was the
first time I encountered what people would now call ‘political correctness’. They’d be talking about things that I just thought were insane. ‘Is
it cool to have penetrative sex?’ Stuff like that!
But Orange Juice were into androgyny and non-machismo. In ‘Simply
Thrilled Honey’, it’s the girl who’s the pushy sexual predator and you’re
the fragile romantic who won’t go to bed with her because you’re not in
love! Orange Juice and Postcard had their own version of sexual politics.
Yeah – with a small ‘p’. It made more sense in Glasgow at that time. After
my parents split up, we lived with my aunt and uncle, and they quickly
got fed up with me and my younger sister, who was thirteen to my fifteen,
and so we commuted to this posh suburb on the south side of Glasgow at
weekends. And if it was a football match that Saturday morning, you’d
get pitched battles. It was an aggressive time, the seventies. So Orange
Juice’s image was a revolt against our Scottish peers, against some of the
things they were doing that were just like identikit punk.
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Would it be fair to say that most of the interesting bands in Scottish postpunk came from middle-class backgrounds?
Simple Minds are from a hardcore working-class background. But Josef
K were very posh.
And your background was culturally rich and slightly bohemian?
To a certain extent. My grandfather came from a tiny little village fifty
miles south of John O’Groats called Helmsdale. He left when he was sixteen to have a scholarship at Glasgow University and went on to become
the youngest director of education in Scotland. He introduced the comprehensive system to Scotland. My grandmother introduced me to
Russian literature, Spanish literature. She’s an intellectual, not in the way
Green is, but she’s ninety-one and you can talk to her about any current
affairs. She was an influence.
So was that why you were drawn to the literary end of rock, the Bowies
and Lou Reeds?
Pre-punk, I didn’t like progressive music or concept albums, or anything
that was too noisy, like Zeppelin. I think glam rock was as much glam
pop really. I also liked going to discos and dancing to soul music. There’s
always been this terrible elitist snobbery about that kind of music, the
idea that rock is somehow more intellectual. Even when funk and soul
were cool by the early eighties, you’d get Gary Kemp saying, ‘I’m taking
soul and funk and adding intelligent lyrics.’ Which is just wrong: he
wrote silly things like ‘Instinction’, and people like Linda Creed, who
wrote songs for Thom Bell, would write lines like, ‘He’s got a funky walk
in his little orthopaedic shoes.’ Nobody else would write things like that,
in any genre.
It’s often said that when the White Riot tour hit Scotland, it wasn’t The
Clash but Subway Sect who had the most impact. What was it about Vic
Godard and the Subway Sect that sparked your imagination?
Rob Simmons, the guitarist, had a Fender Mustang, and the treble was
cranked up full and the guitar was completely out of tune. I didn’t know
any of their songs at that time, but they played things like ‘Parallel
Lines’, which reminded me of ‘Fox on the Run’ by The Sweet. It was an
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So Orange Juice were all from Bearsden, a genteel suburb of Glasgow?
Yeah, although we lived in the outskirts, on a housing estate. That’s
because although I was from a middle-class background, my mum was
an art student and my dad was an art lecturer.
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inspiration because Subway Sect were probably on the same level as us
musically. I’m talking about the groups like us that were actually
inspired in 1976 by punk to pick up instruments, as opposed to Simple
Minds, who were obviously a lot more instrumentally skilled and had
been playing for years. Charlie Burchill had been playing guitar for a
long time, but I got my guitar in ’76.
Subway Sect had this big idea, this ‘we oppose all rock’n’roll’ stance: the
idea that rock had become this dead weight of history, a treadmill for
youth, and if you were smart, you wouldn’t step on it.
At the time I took it seriously, but now it just seems funny. Now I know
Vic personally, so he seemed far weirder then than he does now. But he
took a wrong turn with the whole swing thing he got into with the later
Subway Sect. There was a whole scene around the Wag Club that was
about ‘Let’s pretend rock never happened.’ Before that there was a whole
Northern Soul phase of Subway Sect that was never documented, just
this one brilliant Peel session. And before that there was a whole
Television-influenced era of the band that was never properly documented either. He always had a surfeit of ideas. There’s consensus politics, and in music there’s a consensus about what is good imposed by
magazines like Mojo and Uncut, and the consensus idea is that Costello
is the great punk bard. Well, Costello’s lyrics can’t hold a candle to the
best of Vic’s lyrics. It’s not that witty to be punning all the time.
People go on about how for a couple of months in 1978 there was this
specific line-up of Subway Sect, and for that moment they were the greatest band in the world. But it was never preserved for posterity in the studio.
I didn’t see them then, but Alan Horne from Postcard did. He and Steven
Daly came back from London with a bootleg of a Subway Sect gig and it
included this song, ‘Holiday Hymn’, which the group never recorded
themselves. And we covered it in Orange Juice.
When you formulated Orange Juice, having heard the brittle, clangorous
sound of Subway Sect, you had the idea of a raw sound that didn’t have
the density and heaviness of punk. And playing Gretsch guitars was key
to that, right?
That’s true. The only other people using Gretsches were The Stray Cats,
and they were using the very collectable fifties ones that Eddie Cochran
used. I was looking for a Country Gentleman because I had the gatefold
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So more of a toppy sound? Sparkling?
‘Sparkling’ to me is like a Roger McGuinn sound, and sometimes that
was what we were aiming for, like on ‘Simply Thrilled Honey’, where we
used a twelve-string guitar. As well as the Velvets, our frame of reference
was The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. Sometimes we’d have quite
pretty melodies and then the guitar would be quite irritating. There were
groups around like The Pleasers, who were part of this power-pop movement and who dressed in suits like the Fab Four. We didn’t want to be a
pastiche like that. Our bearings were as much to do with punk as the sixties references. And there was disco in there. And country and western,
which partly came from Alan Horne. Alan liked everything. He had
come up through reading the pre-punk ZigZag, so he knew about West
Coast rock – Buffalo Springfield, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Alan
was far more encyclopaedic in his knowledge.
You and Alan were really good friends once.
I suppose I am still friends with him, but I don’t keep in touch. My wife
Grace gets on far better with him than I do. But he’s a very funny guy.
And he had a big input in terms of Orange Juice’s development.
All the groups on Postcard were influenced to a certain extent by his
taste. That’s not to say we didn’t have arguments. What I brought to the
table specifically was Velvets, Lou Reed and glam rock. I was into Bowie.
You could get information on him from this magazine called The Big
Four. And I would also buy Jackie for Bowie information. I’d buy the
NME occasionally, but not religiously. Steven Daly was much more of a
rock fan and he had sort of the NME’s taste. And the others in Orange
Juice never went to discos, but I went to discos, starting with church-hall
youth-club discos and then in a club called Shuffles. At that time, 1976,
if you went to discos wearing that proto-soulboy look of straight
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sleeve of the Velvet Underground’s Live 1969 and there was Lou Reed
with his Country Gentleman. And I liked the sound of that record.
Gretsches have the clarity of the Fender and the grittiness of the Gibson.
But it was also the way the thing looked, and the fact that they were relatively cheap for a name guitar, and that nobody else had them. We knew
some people would get the Velvets reference. Steven wouldn’t have liked
this idea, but it was to bring back a sixties sensibility. To have the freneticism and tempo of punk rock, but to have rhythm guitars that were
influenced by Live 1969 and . . . Nile Rodgers.
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trousers and Vidal Sassoon fringe, people were going to fight you. They
would want to beat you up just for wearing straight trousers. People at
the discos had white short-sleeve shirts and skinny ties, and they looked
very fresh. A lot of people at Shuffles wore sandals made of plastic, these
cheap eastern European things. The sandals I wore in Orange Juice were
a throwback to that disco look.
You used to wear a raccoon hat at one point, right?
A lot of things came from Army & Navy stores, and that raccoon hat
was one of them. We used to have a lot of button-down shirts and check
shirts, because shops like Flip down in London started doing them. I
liked the look Creedence Clearwater Revival had. Another influence was
the cover of Pet Sounds, with the suede jackets buttoned in the mod style.
The hooped T-shirts came from groups like The Lovin’ Spoonful.
So the group’s image was pieced together, postmodern style, just like the
music?
Not really, it wasn’t that self-conscious. It was like, ‘I like this thing and
I like that thing.’ Alan Horne went through an obsessive Pet Sounds
period, and I thought, ‘This is a good record sleeve but the music should
be less barbershop.’
Malcolm Ross of Josef K said they had an almost ‘new puritan’ outlook:
a clean, mod image – no drugs, not much drink. How about Orange
Juice?
We didn’t really drink at all. Or do drugs. I didn’t really acquire a taste
for drink until I was twenty-two. I was just a social drinker prior to that.
My mum can’t really drink more than two drinks – has no tolerance. My
dad didn’t drink until my parents split up. So I was never around alcohol.
Part of Orange Juice’s image was this fresh-faced naivety and sensitivity.
Avoiding the trappings of rock’n’roll.
A big influence, especially on Steven Daly, was Julie Burchill and Tony
Parsons’ book The Boy Looked at Johnny. It had a peculiar warped
morality to it: speed was OK, marijuana was bad. That informed the
way we thought about drugs. In an early Dave McCullough interview,
McCullough said the whole Postcard thing was actually what Mark E.
Smith called the new puritans. I don’t know if Smith was attacking it or
not, he was so oblique with his lyrics. But there were all these things in
the NME’s letter page that coincided with what we were doing. There
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Do you think The Smiths took some leaves out of Postcard’s book then?
I heard, even before The Smiths’ records came out, that Johnny Marr
was obsessed with Roddy Frame.
I was thinking that some of the lyrics in ‘Simply Thrilled Honey’ and
‘Consolation Prize’ anticipate what Morrissey did with ‘Pretty Girls
Make Graves’, where he’s the neurasthenic, unmanly type who can’t cope
with the overpoweringly sexual woman: ‘She’s too rough and I’m too
delicate.’
I don’t know. We did a lot of things before The Smiths, but only in the
context of post-punk. I sang ‘I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn’s,’
and had Byrds-style Rickenbacker twelve-strings. But The Smiths took
these ideas to the nth degree and they were a lot more palatable.
What you were doing was totally aberrant in the context of post-punk.
The sense of humour. Post-punk was angsty and bleak, but the sad
Orange Juice songs always had a wry wit. And you had the lyric about
how learning to ‘laugh at myself’ was the only remedy for heartbreak.
It was just something that I couldn’t have articulated at the time, but it
was an innate suspicion that a lot of rock was stupid and silly. Particularly the rock that people found profound – that was the most absurd.
Siouxsie and the Banshees. Or Ian Curtis, who by all accounts was a little uptight nutty Tory. You can see why some people might rate Jim
Morrison. But was Curtis a genius even in that relative way that some
people rate Morrison? It’s all very tenth-rate. I liked some of Joy
Division’s music but I didn’t like the cult of Joy Division.
Part of the way Orange Juice and Postcard were framed journalistically
in 1980–1 was as this ray of life-affirming light after a period of deathtripping darkness, symbolized and climaxed by the actual death of Ian
Curtis.
I suppose so, although a lot of it was just instinctive, and a lot of this
nihilistic stuff was silly. I don’t think The Sex Pistols were silly – that
kind of manic intensity, that kind of anger you see in Rotten, it seems
real to me. The things he’s saying are very clever. He’s the figurehead for
the sea change in British music, and he’s the reason why I’m talking to
you now. Everything that followed in the wake of the Pistols, the first
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was a correspondence on Tiller Boys, which was a Mancunian movement. They had floppy fringes. I wondered if it’s just coincidence that
Orange Juice’s stronghold was Manchester. More so than Glasgow.
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wave of punk groups – Buzzcocks, Clash, Vic Godard – was interesting.
But by the time we kicked in there were so many crappy, shitty groups,
so much stuff being taken seriously. We felt the energy of punk as an
impetus but were just trying to have a little gestalt shift.
Post-punk went hand in hand with indie labels, which by 1980 had
become something of a ghetto. Postcard was an independent, but it was
very much about getting out of that ghetto and into the charts.
Yeah. Very stupid, because we didn’t have the infrastructure to infiltrate
the charts. The exciting thing about punk, when it first appeared, was
that it was very unpredictable. People couldn’t get a handle on it. But by
the time we came along so much punk and post-punk was drab, and
underneath there was an orthodoxy and a conformity. It was no longer
a threat. So you had to do something different if you wanted to get any
kind of attention. It wasn’t as contrived as that: there was no manifesto,
and we didn’t have a board meeting about how we were going to get
attention. But we just knew what we didn’t want to be.
How did you meet Alan Horne in the first place?
Steven Daly was working in one branch of this chain of record shops
called Listen, and had been describing Alan, who he’d met in the store.
He had been along to one of our concerts when we were supporting
Johnny and the Self Abusers, Steel Pulse and The Backstabbers. We were
opening for everyone in this venue below Glasgow Apollo called Satellite
City. Our first tune was ‘We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together’
from Live 1969. And then I saw this guy. Alan was quite chubby at the
time and he had a Harris jacket on and hidden under the lapel he had a
little Nazi badge. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. Alan
wanted to come on stage with us and do ‘Springtime for Hitler’ from The
Producers, wearing lederhosen.
Just as a wind-up?
He loved The Producers. Alan loved all that glam-rock stuff to do with
Cabaret and Christopher Isherwood books. Lou Reed on the Rock and
Roll Animal tour had shaved an iron cross in his hair. The whole Berlin
decadence thing, which surfaced again with Bowie and Low. Steven
hated it, he found it abhorrent, but Rock Against Racism and silly things
like that were going on, and Alan said, ‘I’d rather have a movement
called Racism Against Rock.’
And he put some of this puerile Nazi stuff in his fanzine?
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Was he a fun person to hang around with, Alan?
Well, you could sort of cope with it then, but if Alan came along nowadays . . . He’s so manic and hyper hyper. He could be depressed or overly
excited about things – just very intense. He was, and still is, a control
freak. He loved it when jokingly you would call him Mr Postcard. He
wanted to be the boss. The svengali figure, the Malcolm McLaren or
Bernie Rhodes. It was the punk managers that interested him, like The
Fall’s manager Kay Carroll. In the early punk interviews, the manager
assumed the same importance as the singer. Alan knew who every manager was and he used to say the great thing about punk is it’s brought in
the era of ‘manager rock’, where the manager is at least as important as
the group.
Oh, so he was the manager of Orange Juice as well as boss of Postcard?
He sort of managed all the groups on Postcard. Or liked to pretend he
did. Except Josef K. He was a megalomaniac really.
Were Orange Juice and the Postcard crew a tight bunch?
I would never, ever want to go back to that time, ’cos it was pretty neurotic. People were overly sensitive, and barely out of their adolescence,
where everything is heightened. People would get very angry and upset,
or abusive.
How did the dynamics in the band play out?
Well, if we’d wanted longevity we wouldn’t have had Dave McClymont
in the group. He was quite into things like Yes when I first met him, but
I noticed he played a bit of acoustic guitar, so when the original bassist
left The Nu-Sonics [precursor band to Orange Juice], I asked if he’d like
to join. But it was he who instigated the splits in Orange Juice. The first
one was when Orange Juice was briefly a five-piece with Malcolm Ross,
after Josef K had split up. And to an extent everyone was bored.
Malcolm and David left, and I was presented with a fait accompli: which
faction do you want to join? I think they had this idea of getting Zeke as
the drummer, and I was kind of weak . . . You can’t change history, but
it would have been a happier group without him. It’s not like David
brought these fantastic basslines to Orange Juice. I did the riff on ‘Rip It
Up’ using the Roland 303 Bassline machine.
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Yeah, Alan would have crude little cartoons of his flatmate, Brian
Superstar, who later joined The Pastels, in a Nazi uniform, and stuff like
that.
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The famous acid-house bass generator.
They’d only been out for a week when I got it. I liked the sound on
Imagination’s records, and someone told me that this 303 bass machine
was what their producers, Swain and Jolley, used, and then I heard the
bassline on a track by Matt Bianco, ‘Get Out Your Lazy Bed’, and I
thought, ‘That’s weird, it sounds like a string bass but it’s got this portamento, sliding effect on it. I have to get this machine.’ It was a real bugger to program, but the producer worked out how to do it. Zeke played
along to a click track that was synced to the bassline, so the 303 dictated
everything on the ‘Rip It Up’ single.
But on the subject of McClymont’s contribution: c’mon, be fair, there’s
some really good, disco-influenced basslines on those early Orange Juice
singles, like ‘Falling and Laughing’.
No, he did come up with a lot of stuff. He made up 50 per cent of the
‘Falling and Laughing’ bassline. But a lot of his playing in retrospect was
quite busy. It’s the Peter Hook syndrome, where he couldn’t really distinguish between the bass and the guitar, and as a result the bass is more
like a baritone guitar.
With ‘Rip It Up’, and the lyric about the scene getting humdrum and the
call to ‘rip it up and start again’, it seemed like Orange Juice were calling
time on the very movement they’d pretty much started, the New Pop idea
of being shiny and optimistic and chart-bound. Did you feel that it had
all gone wrong? Or were you just frustrated that Orange Juice had not
got into the charts themselves and had to watch others skip merrily in
there using ideas you’d pioneered?
I know that Haircut 100 got a lot of their image ideas from Orange
Juice. I’ve got pictures of James wearing Arran sweaters. Likewise,
Altered Images went from being kindergarten Banshees to being more
Postcard-y.
Did you feel, watching Altered Images and Haircut 100 romping up the
charts, that it was time to get the band’s shit together – shed the amateurish charm, start making competitive records?
Sort of. ‘Rip It Up’ was an experiment with this new piece of technology.
We started out with the drums and the bass, and everything else followed. We treated the lead guitar line with this old seventies funk
machine, the Mutron BiPhase, a sophisticated envelope filter that
around that time you’d heard on Tom Tom Club’s ‘Genius of Love’. But
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It’s a really interesting fusion, and like the earlier ‘Falling and Laughing’
and ‘Poor Old Soul’, has this bizarre quality of sixties jangle meeting
disco.
Jon Savage pointed out to me it was the definitive transitional record
between the old punk-rock era and the New Pop era. You had the
Buzzcocks reference in the lyric about my favourite song being entitled
‘Boredom’. The Spiral Scratch EP influenced Postcard; it was our enabler,
to use psychobabble. It made us see we could do it ourselves. I wanted to
acknowledge it but put this old-style Orange Juice stringent guitar in the
context of New Pop. The producer, Martin Hayles, being a bit of a jazz
funker, didn’t understand the ‘Boredom’ reference, which delighted me.
He didn’t understand the bum note at the end of it!
At that point you talked about pursuing a ‘sophisticated amateurism’,
not slick but not as messy as before . . .
I knew the way things were going with futurism and silly synthy pop,
and I wanted to disassociate ourselves from any of that stuff. The music
press was more important then because if you had a single of the week in
NME, you could sell 5,000 copies. We weren’t getting any radio play, so
it needed to be press-led to a certain extent. Anything that smacked of
kitsch or silliness, I didn’t want anything to do with. It was the aesthetic
of the synth music I didn’t like at that time. I quite liked Human League,
but by the time we made the actual album you had this whole synth-pop
movement and you were either one thing or the other. By 1981 there
were two different camps.
Was this the period – the height of New Romanticism – when you made
a point of wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt to express your discontent? You
didn’t like the obsession with style and nightclubs?
It was magazines like New Sounds New Styles and iD and this music
that was originally called Futurist which was just so stupid. Now, I think
some of those things are great pop records – it’s fine to listen to Gary
Numan go, ‘Now I’m alone’ – but at that time it mattered a lot to us.
More than was healthy.
Orange Juice had a big impact in Glasgow, didn’t they? Everybody suddenly imitated your look and your sound.
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there are so many parameters on that machine, our use of it doesn’t
sound anything like ‘Genius of Love’. We wanted a treated sound to
complement the bassline.
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It was the start of a new sort of Glasgow underground. Prior to that,
Glasgow was about blues rock, Maggie Bell singing in Stone the Crows,
or Frankie Miller. Our fans were people like Teenage Fanclub, who were
at school at the time. Simple Minds were popular but they didn’t inspire
as many people to form groups as we did. To a certain extent, Creation
Records was inspired by Postcard.
And, with some help from Swell Maps and Television Personalities,
Postcard pretty much sired the whole shambling band/cutie/C86 movement. Your line ‘Worldliness must keep apart from me’ could be the mission statement of C86.
I didn’t realize how potent it was. In Japan there was this whole lateeighties movement called Neo-Ako. One of the main groups was
Flipper’s Guitar, and the name comes from the dolphin on our album.
The first Flipper’s Guitar album was called Three Cheers for Our Side,
and that’s a song by James Kirk. They have songs like ‘Let’s Cut Our
Hair Like James Kirk Did Long Ago’. I didn’t realize how potent it
would be, because we were unconscious of it at the time; it was just our
reaction against Glaswegian machismo. But there’s a time when you
have to put away childish things, as the bible says.
When was that moment, for you?
I think it was ‘Rip It Up’ really. There’s some pictures from that era of me
wearing a boy scout’s hat and a scout shirt from the Baden-Powell era.
But I’d also be wearing some motorcycle trousers. I’d do things like wear
motorbike boots with an old nineteenth-century hunting jacket. That
kind of thing had an impact when it was first done, but when it was
appropriated by the so-called cuties, I didn’t like it very much.
Infantilism for its own sake . . . It’s like those damaged people who seek
solace in the security of childhood.
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STEVEN DALY
Orange Juice, drummer
In Orange Juice you were all taken with the New York version of punk
rock – Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith.
It was the intensity and also the style of it. You’d be dreaming about
Max’s and CBGBs. People have a very silly take on rock history, asking,
‘Where will the next punk come from?’, which is as ridiculous as the
obsession that people had in 1974 about where will the new Beatles
come from. The reason there’ll be no new punk ever, or anything like it,
is because the world is so much more accommodating now. The world
was so much harsher then. Punk came out of a very clueless, drifting
rock culture, and it came out with an explosive sense of purpose. That’s
not going to happen any more because people aren’t ever going to get
that clueless again. And the recreational choices aren’t going to get that
restricted ever again.
Another big formative influence: Subway Sect. Why is there such mystique about Vic Godard?
It’s all about context, and there’s certain music that doesn’t work out of
its context and is not supposed to. It’s a provocation at the time, an aesthetic gesture. Saying, ‘We oppose all rock’n’roll,’ like they did on the Bside of ‘Ambition’ . . . to anybody at the time who was at all aware, that
was a catalyst. Vic Godard would talk very lucidly about how rock was
finished, and he was right. To my mind it was becoming redundant –
after the shock of punk you can’t go on boogieing for ever and making
noisy guitar music. Well, of course you can because people are still
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being sold it and dumb little ahistorical children are buying it, but
they’re the Showaddywaddy buyers of today. Was it Billy Bragg or
someone else who had that song, ‘Waiting for the Next Leap Forward’?
You could probably do worse for a title for your book than that,
because that – looking for the Great Leap Forward – is one of the
themes of post-punk.
I saw Subway Sect as part of the White Riot tour: The Slits came on
first, then Subway Sect, then Buzzcocks, then The Jam, and finally The
Clash. And it’s bizarre to think of these five bands that were putatively,
in May 1977, part of the same movement, and how unalike they
sounded. Then I saw them the next year supporting Patti Smith at the
Rainbow in London, on the same bill with Tapper Zukie, and they were
very tight and quite New York style.
And then the next year I’d parted with Orange Juice for a while – sort
of fell out with them, because they were hanging with people from art
school who stroked Edwyn and Alan Horne’s egos, and I felt like, ‘Look,
chaps, we’ve not done anything yet, let’s work harder’ – and I started this
label and was putting out records by James King and The Lone Wolves
and Josef K. Working at the Department of Health and Social Security
and saving my money to put out their singles. Alan went down to
London to help me pick up the records from the pressing plant and take
them round to distributors like Small Wonder and Rough Trade. Alan
was wandering around London with this little ghetto blaster, and then
we went into the Music Machine, where Subway Sect were supporting
the Banshees. And when they came on Alan pressed ‘Record’, and that’s
how Orange Juice ended up covering ‘Holiday Hymn’. At that point
Subway Sect were playing this entire set of Northern Soul stylings. And
they were dressed in polo shirts and smart trousers. That was a whole
incarnation of Subway Sect that got junked. It was never documented.
When we got home, we all huddled around the tape machine and
thought, ‘Let’s cover this song as a nice homage to Uncle Vic.’ We did it
as a John Peel session, but Subway Sect never recorded it. I never found
out why he dropped the whole Northern Soul thing; maybe because this
was around the time Dexy’s Midnight Runners were coming through.
But all that is a long-winded way of saying that’s an example of the Great
Leap Forward. Some people were still trying to make them then, and Vic
Godard was one. Subway Sect had a manifesto.
The only other people we were interested in then were Tony Parsons
and Julie Burchill. After a certain point they seemed far more interesting
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Oh, yeah, talk about manifestos, Burchill and Parsons had written The
Boy Looked at Johnny: The Obituary of Rock’n’Roll in early 1978. But
going back to Vic ‘We Oppose All Rock’n’Roll’ Godard and Subway
Sect . . . People who worship them, like Kevin Pearce of Something
Beginning with ‘O’ fame, often talk in mod-related terms about the
‘cleanness’ of the sound. There’s a sense in which mod (a big influence
on Subway Sect) really wasn’t rock’n’roll. It was R&B filtered through
amphetamine, this splintered speed-freak explosion, full of gaps and
spaces. As opposed to the thick, chugging continuousness of Chuck
Berry-style rock’n’roll.
Bending notes and doing all those little Chuck Berry bits seemed a bit
boozy and floppy and sloppy and laddy. I suppose the Pistols were really
the last ones to do it. The last hold-out for the Chuck Berry riff was Steve
Jones, but they had such a good singer and drummer they didn’t flip into
mundane rocking out. The Jam – I don’t know if they were a rock band
or a pop band. They were sort of an amped-up R&B band. I remember
seeing them on the White Riot tour and thinking they were phenomenal,
but they were definitely not doing what The Buzzcocks were doing.
The other thing about mod is looking clean. The Who’s publicist Peter
Meaden defined modism as ‘clean living under difficult circumstances’.
Orange Juice had a fresh-faced, non-rock’n’roll image, but you got that
more from Talking Heads’ preppy look, right?
Yes. There was also a band called Marie et Les Garçons, who’d played at
one of the original punk festivals in France in 1976 and a few years later
had a record on ZE. And they had a very clean sound, and on the
album’s back cover the boys in the band all wore Lacoste shirts. For us,
looking for clues, it was another indication that you can’t do that standard rock thing any more. You’ve got to look for a new thing.
Unfortunately, what happened was that a lot of roots were trashed
with the old rock culture. You ended up with the New Pop, Thatcherite,
groundless and empty culture that eventually gave us Heat magazine. In
Britain we’ve gone from a country of freethinkers to a country of semihip, semi-ironic clones. But during post-punk there was still a lot of people talking about a lot of ideas. They were literate and had a frame of
reference, and the music was mediated strongly through the music press.
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than any band. Burchill and Parsons were talking about Motown and
Stax, what we thought was proper music, and they were being abrasive
about silly left-over punk bands.
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And the result of that was that the bar had been set, and you thought,
‘This is the way the world is. It’s gonna be exciting.’
For anyone growing up on punk and post-punk and reading the music
press of that time, it did create what in hindsight can appear to be unrealistic expectations. It set you up for . . .
Twenty years of bitterness afterwards!
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PAUL MORLEY
Journalist/ZTT Records aesthetician
You started out doing a fanzine called Out There, which, from what I’ve
read, sounds crazily diverse: pieces on Patti Smith, Stranglers, Sex Pistols,
but also on Eno’s Obscure label, improv drummer John Stevens . . . There
was a weird little moment there just before punk when things got so dull
some people almost gave up on rock; they were listening to Annette
Peacock and weird jazz instead.
I was always into those things as well, free jazz and avant-garde classical, which is why punk was so interesting, because it merged with those
interests. The atonality of The Stooges . . . So in Out There there was a
piece on the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. But there was also something
on Ted Nugent, because in Manchester there was always a big interest in
gonzoid American rock. I wrote most of the magazine, but the Nugent
was one thing I commissioned. I was trying to be like an editor. And
there was a piece on Dylan bootlegs, because I used to sell them in the
book shop in Stockport I worked in. It was called The Bookshop. Martin
Fry used to come there, and Barry Adamson, later of Magazine. I’d
always wanted to be a writer. There was a fanzine in Manchester called
Penetration, originally about Hawkwind, but I’d done a piece on Lenny
Bruce for it. That was the only music fanzine I’d heard of. I planned to
do Out There for ever, but only did the one issue. In some ways my book
Nothing is Out There No. 2.
Out There started before punk really took off and I wanted it to be
really proper looking, so I got it beautifully typeset and printed on glossy
paper. But then Mark P of Sniffin’ Glue sent me a note saying, ‘You look
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like Vogue, fuck off.’ So me and Richard Boon did this other ’zine, a onesheet xeroxed thing called Girl Trouble, and sold it for 2p. Tuppence. It
was quite Dada-influenced. Little poems and songs and things about
Gaye Advert eating glass at Siouxsie concerts.
How quickly did it go from being excited about punk to that eve-of-postpunk feeling that punk was actually narrowing things down, becoming a
new conformity?
In my version of punk, what it became – safety pins and leather jackets
– was a different thing altogether. With the art-punk, the surreal end of
punk, the eclecticism was still there. Punk for me seemed to fit into my
taste in music: when you heard The Fall live it was this chaotic thing
but it seemed to confirm your feelings for the kind of music you liked
anyway. I went to see The Buzzcocks very early on and I remember
screaming with delight, ‘This is like fucking Ornette Coleman.’
Everything just seemed to be skidding around: the guitars were skidding, the bass was skidding, the drums just seemed to be completely
polyrhythmical, and the voice just seemed to be flailing away. If you sat
back a couple of inches, you thought, ‘This is just like free jazz.’ That
was the better side of punk – the bands who were aware of Faust and
Can and free jazz.
Mark Perry has said that far from early-seventies rock being a wasteland,
he wasn’t particularly dissatisfied: there was plenty to be into and excited
by, and that maintained right up until the end of 1975.
Absolutely. Things like Ian Hunter’s solo albums seemed great, and you
could raid the history of music in a much less self-conscious way than
you can now. What was noticeable was no sense of any contemporary
music coming from major labels. That was really the only area that you
could be frustrated – that the business was getting it wrong. But you
could still find lots of great music: people like Roy Harper, or you could
buy albums by Tangerine Dream that sounded pretty weird. Or The
Faust Tapes, for 48p. But it wasn’t relevant to your day-to-day life. What
happened with the punk thing – especially in Manchester – was that it
enabled you to participate. Before The Sex Pistols came to the Lesser
Free Trade Hall the bands that had played there had been Pink Floyd or
Bowie, and it had been very theatrical, very ornate. You’d sit down on
your seat, and if you stood up you were told to sit down again. It was all
very polite, so suddenly to have this rush of energy . . .
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Devoto was one of the very first people to move away from punk, to see
it as something that had gone wrong.
Buzzcocks had only done about six gigs and he left. I asked why, and I
always remember his answer: ‘I had to speak too quick to get all the
words out. The songs are so quick and I’ve got so much to say and I’m
speaking too quick.’ The whole northern thing was wary of how punk
had become gobby and gimmicky and silly. It was already that King’s
Road tourist version of punk.
There was a tremendous mystique around Devoto in late 1977, early ’78,
which you more than anyone built. And which he cultivated with his
cryptic interview technique.
He told me he borrowed it from Dylan, those fantastic early interviews
with people like Nat Hentoff. In the wider scheme of things Devoto was
a completely obscure little man from the north – his real name was
Howard Trafford and he came from Leeds – but through his way with
words and answers he seemed to have this mystique. I was calling
Howard Devoto ‘the Most Important Man Alive’, but almost as a windup. Because it was funny that people were taking it so seriously. To see
the rest of the rock world – the world that would become Q – have to
catch up and review Magazine on the basis that they’d been called the
Greatest Band Ever, that was amusing. And for a moment Devoto really
was on the verge, until that awesome failure of a Top of the Pops performance for ‘Shot by Both Sides’. He just gave up. There was this massive song, the ultimate rock riff, and there he was on TOTP – in those
days that was so rare, for something like Magazine to be on TV – and he
decided that he was so far ahead of the game that he’d just be still. He’d
also got some make-up on. He got the middle-of-the-road BBC make-up
girl to give him a white face, but instead of the rampant Iggy Pop he
wanted to look like he seemed more like Marcel Marceau. I think he said
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I get the impression that for you personally Spiral Scratch is way more
important than ‘Anarchy in the UK’ . . .
It is actually. For lots of reasons. Because ultimately ‘Anarchy’ did have
a vague sense of Mott the Hoople about it. It was so huge sounding. A
brilliantly made piece of work. But Spiral Scratch struck home more. It
still seems to me to be on the verge of falling apart. And it was incredibly
literate. That line about ‘Living in this here movie, but it doesn’t move
me.’ I’m doing a radio show on Radio Four on my eight favourite pieces
of writing, and ‘Boredom’ is one of them.
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later he looked like a ‘little northern bitter tit’. And next week the record
went down the chart, and everything shut down from then on. Killed
stone dead.
‘Shot by Both Sides’ was an oblique refusal of the political polarization
of the time: Rock Against Racism, Tom Robinson Band’s ‘Better Decide
Which Side You’re On’ . . .
I think it was almost an ordinary confession that he was a bit of a wet
liberal. He couldn’t make his mind up, and that was quite a brave statement, at a time when you had to pin your flag to be lefty.
That made me think about how every post-punk city seemed to have its
own character, and how Manchester didn’t have any political bands as
such – no punk protest bands, but none of that Gang of Four-style agitpop either. Manchester’s vibe was much more existentialist than political.
To me the greatest conventional agit-pop band came from Manchester,
and they were called The Worst. They were the real thing: used to work
as mechanics in Preston and did their gigs in overalls that they’d just
spent all day working on cars in. They sang songs about the police state.
But even then there was a Manchester twist to it: it wasn’t The Angelic
Upstarts; it did have an almost existential quality. The political side of
post-punk didn’t seem to fit really in Manchester. There was a lot of
autodidacticism. We were all interested in the experimental side of
things, Ballard and Philip K. Dick and film. I often put it down to the
moors and the odd combination of that with the strange landscape of the
city, the factories and the motorways when you went into the city. It
seemed quite futuristic. It was a hard city. And people were using their
minds to find a way out of a hard situation. For me Ballard was right at
the centre of everything. It was all very predictive – the urban landscape,
and the entertainment-scape, that he predicted has come true.
OK, Paul, now you have to explain to me that Manchester jingoism thing
you all go in for, the absolute contempt for London!
London is a metaphor. It represents everything that’s conservative about
that business approach to culture and art and entertainment. A laziness.
Back then it was so pronounced, you really felt like the country was
slanted, physically slanted at a gradient, so that everything slid down to
London. You did feel annoyed about it. I’ve never been as vociferous
about it as Tony Wilson. I wasn’t so much pro-Manchester as just antiLondon. I often say, ‘No great band has come from London,’ and then
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What was New Hormones’ Richard Boon like?
He was a very enigmatic man. They’re an odd couple, Boon and Devoto.
They seemed as old then as they do now. The funny thing about them is
that at that time they seemed fifty. It’s a clever thing, ’cos everyone else
has aged. They had an interest in Pop Art and Warhol that was unusual.
They all lived in this house, Linder as well. It was a bit like a small version of Warhol’s Factory. There’s an odd sitcom there somehow – the
idea that they all lived there together and delivered this strange stuff into
the world. Someone told me about being round there one day and then
being asked to leave the room when they started to eat. And we wondered what the heck they were doing in there. You had to leave the room
– ‘What’s going on?’
Were there factions in post-punk Manchester or was the scene small
enough for everyone to be close?
Well, there was the elite, the Joy Division/New Order end of things. Then
The Fall, who were always . . . almost on another planet, really. So ordinary that they seemed completely alien. They were never really part of
anything. And there was the Devoto and Shelley end of things. And there
was quite a lot of people just scuffling around. The most successful of
that ilk was Mick Hucknall, who was scrabbling around in a band called
Frantic Elevators, who were pretty horrible, almost like Slade. There was
also the Object label. The Spherical Objects were on that label – a bit
prog, but a neat prog. And The Passage, who were bloody good, but the
problem with Dick Witts was that he seemed a bit like Michael Nyman,
someone fiddling around with punk but never quite having the stamp of
authenticity somehow. There was a band called The Distractions, an
extraordinary group – ‘Time Goes by So Slow’ was a great record. Some
of these groups were almost like dreams, it’s almost like they didn’t quite
exist . . .
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people say, ‘The Stones and The Who.’ But I say, ‘Since then . . .’ And it’s
sort of true, when you think of the bands that came out of London, like
Spandau Ballet.
There was something about the favouritism too. You felt like if a band
came out of London, they’d be signed. In Manchester, the sense that you
could do it yourself led to a greater amount of independence. The
Buzzcocks doing Spiral Scratch on their own label New Hormones was
quite a stalwart thing – you thought, ‘My God, what an astounding
thought.’
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You mentioned Joy Division and Factory as the elite . . .
Because of Peter Saville and Tony Wilson’s arty notions, that kind of
insulated Manchester a little bit. The interesting design, the great
Factory catalogue that listed the posters as well as records . . . it added
to Manchester having this arty, existentialist quality. And the fact that it
started quite early on. The first record, A Factory Sample – just the fact
it was so beautiful looking, so special. It showed the possibilities of what
could be done and showed up the London record industry for being so
boring and crass. Rough Trade, by comparison, seemed quite sort of
scruffy. And Factory cataloguing everything – even moods and sneezes
were catalogued. The Haçienda cat had a catalogue number! That was a
big influence on what I did at ZTT – bringing art into everyday life
somehow.
There’s a character that’s clearly you in the Factory movie, 24 Hour Party
People.
For some reason they didn’t name the character Paul, but I’m the journalist who gets taken in to see Ian Curtis’s body. I don’t quite see why
they didn’t call him Paul! Tony Wilson wanted me to write the Joy
Division book, and obviously he thought it would be important for me
to see the body.
Was Ian Curtis’s suicide a big part of your shift away from post-punk to
New Pop, a desire to walk away from the darkness and embrace something less angst-racked and morbid? Because as the great journalistic
champion of Joy Division, you were totally bound up with the cult of
beautiful despair.
Actually, there’s a more mundane reason, which is that NME’s editor
Neil Spencer wouldn’t take any more writing from Morley on Factory.
So I had to find another way to smuggle some of the ideas in. Plus I love
pop anyway. When Haircut 100 and Altered Images came along, they
didn’t seem as teenybop as they’ve been hindsighted to be. They just
seemed like really interesting pop that had an unusual edge to it. It didn’t
seem like Boyzone. Also, the possibility of a new young band getting in
the charts was very unusual, very rare, and you wanted to change the
dullness and predictable-ness of the industry landscape; you wanted it to
go quicker. You really wanted it to be The Fire Engines or The Scars in
there. But first there had to be a change. And at the time there seemed to
be very little difference between Orange Juice and Haircut 100. They
seemed part of the same world. Even Culture Club, when they started. In
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Still, I think it was confusing for some NME readers, fans who were
really into Joy Division and also into the way you wrote about that kind
of music, and then suddenly you’re writing about what seems much less
‘deep’ music in a much lighter way – this fizzy euphoria. And it was such
a rapid shift. One year you wrote a piece about Radio One and you were
totally admiring of John Peel, and then within about eighteen months
you were saying that Peel’s show was the problem, it was a ghetto for the
new post-punk hippies. You even went on Peel’s show as a guest and
admonished him for not playing the bright new pop!
There was an odd period when for two or three weeks I was a guest on
the John Peel show and he used to tell me to just turn up. And me and
John would have a chat on air. But I blew that by mentioning that Keith
Levene was a heroin addict. I just didn’t know the broadcasting rules.
But yeah, you did get overwrought about things being stagnant. I
wanted change, action, movement – all the things that a young man
wants.
If you coined the term New Pop, there’s a bunch of other people who
co-formulated the concept: Bob Last at Fast Product and Alan Horne
with Postcard were talking about the charts and entryism, and The
Human League were very early in talking about ‘pop’ as a positive
thing.
It was in the air. A great early example of it is Buzzcocks, this sequence
of six or seven perfect pop singles they wrote, starting with ‘Orgasm
Addict’, with beautifully designed sleeves.
And in a perfect world they’d all have been number 1, like The Beatles . . .
So New Pop probably came from that really: ‘This is what pop music
should be about.’ But those singles weren’t really being hits, and you
kind of thought, ‘This is a mad world.’ If Phil Spector songs weren’t hits,
the whole DNA of life would be wrong. How the term originally came
was that I wrote a piece on New Pop for New York Rocker. A bit later,
in the NME, I did a piece on the charts that encapsulated the idea that
the great thing about the charts is this mixture of greatness and silliness.
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the beginning they were a very exotic, mysterious group, and you
wanted them to get into the charts. There was a world where that might
not have happened, and indeed for their first three singles it didn’t. But
why shouldn’t it happen, as opposed to what a record company has
manufactured?
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It’s sometimes virtually all crap, but it can never be all great. But that
piece was summer 1982, when the chart being ‘all great’ actually seemed
a possibility, with groups like Simple Minds and The Associates having
hit singles.
Another critical piece in this shift from post-punk to New Pop was a feature on The Police you wrote in which you decided that, although punk
had been anti-star, you liked pop stars. You were very taken with Sting,
and that had led you to think about the idea of the positive pop star.
Idols that brought new content into pop and widened the horizons of
teenagers, introduced them to all kinds of stuff.
I was always a huge T Rex fan, and that never went away. And what I
saw in Johnny Rotten was that he was a great pop star. Seeing him live
was like seeing Elvis. He and Ian Curtis were great entertainers. I
thought pop could be a fantastic sort of radical entertainment. I did a
piece in The Face trying to persuade the readers that Cabaret Voltaire
were a pop band, asking them about their favourite colours.
Were you also trying to break out of the puritanical mindset that postpunk had, its suspicion of pleasure and fun? The way your writing got
frothy with exclamation marks, it’s like you were trying to burst out into
liberating frivolity. Then there was that infamous gossip column in NME
written by the imaginary character Errol Golders. That was you and Ian
Penman, right? But at a time when unemployment was soaring, Errol’s
celebration of London clubland as this quasi-aristocratic milieu of cocktails and trousers that cost more than a month’s unemployment benefit
. . . you must have known that would have wound up the more earnest,
literal-minded NME readers?
Kind of. And there was a slogan we came up with: ‘Dance, don’t riot.’
We were chuffed that it really upset the NME’s cartoonist Ray Lowry. It
was just the gossip column of the NME and we wanted to change it into
something else. I’ve never felt I was a particularly superficial, escapist
person, so I suppose at the time I didn’t think I was looking a little silly
talking about strawberry daiquiris. Because I was writing about other
things as well.
I remember being insanely excited in 1981–2, totally caught up in this
New Pop that you’d been prophesying, and then it had come true: suddenly the charts were overrun with wonderful things . . . But then in
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Your writing seemed to parallel the music: with post-punk, it was stark
and clean and bordering on abstract, which suited the music, and then
with New Pop it became much brighter and lighter, frisking along in this
giddy way. Were you consciously trying to come up with new ways of
mirroring the spirit of the music in your prose?
Definitely. I wanted to make it feel as you read something that you could
get the music. Even the way the pieces looked on the page, the way they
would sound in your head.
So it’s 1983 and you’re disillusioned, you’ve quit your NME staff-writer
job. And then you get the phone call from Trevor Horn, saying, ‘Do you
fancy starting a label?’ On the face of it, an odd couple.
In 1982–3 both of us were questioning the value of what we did. I had
interviewed Trevor when he was in The Buggles and I’d told him to go
away and listen to Metal Box. And he just heard a load of noise, but the
fact that he was intrigued enough to even listen I thought was great.
Trevor had curiosity about things he didn’t know about. And he knew
there was a lot of things he didn’t know about. At the end of 1982 he’d
just worked with McLaren, and it opened up a whole world of music he
wasn’t aware of. What he knew was the pretty straightforward Beatles
craftsman approach to pop. But he knew that to keep moving forward
he needed new input. Meanwhile, I was going through a period of guilt
about how as a critic all I did was comment and carp. I had tried to make
things happen but ultimately I felt parasitical. I had this romantic idealism that I should contribute.
I was friends with ABC, and they’d been produced by Trevor, and we
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how. Instead of The Associates and Bow Wow Wow, it was now bands
like Kajagoogoo and Wham!.
After 1982 I blamed the recording industry for sucking the energy out of
things and making everything standardized. It felt like they’d really
recovered from punk and sorted themselves out. They’d been panicking
that they were losing control and now they’d got in control again.
Nineteen eighty-three was a weird year for me anyway, as I’d just left
NME and stopped writing full-time. I left the NME at twenty-five, feeling too old. I had gone into writing about music as a writer, not as a rock
critic. I tried always to develop the writing, so I never structured an interview the same. My proudest moment was The Monochrome Set interview: I called each member of the band a number, not by name. I
remember I got a postcard from number 6.
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both showed up on the same day for ‘The Look of Love’ video to make
fools of ourselves in the video. So I got to know Trevor then. And then I
interviewed him again on the basis of the Duck Rock record he did with
McLaren and ABC’s Lexicon of Love – these two extraordinary records.
Then he got the opportunity to do a label and he rang me up. I was supposed to do some TV show but for some reason I stormed off. By storming off I managed to get this phone call from Trevor. And it was his last
attempt at getting hold of me.
We had no idea what role I would play. I never had a title. And then
ZTT became not so much an odd couple but an odd threesome, because
much to my surprise after a few months I realized that his wife Jill
Sinclair was heavily involved as well, on the business side. The idea of
giving some nut from the NME a record label was preposterous, but
that’s what I thought had happened! But Chris Blackwell did give me
extraordinary freedom within the Island company, who were fundamentally sponsoring ZTT. For a few months there was an enormous postNME madness that I got going, creating campaigns and names of
groups. In a stupid sense the fantasy I had about New Pop in the eighties, it came true with me. So there was a glorious narrative purity to it.
You did the infamous ZTT sleevenotes, but it was actually Martin Fry
who got there first with the ABC singles. Although they were more a
retro touch for ABC, a period allusion harking back to the era when
records always had sleevenotes.
Early on, especially with Art of Noise, the original plan was that they
would almost be like monthly magazines with music inside them. I wrote
them all, except for one that Ian Penman did for a ZTT sampler. Ian’s
one alienated the whole planet. And there was a hiccup right at the start,
because the Family [Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair] felt that I’d made a
pornographic video for Frankie’s ‘Relax’. Bernard Rose directed it, but I
made it very clear what I wanted and he was only too happy to supply.
Trevor was in New York producing Foreigner, and Jill got him to call me
from New York to complain. So he hadn’t seen it, but he was, ‘You’ve
done a fucking pornographic video!’ It was an odd combination of energies really.
Had you known the Frankie Goes to Hollywood boys from your days of
writing about the Liverpool scene, which always had strong ties with
Manchester?
I knew Paul Rutherford from The Spitfire Boys. And Holly Johnson
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But it was The Art of Noise that was really you inventing a pop group,
right?
Chris Blackwell actually signed ZTT to Island because of Art of Noise.
That’s what he was really interested in. I envisaged Art of Noise as the
house band, playing on the records of all the groups on the label, like
Motown had a house band.
Were you officially the fourth member? Or fifth, counting Trevor Horn?
I thought I was. Even if I only thought of the name, I think that was
enough. And I acted as if I was. J. J. Jeczalik memorably said later that I
was the tea boy. I did take credit because I named all the songs and I
named the record and I edited it with Trevor out of a lot of material. A
lot of it was high-tech jamming, so quite formless. Trevor didn’t really
quite know what to do with it, but because of my interest in avant-garde
music I could see we could take this bit and isolate that bit.
How were Art of Noise as people?
Working with Anne Dudley was fantastic. We were having a lot of fun
inventing this group. But as soon as it became a legal thing, they wanted
a group – just those three. I’d gone into it to invent a house band for
Trevor on a purely theoretical level, and I had no inkling of the legal side
of it. I just assumed whoever it was would always be The Art of Noise,
so long as Trevor was the musical director. That’s how I plotted the
development of the band in my ten-year plan. I had all these ideas and
plans, and then The Art of Noise left ZTT and became a normal group,
a novelty group, everything I hated.
There’s a Europhile thing running right through ZTT: the Dada and
Futurism allusions of Art of Noise, the signing of Anne Pigalle as postmodern chanteuse, Propaganda as Moroder meets Fritz Lang. But it also
runs through a lot of your NME writing – your championing of labels
like Les Disques du Crépuscule, for instance. Almost like your motto
was, ‘Forget America, look to Europe.’
I was very keen early on to be very European. ZTT was almost like if
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from being in Big in Japan. I must admit, when Trevor brought the idea
up, I thought it was highly unlikely, because I remembered them from
Liverpool. They were on The Tube TV show as an unsigned band and
Trevor saw something in them. I liked the idea that they were northern
and that there was a gay element. I kinda thought it could be the fun I
wanted to have – to invent a pop group.
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pop music had evolved out of what music was like before the Second
World War, before American rock’n’roll happened.
Do you think the – rather belated – BBC ban on ‘Relax’ was crucial in
pushing Frankie over the top? Because the record was out for quite a
while and it wasn’t really taking off.
I think Mike Read, the Radio One DJ who started the ban, was responding to the ‘licking shit’ line. I think he was reading the back of the 12inch single, where I’d put a pornographic sleevenote. I’d rung up Holly
Johnson and said, ‘Look, I’m going to put an abbreviated pornographic
novel on the back of the 12-inch, is that OK?’ And he went, ‘Yeah, all
right.’ I figured that was the kind of label you want to be on – your label
manager’s putting a groovy porn novel on the back of your single.
It feels like Frankie reached its conceptual end with the third single, ‘The
Power of Love’. You had taboo sexuality with ‘Relax’, you had war and
Armageddon with ‘Two Tribes’, and then this schmaltzy Christmas single about love, salvation, redemption. Three of the biggest themes ever;
three number 1s. Then they should have quit, on the highest of highs.
I agree. My plan – which was again the height of naivety and yet the
height of sophistication – was to finish off the trilogy with God, then sell
them to Sony for £5 million. Sony would have been quite happy to pay
that amount. But by then Trevor and Jill wanted to sell them in America.
I said, ‘You’ll never sell them in America.’ They thought Frankie were
The Village People in America. One of my favourite things I ever did
conceptually was to kill them off completely in America by getting them
to cover ‘Born to Run’. I saw them play in San Francisco and they started
‘Born to Run’, and people were horrified.
I wanted every ZTT act to cover songs that would eventually create a
history of pop. With Frankie we did some interesting ones, and then I
wanted them to do ‘Heroin’ to be on the back of ‘Power of Love’. But
that’s when it all started to slide. The band refused. The other time the
band bit back was when we were doing the film. We had Martin Amis
doing the screenplay and Nic Roeg directing, but they wouldn’t do it.
The scenario was that a plane took off from Heathrow with Frankie
going to Hollywood, and while they were in the air there was a nuclear
explosion, so when they landed in Hollywood it’s all post-apocalyptic
creatures. But it never happened. It’s funny when you have to deal with
real people.
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You said once that ZTT was eighteen months of mad, brilliant fun, and
then two years of no fun at all.
More, because I made stupid attempts to get back to what I wanted it to
be. I hated the fact that it died badly. I always wanted a better ending. I
was a major part in the signing of 808 State. I spent nine months of my
life trying to sign 808 to what was then a really unhip label. Somehow I
managed it, but by then I was so exhausted I just faded away. The bit
that I like is the conceptualizing and the fantasy, but it got harder and
harder to do that.
For me the disappointment with ZTT and Frankie is that I’d got a plan
that I wanted to develop over ten, fifteen years. I planned for a quiet
period after Frankie’s preposterous and absurd beginning. I signed a ‘systems music’, minimalist composer, Andrew Poppy, and a French torch
singer, Anne Pigalle. But because it got so successful so early it became a
business thing very quickly. I couldn’t really carry on the level of theoretical excitement I was having because it was becoming real in their way,
which was about the business.
In some ways Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm album was the ultimate
ZTT art-i-fact.
Trevor was spending so much time on this one track, ‘Slave to the
Rhythm’, that I said, ‘Let’s make it an album.’ Because then the record
sells for the cost of an album, not a single. The idea of the record as an
autobiography, that was like Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes. Grace
Jones on Grace Jones.
Grace Jones was that rare thing, the artist who’s perfectly happy to be
manipulated and framed. Whereas Frankie chafed at the public perception of them being puppets. And of course, they were genuinely exploited.
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Why wouldn’t the band go along with it?
I think it comes back to this weird thing: if you’re manipulated, it doesn’t
matter if the people manipulating you are getting you to do fantastic
stuff and getting you to work with great people, you still feel manipulated. You want to do it yourself. So instead of doing ‘Heroin’ they covered ‘Suffragette City’. They didn’t understand why it was such a bad
idea, why it didn’t mean anything. When we came to discuss the second
album’s title, I wanted to call it Liverpool because that’s where they were
going back to. I knew it was all over. Holly wanted to call it something
like The Jewelled Minds of Persia.
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That’s the embarrassment that I have really. It wasn’t as bad as it
could’ve been, as they said it was. But in another sense, they were badly
treated. Recording, publishing, studio – all being locked in the same
deal. It was like a fifties contract. They were being recorded and published by the same company, which is ultimately pretty unfair. There was
also the factor of Holly within the group. Because Holly wrote all the
songs he generated a fair amount of cash. But someone like Paul
Rutherford was getting nothing, because there were no royalties coming
through on account of there being a lot of recoupable costs. And I
always felt he was the most important one in the group.
It’s a shame that something set up on such glorious, idealistic principles – ZTT – should be shattered by the mundane. That’s fundamentally
why we were an odd couple, because I was coming from pleasure and
Trevor was coming from business.
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TREVOR HORN
Producer/ZTT co-founder
What was your entry into the world of music?
My father was a double-bass player in a dance band, The Joe Clarke
Band. So I played bass guitar from when I was twelve. I used to sit in for
him sometimes. And I was in a youth orchestra. I could sight-read music.
I tried to join groups but I found their lack of musical knowledge a bit
. . . I couldn’t communicate with them. So I ended up in a strange limbo
where I could easily make a living, but it was playing shit. Barring a couple of excursions into trying to be in rock bands, that’s pretty much what
I did for twelve years, from the age of eighteen. When I was twenty-five
[circa 1974], I built a studio and started to round up local musicians and
tried to get them to do things, fixing people’s songs up for songwriting
competitions. One day someone told me, ‘What you’re doing is being a
record producer.’ After that it took me four or five years to have a hit.
You once said that, starting out, your motor idea was that pop could be
more exciting than it was – more crammed with ideas.
The whole seventies thing was so monolithic. But there were three things
at the end of that decade that were a really big influence: Kraftwerk’s
The Man Machine, Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, and Abba. I hated
punk. It was so fake anyway. Those groups were produced to hell. The
Sex Pistols had Chris Thomas producing, but most of the other bands
were so thick they didn’t even have the sense to get a proper producer.
Punk was so crap it made you feel like you could do anything. Like, ‘If
people will swallow that . . .’
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Dollar was the first thing I produced. They’d had a few hits. They
were a cabaret act, really. It was my wife Jill’s idea to produce it. I
thought it was a terrible idea! But Dollar seemed to love the idea.
Thereza Bazar said, ‘You make the record and we’ll just front it.’ I cowrote the first two singles with Bruce Woolley – we did ‘Hand Held in
Black and White’ and ‘Mirror Mirror’ in one afternoon. I had this idea
of Vince Hill meets Kraftwerk: something very middle-of-the-road and
straightforward but with a techno rhythm section. That pretty much
describes the output of the British pop business for the last ten years! But
back then, 1980, no one had tried it. There was one week when ‘Mirror
Mirror’ halted at number 41 in the charts. I was already working on the
third Dollar single, ‘Give Me Back My Heart’, and the A&R guy is suddenly, ‘Maybe you should stop work.’ But then ‘Mirror Mirror’ went up
again the next week and was a big hit. I probably put way too much
effort into those Dollar singles, more than the project justified, just
because I was enjoying myself. Thereza’s voice was perfect for technology. But their record label weren’t interested in me producing their whole
album because it would cost too much money.
I was shocked because Dollar were getting loads of press. I had no idea
they would suddenly become hip. I read this review by Paul Morley of a
Tina Turner concert, and suddenly in the middle of it he said, ‘But there’s
nothing as sublime as Dollar’s “Mirror Mirror”.’ I couldn’t believe it!
Press-wise, I’d had a hard time when doing The Buggles. You know,
you’re reading an interview with the band and it says, ‘Trevor Horn says,
a piece of food clinging to the side of his face . . .’ I spent a year wanting
to belt Morley, because he’d done an interview with Buggles in NME and
called us ‘dirty old men with moderne mannerisms’. In a way, he wasn’t
wrong. It was one of our failings as The Buggles that we didn’t have a
manifesto. I learned this when I worked with ABC and I watched Martin
Fry and saw how well he had the whole music-paper thing worked out.
The Buggles, we hadn’t even thought about it. We just made this record,
and suddenly you’re out in the sunlight and some journalist’s asking you
questions.
Well, Martin Fry was reared on the music press and he did a fanzine,
Modern Drugs. He could easily have ended up a music journalist, rather
than fronting ABC.
Martin was a brilliant lyric writer. The words on Lexicon of Love are
great. When you work on something as a producer, the more you hear
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Dollar’s Thereza Bazar and David Van Day had been in Guys and Dolls,
so showbiz was in their veins. But Martin Fry doesn’t seem like a natural
in the same way. His voice is slightly inflexible, doesn’t have a great
range. What made you think he could be a pop star?
That was my wife again. Jill said, ‘There’s this band from Sheffield
you’ve got to see. Everyone says they’re really good, and they need a producer.’ At that point ABC had had one hit, ‘Tears Are Not Enough’, but
they hadn’t liked the producer they’d worked with. When I first met
them, they had this old songwriters’ magazine from the fifties, and it had
this strip cartoon of a songwriter with a cigarette in his mouth and a
pork-pie hat sitting at the piano. I didn’t understand what they were
about at all, with their interest in disco, because to me, having gone
through the seventies – I was about thirty-two then – disco didn’t have
any real heart in it. It was functional music, for people to dance to. ABC
said to me – it was Steve Singleton who said it – ‘If you produce us, you’ll
be the most fashionable producer in the world.’ I was really taken with
that. I thought, ‘How funny that they have that arrogance.’ So I said I’d
do one record with them and see how it went. That was ‘Poison Arrow’.
We rehearsed it for a day in the studio and the middle wasn’t quite right,
so I told them we needed something in here. Steve Singleton came up
with something that I could’ve thought of myself, but I wouldn’t have
suggested it because I would’ve thought it wasn’t their thing. Because
they told me they were punks. So they work up this whole bit in the middle, a girl talking. I thought it was a great idea. And that was the first
time I thought, ‘Ah, this could be good.’ So we spent two days doing
‘Poison Arrow’, but it was still kind of ordinary. So I said, ‘How good do
you want it to be? It can be like this or we can make it better.’ Martin Fry
said, ‘We want it as good as you can make it.’ So then I went back to it
and really started work: programmed the whole rhythm track with the
very primitive sequencer set-up I had at the time, then made everyone
play on top of that.’
Were ABC any cop as instrumentalists?
Surprisingly enough, they were. Mark White was a really good guitar
player, and the drummer, David Palmer, plays with Rod Stewart now.
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the lyric – if it’s crap – the more you come to despise it. Martin’s lyrics,
the more I heard them, the more I saw in them. Like with the better Joni
Mitchell lyrics.
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You made ABC’s sound much bigger and more sumptuous than the
spare, dry funk of the first single, ‘Tears Are Not Enough’. Did you have
to get session players in?
I used Anne Dudley. She did all the keyboards. ABC didn’t have a keyboard player, so that made a lot of difference. But the material was great,
and Mark White had loads of ideas. On ‘The Look of Love’ he programmed the whole bass part. They had it all worked out. I helped them
with the end of the song – getting the arrangement and getting Martin to
talk at the end.
The thing about a really good album is that all the tracks are sort of
similar to each other. One of my favourite albums of all time is Hats by
The Blue Nile, and all the songs on that record are kind of similar.
Lexicon of Love was like that because it was all about Martin Fry getting dumped by this girl. A specific girl who’d dumped him in real life.
So all of the songs have that outrage and anger: ‘Tears Are Not Enough’,
‘Poison Arrow’, ‘Date Stamp’. And that’s why we had the girl on ‘The
Look of Love’. Martin sings, ‘When the girl has left you out on the
table,’ and the girl says, ‘Goodbye.’ I suggested, ‘Why don’t we get the
actual girl in to do that, the one you’ve written these songs for?’ So that’s
the girl. It was very funny.
The whole vibe with the strings and the deluxe arrangements is dashing
Hollywood romance. But the lyrics are actually really biting, really bitter.
It dawned on me as I was working on the record. See, when I would talk
to my contemporaries, they didn’t quite get the idea of the project, and
I’d say, ‘It’s like Bob Dylan, but it’s disco music instead of an acoustic
guitar. The guy’s actually writing about what he really feels, but the
record’s going to be played in a dance club, so it’s gonna have a function.’ They didn’t get it. But they got it eventually.
The Lexicon of Love sound is kinda disco meets Nelson Riddle’s Sinatra
meets Burt Bacharach meets Motown. Did that come from them or from
you?
They wrote the songs, so they were responsible for the harmonic structures. I just elaborated or encouraged them. But don’t forget I also had a
Fairlight, which was the first digital sampler. So there’s bits of that all
over the record.
Were you the first person in UK pop to have a Fairlight?
I was certainly the first reasonably irresponsible person to have one! I
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Malcolm McLaren made a lot of comments in 1982 about how much he
detested New Pop and the whole early-eighties cult of the producer, so
it’s bizarre that he ended up working with you, the ultimate producer!
When I heard he was looking for a producer, I was curious to see what
he was like. And my wife wanted to tell him off for punk rock! But it’s
impossible not to be charmed by Malcolm. When I first met him, we
were so obviously utterly different. Malcolm was wearing this funny pair
of trousers that looked like a baby’s nappy and this buffalo girl’s hat.
And I’d never been a very extravagant dresser; it’s just not my thing.
What intrigued me initially was what he said about how black kids in
New York were listening to Depeche Mode. I’d got this probably erroneous idea that black people in America listened to soul music. He said,
‘Oh no,’ and he told me about scratching. He had a cassette of the World
Famous Supreme Team, and I’d never heard anything like it. He also had
a record by Afrika Bambaataa, ‘Planet Rock’, the one with the big chunk
of ‘Trans-Europe Express’ on it. So we were on the same page right
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was using it as a gimmick, because I was desperate to sell records. That
was my prime concern: success. But look, I was in love with Nelson
Riddle. ABC were hinting at that sound, in the same way that Frankie
Goes to Hollywood, if you listen to the demo the basic idea is Donna
Summer meets heavy metal. ABC had this strange throwback aspect.
The B-side to ‘Poison Arrow’ is this great thing, ‘Theme from Mantrap’.
Lexicon was the first time I got into vocal comping, which is compositing the vocal from lots of different takes. Martin had a hard time
with the previous producer, who reduced him to a gibbering wreck. If
you’re a little bit negative, it’s possible for the singer to become very discouraged. I figured out pretty early on that Martin wasn’t a professional
singer that would naturally sing the song perfectly every time. So I got
him to sing it six or seven times and then I’d piece it together. He loved
that way of doing it, and I managed to get really good vocals out of him.
Martin was great fun to be around. He used to do this thing with his
hair so it looked just like Hitler, and he’d put on this black tape moustache and do this strange dance. ABC were all funny guys. David Bowie
came to sit in on one of the sessions. When he went, he couldn’t find his
bag, and he came back a couple of times looking for it. Then Steven
Singleton came in and said, ‘I’ve freaked David Bowie out! I’ve fucking
hidden his bag, he’s going everywhere looking for his bag. I’ve freaked
Bowie out!’
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away. And he played me South African music which I liked because I
loved the bass parts. So I was intrigued, but I said, ‘Are you going to
sing?’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, no problem.’ He’d done ‘You Need Hands’
in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.
At that time the choice was work with McLaren or with Spandau
Ballet. They were huge fans of ABC. Now Spandau’s next album – that
was the record with ‘True’ on it – went on to sell a hell of a lot more than
Duck Rock did. But I fancied Malcolm; he seemed like a hoot. And we
went off round the world. I tried to quit a couple of times because I really
didn’t see any way out of it! It was all so strange. One of the first things
we did was go to Johannesburg. This was during apartheid. He went out
first and assembled a bunch of musicians, and then we worked nineteen
straight nights in a studio in the middle of Johannesburg. The major
labels had tried to fob us off with what Malcolm called ‘Uncle Toms’,
but he went out and found people on the streets who weren’t used by the
South African majors. There was this great moment when Malcolm sang
for the first time. The Zulu women were all sleeping, and when Malcolm
started singing they all started to wake up. And when he finished singing
this little Zulu lady said, ‘Trevor, he can’t sing.’ In Malcolm’s defence, he
never made any bones about the fact that he had very little sense of
rhythm and wasn’t an experienced singer.
The single ‘Buffalo Gals’ came about because there was this recording
of this square-dancing song by Piute Pete and his Country Cousins on a
1966 Folkways album of square dances. And we had a few failed songs
from the South Africa sessions, with great backing vocals that these Zulu
ladies had done. I was looking at this as a way of killing two birds with
one stone. And I knew Malcolm wanted to do a scratching song called
‘ET Come Home’. And I said, ‘Why don’t we do a scratch version of
“Buffalo Gals”?’ I couldn’t see a country-and-western version of it selling. We flew the World Famous Supreme Team over from New York and
showed them the lyrics, and they said, ‘We can’t rap this Ku Klux Klan
shit.’ I said, ‘Of course this could be rap,’ so I went in the recording
booth and I rapped it. I looked out and I couldn’t see them through the
control-booth window, so I went in the control booth, and they were
both on the floor, crying with laughter. They thought me rapping
‘Buffalo Gals’ was the funniest thing they’d ever seen in their lives. But
they still wouldn’t rap it, and in the end they sang the middle bit and it
was Malcolm that rapped.
At the end of ‘Buffalo Gals’ a girl says, ‘Too much snow white.’ I took
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The Duck Rock sessions basically germinated The Art of Noise, right?
I guess that’s when Art of Noise came together first, because with
Malcolm it was so difficult to know what was going to happen. So I put
together a music department. Anne Dudley was the music department
and J. J. Jeczalik was the rhythm department. So Malcolm would have
an idea or the World Famous Supreme Team would have an idea, and I’d
say, ‘Music,’ and Anne would play something. And it evolved into a
good team. A lot of the stuff on Duck Rock, like ‘Hobo Scratch’, was
pretty hardcore stuff for that time.
‘Buffalo Gals’ especially is an ancestor of all these sample-collage DJ
records of the late eighties. It even looks ahead to rave, jungle and Big
Beat.
It’s certainly a hip hop classic. There was a moment once when I was
walking through Soho, and there’s these two hardcore black guys breakdancing on the pavement, and the ghetto blaster’s playing ‘Hobo
Scratch’. At the time I was working with Foreigner, which I wasn’t enjoying in the slightest, and I had a nice clean pair of trousers and a jacket on.
And I stood there listening and watching, and I thought, ‘If I tell these
guys I made that record, they would never, ever believe me.’
So how did Art of Noise actually come into being?
From doing the Malcolm record we had all these samples from all over
the world. And right after Malcolm I did Yes’s 90125. Some of the stuff
on the single ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ is from a Supreme Team tape.
J. J. came in one day and said, ‘Listen to this.’ He’d looped Alan White
from Yes’s drums. I’d just come back from New York, where I’d seen
Afrika Bambaataa in a club, and I’d asked him who his favourite bands
were, and he’d said a live album by The Guess Who. It had all these
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that from a little piece of conversation from the World Famous Supreme
Team’s radio show. Dave Lee Travis immediately picked up on the single
and started to play it all the time on his daytime Radio One show. But
one day I got a call from the controller of Radio One. I thought they’d
twigged the drug reference, but it turned out it was just to give me the
Radio One DJs award. I really thought I was in trouble!
‘Buffalo Gals’ is actually the last track we did for the album. There
was a blueprint for at least four innovative albums on Duck Rock: Paul
Simon’s Graceland was the same kind of thing that we’d already done –
we did some voodoo stuff, some great Cuban stuff.
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great drum breaks on it. So when I heard this drum loop made out of
some playing by Alan White from Yes, I knew immediately that we were
onto something. That became ‘Beatbox’, the first Art of Noise track.
After Morley heard ‘Beatbox’ and a couple of other things he came up
with the name The Art of Noise and the whole Futurist concept – pages
and pages of The Art of Noise manifesto. I thought the idea of no one
ever meeting Art of Noise was interesting.
So Paul Morley was a proper member of Art of Noise?
That was one of the problems, you see. Morley would come up with a
title like ‘Moments in Love’, and then we’d do a track called ‘Moments
in Love’. One thing Morley was always good at was inspiring you to
want to make a record. But then he’d go on television and say, ‘I am The
Art of Noise.’ And I’d come in, and the band would all be saying, ‘Have
you heard what Paul said?’ It didn’t bother me, but it bothered the others a bit.
How was it that you and Morley got together? He had done that unflattering Buggles interview in NME, but then did a much more appreciative
one later about you as the hippest producer of the moment.
I met him again at the shoot for the video of ‘The Look of Love’. ABC
invited me down, and Paul had a cameo in it. I was wary because I’d
wanted to thump him for a long time, but he’d said some nice things
about me recently. When they shot his cameo, in the middle of the video,
he tried to kiss me, and he took me completely by surprise and I pushed
him off. The next week’s NME had a picture of me recoiling from him. I
suddenly started to see how it works: if you get friendly with these guys,
the whole music-paper thing can be useful – it’s a game. Anyway, I had
this romantic notion about starting a record label, how it would all be
fun and creative. And I thought of Morley. My wife was a bit sceptical.
Jill’s been my manager for twenty-two years now; she runs the business.
And she wasn’t sure what to make of Morley. Maybe because he turned
up with a small plastic handbag the first day. But he’d done an interview
with me and taken all the things I said and presented my ideas so much
better than I did, and I was impressed. That was the impetus.
Art of Noise’s Into Battle was the first thing ZTT put out. It was
Sunday night and I walked out of the Yes album. I had mixed most of the
album and sent it to America, and the manager phoned me up and said
the guys didn’t like it. And I was so beside myself with anger, I was like,
‘Fuck it, I’ve had enough of this crappy old band.’ So I came straight
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Starting with Into Battle, every ZTT sleeve looked fantastic. And then
there were the infamous sleevenotes . . . What did you think of Paul’s
gnomic scribblings?
I liked it. Lots of people used to have a go at me about it. And, of course,
I’d meet people who’d start to talk to me as though I was Paul Morley
and I’d written those sleevenotes. And I’m not like that at all, of course.
That was Morley’s thing. Of course, I had no idea what he was on about.
But some of it I liked a lot. I loved this idea of a manifesto. Quite often
musicians aren’t very good at romanticizing themselves. Unfortunately,
those sleevenotes caused Morley to fall out majorly with most of the
artists fairly quickly. Artists don’t like that sort of thing. Artists basically
want the record label to be a bunch of businessmen that they can curse
and despise to give them an excuse when their own mediocrity comes
through. The last thing they want is a creative record label, because they
want all the creative part for themselves. I don’t know why really.
So how did Frankie Goes to Hollywood play out in terms of the gap
between the raw material of the songs and what actually got on the
recordings? Did the human software of the band contribute anything to
the final result?
They didn’t play on ‘Relax’. They all sang, and they could have played.
But it’s just they were up in Liverpool when it happened. I was just . . .
Look, ‘Relax’ had to be a hit, and it was just at a time when there was a
load of new technology. I tried recording it with the band. Then I tried it
with another band [the Blockheads]. And in the end I did it with some
new technology that I’d got that enabled me to lock a rhythm box to a
Fairlight. In fact, our version of ‘Relax’ is simpler playing-wise than the
way Frankie use to play it. A very simple record in some respects.
With later records the band started to play more and more. The terrible irony of Frankie is that by the time they split up at the end of the
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down here to SARM studios. And I phoned Morley and said, ‘We’re
going to put together the first Art of Noise 12-inch.’ We got all the tapes
out – we had all these bits – and we extracted about twenty-five minutes,
which is Into Battle. It was like a labour of love, a sort of cathartic thing.
And it caused havoc: it caused the British Phonographic Institute to
change the rules about the length of music you were allowed to have on
a 12-inch single. Luckily, we’d done a deal with Chris Blackwell, and he
had a flat in New York, so he knew the music would go down well in
New York. It was modern.
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second album, they were a pretty good band. It’s just that no one was
interested in good bands; they were interested in sensations. They had
a great version of ‘Two Tribes’ that they used to play, and most of the
parts of ‘Two Tribes’ – apart from the guitar part – came from them.
You know when ABC played ‘Poison Arrow’, and I said, ‘How good do
you want it to be?’ and then we made a record like painting by numbers? With Frankie I didn’t even ask them – I just did it. Because they
wanted a success too. I knew ‘Relax’ stood a chance of being a hit. The
way Holly sang it was so hooky. He had such a full-on, flat-out voice.
Big, and right in your face.
How did you get the BIG-ness of sound on ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’?
Did you have special technical tricks with production?
In actual fact, the key you play a song in and the instrumentation and
what notes people play have much more bearing on whether a track
sounds big than any kind of technology. ‘Relax’ is more or less perfect in
as much as it’s in E. So you’re playing the most satisfying note on the
bass guitar all the way through, which is the bottom E. ‘Relax’ was also
rhythm pattern number 41 – my pet pattern on my new drum machine.
And at that point it reminded me of an English folk dance, a Cornish
dance or square dance. And being able to lock the drum pattern to the
Fairlight meant you could program the bass going boom-boom-boom
and lock that with the drum machine also going boom-boom-boom in
straight four-to-the-floor rhythm.
So that’s where the song’s remorseless pounding feel came from. The
tune itself is curiously slight.
It’s more like a jingle than a song. One verse repeated with lots of different inflections. As we were doing ‘Relax’ I became more and more convinced it was all about sex. That sort of beat was like a shagging beat.
The more we worked on the record, and the more I met the guys, the
more I thought the song was about sex. They were pretty obsessed with
it. By the end we were thinking of giant orgasms and stuff like that.
Did you feel like you were doing something subversive, making this
‘shagging’ monster tune with the lyric about coming? Or was it just a bit
of a lark?
I thought it was just being funny. And the radio pluggers were saying,
‘Oh yeah, they’ll definitely play this.’ It was Morley who got it banned
by putting all the stuff on the back of the cover about licking shit off
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That year, 1984, was the last spasm of the Cold War. Reagan was talking
about the Evil Empire and his Star Wars space missiles plan. The Soviet
president, Chernenko, was the last of the Politburo hardliners, just
before Gorbachev came in.
There was still that element of danger.
What do you think of the argument that it would have been conceptually
perfect if Frankie had stopped after their third single, having completed
the big-themed trilogy of sex (‘Relax’), war (‘Two Tribes’) and religion
(‘The Power of Love’) and scored three number 1s in a row with their
first three singles?
I wouldn’t have minded if they’d stopped after ‘Two Tribes’, to be honest. I never liked ‘The Power of Love’ that much. Having to do three 12inch mixes of ‘Power of Love’ was a chore, whereas it had been great fun
doing all the remixes with ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’. In ‘The Power of
Love’, when Holly sings that line, ‘Burns like fire,’ I always imagined he’s
taking a piss and the burning sensation is VD.
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leather boots. So when we did ‘Two Tribes’, we tried to do the same
thing. We got that Patrick Allen guy in to do the voice-over. He did that
record that the government was going to play on the radio if there was a
nuclear attack. But he said, ‘Oh, I’ll get into trouble. I signed the Official
Secrets Act.’ But then he said, ‘Oh, what the hell, I’ll do it. It’s a free
country.’ He was in the studio and he remembered a bit of the text we’d
forgotten. And he said that bit about ‘If your grandmother or anyone
else should die while in the shelter . . .’ And I was behind the mixing
desk, thinking, ‘Wow, this is fantastic,’ and I couldn’t wait to get to do
the 12-inch because I knew I was going to use that bit over and over
again, because I thought it was the most chilling thing. And Morley had
written a bit for him that went, ‘Mine is the last voice you will ever hear.’
And if you listen on the session tapes Patrick Allen’s going, ‘Oh dear,
that’s a bit depressing, isn’t it? I certainly hope not!’ I guess at the time
we thought it was mildly subversive or had some sort of relevance.
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2: OVERVIEWS
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JOHN LYDON AND PUBLIC IMAGE LTD:
TWO BIOGRAPHIES
John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs
(St Martin’s Press)
In recent years, John Lydon has come across as a bit of a relic. When the
Sex Pistols retrospective Kiss This was released, he even talked of reforming the band – but only for a million quid. Nonetheless, Lydon’s
long-awaited punk memoir manages to resurrect the inspirational antihero who changed so many lives in 1977. His corrosive wit and engaging blend of arrogance and self-deprecation shine through the pages of
Rotten, despite its rambling, repetitive, seemingly verbatim style.
The most fascinating part of Rotten concerns Lydon’s early life – from
the grotesque, near-Dickensian poverty of his upbringing in London to
his teenage troublemaking at school. His sense of being a misfit was
intensified by a long bout of meningitis, which caused amnesia, coma
and hallucinations, and left him with bad eyesight (source of the
famously piercing Rotten stare) and mild epilepsy. In his late teens, he
encountered the proto-punk milieu of art-school rockers and squatland
bohemians. Lydon and his pals hung out at Sex, the boutique owned by
Malcolm McLaren, who was managing a band of ruffians called The Sex
Pistols. Lydon became their singer, Johnny Rotten.
Punk was a short-lived alliance between smart working-class kids like
Lydon, middle-class bohos and hooligans: the enemy that united them
was boredom. Older mentor figures like McLaren added ideas from sixties radical movements like situationism (which Lydon now dismisses as
‘mind games for the muddled classes’). Punk’s central paradox was
embedded in Lydon’s character: he was deliberately provocative, then
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mocked the outrage he’d incited. His cultural terrorism was crystallized
in ‘Anarchy in the UK’ – ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to
get it’ – no goals, just goading the establishment for the sake of it. The
Pistols were fuelled by animosity – towards each other as well as the outside world. The long-term legacy of the Pistols has more to do with this
negativity, with Sid Vicious’s macho flirtation with life on the edge, than
with the sensitivity or intelligence Lydon brought to the band. Which is
why Never Mind the Bollocks is now regarded as a hard-rock classic –
not, as Rotten and McLaren hoped, the death of rock – and metal bands
like Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe cover Pistols songs.
Although Lydon’s main musical passions were dub reggae and avantgarde rock (Can, Captain Beefheart), this never found a place in the
Pistols’ raucous rock’n’roll. While the punk audience was very pro-reggae,
punk rock itself was utterly Caucasian, replacing R&B syncopation with
a 4/4 martial beat. It wasn’t until Public Image Ltd, his post-Pistols ‘antirockist’ unit, that Lydon combined his love of arty chaos and black
hypno-rhythms. PiL and other post-punk experimentalists created a head
music that – like dub – expressed feelings of alienation and dread.
Ironically, Lydon barely mentions his life post-1978 – which produced
amazing records like Metal Box – as if he knows that people are only
really interested in his tumultuous, mythic years with the Pistols.
The reggae connection is crucial, however, because one of the most
interesting aspects of Rotten is captured in the subtitle. ‘No Irish, No
Blacks, No Dogs’ was a restriction commonly employed by landlords in
advertisements for tenants, before it was outlawed as racist. In sixties
and seventies London, the Irish were only slightly higher up the social
ladder than Caribbean immigrants. Both were outcast minorities, economic migrants from former British colonial territories. Lydon’s parents
were expatriate Irish, but he grew up alienated from his Gaelic roots.
Because of this, he felt ‘isolated and shallow inside’. He had a similar dispossessed, displaced ethnic identity to his friend Don Letts, a Jamaican
who’d grown up in Britain. Letts (later a member of the post-Clash band
Big Audio Dynamite) took Lydon to heavy roots-reggae clubs where
‘white people could never go . . . [Rastas] may not have liked his music
[i.e. punk rock], but it was like outlaws banding together . . .’ (these are
Letts’ words: he is one of numerous secondary sources interviewed and
quoted in the memoir).
Punk has been seen as an attempt to create a sort of white ethnic identity equivalent to Rastafarianism, based on a similar sense of exile.
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(Unpublished review for Vibe, 1995)
Phil Strongman, Metal Box: Stories from John Lydon’s Public Image
Limited (Helter Skelter Publishing)
My most vivid memory of Metal Box is a week before Christmas Day
1979. My parents were out, so I sneaked PiL’s album out of the airing
cupboard where they stashed the presents and for the first time prised off
the tin’s lid, then gingerly extracted the three discs tightly crammed
inside. Aged sixteen, I just couldn’t wait to play the record that was
being universally acclaimed as a giant step into a brave new world
beyond rock’s confines. As a result I crossed a line myself, between innocence and adulthood.
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Rotten mentions hip hop as the only form of music since punk to rival its
rebelliousness (Lydon is dismissive of grunge’s defeatism and contemptuous of rave’s escapism). Indeed, in 1984 he teamed up with Afrika
Bambaataa to record the single ‘World Destruction’, a track on which, in
his own way, Lydon raps as much as Bambaataa does.
If hip hop is the black punk, it’s because its world view chimes with
Lydon’s: he declares that ‘an absolute sense of individuality is my politics’. His is a precarious creed of the Individual vs The System – precarious, because when you feel solidarity with nobody but yourself, you’re
outnumbered from the start, and that way lies paranoia. Lydon’s fear of
the herd-mentality is very Nietzsche, very gangsta. His tragedy is that,
for all his contempt for earlier rock rebels like Mick Jagger, he’s ended up
just like them, a property-owning aristocrat (in Los Angeles Lydon even
did a bit of real-estate speculation). By believing in nobody but himself,
by disdaining community and populism as sheep-like, Lydon has ended
up a decrepit, self-parodic rock’n’roll monarch.
But then Lydon’s version of ‘anarchy’ was always less about communes
and workers’ councils and the prosaic practicality of self-government,
and far closer to the nineteenth-century anarchist doctrine ‘Individual
Sovereignty’, which decreed that each person was ‘the absolute despot or
sovereign’ of his life. Terrorists become tyrants, underdogs become overlords – that’s the oldest story in rock’n’roll, and it’s true of punks and rappers alike. For ‘an absolute sense of individuality’ is no kind of politics at
all – when it’s not delusional to the point of pathology, it’s simply
pathetic.
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Demystification was the whole point of Metal Box’s packaging, a
metallic canister of the type that ordinarily contains movie reels. Like
the band-as-corporation name Public Image Ltd, the matt-grey tin was
an attempt to strip away mystique, all the ‘bollocks’ of rock romanticism. But Metal Box, of course, just added to the mystique around PiL,
the group John Lydon formed after splitting with The Sex Pistols. Drab
yet imposing, standing out in record-shop racks or on the shelves of a
collection, the can instantly became a fetish object. And although its
aura was utilitarian, the packaging was actually less functional than a
normal album jacket. Instead of slipping the disc out of its sleeve, you
had to carefully ease out the three 45 rpm 12-inches, which were separated only by paper circles the same size as the platters. Removing the
vinyl without scratching it was a challenge. Almost thirty years later, my
three discs look in remarkably good nick considering I must have
played them hundreds of times. But then I was precious about my possessions: an avid post-punk fan hamstrung by weak finances, I owned
about six albums in toto, and Metal Box’s hefty £7.45 price tag was the
reason I’d requested it for Christmas, despite the delay this would mean
in hearing it.
All this user-unfriendly palaver with the discs did have the effect of
heightening the experience of playing Metal Box, giving it an almost ritualistic quality. PiL’s own motivations were partly malicious pranksterism and partly a serious attempt to deconstruct the Album. In interviews,
bassist Jah Wobble was adamant that you should definitely not play
Metal Box in sequence but listen to one side of a disc (two or three tracks
at most) at a time. Spreading around an hour of music across three
records encouraged listeners to reshuffle the running order as they saw
fit. The record became a set of resources rather than a unitary artwork.
‘Useful’ was a big PiL buzzword (that’s what they liked about disco – it
was danceable). It was a term that allowed Lydon to carry on opposing
himself to all things arty and pretentious, even as he perpetrated a
supreme feat of artiness with Metal Box.
Like Factory Records’ exquisitely designed releases of the same era,
Metal Box simultaneously extended the art-rock tradition of extravagant packaging (Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, for instance) while subverting it through its stark plainness (which, ironically, cost a bleedin’
fortune). The only precedent I can think of is Alice Cooper’s 1974 album
Muscle of Love, which came in a brown cardboard carton (Lydon, as it
happens, was a huge Alice fan). The concept for Metal Box originated
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with PiL’s design-conscious friend Dennis Morris, the court photographer at Lydon’s house in Gunter Grove, Chelsea, and also a member of
the all-black PiL-like band Basement 5. Where the sleeve of the debut
album Public Image lampooned rock’s cult of personality (Morris photographed the band in Vogue-style make-up and suits), Metal Box went
one step further to a blank impersonality, the absence of any kind of
image at all. Flowers of Romance, the third album, took a step too far
with its desultory Polaroid of band associate Jeanette Lee, but that was
long after Morris had been ousted from the PiL milieu.
Morris’s crucial contribution to PiL is something that comes through
loud and clear in the new PiL book, Metal Box: Stories from John
Lydon’s Public Image Limited (and yes, that misspelling of the band’s
name – not a good augury – is maintained doggedly from the front cover
right through to the book’s end). If author Phil Strongman is savvy
enough to name his tome after PiL’s totemic masterpiece, he’s less shrewd
in doggedly pursuing the story long after PiL ceased to be a creative
force. As Mark Fisher has noted, every pop story, followed through to its
narrative (in)conclusion, ends in ignominy or disappointment. So it is
with the PiL-brand-disgracing travesties Lydon released immediately
after Wobble (the group’s heart and soul) and then guitarist Keith Levene
(its musical brains) were ejected. More disheartening still, in a way, was
the mediocre competence of the PiL albums of the late eighties and early
nineties. Still, Strongman’s account of the ‘good years’ is rich in new
data, from deliciously incongruous trivia (Ted Nugent was Levene’s
choice to produce the first album! Led Zep manager Peter Grant was
mad keen to take on PiL as clients!) to more compelling revelations (the
mystery of whether ‘Poptones’, Metal Box’s stand-out track, is sung by a
murdered corpse or an abduction survivor abandoned and shivering in
the woods is settled).
As so often with rock biographies, though, quite a lot of the information tends to tarnish the reputations of the protagonists. Ironically, given
their fervent anti-rock stance (Lydon derided rock as a ‘disease’, something to be ‘cancelled’), PiL’s productivity was disabled by a thoroughly
rock’n’roll set of failings: drug addiction, drug paranoia, egomania,
money disputes, mismanagement. (PiL actually had no manager, on
account of Lydon’s bad experiences with Malcolm McLaren; the role
was portioned between Jeanette Lee and another Lydon crony, Dave
Crowe, and the band finances were kept in a box – cardboard, this time
– under Crowe’s bed.) Equally lamentably rock’n’roll is the Spinal Tap-
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like procession of drummers, five in the first two years (one of whom,
ex-Fall drummer Karl Burns, stayed in the band for just a few days, quitting after being the victim of a dangerous prank involving fire).
All the main players (and numerous extremely minor ones) are interviewed, with the glaring exception of Lydon himself. But that’s no surprise, because he’s consciously distanced himself from PiL over the
years. At some point he clearly grasped that his place in rock history
(and future income) depended on The Sex Pistols adventure and subsequently threw all his energies into burnishing the Johnny Rotten legend.
But I wonder if another factor behind Lydon’s silence is that the PiL
years are painful to contemplate – not just because of bad blood
(Wobble was one of his best friends) but because the music of Metal
Box, rooted in his true loves (Krautrock, Peter Hammill, dub) meant so
much to him. He really believed all that ‘rock is dead’ rhetoric, and was
sincere when he dismissed The Sex Pistols as way too traditional. And
for a moment back there rock’s intelligentsia concurred. Metal Box’s
stature in 1979–80 was so immense that many commentators invoked
Miles Davis’s early-seventies music as a reference point. Lester Bangs
declared that he’d stake a lifetime’s writing on Metal Box and Miles’s
Get Up with It. When his apartment caught fire, the first and only thing
Bangs grabbed as he fled to the street below in his jim-jams was that
grey tin can.
It’s the music inside that counts, though, isn’t it? My other vivid memory of Metal Box is taking it to school after our music teacher asked each
member of the class to bring in a favourite record and talk about it. I
played ‘Death Disco’ and ‘Poptones’, then regurgitated stuff I’d read in
NME about how PiL were radical for absorbing the influence of funk
and reggae. I wasn’t able to articulate what made their mutational
approach different and superior to contemporaries like The Police or,
indeed, Old Wave rock gods like the Stones when they disco-rocked it
with ‘Miss You’. But the lasting proof of PiL’s innovatory power is their
music’s ever-widening ripples of influence, which encompass Massive
Attack, Primal Scream (they hired Wobble for 1991’s ‘Higher than the
Sun’), Tortoise, Radiohead and many more. You can trace a line from
PiL via On U Sound (whose Adrian Sherwood had musical dealings with
Lydon, Levene and Wobble back then) to today’s dubstep, which, like
Metal Box, is Jamaican music with the sunshine extracted, roots reggae
without Rasta’s consoling dream of Zion.
PiL’s biggest influence, though, might be their rhetoric. The idea that
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(Frieze magazine, 2007)
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‘rock is obsolete’ (as Wobble put it in 1978) became a self-replicating
meme that inoculated an entire generation against the retro-virus by
directing them away from rock’s back pages and towards the cutting
edges of contemporary black music. In the age of downloading and
dematerialized sound-data, Metal Box has a fresh resonance for me as a
powerful argument in favour of the necessity for music to be physically
embodied. The record was significantly diminished in its subsequent
incarnation as Second Edition (the gatefold-sleeved double album it
became when the 50,000 limited edition Metal Box sold out). The CD
reissue, housed in a miniature metal canister, is almost risible to behold,
while its digitized sound lacks the warmth and weight of the original
deep-grooved 45 rpm 12-inches. Most crucially, you simply weren’t
meant to listen to Metal Box as one long, uninterrupted, seventy-minute
sequence. A 1979 pressing fetches $200 on the record-collector site
Gemm; the reproduction antique vinyl reissue of Metal Box from early
in the noughties isn’t cheap either. But this is one record you simply must
have, hold and hear in its original format.
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JOY DIVISION: TWO MOVIES
24 Hour Party People
No British city has a greater sense of self-mystique than Manchester.
Populous enough to swagger convincingly as a counter-capital to
London, yet still eclipsed by the latter’s concentration of political, financial and media power, Manchester has developed a retaliatory superiority complex: northern suss and spirit versus those smug, effete ‘southern
wankers’. Near the close of 24 Hour Party People – Michael Winterbottom’s lightly fictionalized movie about Factory, the legendary
Manchester post-punk record label – TV presenter and Factory CEO
Tony Wilson explains his motivations in terms of ‘civic pride’. This peculiar provincial patriotism is the heart of the film, but like so much in
Party People, it’s so thinly fleshed out it’s hard to see how someone not
familiar with (a) the Factory story, and (b) Britain’s class-inflected
regional antagonisms would even notice it.
Along with its damp climate and post-industrial grey decay (much
improved since the 1976–92 period covered in Party People, thanks to
urban regeneration funding), Manchester is justly renowned for music: a
series of epoch-defining bands, from Factory’s own Joy Division (and its
successor band New Order) through The Smiths to Stone Roses, Happy
Mondays (the other legendary Factory group) and Oasis. 24 Hour Party
People’s cardinal flaw is its failure to convey what made Joy Division and
Happy Mondays special, why they transcended local cult status and captured the national imagination.
Music qua music has always been a challenge for the rock movie,
which is why they tend to stick to the Behind the Music dirt’n’drama of
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interband conflicts, mismanagement, drug abuse; the dream of fameand-fortune achieved only for it to turn into nightmare. Neither music’s
germinal mysteries (jam sessions, the intracranial moment of inspiration)
nor its raptures (the solitary listener’s bliss, the crowd’s collective fervor)
lend themselves to narrative. Nonetheless, for a good thirty minutes
Party People seems to have pulled it off. The reconstructions of The Sex
Pistols’ 1976 performance at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall
(attended by just forty-two people, who became the kernel of the local
punk scene) and of an early Joy Division show transmit the real rush of
rock’n’roll history in the making. And the film seems to have struck an
inspired balance between docudrama realism and postmodern selfreflexive wit. Wilson, played by the brilliant British comedian Steve
Coogan, addresses the camera Alfie-style, narrating his own story and
helpfully pointing out when things have been distorted or made up for
extra mythic impact.
Almost immediately after Joy Division enter the picture, though, Party
People begins to unravel. The group’s vocalist Ian Curtis (Sean Harris)
was worshipped at the time as a seer plugged into the currents of dread
pervading post-punk Britain. In Party People you get no real sense of this
complicated, troubled figure. Approaching Wilson for the first time at a
punk gig, Curtis greets him with the words, ‘You’re a cunt.’ For no explicable reason, the movie leaves out what he said next: ‘’cause you haven’t
put us on television’ – a reference to Wilson’s So It Goes, at that time the
only TV show featuring pun k bands. So instead of demonstrating Curtis’s
ambition and hunger for stardom, the movie creates the impression of
aimless, loutish aggression. Similarly, Curtis’s epilepsy (a latent trait he
seems to have somehow harnessed for the convulsive trance-dance of his
stage performance, only for it to get out of control) is not set up at all, and
his suicide is botched, appearing as a seemingly impulsive act. In a typically pointless gesture of historical fidelity, we see Curtis watching
Herzog’s Stroszek on TV a few hours before hanging himself – just about
the only hint of Curtis’s true artiness. As a result of all this, when Wilson
gazes at Curtis in the chapel of rest and declares, ‘That’s the Che Guevara
of rock,’ the eulogy seems comically overstated and utterly unsubstantiated by what we’ve seen so far. Still, Curtis fares better than Joy Division’s
other members, who aren’t even formally introduced by name.
As for the label’s other two geniuses, Martin Hannett (Andy Serkis), the
maverick producer who had so much to do with the eerie and skeletal
Factory sound, comes across as little more than a foul-tempered drunk,
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while not a single shred of evidence is mustered to sustain Wilson’s
repeated claim that Happy Mondays’ singer Shaun Ryder (Danny
Cunningham) is the greatest poet since Yeats. What is actually depicted –
sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rave’n’roll – makes the Mondays look more like a
Mancunian Mötley Crüe.
Wilson hogs the screen, with much time devoted to an initially hilarious but steadily diminishing running joke about the trivial stories he’s
obliged to cover on his TV show (midget zoo keepers, a duck trained to
round up sheep). Yet Wilson’s own complexity is sold short. Cambridgeeducated Wilson was steeped in the renegade canon of anarcho-surrealist
literature and politics, peppering Factory output with allusions to
Lautréamont and naming his nightclub the Haçienda after a situationist
slogan. The movie gestures at Wilson’s underlying seriousness, but only in
a mocking, borderline anti-intellectual way. Mostly he comes over as an
odd mix of buffoon and visionary, a naif-with-integrity whose contracts
(signed using his own blood) declared only that the bands retained ownership of their music and were free to leave whenever they pleased.
Party People jumps swiftly from Curtis’s 1980 death to the reign of
H appy Mondays as house band at the Haçienda during the 1988–91
‘Madchester’ period, when the club was an Ecstasy-soaked mecca for
ravers from across the land. Perhaps the most interesting thing about
Factory is how it survived for so long given the sporadic nature of
Wilson’s A&R skills (he passed on The Smiths, for instance, and between
Joy Division and Mondays signed a large number of undistinguished
bands) and his lack of business acumen. New Order’s 1983 hit ‘Blue
Monday’ was the biggest-selling 12-inch single of all time but lost
Factory a fortune because its lavish Peter Saville cover cost more than the
label’s profit margins. When it comes to Factory’s eventual collapse
(partly caused by Happy Mondays’ profligacy), the movie glosses over
the real pain and humiliation this must have involved. Instead, we see
Wilson closing down the Haçienda with a massive shindig and inviting
the revellers to ransack the offices for computers and other strippable
assets.
Like so many post-Trainspotting Brit films – especially the ill-starred
rave flick Human Traffic – Party People is relentlessly lively, as if convinced that the youth market will not stand for stillness or sombreness
(essential, surely, if you wish to convey a sense of Manchester’s
Ballardian desolation in the seventies, so crucial to Joy Division’s own
atmosphere). Characters are constantly shouting and swearing, and
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(Director’s cut of a review for Film Comment, 2002)
Control
The mystique surrounding Joy Division has always been way out of proportion to their record sales. While other far bigger artists, such as The
Clash, David Bowie or Pink Floyd, are still waiting to get a biopic, the
post-punk cult from Manchester have two to their name. The first,
2002’s bright, hyperactive 24 Hour Party People, couldn’t be further in
mood from the lustrous monochrome and stillness of Anton Corbijn’s
new Control. Party People wasn’t entirely devoted to Joy Division (its
focal character was Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson, the band’s
patron and tireless champion). But it’s hard to imagine that movie getting made without the gravitas and international name recognition supplied by Joy Division.
Crucial to the group’s dark magnetism at the time and its abiding
allure ever since is the charisma of doomed frontman Ian Curtis. This
manifested itself in everything from the relatively small number of photographs (many taken by Corbijn himself) that have kept the singer’s
cool ageless in black and white, to Curtis’s lyrics, with their combination
of unflowery directness and mysterious poetic depths. Like Morrissey
(except without the latter’s Wildean wit), Curtis’s despair has a perennial
appeal to sensitive teenagers confronting for the first time the possibility
that life is meaningless. But to describe such a world view as adolescent
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there’s barely a scene that doesn’t involve drink or drugs. On the plus
side, the movie has plenty of gags, energetic hand-held camera work and
some striking set pieces – like the scene where the teenage Shaun Ryder
and his brother poison 3,000 pigeons on top of an apartment block. It’s
quite possible, especially if you have absolutely nothing invested in the
idea of Joy Division or the whole post-punk era, that you’ll find 24 Hour
Party People highly entertaining – a feel-good movie about suicide, drug
fuck-ups and business failure, yippee! Then again, to actually follow the
film on even a basic narrative level you’d need to know a fair bit about
Factory already. Here is Party People’s paradox, its Achilles heel of ‘negative crossover’: the movie is sure to irritate the only people truly
equipped to watch it, while those with no real emotional connection to
the subject will most likely be confused and leave the theatre having
gleaned little sense of what was at stake in Factory’s struggle.
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is condescending and misleading. After all, it could be that the stark perceptions granted during that emotionally raw-skinned period of our lives
are actually correct, and that these insights only get blunted by the
arrival of adult comforts and commitments.
Joy Division suit the big screen in part because of the narrative shape
provided by Curtis’s suicide. Rock biopic makers love an early death
(that’s why there’s a film about Brian Jones, but not about the Stones).
Well before his dramatic exit, Curtis was already being treated like a seer,
a post-punk equivalent to Jim Morrison. The suicide transformed that
charisma into a martyr-like aura. This idea of Curtis as a fallen saviour
was later played up in Corbijn’s 1988 video for the re-released single
‘Atmosphere’, where a procession of cowled, monk-like figures carry a
gigantic placard depicting the singer – an outsize religious icon, essentially.
In some ways, Control is Corbijn’s belated sequel to (or massively
expanded remix of) that black-and-white, Ingmar Bergman-esque
promo. But a full-length movie can’t rely on the power of pure imagery
the way a video can. Corbijn was always going to have to try to ‘explain’
Joy Division. One obvious approach would be to situate their music as
the product of a time and place. The place: Manchester, a declining
industrial city in the north-west of England where annual rainfall rates
are even worse than the rest of the country. The time: the late seventies,
when Britain was gripped by a dreadful sense of malaise, with labour
unrest, rising unemployment and a resurgence of far-right militancy on
the streets. Yet the band’s impact all over the world and across subsequent decades shows the limits of that approach. Joy Division’s songs
were never topical in any crude sociopolitical sense, and a history lesson
is no more required to understand ‘Shadowplay’ or ‘Disorder’ than an
understanding of eleventh-century Scottish politics is necessary to be
gripped by Macbeth.
While unstinting in its attention to period detail, Control barely references what’s going on in late-seventies Britain. Instead, Corbijn opts for
a different but in its own way equally reductive perspective: biography.
The ‘truth’ of Joy Division’s songs is presented as Ian Curtis’s increasingly out-of-control life: the disintegration of his marriage shortly after
the birth of his daughter, accelerated by his affair with a glamorous
Belgian journalist, and the conflicting pressures of impending fame versus a rapidly deteriorating epileptic condition.
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standing Joy Division the approach has its limits. The singer’s lyrics are
rarely straightforward depictions of an individual’s life. Crucially, they
are existential rather than autobiographical. Curtis stripped away the
concrete, everyday details that a more observational songwriter would
use to impart a sense of lived reality (the one big exception: ‘Love Will
Tear Us Apart’). Sourced in his private hell as they often are (especially
on the posthumously released second album Closer), there’s an element
of depersonalization. The singer inhabits these songs as a sort of ‘everyself’ confronted by the big dilemmas and impasses of the human condition, the conflicts and quandaries of trust, doubt, betrayal, dread,
claustrophobia, futility. Ordinary life achieves an epic grandeur (hence
the songs’ perennial fit with the wounded narcissism of adolescence). But
there’s no bombast or emotional theatrics, but rather a modernist starkness as pared down as a Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter play.
‘Existential’ is the right word, because the canon of existentialist literature (Kafka, Conrad, Camus, Dostoevsky) was massively influential on
post-punk bands like Joy Division and their equally angst-racked contemporaries Josef K and Magazine. (It was a hyper-literate time, when
singers went around with Penguin Modern Classics poking out of the
pockets of their long black overcoats.) Curtis’s words are all the more
effective through being framed by music that had the hard-rocking
power of The Stooges but was too repressed to actually rock out. This
inhibited, at times disjointed quality, which owed a lot to Steve Morris’s
inventive circular drumming patterns, enhanced the group’s aura of
modernist severity. It also aligned them with mittel Europa and the
decidedly un-American electronic rock of Kraftwerk. By Closer they
were dabbling with synthesizers, a penchant that would blossom in New
Order.
The other problem with situating Joy Division’s meaning in the
specifics of Curtis’s life is that during the group’s lifetime hardly any of
this was public knowledge. Virtually nobody outside the Factory
Records milieu was aware of Curtis’s marital problems, and few knew
that he suffered from epilepsy. It’s really only since the 1995 publication
of Touching from a Distance, the memoir by his widow Deborah Curtis
on which Control is largely based, that the truth has become more
widely known. The foundations of the group’s enduring cult were laid
during a fifteen-year period in which Curtis truly was an enigma, a mystery man whose reasons for departing this mortal coil remained cloudy.
Facts, once learned, are hard to dislodge from your mind, though, and
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as soon as you’re acquainted with the back story, Curtis’s suicide seems
logical, even overdetermined. Yet there’s one key factor mentioned in
Touching from a Distance that Control chooses to ignore: Curtis’s
romantic fascination with rock stars who died young, their legend inviolate from the ravages of artistic decline and physical decay. As Deborah
Curtis wrote, ‘[Ian] told me that he had no intention of living beyond his
early twenties.’ This apparent death wish suggests that amid the depression and confusion there was an aesthetic component to his fatal decision. Much is made of the supposed paradox that Joy Division were
ordinary, unassuming lower-middle-class lads who liked a beer and a
laugh. But just a glance at their song titles, let alone full immersion in
their music, shows they were also aesthetes who looked to art as an
escape from and triumph over the soul-crushing dreariness of real life.
From his teenage infatuation with glam rock (evoked with vivid economy in Control), through his love of modernist literature, to the attention he and his bandmates paid to the records’ cover design, Curtis
clearly appreciated the power of gesture. Effectively terminating the
band along with himself (they’d vowed to drop the name Joy Division if
any member quit), Curtis’s suicide ensured that the group’s body of work
would be compact and near-immaculate.
Right from the start, Curtis was driven by a fierce ambition to become
precisely the kind of edge-walking rock shaman/saviour that he ended
his life as. The manner of the ending sealed the deal, giving Joy Division’s
music an appalling gravity and – for better or worse – an undeniable
authenticity. Because the suicide preceded the release of both Closer and
the group’s most famous single, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, it determined
their reception and their resonance. It could be that Curtis planned it
that way. He played a major role in choosing Closer’s cover, a photograph of a sculpture tableau in a Genoa cemetery of the dead Christ surrounded by mourners. And he had already made one attempt at killing
himself a few months before recording Closer.
Myth is what rock music is all about, despite the attrition of facts and
overexposure wrought by historians and gossipers alike. It’s at this
mythopoeic level that Control succeeds. Corbijn made his name as a
rock photographer with the pictures he took of Joy Division. With this
tone poem of a movie, he continues what he started in those photographs: the creation of a visual language that uncannily paralleled what
Joy Division did with sound, which was to assimilate the desolation of
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theticizing it, transfiguring it into sombre glamour. The barren beauty of
that landscape of sound was an exteriorization of how lots of people felt
inside at that late-seventies moment – the dawn of the Thatcher–Reagan
era, a freshly frigid Cold War with renewed anxiety about Armageddon.
But tension and dread are far more the norm than they are the exception,
which explains the time-defying and endlessly renewing appeal of Joy
Division’s records.
While there’s plenty of their music in Control, the way it bursts out of
the subdued near-silence of the rest of the movie makes it seem like a
force of nature rather than a product of human effort. Control keeps
the music shrouded in mystery. The storyline leaps straight from the
band’s decision to form to the group waiting nervously to go on stage
for the first time. We don’t see how the group gradually arrived at their
sound (a painfully slow emergence from the coarse chrysalis of the
punky-sounding Warsaw). We don’t learn anything about how Steve
Morris came up with those unique gyrating drum patterns, or the genesis of Peter Hook’s unorthodox bass-as-lead-melodic-instrument style,
or where the implosive violence of Bernard Sumner’s guitar-playing
originated. Martin Hannett, the producer who played a huge role in
shaping the uncanny spatiality of Joy Division’s recordings, makes only
the briefest appearance.
This isn’t unusual for rock biopics, which invariably focus on the
things that music brings – drug problems, bad management, love entanglements, fame going to the artist’s head – while avoiding music-making
itself. And maybe that’s understandable, given that the nitty-gritty of
band life is either uncinematic (the mundane graft of rehearsals, jamming out songs, recording sessions, tour buses, sound checks, etc.) or
unfilmable (the flash of inspiration inside the songwriter’s head). Control
is in some ways better for avoiding the demystifying humdrum of workaday musical practice, although it did make me wonder why there’s never
been a rock equivalent to Topsy Turvy, Mike Leigh’s film about Gilbert
and Sullivan and the D’Oyly Carte, a movie that shows the craft and collegiality of collective musical creativity. (The closest I could think of was
the hip-hop movie Hustle and Flow, where we actually get to see the
group write a crunk track, albeit with implausible ease and swiftness.)
But in addition to scanting on Joy Division as musicians, Control
imparts little sense of the music’s impact outside the Factory circle, of the
way that by early 1980 the group had assumed a hallowed, central role
in post-punk culture.
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Fair enough, perhaps, given that Corbijn has pointedly stressed that
this is a film about Ian Curtis, not Joy Division. Still, it seems off-balance
if only because of the enormity of music in Curtis’s life. And ultimately
it’s the music that keeps any of us still enthralled, nearly three decades
on. There is a sense in which music and cinema can never coexist happily
because they represent realms of sensory experience that are in competition. It’s telling that Joy Division were about sound (this was rock at its
hardest, but without any of metal’s macho bombast) and vision (Curtis’s
unflinching lyrics), but not so much about visuals. Photographs of the
band appeared on none of their releases, a conscious choice (a bid for
timelessness) made by the band as much as by Factory designer Peter
Saville. So perhaps the ultimate Joy Division movie will always be the
one playing over your closed eyelids when you listen.
(Director’s cut of a piece for the New York Times, 2007)
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ONO, ENO, ARTO
Non-musicians and the Emergence of ‘Concept Rock’
Art-school bands were legion in the sixties, especially in the UK. But
what’s striking is the minimal extent to which art ideas affected actual
musical practice. The ‘artiness’ in sixties rock tended to have more to do
with the way groups presented themselves or packaged their records,
along with a generalized bohemian and Romantic sensibility that
enfolded the music. So while Pete Townshend borrowed the idea of guitarsmashing from Gustav Metzger’s autodestructive art, and the influence of
the British school of Pop Art suffused The Who Sell Out, the actual substance of The Who’s music remained amped-up R&B. Dilettantism was
frowned upon; sixties rockers struggled to attain virtuosity and showed
great reverence for the craft of rhythm and blues, folk and so forth. When
sixties rock did go ‘progressive’, the catalyst came not from modern art
but from other forms of music – the post-Coltrane directions in jazz,
Indian raga, musique concrète and avant-classical electronic composers
like Stockhausen. Often the ‘innovations’ in rock actually came from
going back to the pre-rock era, whether it was music hall with The Beatles
or, increasingly, pre-twentieth-century classical music (rock opera, as with
The Who’s Tommy). As for the ‘concept album’, this owed nothing to
conceptual art and everything to literature (and not even the cutting edge
of modernist fiction).
What about The Velvet Underground? Surely they were a supremely
arty group? Well, what you have with the Velvets is an experimental rock
group who were adopted by, and in a sense framed by, an artist, Andy
Warhol. But it’s hard to see much connection between Warhol’s ideas
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and practices and what the Velvets did sonically. They were extreme,
which seems arty, but their extremism was actually sourced in music and
literature. None of them, in fact, were art-school products: Lou Reed’s
background was English literature (he was mentored by Delmore
Schwartz), while John Cale studied music at Goldsmiths College and had
been involved in New York’s avant-garde classical vanguard as a participant in La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. The Velvet
Underground’s reputation as the founding fathers of ‘art rock’ comes
from their patron and from their influence on subsequent art-schooltype bands, above all Roxy Music.
To my mind, it’s Roxy’s Brian Eno who was the first figure to bring art
ideas right into the heart of music-making practice; Eno, along with
Yoko Ono (like John Cale, a product of the post-John Cage/Fluxus
experimental scene in New York and a contemporary of La Monte
Young’s). Although Eno and Ono both made their groundbreaking work
in the late sixties and early seventies, their actual influence came through
strongest during the post-punk period of the late seventies (not coincidentally, the single greatest phase of art-school students forming bands).
Ono’s music was generally scorned during her own time. Eno was widely
interviewed on account of being the most flamboyant, eloquent and
intellectually engaging member of Roxy Music, but the ideas he aired
went against the grain of the early seventies, the age of progressive rock,
and only achieved wider fruition after punk.
Ono’s first interventions in rock were a series of records with John
Lennon: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968), Unfinished Music
No. 2: Life with the Lions (1969) and Wedding Album (1969). These
albums came out on Zapple, the experimental imprint of The Beatles’
label Apple, and were rock only in the loosest sense of the word, being
closer to concept art wrought with sound than music. On the Rykodisc
reissue of Life with the Lions, there’s a quote from Sonic Youth’s
Thurston Moore: ‘I make sounds to look at. This I know from Yoko. I
live in her shadow.’ Lions’ opening track, ‘Cambridge 1969’, is a live
performance at Cambridge University, nearly half an hour of Yoko
screaming over Lennon’s feedback guitar; the second side of the album
includes ‘Two Minutes Silence’, the first of several art-rock homages to
John Cage’s ‘4:33’, and ‘No Bed for Beatle John’, on which Ono recites
Gregorian chant-style various newspaper articles about the couple.
Wedding Album continued this ploy of using Ono and Lennon’s celebrity
as its raw material: ‘Amsterdam’, which takes up the entire second side,
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comprises interviews, conversation and found sounds taped during the
couple’s ‘Bed-In’ honeymoon/peace protest.
Her next forays into recording, Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Fly
(1971), were closer to (finished) music, but still highly conceptual. At
a time when rock was becoming ever more obsessed with sophistication (subtle playing, ornate arrangements, densely overdubbed production), Ono and partner Lennon staged a self-conscious return to the
primitivism of early rock’n’roll. Ono declared her goal to be a combination of the ‘strong heavy beat’ of rock at its most repetitive and
mind-evacuating with abstract vocalization influenced equally by free
jazz and the primal-scream therapy that the couple were exploring.
Similar ideas of ‘going back’ and stripping down were being mooted by
critics like Lester Bangs, who were then starting to espouse the heresy
that the crude garage punk of bands like The Troggs and The Count
Five was superior to Sgt Pepper’s and Disraeli Gears. Unlike the midsixties garage bands, who were unable to play anything beyond rudimentary rock, Ono was getting superbly skilled musicians (Eric
Clapton, Ringo Starr, Lennon himself) to play like brain-dead gorillas
wearing oven mitts. As an example of ‘conscious regression’, Plastic
Ono Band has as strong a claim as The Stooges to be the seminal
proto-punk record. Ono’s contribution to the racket was her abstract
vocalese, a searing shriek that anticipated and influenced post-punk
women singers like Lydia Lunch, Siouxsie Sioux, China Burg of Mars,
The Slits’ Ari Up and Linder Sterling of Ludus.
Eno’s own brand of proto-punk primitivism was equally conceptual.
Proudly describing himself as a ‘non-musician’ in the countless interviews he did for Roxy and then as a solo artist, Eno espoused a defiantly
dilettante approach to rock that ran counter to the reigning valorization
of instrumental technique in progressive rock. Eno’s approach was
markedly different to Ono’s, however, in that he didn’t have her political
and feminist commitments, nor her belief in expressionism (which in the
spirit of the sixties tends to equate ‘truth’ with the pre-socialised, the
child-like or animalistic). Ideas, Eno argued, counted for far more than
craft. But they also counted for more than passion, emotional content,
expressive intent. If Ono was a proto-punk, angry and anguished, Eno
was proto-post-punk: his critique of rock’s fixation with authenticity
and passion anticipated the post-punk interrogation of ‘rockism’. But in
another sense, Eno’s impulse wasn’t anti-rock so much as an attempt to
liberate certain potentials in the music. Eno aimed to bypass rock’s ego
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drama, its ‘adolescent’ (as he saw it) theatre of rebellion, and to focus
instead on its noise and its mechanistic insistence (‘idiot energy’, he
called it), along with its infringements of taste, logic and proportion (the
‘insanity . . . clumsiness and grotesqueness’ he valued in Roxy Music and
which faded away after he was expelled from the group). Eno’s atonal
blurts of synth noise and tape experiments on the first two Roxy albums
would inspire a generation of post-punk musicians who wanted to
explore electronics but bypass the pianistic strictures of the keyboard
synthesizer.
While Yoko was a well-known artist before she entered pop music,
Eno only achieved fame through music. But his whole approach to music
was shaped by his late-sixties stint at Ipswich Art College, where he
assimilated a sensibility that merged playfulness and detachment. One of
his teachers, Roy Ascott, put the students through a disorientation
process in order to knock all the Romanticism out of them. ‘Process not
product’ was the slogan of the day, with the artwork seen merely as the
residue of the procedure. What came out of these ideas was a validation
of dilettantism, in the sense that people conceived of themselves as artists
first in an almost abstract or intransitive sense, and the choice of a specific medium to work in was secondary, provisional, and usually temporary. Attitude and concepts mattered more than technique or
commitment. ‘Everybody thought they could do anything,’ Eno recalled
of the Ipswich ferment. ‘Painters could compose music, bricklayers could
do happenings, prostitutes could write operas . . . Most of all, what it
said to me . . . is that “At this moment of time there isn’t a received container for what you want to do, there isn’t a category into which you
automatically fit. So though we are called a painting college, part of your
job here is to find out what medium you want to work in . . .” We had
one student there who was knitting, that was her work, and another who
did performances with a violin on a tightrope.’
Later, in the early seventies, as a frequent visitor to a similarly freeform art college, Watford, Eno would collaborate with the painter/tutor
Peter Schmidt to create the Oblique Strategies, a pack of cards that
offered koan-like instructions and lateral-thinking suggestions and were
carefully worded to help artists by jolting them through impasses or
loosening creative blocks: ‘Honour thy error as a hidden intention’,
‘Turn it upside down’, ‘Into the impossible’, ‘Is it finished?’, etc. Some of
the oblique strategies emerged first as functioning principles within Eno’s
own music-making: the tape-delay systems used to create his solo album
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Discreet Music and the Fripp/Eno collaborations like No Pussyfooting,
for instance, were incarnations of the Oblique maxim ‘Repetition is a
form of change.’ One of the instructions, ‘Change instrument roles’,
would actually be adopted (or, more likely, independently discovered) by
post-punk musicians, with certain bands ‘keeping it fresh’ by having
members swap instruments on stage.
As well as being a conduit for a certain sixties British art-school sensibility into rock, Eno was also a key figure in the emergence of a
‘painterly’ approach to recording. Along with Robert Wyatt and Pink
Floyd, he was in the vanguard of exploring the textural and spatial possibilities opened up by the recording studio. In his interviews and writings, there is a consistent impulse to translate sound into the visual
register, whether talking about tape as a kind of canvas onto which you
can daub layer after layer of sound, or characterizing his productions of
groups like U2 as the creation of a landscape in which the songs happen.
The essence of record production, for Eno, was its departure from real
time: instead of recording a musical event, you built up a phantasmagorical pseudo-event that could never have happened as a discrete
performance-in-time. Sound-tinting effects and treatments opened up a
fantastical palette of timbres; stereo placement, panning and reverb created the audio equivalent of perspective and allowed for all kind of fictional or Escher-like spatialities; cutting and splicing and tape loops
achieved effects midway between collage and time travel. Briefly out of
favour during the convulsion of punk (where his Zen-infused detachment went against the fire and ire of the day), Eno became a central figure again during post-punk, when the music grew more open-ended and
experimental. He became one of the major producers of the era, working with Devo and Talking Heads and convening the four main No Wave
bands in 1978 for the scene-defining compilation No New York.
A couple of years prior to No New York, Eno briefly worked with
Television, one of the principal first-wave New York punk bands. The
demos turned out disastrously, though. It was a clash of sensibility: the
original CBGB punk groups – Television, Patti Smith Group, Richard
Hell and the Voidoids – were fundamentally literary, pursuing a vision of
poetry fused with rock’n’roll (Smith called her style ‘Rimbaud and Roll’,
Television’s frontman/lead guitarist named himself Tom Verlaine). Eno’s
sensibility came from the plastic arts rather than literature; indeed, he
rejected ‘rockist’ ideas of expression torn from the heart and soul, often
forming his lyrics out of nonsense babble.
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Eno got on infinitely better with the No Wave groups. The scene was
crammed with art-school polymaths, Eno-like dilettantes happily dividing their energies between art, film-making, experimental theatre and
performance art, poetry and being in bands. DNA’s Arto Lindsay and
Mars’s Mark Cunningham and China Burg had all studied at Eckerd
College in Florida, a liberal arts college with a similar free-form atmosphere to Ipswich. Mars drummer Nancy Arlen was a plastic-resins sculptor, while guitarist Sumner Crane was a Renaissance man equally
interested in experimental music, abstract painting and philosophy. The
group’s approach to making rock was stringently conceptual, ‘a countdown from 10 to 1’ (Cunningham) where each step involved shedding
one of the conventions of rock’n’roll, such as unified tempo or tonality.
Years before Sonic Youth (whom they massively influenced), Mars
explored the ‘reinvention of the guitar’, experimenting with detuning the
instruments, retuning within songs, using the guitar percussively.
Towards the end of Mars’s brief but ultra-intense existence, Crane (an
accomplished blues guitarist who chose to mutilate his own talent) was
generating noise by manipulating the guitar jack. Melody was massacred
by the twin screaming of Burg and Crane, while the lyrics explored various states of psychosis and disassociation.
DNA were partly defined by leader Arto Lindsay’s desire to sound as
little like his friends Mars as possible. Instead of the latter’s wall of
noise, DNA devised a skeletal sound full of stops and starts. Later, when
a more conventionally skilled musician – bassist Tim Wright, formerly
of Pere Ubu – joined, DNA developed a groove aesthetic, albeit still fitful and fractured. But the outfit was at its most radically arty and antimusical in its earliest incarnation, featuring Robin Crutchfield on
keyboards. Crutchfield was a performance artist recruited by Arto
Lindsay not for any musical ability but because of a widely circulated
photograph of one of his theatre pieces. Garishly made-up, with dozens
of miniature genderless plastic baby dolls attached to his bare flesh by
adhesive tape, the image of Crutchfield appeared in Toronto’s File magazine and was included in a box of artists’ postcards put out by
Vancouver’s Image Bank. Crutchfield’s approach to playing the keyboard virtually involved transposing a visual-arts logic to music: ‘I relate
to the piano sculpturally, pretty much in patterns of black and white, in
groups of two or three keys, and I see these symmetrical patterns on the
piano and I work a lot with that!’ he explained in a 1978 interview.
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cal pattern I’m using.’ Lindsay himself uses visual metaphors to describe
his approach to guitar-playing: ‘It was sculptural as opposed to
painterly, shapes that poked out at you, rather than a surface.’
You can see a savage contempt for rock that goes way beyond dilettantism in the attitude of Lydia Lunch, frontwoman and leader of
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, who saw the music purely as a vehicle for
what she wanted to do verbally, even claiming that if ‘spoken word’ was
more established in the late seventies she would have chosen that as her
format. In Teenage Jesus, musicality, that decadent dog, is on a tight
leash; sound is yoked to expressive urgency and content. Rhythm gets
reduced to a dirge-like march beat played on a drum kit that consisted of
a broken cymbal and a dysfunctional snare; Lunch’s singing range is limited to a single note; songs last as little as forty seconds. Yet unlike many
punk groups of the time, Teenage Jesus was far from inept chaos; it was
a deliberately achieved sound, ‘a very rigid regiment of almost military
precision’, in Lunch’s words, rather than ‘a spontaneous combustion’.
Early on Teenage Jesus and the Jerks included James Chance on saxophone, but the expressiveness of his playing stuck out like a sore thumb.
Chance then formed The Contortions, easily the most conventionally
musical of the No Wave groups, with a tight James Brown-inspired
groove and songs that had a tonal centre. Chance was an accomplished,
conservatory-trained musician who had passed through the loft-jazz
scene in New York. But in the spirit of the times, Chance recruited two
female non-musicians into his band: Pat Place, fresh from art school in
Chicago, and Adele Bertei, a veteran of the proto-punk scene clustered
around the Cleveland Institute of Art. Bertei developed a strange, antimusical approach to her instrument, pounding the keys of the keyboard
percussively, beating them with her fists and elbows, even jumping on top
and dancing on it. The Contortions treated audiences as roughly as their
equipment: a fixture of their shows was Chance’s baiting of audience
members, typically jumping off the stage to molest a woman in the crowd
and then becoming embroiled in a fight with her boyfriend. Equally influenced by rock provocateurs like Iggy Pop and the recent tradition of confrontational performance art (from the Living Theater and the Vienna
Aktionists onwards), Chance’s sensational interactions with the audience
created an atmosphere of tense expectation at gigs. As Place recalled, ‘A
big part of it was the art crowd. The violence plus the noise element made
our shows something like performance art combined with music.’
One of Mars’s unrecorded songs was ‘RTMT’, a riposte to a critic who
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dismissed the group as ‘arty and empty’. Yet there was a profound
ambivalence at the core of No Wave about the idea of ‘art’, an attraction–repulsion syndrome that translated into a kind of playing-bothsides-of-the-fence. In the rock world, the No Wavers used their
conceptualism and avant-garde extremity as a mark of difference, the
edge that set them apart from the ‘it’s only rock’n’roll’ approach of
bands like The Ramones. But in downtown New York’s art scene, the
No Wavers came over like punks, their attitude and aggression disrupting the genteel, contemplative ambience of SoHo art-spaces like the
Kitchen. DNA’s Lindsay recalls how they preferred to play rock clubs
like CBGB rather than the Kitchen, ‘home of the John Rockwellapproved avant-garde’, a reference to the post-John Cage school of composers like Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Meredith Monk, etc., as
written about by the New York Times’ music critic John Rockwell.
No Wave’s extremism ensured that the movement rapidly burned itself
out: Mars’s countdown-to-zero left them nowhere to go, Lydia Lunch
started a new, raunch’n’roll-style band called 8-Eyed Spy, and DNA’s
music, while still fractured, lost some of its earlier abstruseness with the
addition of bassist Tim Wright. By 1979 the New York scene was shifting in a groovier, dance-and-fun-oriented direction. But the art element
remained as strong as ever. The B-52’s were products of the art colleges
in Athens, Georgia, while funk experimentalists Liquid Liquid were led
by comics artist Richard McGuire. Future film-makers Jim Jarmusch,
Vincent Gallo and John Lurie all played in bands. Artists like JeanMichel Basquiat and Robert Longo divided their energy equally between
music and painting.
Where No Wave’s catastrophic modernism sought to raze rock tradition and build new forms of authentic expression from a cultural Year
Zero, this next wave of New York music-and-culture was postmodern: it
took existing genres and inhabited them with a knowing wink, mutated
them with a sly kink. ‘The future is not in style any more,’ declared
Kristian Hoffman, a former James Chance sideman who went on to
work with Club 57 icon Klaus Nomi and start his own neo-rockabilly
band The Swinging Madisons. In 1980 New York Times critic Robert
Palmer tagged this new sensibility as ‘the fake aesthetic’, picking up on a
wisecrack by John Lurie, who described his band The Lounge Lizards as
‘fake jazz’. Palmer characterized the Lizards and their peers as ‘conceptual artists who enjoy toying with the form and content of musical
idioms and sometimes satirizing the associated behavioral stances – the
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Non-musicians and Anti-music: A Coda
As an importer of art-school ideas into rock music, Eno’s only serious rival
is Malcolm McLaren. Both were products of the free-form environment of
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Lounge Lizards don’t just sound like a 1950s’ jazz band gone berserk,
for example; they even look like one.’
At the dawn of the eighties No Wave’s belief in intensity and expressive
truth was replaced by stylization and surface. Many No Wave performers
participated in this shift: James Chance made a ‘disco’ record as James
White and the Blacks; Lydia Lunch did something similar on her Queen
of Siam solo album, fusing cabaret, torch songs and cartoon-soundtrack
music with her lyrics of abjection and horror. Kid Creole and the
Coconuts took the razzle and elegance of pre-rock’n’roll styles (musicals,
show tunes, big-band music, Latin dance rhythms) and combined it with
a modern disco-funk groove and thoroughly contemporary lyrics (e.g.
‘Mr Softee’, a song about impotence). The cover version, rarely done during punk and No Wave days because of the premium on innovation and
originality, became an emblem of this shift towards postmodernism:
Chance covered Irving Berlin’s ‘Tropical Heatwave’, Lydia Lunch sang
the Billy Holliday classic ‘Gloomy Sunday’, and Cristina, their labelmate
on ZE Records, updated Leiber and Stoller’s classic ‘Is That All There Is?’
Popular-music history became a wardrobe of provisional identities, songpersonae that a performer could put on and then divest. Similar things
were going on in the art world, of course – for instance, Cindy Sherman’s
identity games using a panoply of feminine personae.
This phase of New York music, sometimes called ‘mutant disco’, was
itself eventually eclipsed by a fresh wave of art-into-rock bands who had
been formatively scarred by No Wave. The battle flag against dance
rhythms and irony was unfurled at a 1981 event called Noise Fest, a
week-long showcase for the new breed of dissonant, confrontational
bands. It took place, naturally, at a SoHo art gallery called the White
Columns and was curated by a young Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth
(who would one day do their own Ono-style ‘cover’ of Cage’s ‘4:33’ on
their 1988 side project The Whitey Album, albeit, at one minute long,
half the length of Ono’s ‘Two Minutes Silence’). And so it goes, the
never-ending art-school dance, carried on into the noughties by outfits
like Fischerspooner and Gang Gang Dance: artists-turned-rockers looking to walk the teetering tightrope between RT and MT.
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British art schools in the sixties, but their sensibilities could hardly
have been more different and their influence on the music scene has
taken a radically opposed form. Eno vaunted his non-musicianship but
loved musical experimentation for its own sake and venerated the egodissolving power of sound. But McLaren boasted of his indifference,
verging on contempt, for music qua music, seeing it as at best a tool for
creating cultural mayhem. The visual was McLaren’s métier, as seen in
his passion for fashion and his perpetual impulse to use the bands he
managed as vehicles for movie-making.
According to his old friend and fellow art student, the writer and pop
biographer Fred Vermorel, this sniffy attitude towards music was
acquired during McLaren’s stints in the British art-school system (he
attended three different art colleges over the course of eight years). In the
bohemian milieu in which he and Vermorel moved, music in general and
pop music in particular was held in low regard. One of their tutors, the
art historian Theodore Ramous, counselled his students that ‘musicianship was for the more stupid kinds of artist’. Vermorel asserts that
‘before he resigned himself to the fact that the music industry represented a fertile playground for subsidizing his mischief, Malcolm was
not the slightest bit interested in rock or any sort of popular music.
Indeed we all had a disdain for such music and particularly for the culture surrounding it, which seemed obese and abject.’
The notion of pop as a suitable avenue for mischief-making is said to
have first entered McLaren’s consciousness during his brief period of
association with King Mob, a UK affiliate of the Situationiste
Internationale. One member of King Mob, Christopher Gray, broached
the idea of creating a ‘totally unpleasant’ and utterly anti-musical pop
band.
Situationism was dedicated to the abolition of art as a realm of existence separate from everyday life. Instead of the passively contemplated
artwork, the goal was to create participatory events or ‘situations’, an
open-ended concept that could refer to anything from ‘total art’ happenings to Yippie-style pranks to wild eruptions of festivity to inner-city
riots. McLaren began to see rock as an arena in which he could operate
as the catalyst for chaos. His first stab at cultural terrorism was with
The New York Dolls, cross-dressing proto-punks associated with the
Mercer Arts Center in New York. He was attracted to the group
because of their musical ineptitude: ‘I thought it was the worst record
I’d ever heard . . . what mattered was that they were so good at being
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bad.’ When he took over as the group’s manager, it was the dying days
of the Vietnam War, and McLaren’s provocation was to give the Dolls a
treasonous communist-image make-over, devising a Maoist look of red
patent leather and convincing the band to perform in front of gigantic
hammer-and-sickle flags.
When the band disintegrated, McLaren returned to London and set
about finding a UK equivalent to the Dolls. He took on a bunch of hungry but directionless youths, gave them their name (The Sex Pistols) and
found them a lead singer. Again, his attitude towards music was contemptuous. He insisted, and has continued to insist, despite considerable
evidence to the contrary, that the Pistols couldn’t play and that punk had
never been about the music. ‘Christ, if people bought the records for the
music, this thing would have died a death long ago,’ he quipped to the
Sunday Times in 1977. He often talked of initially seeing the Pistols as in
large part a vehicle for selling the clothes he and partner Vivienne
Westwood made and sold via their King’s Road boutique Sex (the
group’s very name was a kind of advert for the shop). Throughout the
Pistols’ brief career, McLaren was impatient to leave behind ‘mere’
music. He put a huge amount of time and energy (and the bulk of the
group’s earnings) into a Sex Pistols movie. Initially it was to be directed
by soft-porn maven Russ Meyer and scripted by Roger Ebert (based
around ideas supplied by McLaren) and bear the title Who Killed
Bambi? When that fell through owing to personality clashes between the
director and the band, who had minimal interest in making movies and
were more concerned with recording and touring, the project mutated
into The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.
Swindle was an outrageous rewrite of recent history that not only presented McLaren as a Svengali mastermind who cynically planned every
step in the Pistols’ rise, but barefacedly nominated the manager as the
author of punk rock itself. ‘I have brought you many things in my time
. . . but the most successful of all was an invention of mine they called
punk rock,’ McLaren hisses from beneath a black leather hood (part of
Sex’s fetish-wear line) at the start of the movie. In an interview some
years later, McLaren talked of The Sex Pistols and the sociocultural
furore that swirled around their name as a gigantic art piece whose components included publicity, hype, tabloid shock-horror headlines, persecution by the authorities and, only incidentally, a bunch of human beings
and their music. ‘Rather than just while away my time painting, I
decided to use people, just the way a sculptor uses clay,’ he mused airily.
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Although McLaren’s account of his role in The Sex Pistols severely distorted the creative period of the group (when melody-writer Glen
Matlock, an alumnus of St Martins College of Art and Design, and
singer/lyricist Johnny Rotten were still in the band), it does describe
fairly McLaren’s contribution in the later stages of the group’s existence.
The first true flourish of McLaren as auteur was his recruitment into The
Sex Pistols as lead vocalist the infamous Great Train Robber Ronnie
Biggs. The Sex Pistols single ‘No One Is Innocent’ (a.k.a. ‘Cosh the
Driver’, a callously provocative reference to the brutal treatment meted
out to one British Rail employee during the robbery) took this bête noire
of the UK establishment into the Top 10. Biggs, who had escaped from
prison and lived a playboy’s life in Brazil, symbolized the subversive idea
that ‘crime does pay’. One verse in ‘No One Is Innocent’ referred facetiously to Martin Bormann, another Latin American exile; he too was
supposed to have joined the Pistols’ new line-up. At a time of rising lawlessness in the UK, and in a country where the Second World War was a
vivid memory, the recruitment of these two enemies of the nation into
the Pistols was a crude attempt to double the treasonous impact of ‘God
Save the Queen’ the previous summer. But it was also meant to stick in
the craw of the liberals and lefties who had gradually embraced punk as
the ‘authentic voice of disenfranchised youth on the street’ and were
attempting firmly to align its rebellion with the struggles of the AntiNazi League and its sister organization Rock Against Racism.
After losing control of the Pistols, McLaren’s next intervention in pop,
Bow Wow Wow, was an attempt to replay The Sex Pistols’ farrago as if
it really had been a meticulously executed master plan. Deliberately
picking more malleable musicians, including a fifteen-year-old AngloBurmese girl as lead vocalist, McLaren concocted an inspired ragbag of
subversive ideas: cassette piracy (then the record industry’s greatest fear),
underage sex, back-to-nature savagery, a gleefully against-the-grain celebration of mass unemployment as liberating for youth, and more. The
group’s sound, with its fetching African Burundi rhythms, funk bass and
dashing Duane Eddy guitar, was hitched to a new clothing line designed
by Westwood and McLaren, a swashbuckling wardrobe inspired by
pirates, Red Indians and other romantic heroes. Bow Wow Wow’s music
was great, but almost incidental to McLaren’s scheme. Along with the
record industry and respectable teen-sex-fearing grown-ups, his target
was the post-punk drift towards musicality. As far as he was concerned,
this was the return of art rock in all its studenty reverence and cerebral
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sexlessness. He was particularly scornful of Johnny Rotten’s new venture
Public Image Ltd: ‘He’s asking you to take a course in music before you
understand it.’ Rock’n’roll, in his view, was ‘only a bloody Mickey
Mouse medium really’. And as with The Sex Pistols, McLaren was impatient to get out of music and into other media: there were plans for a
Bow Wow Wow movie (the group had originally been hatched out of a
soft-porn film script) and a magazine called Chicken (although this
‘Playboy for teens’ may have been designed purely to cause a child-porn
scandal and embarrass its backers, EMI Records).
During punk, McLaren had pioneered an almost entirely new phenomenon: the manager as star. Figures like himself and Clash manager
Bernie Rhodes were as prominent in the music-paper interviews as the
bands themselves. With Bow Wow Wow, the journalists only spoke to
McLaren, and the interview became his true art form. McLaren now
seemed to believe that all he needed to do was unfurl his ideas, the blueprint of a new youth subculture, and the kids out there in readerland
would simply step into their assigned roles. Reversing the sequence of
The Sex Pistols, where genuine chaos and improvised mayhem was followed by McLaren’s retroactive rewrite (‘It’s a swindle’), McLaren now
presented his master plan in advance, prior to its realization as a pop
event: the actual process of creating situations seemed redundant next to
‘giving people ideas’. A series of projects – Bow Wow Wow, with its confusing clutter of subversions; a McLaren solo career that rapidly ran
through hip-hop scratching, ethnic world rhythms and opera across the
albums Duck Rock and Fans – barely extended beyond their elaboration
in interviews. He boasted of his indifference to music, which in the case
of the recordings issued under his name was pulled together by producers, sampling technicians and session musicians. Hip hop attracted him
precisely because it was an art form based around collage and sonic
ready-mades. Duck Rock involved the ‘borrowing’ of Appalachian
square-dance tunes, Soweto pop songs and New York schoolgirl jumprope rhymes; Fans was based around Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
McLaren laughed off accusations of appropriation and plagiarism. ‘If
people don’t want me to plagiarize, I’ll have to stop work . . . I can’t sit
down and write a tune. I’m not interested. I can’t write a tune as good as
Puccini, so why bother?’
Like Eno, McLaren conceived of himself as an Artist in an absolute
and general sense, as opposed to a practitioner of a specific art form.
Being an artist was an existential state or characterological disposition,
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and pop music merely served as a handy medium, an entry-level arena
that he abandoned as soon as he could for Hollywood and a fruitless (if
financially rewarding) sojourn at the major studio CBS, where he was
hired to generate edgy treatments. Not long after projects like Heavy
Metal Surf Nazis entered the cryogenic death zone of development
limbo, McLaren received a rare honour, becoming the first and most
likely only rock manager to enjoy a retrospective at a museum. Titled
Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave, the exhibition was held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in
the autumn of 1988. The ‘work’ consisted not of paintings or sculptures
but posters, promo videos, text-daubed T-shirts and other garments
made during his partnership with Westwood, record covers and slides
emblazoned with McLaren’s choicest bon mots and slogans. History
does not record whether the exhibition also included framed record contracts from The Sex Pistols deals McLaren struck with major labels EMI
and A&M only to be lucratively ‘let go’ when the horrified companies
changed their minds. There was, however, just one small relic of
McLaren’s eight years in the British art-school system, a painting covered
with the scrawled promise/threat: ‘I will be so bad.’
(Adapted from a catalogue essay for ‘Sympathy for the Devil:
Art and Rock and Roll since 1967’, a 2007 exhibition at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago)
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THE BLASTING CONCEPT: LOS ANGELES, SST,
AND “PROGRESSIVE PUNK”
A chapter lost from the American edition of Rip It Up and Start Again
Los Angeles punk matched New York and San Francisco for intensity.
Curiously, though, when its original burst of energy, with bands like The
Germs and the Weirdos, burned out, LA didn’t ‘go postpunk’, but
instead turned its face to the past. Some ex-punks embraced ‘power
pop’, a return to the tight, melodic, high-energy sounds of the midSixties (with first The Knack and then the MTV-friendly Go-Go’s taking
the style into the charts). A ‘cooler’ variation on this back-to-the-Sixties
move came slightly later in the form of ‘The Paisley Underground’ –
neo-psychedelic groups like The Dream Syndicate and The Rain Parade.
Other SoCal punks embarked on a rediscovery of American roots
music, from rockabilly to country to blues. The vogue was spearheaded
by The Blasters with their 1980 debut American Music, but really gathered force as a nativist backlash against the Second British Invasion, a
return to ‘real music’ rather than all those synth-toting Anglo poseurs
prancing on MTV. SoCal’s retro-roots flavors ranged from the hoodoobilly
of The Gun Club and The Flesh Eaters (both influenced by the Cramps,
who’d migrated from New York to LA) to the craze for ‘cowpunk’ (Tex
& the Horseheads, Blood on the Saddle, The Beat Farmers, and many
more).
While the ex-punk hipsters started rifling through rock’s back pages,
punk itself reached Los Angeles’s sprawling suburbs and turned into
hardcore. On the face of it, hardcore was just as retrogressive as the nouveau Americana. Like Oi! in Britain, hardcore’s ‘punk will never die’
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stance translated into a diehard fundamentalism, freezing any impulses
towards musical progress and restricting the emotional palette to
snarling rage and fratboy rowdiness. That didn’t matter at first. Hardcore’s
aggression and visceral impact made it invigorating. The early records by
SoCal outfits The Descendents, Angry Samoans, and Circle Jerks, along
with non-LA bands like Negative Approach and Scream, were among
the most thrilling music of the era.
In the early days, hardcore also served as a home for mavericks. San
Francisco’s Flipper played noise-drenched dirges in defiance of hardcore’s ‘loud-fast rules’ strictures. Bad Brains, from Washington DC,
could play faster than almost anybody, but their tempest had an exquisite fluency that revealed the all-black band’s roots in jazz-fusion. (Once
called Mind Power, they’d been born again as punks and then as
Rastafarians!) Most crucially, there was the SST label, founded by Black
Flag and based in the Los Angeles suburb of Hermosa Beach.
Formed in 1977, Black Flag started from the most pared-down of existential stances – self as cell, body as cage – and then tried to blast their
way to freedom. Greg Ginn, the group’s guitarist and leader, described
what they did as modern blues. Spot, SST’s house producer, claimed
Black Flag’s music was ‘as comforting as the screams that relieve pain.’
Glimmers of humor like ‘TV Party’ relieved the darkness, but for the
most part Black Flag’s vision ranged from the embattled defiance of ‘Rise
Above’ to the wallowing trauma of ‘Damaged I’, a slow-grind as drawnout as the death throes of a wounded animal.
After hearing the group’s 1982 debut album Damaged, NME’s Barney
Hoskyns hailed Black Flag as ‘the only progressively retarded group on
earth.’ The album was such a definitive hardcore statement that it served
to simultaneously codify the genre and render it nearly obsolete. As
Black Flag copyists swarmed across America, the group wrestled with
the same dilemma that British postpunk groups confronted a few years
earlier: progression versus stasis, challenging their audience or pandering
to it. Black Flag began to push their music in a more expansive direction.
And they transformed SST into hardcore’s vanguard label, drawing on
local oddballs like the Minutemen and Saccharine Trust along with outof-town kinsmen like Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü.
Postpunk isn’t really the right word for this music, not when that word
refers to bands like PiL or Cabaret Voltaire. The SST bands were too
rooted in the hard riffs and heavy rhythms of pre-punk rock. The term
‘progressive punk’ fits better. As they developed, the SST bands shook
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loose of hardcore’s stylistic straitjacket through exploring hybrid genres,
writing longer songs, introducing elements of freeform jamming and
extended solos, and recording instrumentals and even concept albums.
Unlike the UK postpunk groups, though, the SST groups had almost no
interest in the studio-as-instrument approach. Their innovations all took
place within the context of the band as performing unit. Essentially livein-the-studio documents, their records were made with staggering speed
and cheapness. Songs were typically captured in a single take, without
overdubs or embellishments. Another SST hallmark was its groups’ unpunk belief in virtuosity. Black Flag set the tone here. Ginn was a sort of
guitar anti-hero, specializing in strange stunted and mutilated solos.
Impelled by a monstrous work ethic, Ginn drove Black Flag ‘like Patton
on steroids’, according to singer Henry Rollins, enforcing a punishing
regime of daily practice sessions. ‘New redneck’ is the term Joe Carducci,
the label’s head of marketing and promotion, invented to describe the
SST sweat-hog ethos.
The SST groups had the same ‘no pain no gain’ attitude toward touring, embarking on marathon treks that took in parts of the country no
other bands visited. ‘The first-wave Hollywood punk bands, none of
them thought about touring,’ says Mike Watt of the Minutemen. ‘Only
the Dils had a van, I think. I guess they all thought they’d get signed to
majors and be stars. But Black Flag’s idea was to build this tour circuit
across the country from scratch. For kids in places like Shreveport or
Boise, the only punk show all year ‘round was when Black Flag rolled
into town.’ The band traveled in the most rudimentary conditions.
Because most of the venues would only pay $100 tops, the band had to
‘sleep in the van’, says Carducci, ‘and mooch off the people who came to
the shows.’
Carducci joined SST because Black Flag were so busy touring that the
label had built up a backlog of unreleased music in the can, including
records by the Minutemen and Saccharine Trust. They were also too
cash-poor to put anything out, so Carducci became one of the label’s
four partners and funded the releases. Drawing on his experience from
working at the Portland, Oregon–based distributor Systematic and running his own small label Thermidor on the side, Carducci was able to get
SST on proper footing (‘when I joined’, he says, ‘they were doing business from a phone booth!’). With his help, SST became America’s nearest equivalent to Rough Trade, operating with a similar mix of idealism
and pragmatism, and driven by a missionary zeal to get their records out
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and into every corner of the country that earlier American independent
labels had generally lacked. To be fair, these early American indies were
probably mentally defeated by the sheer geographical enormity of the
country and the patchy nature of independent distribution in those days.
‘There was no map for this thing at all then,’ says Carducci. He recalls
having ‘to go to the public library and look up record stores in every
Yellow Pages across the country’, trying to work out if the store sold
unusual stuff, and then sending them Systematic’s mail order catalogue.
SST shared with Rough Trade not just heroic ambition but a collectivist ethos, although in SST’s case the vibe was more like a military unit
than a post-hippie wholefood store. SST’s headquarters, a one room
apartment in Hermosa Beach, also served as rough-and-ready barracks
for seven people, who slept on the floor and in makeshift bunk beds created by stacking desks on top of each other. In addition to rehearsing,
writing, recording and gigging, the musicians in Black Flag (and other
SST bands) helped with the daily operations of the label, making phone
calls to record stores and going on flyer-posting missions around town.
At some deep psychological level, the privations of the lifestyle –
cramped living quarters, little money, bad food, used thrift-store clothing, endless work – were attractive. SST’s recruits were people looking
for a purpose, a mission.
If there was a political slant to SST, it wasn’t socialistic, like Rough
Trade’s, but a brand of autonomy leaning towards the libertarian anarchist, in which a distrust of all forms of authority was balanced by an
equally powerful impulse toward self-discipline and hard work. Ginn
had been a teenage entrepreneur, running his own ham radio equipment
business, Solid State Tuners (hence the name SST). Still, like Rough
Trade, SST did put the interests of its artists first. All of their contracts
were for one record at a time, because, Ginn once said, ‘we don't want
to work with anyone who doesn’t want to be here’. Chuck Dukowski,
who switched from being Black Flag’s bassist to being the label’s chief
organizer, declared, ‘our politique is our catalogue – diversity, selfexpression, the individual being allowed to develop at his own pace and
in his own direction.’
Contributing to SST’s strong identity was the artwork of Ginn’s
brother, Raymond Pettibon, which appeared on many of the label’s
records, flyers, and T-shirts. Rollins’ biographer James Parker wrote of
how ‘Pettibon’s eerie, mocking artwork’ seemed to offer ‘some kind of
uncrackable code to [Black Flag’s] attitude and style’. Pettibon’s ink
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drawings were, to put it bluntly, creepy. The intended effect was sometimes gallows humor, sometime pure horror (the cover of the SST compilation The Blasting Concept shows a woman being strangled and
raped in the foreground with a mushroom cloud on the horizon), but
almost always tinged with an apocalyptic mystical dread.
One of Pettibon’s most famous pieces depicted Charlie Manson as the
fifth Beatle. Manson figured as a kind of patron anti-saint for the SST
crew (Rollins even struck up a correspondence with him in jail). 1969,
the year of the Sharon Tate murders and Altamont, was the foundation
of Black Flag’s worldview. Musically too, it was the ignition point for
the group’s two biggest influences, Black Sabbath and the Stooges
(whose ‘1969’ seemed to take perverse glee in ‘war across the USA’). The
germ of punk can be traced to that year. 1969 saw the death of the hippie dream. Unlike the other punk bands, though, Black Flag and its SST
cohorts didn’t give up on hippie music (Ginn was a Grateful Dead
diehard) or its musical concerns (progression, artistic growth, fusion,
chops). They kept those pre-punk values and combined them with
punk’s negativity, which they rooted in the heavy, despair-laden vision of
Black Sabbath songs like ‘War Pigs’ as much as the Stooges’ ‘No Fun’.
‘Our musicians were studying Seventies and Sixties rock, they didn’t
study punk rock records,’ says Carducci. Former Black Flag vocalist Dez
Cadena even started a band called D.C.3 dedicated to the heavy rock
sounds of his youth, such as Mountain and Deep Purple.
By 1984, Ginn himself was listening to King Crimson and Mahavishnu
Orchestra, says Carducci, and coffee – the group’s previous narcotic of
choice—was being ousted by pot. Building on the deliciously turgid
grind of ‘Damaged I’, Ginn decided that slow tempos were the way
ahead. He taught the group’s new drummer Bill Stevenson how to let the
rhythm ‘ooze out’. The result was the trudging sludge of Black Flag’s
1983 album My War. Side two’s trio of protracted dirges, ‘Nothing Left
Inside’, ‘Three Nights’, and ‘Scream’, appalled hardcore youth, who
craved a high-velocity soundtrack for slamdancing. At Black Flag gigs,
the shaven-headed kids were equally aghast when they saw the group’s
hair, which had followed the music’s early Seventies trajectory and
grown long and lank.
In the gap between Damaged and My War, the hardcore scene had
degenerated. By 1983 tribal identity had eclipsed artistic expression as a
priority. Music was little more than a delivery system for the content,
which varied only slightly more. There was basic apolitical hardcore
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such as Orange County’s TSOL, typically affluent suburban youth who
were bored and looking for Fight Club-style release through violence,
and whose anti-authoritarianism was instinctual, non-ideological, and
basically selfish. TSOL’s Jack Grisham described their vibe as
‘Clockwork fuckin’ Orange County’. But this brand of delinquent hardcore was increasingly being superceded by politically conscious puritans
like Millions of Dead Cops and DC scene leaders Minor Threat. The latter pioneered the Straight Edge movement – agit-prop-spouting skinhead
outfits opposed to mind-dulling distractions like drink, drugs, and in
some cases, even sex.
By the time My War came out, the most powerful force in hardcore
was the magazine MaximumRockNRoll, which was founded in 1982 by
a veteran Berkeley politico called Tim Yohannon. Hardcore’s elevation
of content-over-form was reflected in MRR’s refusal of glossy paper
stock. The mag was printed on paper so low-grade and ink-smutted, one
would flinch from wiping your ass with it. ‘MaximumRockNRoll had
identified what they were interested in, which was imitations of Black
Flag circa Damaged, Minor Threat, and the Dead Kennedys,’ says
Carducci. ‘They didn’t pay attention to anything else’. MRR, naturally,
gave My War a terrible review.
The musical symbol for hardcore’s homogeneity was the rapid-fire,
regimented, polka-like beat that virtually every band used. Ginn, in contrast, wanted Black Flag’s music to swing. When the group embarked on
a massive spate of touring in 1984, the scenario became: Black Flag versus samecore. ‘We’ve been preparing for a couple of years and now we’re
ready to go into an attack phase’, Ginn told a radio interviewer. ‘Kill
Everything Now’ was the motto of their first big tour of 1984 (a year in
which they played some 200 dates). The hardcore purists responded to
Black Flag’s hostility in kind, with straggly-haired frontman Rollins
receiving the brunt of audience abuse.
The Minutemen often encountered the same kind of resistance. ‘When
you get situations like hardcore where the bent is egalitarian, their idea
of being equal is everybody being the same’, muses Mike Watt, the
group’s bassist. ‘So if you’re trying to experiment, like we were, that’s
rocking the boat, because it’s taken as elitist. Hardcore’s attitude got to
be “why experiment? All we want is a fast beat so we can dance.” Or not
even dance, just beat the shit out of each other, with the slamdancing.
The big enemy is becoming generic, because that’s when people stop listening and the music becomes a background sound. But we never saw
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punk as a style of music particularly. Early on, it was so all over the map.
It seemed more like a state of mind than a genre of music.’
The Minutemen’s way of going against the grain was totally different
from Black Flag’s. Instead of heavy trudging dirge-riffs, they wrote songs
that were like electro-convulsive jolts, over almost as soon as they
started. Paranoid Time, their debut EP and SST’s second release,
crammed seven songs into six minutes and forty-one seconds. The
Minutemen’s nimble punk-funk was closer to Gang of Four than your
average hardcore band. ‘Paranoid Chant’, the stand-out tune on the EP,
was a bit like Gang of Four’s nuclear Armageddon satire ‘In The Ditch’,
except funnier and more pithy, as singer/guitarist D. Boon plays a poor
flustered schlub who tries to ‘talk to girls’ but keeps ‘thinking of World
War III’.
Unlike Black Flag, who disdained the postpunk coming out of
England, The Minutemen loved Wire’s compression (‘really small songs,
no solos’, says Watt), the Pop Group’s mesh of ‘Beefheart and
Funkadelic’, and The Fall’s half-sung/half-spoken rants. In classic postpunk fashion, the group conceived of their sound as a democracy. Bass
and drums were on equal footing with the guitar, which definitely wasn’t
the lead instrument. ‘D. Boon saw music in terms of economy’, says
Watt. ‘He said, “if you really want the bass up there, I gotta make room
for it.” That was the idea of him having a thin sound, playing really trebly, to leave all the lower mid-frequencies and the bottom end for me. It
was very generous of him.’
On the Minutemen’s classic 1981-83 albums The Punch Line, What
Makes A Man Starts Fires, and Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of
Heat, Watt’s bass lunges, darts, churns, and pulsates like a sack full of
randy hamsters. Boon’s guitar, all splintered chords and spindly microsolos, is as flab-free as his pudgy physique wasn’t. Drummer George
Hurley is a human breakbeat machine, scattering syncopations and tomrolls like funky shrapnel. The paradox of the Minutemen is that they’re
a groove band but the songs are so short and delivered so fast that the
effect isn’t exactly groovy, it’s more haywire—an uncontainable explosion of ideas, musical and lyrical.
The Minutemen were overtly political. Boon was a member of CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and
would often leave the stage soaked in sweat and immediately start working the room, handing out leaflets to gig-goers. The band’s general
worldview was anti-capitalist and pro-worker, informed by Boon and
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Watt’s backgrounds growing up in San Pedro, a harbor town and U.S.
Navy base to the south of Los Angeles, and feeling that their average guy
dads (an auto worker and navy sailor respectively) got a raw deal. In the
early years of the Minutemen, Boon put out a fanzine called Prole that
covered music, politics, and art.
‘The Minutemen thought of themselves in terms of the history of port
labor battles, the longshoremen and unions’, says Carducci. ‘They and
Black Flag and other SST bands came from areas of Los Angeles where
there’s a certain amount of inherited bohemianism, with all the beach
towns, but there’s also a big blue collar population. If you drive out on
the freeways, beyond all the obvious famous places in LA, you see the
true scale of the place and realize there’s this whole population who
aren’t just pushing paper at the movie studios, they're actually making
things.’ The peculiar mix of light industry and sun-baked, post-hippie
bohemia in areas like Hermosa Beach and San Pedro created a particular
sensibility that fused artiness and unpretentiousness. Dilettante tendencies got inoculated by the heavy-duty work ethic. ‘What I loved about
that area of Los Angeles was the fearlessness, the not worrying about
being cool,’ says Carducci.
‘We were kind of products of the Sixties, me and D. Boon, but not
adults in the Sixties,’ says Watt. ‘We were all primed with this rebellionminded worldview, but we missed the train.’ As much as the Pop Group,
they saw what they did as part of a continuum that included Bob Dylan
and especially Creedence Clearwater Revival. They admired the populist
class-consciousness of songs like ‘Fortunate Son’. Watt wore flannel in
homage to Creedence singer John Fogerty. The name Minutemen itself is
a Sixties allusion. Although it originally dates back to the militias of the
Revolutionary War, Watt and Boon chose it as an ironic reference to a
Sixties group of paranoid rightwing terrorists, who called themselves the
Minutemen because they felt they were defending the republic from its
internal enemies, ranging from crypto-communist summer camps to Red
infiltrators in the Justice Department.
Along with defending the worker, the Minutemen believed in hard
work. In addition to churning out records and gigging tirelessly, they ran
their own indie label, New Alliance, and put out early releases by a number of artists who later wound up on SST, such as Hüsker Dü and the
Descendents. The Minutemen toured as doggedly as Black Flag (fifty
gigs in as many days was not untypical) and with the same low-budget,
no-roadies-and-no-driver approach. They booked their own shows,
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unloaded their gear and set it up themselves, slept in the van or on fans’
floors. Singing in ‘The Politics of Time’ about life on the road, D. Boon
declared, ‘We jam econo/It makes us stench.’ Econo was the band’s private slang term for their ultra-frugal approach to touring and recording.
Songs were rehearsed to perfection before entering the studio and then
knocked out in a single take. Keeping costs down was all part of the
quest for autonomy. ‘Being small, you build a sense of self-reliance that
you can’t learn if you become a big rock band,’ says Watt.
The Minutemen’s down-to-earth aura allowed them to get away with
being pretty avant. Their lyrics were condensed into telegraphic blurts
that sometimes resembled a demagogue’s slogans. ‘Games’, from 1981’s
The Punch Line, shouts down a manipulative person, or perhaps
Manipulation in the abstract, with one-word cries of accusation:
‘Contradictions! Lies, lies! . . . Unreal!’ Other times, the words come
across like opaque fragments of modernist poetry. On ‘The Glory of
Man’, Boon sings, ‘I live sweat but I dream light years/I am the tide the
rise and the fall/The reality soldier the laugh child.’ The Minutemen had
a knack for a great title – ‘Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts,’ ‘If Reagan
Played Disco’, and the self-demystifying ‘Shit From An Old Notebook’.
The more abstract lyrics usually came from Watt, the more straightforwardly denunciatory stuff from Boon. When the latter complained,
‘your words are too spacey, man, you gotta get more clear,’ a piqued
Watt took his landlady’s note about the bathtub leaking and turned it
into the song ‘Take 5, D’ (‘hope we can rely on you not to use
shower/you’re not keeping tub caulked’). Says Watt, ‘I was like, “this
real enough for you, D.?”’
‘Take 5, D’ appeared on 1984’s Double Nickels on the Dime, the
Minutemen’s most accomplished and conventionally pleasant record.
The double album’s forty-five songs seem like an attempt to imagine
what postpunk would sound like if it were rooted in American music
rather than based in a rejection of it. ‘‘‘Mr. Narrator!”/This is Bob Dylan
to me . . . I’m his soldier child,’ Boon sang on the bittersweet and almostmellow ‘History Lesson (Part II)’, a reverie about the childhood friends
Watt and Boon having their lives changed by punk rock. ‘Coming up
from Pedro, me and Boon were kind of hicks as far as the Hollywood
punks were considered, provincials or something,’ recalls Watt, explaining the song’s description of the pair as ‘fuckin’ corndogs’. ‘But we didn’t
care, it was just so liberating for us, that scene.’
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They got the idea of doing a double album from Hüsker Dü, who
recorded their own double LP (a concept album to boot) in a lightningfast three-day session in late 1983. Inspired by friendly rivalry, the
Minutemen set to recording Double Nickels. SST actually delayed putting out Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade until July 1984 so it could be released
on the exact same day as the Minutemen’s opus, to intensify the impact
and the sense of SST’s brand of post-hardcore reaching a peak of aesthetic maturity.
Just over three years earlier, Hüsker Dü had released their debut single
‘Statues’ on their own tiny, Minneapolis-based label Reflex. Punk, the
group’s initial inspiration, was over, British postpunk seemed like the
way ahead. ‘That single sounds like Public Image, it’s got that Keith
Levene sound,’ says Carducci, claiming that Hüsker Dü later dismissed
that period in the band’s life ‘as a dark time, a weak moment of doubt’.
After hearing the early hardcore of Black Flag and Dead Kennedys,
Hüsker Dü were galvanized with renewed purpose and threw themselves
unreservedly into the ‘loud-fast rules’ maelstrom. The result was Land
Speed Record, seventeen songs in just twenty-six minutes, the contours
of the vocal melodies almost completely disappearing in the dustcloud of
distortion the band left in its amphetamine-fueled slipstream. Gradually,
the love of Sixties pop shared by guitarist/vocalist Bob Mould and drummer/vocalist Grant Hart re-emerged, reaching fruition with Zen Arcade’s
Beatlesy melodies, Byrdsy folk-rock harmonies, piano interludes, and
occasional psychedelia-style backwards guitar.
What made Hüsker Dü classic SST prog-punkers was the virtuosity
inside the mayhem. Hart’s fleet-footed drumming sometimes recalled
jazz-schooled players like Billy Cobham from Mahavishnu Orchestra, or
Mitch Mitchell, the drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. His intricate hi-hat patterns and cymbal splashes generated a spray of high-end
sound that merged with the snow-flurry tempest of Mould’s open-tuned
guitar. Hüsker Dü’s music was furious like punk, yet its blast achieved an
abstraction to rival free jazz. As if to signpost the fact that this effect
wasn’t just an accidental byproduct of playing hard and fast, but fully
intended, Zen Arcade closed with a fourteen-minute instrumental of fullon improvisation. A devastating foray at the intersection of thrash metal,
jazz-rock, and raga, ‘Reoccurring Dreams’ fills the mind’s eye’s with
images of tornado spouts, napalm horizons, boiling seas, gas-plumes
blistering from the surface of the sun . . .
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The most neo-psychedelic and crypto-prog band on the SST roster was
not Hüsker Dü, though, but Meat Puppets, a trio of sunstruck visionaries from Phoenix, Arizona who were at heart hippies. Being from affluent liberal backgrounds, the band—the brothers Curt and Cris
Kirkwood on guitar and bass, and drummer Derrick Bostrom—were
able to spend their teenage years ‘exploring our minds’, as Bostrom
euphemizes it. In plain English, getting wasted and listening to music.
In one early interview, Meat Puppets talked about how the two biggest
influences on their music were the desert and ‘smoke’, meaning marijuana. Indeed, Bostrom and the brothers Kirkwood originally met
through a shared pot dealer. ‘The desert around Phoenix was where we’d
go to get high,’ recalls Bostrom. ‘We’d cross the edge of town, find a
stretch of desert, light up a joint, or trip.’
The Kirkwoods were hippies in terms of their musical taste, too, worshipping what Cris called ‘the tasty fuckin’ lick-meisters’ of jazz-rock
and prog acts such as Gong, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Al DiMeola, Gentle
Giant, and ECM guitarists Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie.
Learning to play guitar and bass, the Kirkwoods hurled themselves into
developing serious chops, something audible even amid the excruciated
racket of Meat Puppets first EP In a Car, on which there’s a discernible
intricacy to the cacophony.
Although he liked to get high, Bostrom wasn’t a hippie but a hipster. It
was he who turned the Kirkwoods onto punk rock, playing them records
by the Damned and Television. A manic Phoenix gig by Devo also
rearranged the brothers’ sensibilities, and they plunged avidly into the
modern loud-fast-rules sound. In many ways, though, it was almost by
chance that Meat Puppets ended up at the home of hardcore, SST. When
they first started to visit Los Angeles, the group gravitated towards
SoCal’s way-underground postpunk scene, which was based around
obscure performance spaces such as the Brave Dog and the Anticlub, and
shows in unusual settings, such as art galleries, or the Mojave Desert. ‘At
the start of the band, in 1980, we were hanging out with all these groups
associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society,’ recalls Bostrom.
‘Bands like B People, Monitor, Human Hands. On the fringe of the
LAFMS, there was people like Savage Republic and 100 Flowers. One
thing we all had in common was a love of Beefheart.’
A determinedly anti-rock outfit led by UCLA art student Bruce Licher,
Savage Republic were something like a West Coast Einsturzende
Neubauten. They used scrap metal as percussion, made music in the
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utility tunnels under UCLA, and staged events in the desert. Gradually,
they evolved into a trance-rock outfit with drone-tone inputs from
Arabic music. As for The Los Angeles Free Music Society, they were
SoCal’s nearest equivalent to The Residents or the London Musicians
Collective – a coalition of post-psychedelic misfits and improvisers.
Founded in 1975, the LAFMS was motivated by a kind of boredom with
mid-Seventies music culture similar to that which sparked punk, but its
response was absurdist and whimsical, based on a love of the esoteric
and out-there that encompassed exotica, field recordings, soundtracks,
cartoon music, Krautrock, and musique concrète. Centered on a
Pasadena record store called Poobah’s, the LAFMS’s sensibility was
record collector at heart. This was music made by and for people who
knew about Sun Ra, Harry Partch, John Cage, and The Shaggs. Often
comprised of the same few people using different names, the LAFMS
groups – the DooDooettes, Le Forte Four, Airway, Smegma – put out
records all through the late Seventies and early Eighties, but in very small
numbers, anywhere from a few hundred copies to a thousand. At a time
when punk had opened up the possibility for weird shit to sell in substantial amounts (the Residents’ Eskimo shifted 100,000 copies, for
instance), this indicated a striking lack of ambition compared to SST’s
will-to-power.
Meat Puppets could easily have ended up happily idling in this subcultural backwater. Two of the group’s earliest recordings were their
contributions to a compilation on 100 Flowers’ Happy Squid label and
the LAFMS cassette Light Bulb. Through the LAFMS-associated band
Monitor, however, they met Carducci just as he was joining SST and he
suggested that Meat Puppets follow him. The Puppets’ first three albums
for SST are a staggering body of work. Each record saw the group make
a dizzying quantum jump, or perplexing sideways leap, each time inventing and then abandoning a unique sound that a shrewder band could
have based an entire career upon.
An exquisitely lacerated collision of thrashpunk, acid rock, and country, the debut Meat Puppets makes one imagine what bluegrass would
have sounded like if the peyote cactus were indigenous to the
Appalachian mountains. Bostrom’s drums accelerate what he calls ‘the
country shuffle two-step’ to hardcore tempo. The album contains two
C&W covers, the Doc Watson tune ‘Walking Boss’ and an unraveled
version of ‘Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds’, which was originally recorded in the
1940s by an anodyne vocal group called Sons of the Pioneers. Curt
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Kirkwood doesn’t sound like he’ll be gracing the stage at the Grand Ole
Opry any time soon, though. Gnashing the dreamily wistful words into
an indecipherably mangled yowl, he sounds like a Venezuelan shaman
flipping out on hallucinogenic tree-bark. One can almost see the long
strings of drool hanging from his chin. According to Bostrom, the
Kirkwood brothers were pretty close to this state when they recorded the
album. ‘Curt and Cris were on mushrooms. That’s why there’s this weird
feedback that Curt couldn’t squelch and slightly off tunings. He couldn’t
quite get his guitar in tune because he was tripping. And we recorded the
record live, with the guitar sound bleeding through the drum microphones.’
Meat Puppets at this stage made a din that was loud and frantic and
extreme enough to just about pass for hardcore. But the Puppets’ surreal
humor irritated the skinhead fraternity. At a gig in San Francisco opening for the Dead Kennedys, the Meat Puppets kicked off with the theme
from The King and I. ‘God, it was like there a dumpster above the stage
tipping a whole load of beercans on top of us!’ Cris Kirkwood recalled
in 1987.
By the time they came to record Meat Puppets II in the spring of 1983,
the group ‘were so sick of the hardcore thing,’ says Bostrom. ‘We were
really into pissing off the crowd.’ Hence the band’s swerve into psychedelic country rock, with Curt ditching the foaming-at-the-mouth delivery in favor of a frayed country croon, plaintive and fragile. Bostrom had
written all the lyrics on the debut. But on the second album Curt sang his
own words and so had more commitment to communicating emotion.
Meat Puppets II starts as shitkicking and ferocious as anything on the
first record, with ‘Split Myself In Two’. Its sandstorm of guitarfuzz flickers with fleeting silvery melody-swirls that suddenly billow into an
ecstatic solo. But the heart of the record resides in the slower songs like
‘Aurora Borealis’ and ‘We’re Here’. Curt cleaves the sky with plangent
echoplex peals or twinkles in the far distance with a needling stellar
beauty.
As titles like ‘Plateau’, ‘Climbing’, and ‘New Gods’ hint, the album is
unabashedly mystical, all about bewilderment in the wilderness, the
derangement caused by the unrelenting glare and undifferentiated
dunescape of the Sonoran desert around Phoenix. And drugs too, of
course. ‘Oh, Me’ declares, ‘I can’t see the end of me/my whole expanse I
cannot see.’ An instrumental driven by iridescent fingerpicking, ‘I’m a
Mindless Idiot’ is a spiritual boast, celebrating blissed-out vacancy as a
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state of grace. In a 1987 interview, Curt talked about how ‘the BIG experiences I’ve had have been in the great canyons, or at the beach. For us
the desert is such a great place to go open up your senses, get drunk,
spend the night out. Thousands of miles of nothing at all. I mean, anyone who could see the Grand Canyon and not want to write a song . . .’
Stoned out of their collective gourd, the Puppets loved to contemplate
landscapes whose changeless majesty seemed to open out onto infinity
and eternity. ‘We’re not into any kind of topical or political referencing
in the lyrics, all that stuff about the System, should we eat McDonald’s
or not,’ said Cris, perhaps making a dig at the MaximumRockNRoll
world of politicized hardcore. ‘It’s so trifling and fleeting, it’s gonna be
outdated, in 10 years, 50 years, 500 years for sure. And in 50 billion trillion years . . .’
But Meat Puppets II wasn’t totally beatific. It also resurrected a certain tone of desolation that dates back to that early seventies moment of
post-hippie burn-out and disillusion – think of Neil Young’s Everybody
Knows This Is Nowhere, After The Goldrush, and Zuma, or of movies
like Two Lane Blacktop – and found it eerily applicable to the Reagan
Eighties. On ‘Lost’, Curt sings of being ‘lost on the freeways again’, of
having ‘grown tired of living Nixon’s mess’, of wounds ‘I know will
never mend’.
Wiping the floor with the cowpunk and retro-Americana competition,
Meat Puppets II brought the group a huge amount of critical praise on
its release in April 1984. Bostrom believes it would have had even more
impact if it had been released shortly after being recorded in spring ’83.
‘It would really have blown the scene apart, it would have been a huge
gauntlet thrown down.’ But for reasons not entirely clear, SST delayed its
release almost a year. Meat Puppets then embarked on a massive SST
tour, sandwiched on the bill between the outrageously offensive NigHeist and the headlining Black Flag. Needless to say, the Puppets’ hippielike hair and long improvisatory jams weren’t warmly embraced by the
hardcore community.
‘We are a progressive band, a high-energy, post-punk, psychedelic
kind of band,’ Bostrom once declared. The mixture sounds like an identity crisis and a recipe for disaster. But the group’s divided impulses
meshed even more sublimely on the Meat Puppets third album Up On
The Sun, in the form of a radiant fastfunk that resembled a cross
between Talking Heads and Grateful Dead. ‘We came to really relate to
the Dead,’ admits Bostrom. Lots of people spotted the Jerry Garcia
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element in Curt’s playing, but nobody noticed what Bostrom calls ‘the
sad and bitter truth – the band Curt was really listening to on that album
was Duran Duran! He’d always pick up on some mainstream artist, and
try to see what he could learn from them’.
The other, equally embarrassing secret behind Up On The Sun is
Curt’s reliance on the Rockman, a guitar device invented by Tom Scholz
of arena rockers Boston that created an extremely clean distortion
sound. As Bostrom notes, it’s the sort of sterilizing technology that
ruined Eighties mainstream rock. But in Curt Kirkwood’s hands the
Rockman is a magical tool, enabling the dragonfly glisten of ‘Away’ and
‘Animal Kingdom’, the almost brutal brightness of ‘Hot Pink’, the scintillating gladfoot hurtle of ‘Swimming Ground’. Throughout the album,
the music gives off a strange shimmer, as if it’s reaching the listener
through the heat-haze rising off a noon-baked highway. Bostrom’s buoyant drums and Cris Kirkwood’s jazzy chiming bass sustain a wonderful
mood somewhere between urgent and serene. After a couple of slightly
quirked-out warpfunk ditties on Side Two with titles like ‘Buckethead’,
the final stretch of Up On The Sun turns wholly holy. ‘Seal Whales’,
‘Two Rivers’, and ‘Creator’ are pantheistic hymns to what Curt once
called ‘the wild wonder of being’. It’s some of the most glorious music of
the Eighties.
By the time Up On The Sun was released in 1985, SST had crested.
1984 – the year of Double Nickels, Zen Arcade, Meat Puppets II, and a
slew of Black Flag releases – saw all the label’s leading groups reach a
synchronized peak. Over the next few years, Hüsker Dü maintained a
high standard, with three more albums for SST and two after they left
for the major label league, but nothing quite matched the towering Zen
Arcade. The Minutemen slackened with a desultory stab at crossover
(Project: Mersh) and the sapped-sounding 3-Way Tie For Last. The latter I reluctantly panned – as ‘hardcore’s Sandinista’, in reference to the
Clash’s bloated and over-eclectic triple album – for one of my first
assignments as a cub reviewer at Melody Maker, the reluctance stemming mostly from the fact that D. Boon had died in a car accident shortly
after the record’s release.
After Up On The Sun, Meat Puppets also tried to go mersh
(Minutemen-slang for commercial) with the overproduced Mirage and
the ZZ Top-style neo-boogie of Huevos. They eventually became a successful mainstream band in the early nineties, thanks in large part to
their fan Kurt Cobain, who covered no less than three songs from Meat
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Puppets II during Nirvana’s episode of MTV’s Unplugged, on which the
brothers Kirkwood both performed.
By the time of 1987’s Huevos, SST itself had gone full-on progressive
and pretty much forgotten the punk part of the equation. Greg Ginn
started a sideline group called Gone, an instrumental trio hacking out
stop-start seizures of jagged bombast like a thrash-metal King Crimson.
The SST roster became scrofulous with trippy jam bands, instrumental
combos, retro-metal and Zappa-damaged buffoons. A few were great
(awesome Sabbath-clones Saint Vitus), some were interesting (Always
August, Paper Bag, Blind Idiot God), most were onanistic drivel.
Sometimes releasing as many as seven albums in a month, SST’s
approach weirdly degenerated into an underground parallel to the mainstream major labels’ strategy of ‘throw shit at the wall and hope some of
it sticks’.
It was the mid-Eighties output of Black Flag itself that exemplified
where SST went wrong. The label had defined itself in opposition to
hardcore, which it believed had degenerated from a music-driven scene
into something determined by solidarities based on fashion or political
beliefs. SST’s ethos was ‘it’s all about the music, man, and only the
music’. In their refusal to pander to their audience with more-of-thesame, Black Flag went too far in the opposite direction toward an auteur
trip, a monologue that ignored the existence of listeners altogether. They
ended up producing the kind of Jeff Beck-like jack-off that punk originally set out to abolish, things like the Family Man EP (one side instrumentals, the other spoken word) and the all-instrumental The Process of
Weeding Out (a pun on pot-damaged music-making, but also Black
Flag’s intent to sift its audience of hardcore camp followers, leaving just
the ‘real’ music fans). The irony is that while some of Black Flag’s lateperiod releases have their moments, almost everyone would agree that
the band’s greatest work remains the definitively hardcore Damaged.
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LONDON GLAM CITY
Poseurs, Dreamers, Heroes and Monsters, from the Bromley
Contingent and Blitz to the Batcave and Leigh Bowery
London has long been a place where people go to shed their past and
invent a fantastical future self. Small-town misfits and arty weirdos of all
sorts have flocked to the capital, leaving behind one kind of community
(conformist, constraining) and looking to find another kind: a fellowship
of freaks. Some, like John Foxx of Ultravox or Steve Strange of Visage,
came from the industrial provinces of the UK. Others journeyed from far
overseas, like Australian exile Leigh Bowery, fabled and fabulous host of
the club Taboo. And still others – Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin of the
Banshees, Japan’s David Sylvian – hailed from the near-and-yet-so-far
suburbs of London itself. All of these refugees from banality were like
Billy Liar if he’d got on that London-bound train rather than chickening
out at the last minute. Not content to keep their fantasies caged in their
own skulls, they followed instead the advice of The Rocky Horror
Show’s transvestite hero Dr Frankenfurter: ‘Don’t dream it, be it.’
Even before forming the Banshees, Sioux and Severin were already
famous as prominent members of the Bromley Contingent, a coterie of
dressed-to-distress punks named after the staid suburban town on the
southern-most fringe of London where most of them lived. Suburbia and
the festering frustration trapped behind its net curtains and neatly
trimmed hedges was a major inspiration to the Banshees, resulting in
songs like ‘Suburban Relapse’, about a housewife who has a psychotic
breakdown. But the blandness of the ’burbs was also a spur to stand out
and be different.
The future Banshees drew inspiration from the extremist personae and
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decadent chic of Warhol’s Factory and The Velvet Underground
(Severin’s chosen name came from the character in VU’s ‘Venus in Furs’,
itself inspired by the classic sadomasochist novel of the same title). Sioux
and Severin also looked closer to home, to British glam rock, especially
David Bowie (who originally came from Bromley) and Roxy Music.
Indeed, rather than meeting in the Bromley area, it was at a Roxy gig at
Wembley Arena on the other side of London that Sioux and Severin first
encountered each other.
The essence of glam is a mixture of exhibitionism and authoritarianism – regal and dazzling, the star literally enthrals the fan, who’s midway
between voyeur and vassal. As glam-fans-turned-punks, the Bromley
Contingent were always at odds with 1977’s official doctrine of ‘no more
heroes’ and ‘anyone can do it’. Billy Idol’s very name signalled a will-tostardom that contradicted the idea that the revolution was all about
ordinary ‘kids on the street’ seizing the stage from rock’s corrupt, out-oftouch ruling class (Led Zep, the Stones, etc.). Sure, Siouxsie, Idol, et al.
wanted to overthrow the decrepit rock-star royalty – but only to usurp
their place on the throne.
Politically, too, there was an element to glam that ran against the
socialist egalitarianism that punk represented for most people. Bowie, in
1975, had talked about how the UK needed a ‘strong leader’; Roxy
played with the imagery of aristocracy. Siouxsie likewise flirted with
right-wing symbolism. Whether expressing genuinely dodgy tendencies
or simply aiming to goad the elder generation who’d endured the Blitz,
the singer wore swastikas. Years later, she described her version of
extreme individualism as ‘fascist. I mean, I call myself a fascist personally. I like everything my own way.’ A theatre of tyranny and terrorism,
mystique and mystery, the Banshees’ version of punk bridged the gap
between glam and Goth.
Far more than politicos like The Clash or buffoons like The Damned,
the Banshees’ true peers were a pair of bands not generally seen as New
Wave but typically dismissed as glam johnny-come-latelys: Ultravox and
Japan. Originally from Lancashire, John Foxx came to London to study
at the Royal College of Art and soon formed the band that would evolve
into Ultravox. Although their art-rock was aggressive and initially guitardominated, the group’s overall style – especially Foxx’s mannered delivery
– seemed fatal ly out of step with the reigning punk sound. Brian Eno’s
role as producer on the 1976 debut album encouraged critics to dismiss
Ultravox as Roxy-wannabes. But they weren’t behind their own time so
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much as slightly in front. By 1978’s synth-dominated Systems of
Romance, their blend of clinical electro-rock and elegant alienation anticipated where UK pop culture was next headed: New Romanticism.
Japan came from Catford, a London-periphery town even more
dowdy than Bromley. Like John Foxx (born Dennis Leigh), singer David
Sylvian changed his name to something sleeker and more exotic than his
given moniker, David Batt. He and his drummer brother Steve looked to
their heroes The New York Dolls: ‘Sylvian’ was a corruption of that
group’s Sylvain Sylvain, while the drummer mangled David Johansen
into Jansen. Perhaps they were desperate to sever ties symbolically to
their dad, whose humble occupation was filling rat-holes with plaster for
Rentokil. Japan initially sounded like a svelte blend of disco and hard
rock, but when they added synths to the sound palette the music become
increasingly exotic and exquisite. Likewise the group’s image: Sylvian
turned himself into an objet d’art, his blond wedge-cut resembling a
sculpted block of platinum, his thickly made-up face forming an immaculately blank facade. This was style as mask, inscrutable and enigmatic.
The early campaign to break Japan (including an androgynous ad
with Sylvian pulling open his jacket and showing fake breasts) couldn’t
have been more at odds with the punk mid-seventies. But when the backlash against punk came circa 1979 with a return to glamour, Japan and
Ultravox both suddenly became hip. At new London nightspots like A
Club for Heroes, the ethos was essentially the reactivation of glam’s
impulse to look like you were living in a movie. The scene was the perfect milieu for Japan and Ultravox, cinephiles who’d written art-movieinspired songs like ‘Nightporter’ and ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, while
their dance-rocky sound made for a perfect soundtrack for the poseurs at
the Blitz, most of whom were former punks who’d reverted to their true
identities as Bowie boys and Roxy girls.
The Blitz doorman was a Welshman who called himself Steve Strange.
He became the frontman of Visage, a band whose name crystallized the
new spirit of the age, being a more stylized version of ‘the face’ (which not
coincidentally was the name of a new ‘style magazine’ that would come
to define the early eighties). Strange and his fellow night creatures
favoured geometric make-up that turned the face into an abstract canvas
and clothes that jumbled up vintage and futuristic. Strange described the
scene’s spirit in terms that recalled the razzle-dazzle escapism that cheered
people up during the thirties Depression, characterizing the Blitz kids as
‘people who work nine to five and then go out and live their fantasies.
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They’re glad to be dressed up and escaping work and all the greyness and
depression.’ There was a fascination for Europe between the wars –
Weimar Germany, Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret – reflected in the
period-styled video for the Visage hit ‘The Damned Don’t Cry’ and also
in Ultravox’s own smash, ‘Vienna’.
Spandau Ballet, the other major New Romantic band, continued the
fascination with mittel Europa, taking their name from the prison where
Rudolf Hess was incarcerated and conjuring a Teutonic vibe with their
cold synths and operatic vocals. Echoing glam, New Romanticism was
all about a self-created aristocracy. Spandau, early on, didn’t play gigs
but staged invitation-only events at unusual locations like the Scala
Cinema or HMS Belfast; their press champion, Robert Elms, blithely
noted that Spandau’s ‘strident elitism means that unless your ears are
pinned firmly to the “right” ground your chances of seeing them are at
present slim. On the evidence of their latest performance it really is your
loss.’ Yet unlike showbiz, which really was an authoritarian monologue
from star to audience, New Romanticism was a community, a sort of
egalitarian elite where anybody could be a face on the scene if they made
an effort. Spandau guitarist Gary Kemp described the group’s music as
‘applause to the audience’, who effectively co-created the atmosphere of
their events.
Every New Romantic was an idol-wannabe looking to cross over and
make it big. While the likes of Boy George became stars, a new scene was
fermenting in London during 1982: Goth. Its epicentre was the Batcave,
a Soho nightclub packed with fans of the Banshees and the early cultyand-kinky Adam & the Antz. ‘It was a light bulb for all the freaks and
people like myself who were from the sticks and wanted a bit more from
life,’ Johnny Melton from the band Specimen has said of the Batcave.
‘Freaks, weirdos, sexual deviants . . .’ The club’s vibe was all leather-andlace and B-movie ghoulishness, while the soundtrack consisted of old
glam, The Cramps and early efforts by Goth bands like Alien Sex Fiend.
But while Goth rejected synths and disco-funk, the scene was really not
that different from New Romanticism, sharing common ancestry in
Bowie/Roxy and a passion for posing. There was even some cross-over
between the scenes: Goth face Andi Sex Gang shared a squat with Boy
George at one point, while Theatre of Hate frontman Kirk Brandon is
reputed to have been on even more intimate terms. Specimen’s anthem
‘Stand Up, Stand Out’ could have been a manifesto for New
Romanticism as much as for Goth, as could Banshees songs like ‘Painted
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Bird’, which paid tribute to their audience with the lines: ‘Confound that
dowdy flock with a sharp honed nerve/because we’re painted birds, by
our own design.’
Like the Blitz before it, the Batcave metastasized across pop culture,
spawning similar scenes across the UK and the world, while its bigger
talents became successful – and increasingly conventional-sounding –
rock bands. Meanwhile, the spirit of ‘don’t dream it, be it’ rematerialized
in a new club, Taboo. Launched in January 1985 and located in a tacky
Leicester Square disco called Circus Maximum, Taboo fused the flamboyance of New Romanticism with the darkness of Goth and chucked in
an (un)healthy dose of debauchery (heroin, poppers, acid, barbiturates
and insane amounts of alcohol). ‘It was a very harsh anti-glamour look,’
scenester Matthew Glammore has recalled. ‘It was extreme, severe,
intense, nasty . . . It was make-up heaven.’
Taboo’s co-founder and host, Leigh Bowery, was a fan of Against
Nature, J. K. Huysmans’ late-nineteenth-century decadent novel about
an aristocrat who dedicates himself to artifice and monstrosity. Bowery
likewise devoted his entire week to conceiving and creating the outrageous outfits he would wear at Taboo. ‘Modern art on legs’ is how Boy
George described Bowery, although you could equally describe the obese
Aussie’s whole life as performance art that never ended. Taboo’s clique
of freaks – which included figures like Trojan, former Antperson Kevin
Mooney, Princess Julia and ruthlessly strict doorman Mark Vaultier –
were gluttons for pleasure, and accordingly the vibe was ‘messy’ in a way
that anticipated the polydrug squalor of nineties club culture. Taboo was
the first British club where Ecstasy was widely used, but the vibe wasn’t
the least bit loved-up: instead, there was a kind of competitive vileness
(Bowery and acolytes were virtuosos of insult and ego-puncture) and
grossness (Glammore has claimed he used to vomit on people).
Unlike its precursors – Bromley Contingent, Blitz, Batcave – no pop
careers were spawned at Taboo, though. Music took a back seat to
extremist style and grotesque behaviour. One of the DJs, Rachel Auburn,
had never seen two turntables together before and initially played a functional soundtrack of party tunes, early Madonna and Hi-NRG. The
other DJ, Jeffrey Hinton, got so tripped out once that he placed the stylus on the bare slipmat for five full minutes. Bowery did have a bash at
being a pop star in the early nineties with the band Minty, which also
included Glammore, and the group got a smidgeon of attention via the
Romo scene, an ill-fated, premature attempt to revive New Romanticism
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in the mid-nineties. But mostly Bowery looked to the world of fashion
and art rather than pop, talking of his desire to become ‘the Andy
Warhol of London’.
Years after his death from AIDS-related illness, the spectre of Bowery
stalked the London scene again. Figuratively, in the form of the resurgence of nightclubs based around over-the-top dressing-up. And literally:
Boy George would head out to these clubs straight after performing in
his stage musical Taboo, still wearing his Leigh Bowery costume. At
nights like Boombox, Horse Meat Disco, Antisocial and Bistrotheque,
you’ll see many echoes of Taboo-style extremity: a guy wearing a veil
over his face made entirely out of tea bags, another with green lipstick
and giant-size liquorice allsorts sticking out of his head. ‘A lot of people
do spend an incredible amount of time on their costumes,’ says Richard
Mortimer, the host of Boombox. ‘And the outfits can be really shocking.
But at some of the other clubs on the scene, kids do the Leigh Bowery
thing but they do it really badly.’ There’s also a bit of the Batcave in the
mix too, says Mortimer. ‘There’s a Goth thing coming back in a big way.
You’ve never seen so much black make-up, but it’s kind of camp Goth.’
Music is even more secondary than it was for the Taboo scene – basic
party sounds or campy retro selections (‘ironic eighties’ having now been
superseded by ‘ironic nineties’, since the sixteen-year-olds now coming
onto the scene weren’t even born in 1990). ‘It’s not about the music,
more about a vibe, a collective of people,’ says Mortimer. If the scene,
which is clustered in east London and in Vauxhall, just south of the river,
looks anywhere it’s to the fashion world. Boombox ring up designers like
Gareth Pugh and Giles Deacon to borrow outfits for their outrageous
doorman Janette to wear. And a fantasy of fashion-runway glamour has
possessed the scene in the form of vogueing, the New York gay subculture of competitive cross-dressing and icon imitation. Directly inspired
by the documentary Paris Is Burning, Bistrotheque held the first Vogue
Ball, and Horse Meat Disco followed with its Vauxhall Is Gurning balls.
Vogueing is the ultimate expression of glam’s erasure of reality by fantasy. True to glam’s elitist spirit, vogueing is organized along hierarchical
and competitive lines. Coteries are called ‘houses’, a word that refers to
fashion houses but is also oddly redolent of the British public-school system, where houses are quasi-families warring with each other on the
sports field. Hence House of Boombox, House of Fierce Nest, House of
Cunt and all the other clans competing at Vauxhall Is Gurning. And yet,
although there’s fierce rivalry and bitchiness, there’s also an element of
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(Director’s cut of piece for GQ Style, 2007)
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punk do-it-yourself involved in the nu-vogue scene. ‘Kids make their
own outfits, they go to vintage shops and markets,’ says Mortimer. ‘One
girl came to Boombox wearing six tutus – a great look, but also really
cheap ’cos they only cost £1 each.’ With this latest twist to London’s
glam continuum, everyone’s equal and anyone can belong, just so long as
they’ve gone out of their way to make a spectacle of themselves.
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A FINAL INTERVIEW: SIMON REYNOLDS
Rip It Up and Start Again, historian
How did you define ‘post-punk’? As an entity it seems fairly . . . nebulous.
The way I loosely defined it was: groups that had been catalyzed by
punk but didn’t sound ‘punk rock’ in the classic Pistols/Clash sense.
They wouldn’t have existed without the spur of punk giving them the
confidence to do it themselves, but they interpreted punk as an imperative to keep changing. The big exception to ‘catalyzed by punk’ – and
which required a second-level definition – were those bands who happened to be in existence several years before punk happened, like Devo
and Cabaret Voltaire, but who only found an audience because punk
opened things up and as a result have always been thought of as ‘postpunk’. There were several levels to that opening up. Punk created an
audience with an appetite for more challenging music, extremes of all
kinds. Punk shook up the major labels, making them more likely to risk
signing edgy bands for fear of getting left behind. Finally, punk triggered
the independent-label boom, which provided a distribution network for
all kinds of weirdo music that otherwise would have had to subsist on a
mail-order level but which could now reach a vastly bigger audience.
They were also able to ‘signify’ in a much expanded and more energized
context.
Perhaps the best way to think of post-punk is not as a genre but as a
space of possibility, out of which a range of new genres emerged – Goth,
industrial, synthpop, mutant disco, et al. Because it’s a space – or maybe
a discourse about music, rather than a style of music – what unites all
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Talking of periods, there’s a kind of sparring with the sixties thing going
on in Rip It Up, contesting its claim to be the most exciting era for rock.
In the intro I do argue that post-punk is ‘a fair match’ for the sixties in
terms of artistically expansive, ever-mutating music and a spirit of
change and political-cultural idealism infusing youth culture. There was
definitely an element of generational jousting going on, as much as I love
the music of the sixties and in some ways feel like a child of that era
(born in 1963). It’s based on authentic frustration, being sick and tired
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this activity is a set of open-ended imperatives: innovation, wilful oddness; the jettisoning of all things precedented or ‘rock’n’roll’. This openendedness encouraged diversity and divergence, such that by the end of
the period the book covers the distance between all the post-punk fragments has become vast: from Goth to New Pop to the Big Music of
Bunnymen/U2 to the second wave of industrial outfits . . . Everything has
scattered and followed its own path, often completely antithetical to the
other directions taken. But the shared point of origin – the mythic site of
lost unity – is punk. That’s the ignition point. The Big Bang.
Why end in 1984? Periodization is a tricky business: historians have
written books dedicated to these questions of ‘What is an era?’, ‘In what
circumstances can you separate off a segment of time as a defined epoch
or isolate a “spirit of the age”?’ Periods are messy at both ends; they coalesce gradually and they crumble away without ever completely disappearing. By 1984, though, it felt to me that the ideas and energies of both
post-punk and its inseparable ‘phase two’, New Pop, had run their
course. The preponderance of vanguard taste – musicians, critics, fans –
had shifted in a retro direction. The same kind of people who had several
years earlier been the PiLs, Scrittis, Gang of Fours, Human Leagues were
no longer engaging with contemporary black music or exploring electronics; they’d gone back to the guitar and the traditional rock line-up,
and they’d become obsessed with the sixties. There were exceptions, a
few new bands who kept faith with post-punk ideas; the industrial genre
kept growing; certain key figures from the post-punk era like Cabaret
Voltaire and Mark Stewart kept on making music in line with post-punk
ideas. You could also maybe see Madonna and Pet Shop Boys as ‘late
New Pop’: modern dance beats + literate lyrics + neo-glam games played
with image and persona. But the majority of hip, mover-and-shaker
types were now busy reworking rock’s past. Above all, they were fixated
on the sixties.
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of baby boomers getting to retell their stories endlessly. The hundreds of
books about Dylan. Or, just to take one example, Peter Guralnick’s book
on Sam Cooke: it’s not even the first book on Sam Cooke, and it’s 750
pages long, substantially longer than Rip It Up, a book about a whole
era of music, about scores and scores of bands. I know Cooke was an
important figure, but was he really more important than post-punk’s
eight-year span of hyperactive music history? The sixties still has this
hugely privileged status. So the overstatement of the case for post-punk
is very much a rhetorical pitch aimed at stroking the collective ego of my
generation. To buck its self-image up a bit: ‘C’mon, take pride in having
lived through such an amazing time!’
At the same time I do very much see punk and post-punk as a continuation of the sixties: at once an extension of, and a twist within, the
whole sixties idea of youth as cultural vanguard. With punk, there’s
internecine warfare being conducted across generational lines, but that
all takes place within a much larger ‘rockist’ consensus that sees rock as
a force for change, disruption, subversion. Post-punk, because it let back
in ideas of complexity and progression that punk had trampled, reconnects even more to all those sixties ideas about rock-as-art. And if you
think about it, in 1979 these were relatively recent ideas. Post-punk took
place only a dozen years or so after Sgt Pepper’s and ‘Strawberry Fields
Forever’. More recently still, everyone from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin
to David Bowie were all, in their different ways, upholding within a
mainstream context ideas of experiment and constant artistic development. Even mainstream rock figures contemporaneous with the postpunk groups, like Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and The Police (who did a lot
of improvisation in their live performances), were keeping alive these
ideas about listeners needing to be challenged and artists needing to
stretch themselves. So these sixties values were still in the air.
I wanted to big up the music of my formative years, but without necessarily bumming out the youth of today. Saying post-punk is the equal
of the sixties is not the same as saying it’s the last time rock music mattered. After all, in my own lifetime as critic, a.k.a. ‘professional fan’,
there’s been rap, rave, grunge and much more besides. I wrote a whole
book, Energy Flash, about electronic dance music, which makes the
nineties seem insanely exciting and momentous. Which it was! The
nineties felt like this blur of constant change. Nonetheless, there was
arguably a unique combination of circumstances with post-punk: the
cultural fall-out of punk, the explosion of independent labels, the politi406
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How did you arrive at the idea of writing the history of post-punk at that
particular point, 2002?
I’d completely forgotten about it until some time after Rip It Up came out
and I stumbled on the proposal in an old folder: an idea for a book I came
up with in the early nineties that, while not identical to Rip, sort of contained the post-punk book within it. It was about the ‘punk diaspora’, all
the different ideas of ‘what punk is all about’ and how they’d gone into
hugely divergent directions. It was going to cover Goth, anarcho-punk,
Oi! . . . also New Pop and the Style Council/Redskins school of socialist
soul . . . along with that breed of post-McLaren schemers like the KLF
and Sigue Sigue Sputnik . . . But even things like the folk-punk bands like
The Pogues and The Men They Couldn’t Hang. And more besides. This
book would have had a much bigger time span, going right up to grunge.
But a big portion of it was to be what I was then calling ‘the post-punk
vanguard’. So this idea had been floating around in the back of my mind
for some time – the fall-out from punk.
But what specifically spurred me at the end of the nineties to reconsider that era related more to dance culture. The nineties had been this
incredibly exciting surge, in many ways comparable to post-punk,
except this time I’d been involved really heavily as both a participant and
a critic. But by about 1999 the energy was starting to fade. The rave
spirit had gone, and the scene was all about clubs and all this rather
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cal turmoil of the era, the influence of feminism and of new forms of critical theory like post-structuralism, the amazing richness of black music
in the late seventies, combined with the new affordability and availability of synthesizers and drum machines. All of this meshed to create an
exceptionally productive and changeful era. Post-punk was a sustained
surge of innovation on multiple levels: the sonic, the lyrical, performance, and also in terms of the discussion about what music was for, what
power it could have (a debate which went on in the music press and
fanzines, but also at the point of musical production itself).
I was fifteen when all this kicked off in 1978, and there is that sense
that when you’re growing up, whatever’s around musically seems ultraspecial because you’re so impressionable and capable of being blown
away. But there were critics much older than me, like Greil Marcus, who
were just totally captivated by this new music, groups like Gang of Four
and Delta 5. So I think there is an objective truth to the notion of postpunk as an extraordinarily inventive time.
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pleasant-sounding house music. I began to feel somewhat adrift, wondering, ‘How did I end up here?’
I can remember a specific conversation that lit a sort of spark. It was
late in 1998 and I was talking on the phone with a fellow dance journalist, Tony Marcus, a writer whose work I liked a lot and who I had got to
do some stuff when I was an editor at Spin. He surprised me by mentioning that he’d been listening to Crass recently. The expression he used
was, ‘To remind me who I am.’ Being a few years younger than me, Crass
had been the band that defined his early eighties youth. And as it happened, my younger brother Tim had been really into Crass. What I think
Tony meant was that he’d been through the whole dance and drugs
adventure in the nineties and then found himself wondering, ‘Well, what
was all that about then?’ and looking to reorient himself. That remark of
Tony’s, ‘remind me who I am’, stuck with me. And the next year I found
myself digging out my equivalent of the Crass records, which were the
early Scritti Politti singles. Then, by 2000, you were starting to hear the
very first stirrings of music that sounded influenced by post-punk. Some
of it was by hip young rock bands. But some of it was coming from
within the dance scene and seemingly expressed a desire for something a
bit more spiky and edgy. That old post-punk idea of ‘dangerous dance’.
The actual beginning proper of Rip It Up was a feature I wrote for
Uncut. I started it at the very end of 2000 and it spiralled into this massive piece. I got it into my head that they’d make it the cover story and
run it at 10,000 words. So naturally I wrote just under 20,000 words!
And of course in the end it wasn’t the cover feature, and late in 2001 it
finally ran at about 5,000. But in the process of spending way too long
on this story – two months, vastly longer than was justified by the
cheque I’d be receiving – I came to realize: there’s a book here. The
Uncut piece was like a survey of the landscape, the broadest contours,
but I could see that the terrain was incredibly rich.
When I started on the book in 2002, I just went nuts with the research.
The result was a mass of information and stories and theories that had
to be shaped into something readable. I don’t think people necessarily
understand how hard it is to take something that is like a chunky, soupy
stew and then boil it down into a really good, clear consommé.
Something that goes down easy but has all the nutritive value in it of
everything that’s been taken out of it. If you want all the strained-out
lumpy matter – the extraneous data, anecdotes, my digressive thoughts –
they are on the web as footnotes. Deciding I was going to do that made
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it a lot easier to implement the kind of savage cutting that was needed. I
could kid myself that I wasn’t really throwing away this stuff, that nothing was actually being wasted.
In terms of organizing the material, there were two alternatives: thematic or narrative. Well, there was a third option, a chronological
account, but that seemed impossible because post-punk as a lived experience involved all these things happening simultaneously. So I decided to
go with narrative, breaking it down into separate stories about particular bands or clusters of groups – based around cities, labels, genres, and
so forth. The thematic approach – a chapter on gender, a chapter on artschool influences, and so forth – seemed too academic. It wouldn’t have
the vividness and the personal involvement you got with the individualized narratives. One thing I really wanted to get across was a sense of
these human beings and their struggle to do something different musically. So it’s a heroic narrative, or series of heroic narratives, in the sense
that whatever their flaws or failings, these musicians were striving. What
impressed me time and again was how they chose to take the path of
most resistance. They could have done something easier, taken a more
commercial path, but instead they tried to do something innovative and
challenging. They had dreams and master plans, and sometimes – maybe
most of the time – they wouldn’t work out. But now and then, amazingly, they did.
A big difference between Rip It Up and my previous books is that
there’s a lot less theory. For the most part it entered the picture only
when the bands themselves, like Gang of Four or Scritti, were inspired by
philosophy, political theory, art criticism. In the past, I’ve often used
music – like techno and jungle – as a blank canvas to explore my ideas.
This time around I wasn’t really concerned with imposing my own take
on everything; more with endeavouring to understand what the protagonists were trying to do, where their heads were at. I was conscious of
dealing with this legion of brilliant minds who had really sharp ideas of
what they were trying to achieve and were highly articulate. Many of
them were kind of musician/critics in a sense, eloquent in meta-talk. So
my job was really to let them speak and organize a context for their ideas
to shine. The goal was to illuminate the artists’ musical and intellectual
adventures by recreating the context they operated in, the cultural conversation they were engaged in, the dilemmas they faced. The groups do
get critiqued and sometimes rebuked, but the general spirit of the enterprise was supportive, or even collaborative. I felt like I was on their side.
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You strike a rather sniffy, dismissive attitude towards punk rock. But by
definition, post-punk wouldn’t have existed without punk.
Post-punk wasn’t the repudiation of punk, just as postmodernism is not
the rejection of modernism. The ‘post’ doesn’t signify you’ve jettisoned
the preceding set of ideas, but rather that you’re complexifying those
ideas, exploring the gaps and interrogating the hidden assumptions. But
absolutely, you’re right, the ‘punk’ in post-punk was absolutely crucial.
Firstly, because of that initial burst of self-belief and will-to-power that
punk gave people and that convinced them they really could create their
own music. But also because of a darker edge, an impulse towards
extremes. In fact, one of the things that drove post-punk, or an element
within it, was a feeling that punk, as music, wasn’t extreme enough.
Because post-punk has been so neglected, I did have to rhetorically ‘do
down’ punk a bit in order to raise up post-punk. So how much a fan I am
of pure punk, things like the Pistols and Buzzcocks and X-Ray Spex,
doesn’t necessarily come across. But you know, there’s hundreds of
books about punk – histories and photo books and memoirs. Tons of
documentaries. So it did feel like post-punk was the underdog and
needed to be aggressively defended.
The reason why punk has done so well out of history is its relative
clarity as a phenomenon. Post-punk is a lot more complex and diffuse on
every level, to the point of being a muddle. In a way, post-punk is too
rich. Punk was violent and vivid, and in its pure form it was over quite
quickly. The story has lots of drama – events that convulsed the mainstream like ‘God Save the Queen’ being banned or the Pistols swearing
on Bill Grundy. Post-punk can’t match punk’s iconography – the simple
shock impact of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose or Johnny
Rotten’s yellow-fanged face. There was a defined look in terms of clothes
and hair and record design, a visual language that’s proved to be eternally stylish and surprisingly resilient in terms of its confrontational
power.
But yeah, it’s called post-punk for a reason. The passion and seriousness that runs through all the music in Rip It Up totally comes from that
tremendously reinvigorated sense of the power of music that was
restored in 1976–7. As a result of which every decision made was
freighted with moral urgency. All the things Gang of Four did, the
Brechtian attempts to ‘expose the device’ or demystify the process . . .
they really believed these gestures meant something, that people would
be changed by coming into contact with these ideas. All the anxiousness
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What else did post-punk carry over from punk?
Following in the footsteps of the situationists, punk had identified boredom as the problem facing youth in the affluent West. And if punk was
a destructive response to boredom, you could say that post-punk was a
constructive response: it was literally about making up a whole bunch of
reasons to be excited, a mesh of fevered activity and discussion that
made the world seem more interesting and life seem more urgent.
One thing that came back to me as I did my research was how much
music and the rock press in those days was a lifeline that I and other people who lived in small towns across the UK grabbed onto. If you didn’t
live in one of the big metropolitan centres, you were starved of stimulation. Boredom is a great motivator. A vista of emptiness is something you
want to fill. It was a different kind of boredom in those days to the kind
you get nowadays, which I think of as this sated, distracted-to-death
boredom, the problem of having too many options. We didn’t have that
problem in the seventies. As a kid at that time, there were big stretches
of time where the sensation of boredom was so gnawingly intense it was
almost spiritual. In the UK back then there were only three TV channels,
and they were off for stretches during the afternoon and closed down
completely around midnight. There were only a few radio stations and
the time they allotted to left-field music was pretty restricted. We didn’t
have video rental or DVDs to buy. There were no blogs or online message boards, no YouTube or internet radio. Kids today living in small
towns probably suffer from not having much to do, but they still have
infinitely more in terms of stimulation and distraction that they can
siphon into their computer or mobile phone. They can download music
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and doubt of a Scritti Politti, their constant critique of themselves and
everybody else, the fretting about what was reactionary and what was
the right path from punk . . . Being that intense and self-questioning felt
like a very consequential thing to do at that point in history. I can imagine it might seem bizarre, even silly, to younger people – ‘Why were they
getting so worked up? Did they really think pop music could matter this
much?’ Well, you know what? They really did. We really did. That
earnestness was actually one of the things that attracted me to the
period, in contrast to the blank, disengaged irony that’s been so prevalent from the nineties onwards. When I interviewed him, Ian Penman
pinpointed the quality of the era as ‘sincerity – everyone was brittle with
it’.
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and get what they want instantly, legally or illegally. But during postpunk days the avenues that existed for accessing cutting-edge music were
the local record store, John Peel’s radio show, a couple of TV shows that
might occasionally have something left-field on, and the music press.
Those were your connection points and they became enormously highly
charged. It created a relationship with music of an intensity that I don’t
see today. Both information-wise and in terms of getting hold of the
music itself, it was a scarcity economy. An economy of delay and anticipation: you had to wait for the record to arrive in your local shop; you
had to wait until 10 p.m. for Peel; you had to wait for Top of the Pops
and the off-chance a cool band would be featured. And you had to wait
for the weekly music papers to arrive in WH Smith. The day the new
issues of the music press came out was the best day of the week. They
were like little capsules from a world where all the excitement and all the
ideas were. Lots of people would read them from cover to cover.
That’s something that comes across loud and clear in the book – the crucial role played by the rock press, and especially the British weeklies.
I wanted to be a music journalist from about the age of seventeen, which
would have been 1980. Not long after getting into music seriously with
Sex Pistols and Ian Dury, I hooked into the UK weeklies. It was a golden
age in terms of adventurous writing, especially at NME. I became as passionate about the journalism as the music. The two seemed to be meshed
together and catalyzing each other. Pop music was most definitely the
forward-thinking and most fast-moving area in culture. And music journalists at that particular moment in history played a big role in terms of
championing certain bands or scenes, pushing particular directions for
music, and making a set of values and a particular kind of language and
way of thinking about music seem ‘sexy’. Looking back, that must have
been what drew me to the idea of rock criticism as a vocation: the fact
that you could actually contribute to music in a real way, just through
writing. The most influential journalists – Julie Burchill, Paul Morley,
Dave McCullough, Ian Penman, Barney Hoskyns – seemed as important
as the bands in terms of shaping a climate of ideas and sensibility, a horizon of possibility within which new music was made. These writers set
challenges for music. In prose, if not always necessarily in person, they
were incredibly charismatic figures; they spun this sort of super-self persona out of words. And if I’m honest, it’s the fact that these writers
seemed to have power that made music journalism attractive to me as a
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career. That ability to decree and to condemn appealed to the megalomaniac in me!
Not all rock writers at that time had such an exalted notion of what
they did, and looking back through the old issues for research I was
really impressed by the reporting and the less flashy, ego-driven writing,
the quality of which was superb. But back in the day, the writers I gravitated towards as a teenage reader were very much in that Lester Bangs
mode of rock writer as prophet/catalyst. Bangs theorized punk before it
happened, laid the groundwork for it, and in that sense his writing
changed history. Nowadays this oracular notion of the rock writer has
faded away; I think the model people now look to is the analyst and historian, with a figure like Greil Marcus representing that at its loftiest.
You’d see bands forming in the image of Lester Bangs, or the image of his
prose – just as in post-punk days you’d see bands shaped by Morley’s
writing. But you don’t see that with Marcus, I think. His genius lies with
the mythography of things after they’ve happened. Bands didn’t form to
follow the Marcusian program, as they did with Bangs, with Morley, or
even with someone like Gary Bushell at Sounds, who basically codified
the whole Oi! movement and came up with an impressively thought-out
aesthetic that connected Madness and Slade and Oi! as this English
working-class tradition.
I’m not overestimating the importance of these writers. When I interviewed bands for the book, I was surprised how often the names of journalists came up. Gavin Friday from Virgin Prunes was like, ‘Oh yeah, we
used to read Morley. He was gospel. We followed his every word.’
During post-punk, there was a synergy, or even a symbiosis, between the
criticism and the artistic practice – the people in the most interesting
bands thought like critics, and indeed often were writers as much as
musicians. At the same time, some writers crossed the line into making
music or into the business side by running labels. I never had any real
interest in music-making but I did like the idea of the activist critic who
makes things happen. There was something about the temperament bred
in the UK and in the crucible of the music press then that created a certain kind of stylish swagger to the prose – a mixture of flamboyance,
exuberance, a playfulness offset by a deadly seriousness, and this crusading, near-messianic quality. Rock writing in the UK in those days was
just about the hardest hit of seriousness available to a young mind, but –
because this was pop music – it was also about fun, excitement, desire.
Going back through the UK weekly music press – and I pretty much
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went through the entire run from 1978 to 1984 of NME, Melody Maker
and Sounds – I started to see it as a really historically unique and quite
unlikely phenomenon. It seemed normal at the time, of course, but in retrospect – and it’s one of those things you can see clearly only after it’s
gone, maybe – it was an autonomous cultural space that magically combined aspects of ‘the underground’ with ‘mainstream’, i.e. the kind of
funding and national distribution that you only get in the corporate
media. The music papers were owned by big media companies, but in the
seventies and early eighties they enjoyed a kind of benign neglect.
The companies didn’t interfere in the papers’ activities, partly because
they didn’t understand the rock world and because pop music was much
more peripheral in the culture then, but also because the papers sold a lot
of copies and, being cheap to maintain, were really profitable. So why
mess with a winning formula? It was only in the mid-eighties when the
papers’ sales figures began to slide calamitously that the media conglomerates started to interfere and began systematically eroding the freedom of the papers. At Melody Maker, I managed to catch the last blast
of the music press as a semi-autonomous culture zone. Nowadays the
only place you can find similar levels of freedom are blogs and webzines.
The downside is that you can’t make a living off that kind of writing,
which means that the adventurous end of music-writing increasingly
becomes an amateur entreprise, a sideline to your real job. Whereas on
the weekly music press, back in the good old days, if you were hopped
up on youthful energy and opinionated-ness and generated a lot of
words, you could earn a good living. At least as far as someone straight
out of college was concerned.
But going back to the seventies music papers, in terms of their structural ownership and distribution they were corporate and mainstream.
But in terms of their content and attitude, the ‘vibe’ that oozed from
every headline and picture caption, they were underground. A lot of the
writers had actually come from the underground hippy press of the late
sixties and early seventies; later, they’d come from punkzines. The NME
in particular was a pretty anarchic milieu where all kinds of offbeat,
irreverent writing co-existed with more professional magazine-type elements like the news pages, the gig guide and proper reported journalism.
The paper would host all kinds of experiments with form, poetical selfindulgence, writing that was highly political or that drew on cutting-edge
critical theory and philosophy. It would routinely run confrontational
interviews with stars and hilariously abusive reviews of albums, yet the
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record companies would have to accept it with a forced smile and continue paying for adverts.
The reason the music papers were so profitable for their owners was
because they had a captive market: the record industry had hardly any
other ways of reaching the record-buying and concert-going audience
with adverts for albums or tours. They also had a captive readership
who depended on them for information about music, especially during
punk when it was not getting on the radio. Even at the best of times
newspapers covered pop in a very desultory way, and this was before the
massive explosion of specialist music magazines. As a result of all these
factors – being left alone by their owners, the record industry being
dependent on them for advertising and for actual editorial coverage in
terms of reviews and interviews, the sheer vastness of their readership –
the music papers developed a feeling of invincibility and entitlement.
They felt like they could do anything they wanted, so they did.
In those days, because of the amount of advertising pages from the
record industry, the papers had a lot of space, and so word counts were
big. A lead album review might be longer than a feature is today, running
to a couple of thousand words. Even an ordinary down-page record
review could be a thousand words long. All this largesse gave writers
space in which to speculate, write around the subject, get word-drunk or
use the album-review format as an excuse to write a mini-manifesto. In
addition to the regular kind of things you’d expect from a music paper,
there’d be think pieces and overviews, and historical pieces rescuing certain artists from oblivion. Back then, the music papers also covered a lot
of stuff that wasn’t strictly music: articles on politics or wider cultural
trends, pieces on film and literature. But everything was filtered through
the prism of music, which – as in the sixties – was the centre of youth culture, the glue that connected everything together. Music was embedded
in the matrix of what still felt like a counter-culture. It did feel oppositional and allied to progressive currents in society. But it wasn’t like
everyone on ‘our side’ agreed: there were great squabbles and dissensions in the music papers. Writers would fight with writers on other
music papers: NME would have arguments running with Sounds. But
also within each paper there’d be debates and spats and feuds.
For instance, there was a time when I was unable to choose between
the rival visions of Paul Morley and Barney Hoskyns, both star NME
writers. Morley was in full New Pop mode and was celebrating the values of colour and cleanness and health and poptimism as manifested by
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groups like Haircut 100 and Altered Images. And in response Hoskyns
formulated a whole counter-aesthetic of sickness and dirt and madness
and darkness, based around groups like The Birthday Party and Black
Flag. He was hopped up on Nietzsche and narcotics, doing this intellectually high-powered, voluptuously sensual style of writing that crusaded
for rock’n’roll ideas of the dissolute and Dionysian – a renegade stance
at a time when ‘rock’ was very much denigrated and considered off the
agenda. Such was the evenly matched power of Morley’s and Hoskyns’
opposed rhetoric that I’d be flip-flopping back and forth on a weekly
basis, unable to align myself completely with either of their different
visions of what music should be.
It strikes me now that during punk/post-punk the music press served
as a kind of meaning-generating factory, indirectly and unwittingly subsidized by the record industry. In a semi-conscious way the papers and
their writers were engaged in the business of creating a form of ‘surplus
value’, to misuse the Marxist term. As a result, rock fans got far more
out of the music than what they paid for it in monetary terms. The intensity of meaning invested in these records and groups transcended the
commodity relationship. Yet in a larger sense you could argue that this
massive injection of significance and passion ultimately only served the
record industry’s interests, because it kept people looking to music for
salvation, rather than directing their idealistic energies into politics.
Nonetheless, for all the ambivalence of the role the music papers played,
going back to the vintage issues of the weeklies made me freshly amazed
that such a space of freedom had ever been allowed to exist.
Where do you stand on the vexed question of ‘politics and pop’?
I’ve never quite worked that out. Instances of politicized pop that actually work as pop – as good music and as something that’s popular, in the
charts – seem fairly rare. There’s a distinction to be made, perhaps,
between politicized music and political music. One idea regularly aired
during post-punk was the notion that all music is political, not just the
consciously political music. Pop music that is conservative in its values
or escapist is just as much a political statement as overtly radical music.
It’s a force for anti-change! People were also beginning to explore the
idea that the stuff that’s full of contradictions, that leaves you conflicted,
is the truly political music, because it starts a process of thought. You
could see that idea reaching a kind of fruition later with hip hop. Rap is
endlessly fascinating to think about, politically, for what it tells you
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Sexual politics and the concept of the personal-is-political was a big
thing during post-punk.
The gender drum isn’t banged too hard in Rip It Up, partly because I’d
already done the feminist take on rock history with The Sex Revolts, the
book with my wife Joy Press. In some ways, as much as there were all
these striking and extreme female singers at that time, the real revolution
was more prosaic: the matter-of-fact inclusion of women in bands. For
the first time in rock history, it was commonplace for there to be mixedgender groups, with women playing the bass or guitar or drums. Perhaps
it is hard to recapture how utterly new that was, but if you look at prepunk rock in the sixties and early seventies, there’s really only a few
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about society and culture. It’s just that what you find there may be quite
depressing or confusing. It might not necessarily lead you to positive,
uplifting conclusions.
You know, when I started out writing in the late eighties, a lot of what
I was doing was a reaction against post-punk, against the ideas and values I’d grown up with. I got into this quasi-mystical trip that mixed up
psychedelic notions with riffs stolen from French critical theory, concepts of ego-shattering jouissance. And a lot of that related to a disillusionment with the idea of political pop. By the late eighties the notion
that rock could change the world had been beaten out of me and out of
lots of other people by the manifest failures of earlier attempts, failures
both aesthetic and in the sense that it was hard to see what they actually
achieved or what the point of them was, especially in the inclement political climate of the eighties. I think that’s what a lot of the neo-psychedelic
music of the era was about and the writing that surrounded it by me and
others. Sort of, ‘Resistance is futile, so let’s get blissed.’ Not so much
drop out as drop off: dream your way out of the deadlock. Hence all the
paeans to My Bloody Valentine and Daydream Nation etc. that would
go towards forming my first book, Blissed Out. My writing then wasn’t
so much apolitical as anti-political. Today I’d see it as aestheticizing surrender, celebrating musical forms that expressed or allegorized the feelings of defeatism and capitulation felt by young people during the
Thatcher/Reagan era. In a sense, it was hope-less writing. The best, I
thought, that music could do was to mobilize a kind of exodus from the
mainstream – an exit from the social, from history itself, even – through
the creation of an underground culture based around self-loss and transcendence.
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female drummers – Mo Tucker in The Velvet Underground, plus the
drummers in the handful of all-female bands that existed, who were
really considered bizarre novelty acts almost. Outside folk rock and
singer-songwriter-type music, there were hardly any female guitarists.
Punk started to change that. Then post-punk took it much further.
But yes, there was a lot of general interest in sexual politics during
post-punk. Earlier rock was often critiqued for being masculinist and
sexist, sanctioning certain kinds of male misbehaviour and treating
women as ‘chicks’. Hard rock was seen as a very phallocentric form of
music with a stunted idea of sexuality, in comparison with funk and
disco, which were considered more polymorphous and sensual. In one of
his Interview columns, Glenn O’Brien argued that dance music was the
best form of anti-fascist politics because it broke down the ‘character
armour’ and bodily rigidities. That was a Wilhelm Reich idea, those theories of his to do with fascism and its relationship to sexual repression
and the regimentation of the body. Post-punk’s idea was similar to
Funkadelic’s ‘free your mind and your ass will follow’, except the other
way around – ‘free your ass and your mind will follow’.
Post-punk culture was quite alarmed by the resurgence of heavy metal
at the end of the seventies, with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal,
as Sounds dubbed it. That movement was spearheaded by Iron Maiden,
a group who’d learned certain things from punk in terms of stripping
away the flab and building up their scene from the grass roots, but who
were essentially peddling the same old cock rock and warrior-male fantasies, the same old wave-your-willy-in-the-air guitar solos. Post-punk
saw heavy metal as reactionary on account of its sexist attitudes and militaristic imagery. But there was also a sense in which the resurgent metal
scene was a rival recruiter for youth. As was Oi!, another rapidly growing movement that post-punks critiqued as backward both sonically and
politically. Oi! was as macho as metal – there were hardly any female Oi!
musicians or singers – to the point where the only difference between it
and metal was that Oi! didn’t have guitar solos because they couldn’t
play well enough. And later on certain Oi! groups, like Cockney Rejects,
actually went metal.
One thing notable about post-punk’s progressive sexual politics is that
the shift into New Pop involved something of a backward step. Most of
the groups were all boys, with women going back to being singers: Clare
Grogan, Annie Lennox, ‘the girls’ in The Human League, Bananarama.
I’m not entirely surely why that happened, but it was noticeable. Like
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From gender to race . . . If you look at the ranks of post-punk, there
aren’t that many black musicians: Barry Adamson in Magazine, all of
Basement 5, a few others. It’s a surprisingly segregated scene, given its
overt multiculturalist politics and support for Rock Against Racism. And
given that it was so dependent on the great currents of black musical
innovation at that time.
There’s a case for saying it’s always a golden age for black music, but the
late seventies was particularly golden, and that was the backdrop for
post-punk, the well it kept drawing on: funk, disco, reggae reaching its
absolute prime of spiritual-political power and sonic creativity. Then,
nearer the end of the post-punk period, you have rap and electro and the
various forms of post-disco club music that groups like New Order
picked up on.
The post-punk groups initially tended to have a somewhat restricted
idea of black music. Its version of funk was a bit rocky, reduced to hard
bass riffs and a clipped guitar. They didn’t quite grasp the full range of
sensuality in the music, the role of vocal arrangements and lush production and horns and keyboards. Their idea of funk was austere: James
Brown, rather than Earth, Wind and Fire. There was still a bit of a suspicion of softness and slickness and luxury.
In a sense, the bass simply took over the privileged position that the
guitar had before. It became the star instrument. My fantasies about
being in a band involved being the bassist, like Jah Wobble or Tina
Weymouth. Slap bass seemed like the ultimate in musical glory. Before
punk there had been a handful of star bassists whose playing had an
unusual spotlit prominence in the music – Jack Bruce, John Paul Jones,
John McVie, Paul McCartney on particular Beatles songs like ‘Rain’. But
in most hard rock – including metal and glam – the bass played a subordinate role, mostly just reinforcing the riff played by the guitarist or acting like the glue between the rhythm guitar and the drums. Punk took
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glam rock, its precursor, New Pop seemed to be very much a boy thing,
about young men experimenting with androgyny and feminizing themselves, or actually being gay. But for some reason, you see hardly any
women playing synth in the synthpop groups. One of the few exceptions
was Gillian Gilbert in New Order. Still, the longer-term legacy of postpunk, with indie and alternative rock, is the almost unremarkable-ness
of women playing the journeyman instrumental roles in bands – drums,
bass, rhythm guitar.
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that subordination of the bass even further, with the bassist playing
unmelodic, rapid-note patterns that bolstered the chugging power-chord
drive of the guitar. The bass was often virtually inaudible beneath this
monolithic wall of noise. The one huge exception to that was JeanJacques Burnel in The Stranglers, whom Peter Hook has cited as an
influence for his own bass-as-lead-instrument style in Joy Division. Postpunk completely inverted punk’s organization of sound: the guitar
became more sporadic and thin-bodied; the bass becomes the melodic
voice and centre of emotion in a song.
The other thing about post-punk and its relationship to black music
was it was applying all those punky do-it-yourself, anyone-can-do-it
notions to music where the idea of scruffy amateurism has no resonance,
no place. In black music, there’s tremendous premium placed on being a
really shit-hot, tight player. Virtuosity and chops and professionalism are
hugely esteemed. If you listen to classic disco records in the pre-drum
machine, pre-sequencer era, the musicianship on those tracks is fabulous; often there’d be a serious guitar solo chucked in there, incongruously. But the collision of punk DIY with these virtuoso-oriented black
styles produced interesting results, in the sense that when the post-punks
grappled with funk or reggae, it came out wrong. They weren’t like
Average White Band or Ian Dury’s backing group the Blockheads, ultraaccomplished players who could swing and groove with the best black
funk outfits. With groups like AWB, there’s always going to be an element of redundancy: at best, it’s some more really good ‘black’ music –
that just happens to be played by white musicians – entering a crowded
market. Post-punk, being slightly mangled and stilted-sounding compared to the ‘real thing’, was a mutation rather than an imitation. A
Certain Ratio, to take one example, were most interesting early on when
they were trying to play rhythmically complex music that was some way
beyond their reach. Later on they got much more skilled and ended up
making quite bland jazz-funk, like a second-division Level 42.
One odd thing I noticed long after finishing the book that complicates
history somewhat relates to this idea that the punks discovered reggae
and formed this radical identification with roots culture. That whole
story about how Don Letts’s DJing at the Roxy introduced the punks to
reggae. But reggae music had already visited the UK pop charts numerous times before punk. It was hardly an obscure form of music. Island
had launched the massive marketing campaign for Bob Marley and the
Wailers in 1973. You had critics like Greil Marcus hailing Marley as a
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Dylan-like figure and saying that ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ was the real ‘Street
Fighting Man’. Talking of which, The Rolling Stones had reggae-influenced music on 1976’s Black and Blue and later signed Peter Tosh to
their own label. Eric Clapton had a big hit with his cover of ‘I Shot the
Sheriff’ . . . Hell, even The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ is based around a
reggae beat. In truth, the identification between white bohemia and
Jamaican music was well established before punk. It was the hippies who
loved reggae first. There was a big affinity between post-psychedelic progressive music and reggae: a love of dope and a smoke-hazy blend of politics and spirituality in vague opposition to the system.
Come to think of it, other things that seemed like a big deal when
post-punks embarked upon them – dabbling with funk and disco – were
actually done earlier by Old Wave groups. The Rolling Stones did funk
and disco with ‘Hot Stuff’ and ‘Miss You’ respectively. Robert Palmer
recorded a whole album with The Meters in 1975. Punk’s Year Zero
effect created a kind of convenient myopia about all that. But there was
a difference: being much better musicians, the Old Wavers could duplicate funk and reggae much more exactly. So you didn’t get the same accidental innovation syndrome as with the more clumsy attempts by
post-punks.
Still, that does actually illustrate further my point about the continuity between post-punk and pre-punk: what was then called ‘progressive’
music or ‘the underground’, the whole British milieu that came from The
Soft Machine and the careers that span off it, and various groups clustered around labels like Island, Charisma, Virgin, Harvest. One thing
that characterized that milieu was the collision of blackness and
Englishness. Robert Wyatt is a supreme example. He’s often said that he
was really a jazz fan, a fifties beatnik type. His true heroes and influences
are Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, Miles Davis, but also people like
Dionne Warwick, vocally. He’s even said that he doesn’t really have anything to do with rock and is quite proud that nothing he’s ever done
could really be considered a rock song. So there’s a total projection
towards black American music, but there’s an equally irresistible impulse
in Wyatt’s music towards Englishness – in the humour, the whimsy, his
singing, the kind of language he uses. His voice is the closest there’s ever
been to ‘an English soul’, not in the Paul Young or Amy Winehouse sense
of trying to sound black, but someone who’s achingly soulful but utterly
English in his cadence and idiom.
I see post-punk as the resumption of this early seventies thing where
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black music gets meshed with English eccentricity and pathos. Which
explains why Wyatt was such a touchstone figure for the post-punks,
able to come back as a credible figure rather than be written off as a
‘boring old fart’. But you also have figures like This Heat who were
active in both the pre-punk and post-punk phases. Just before punk,
their drummer Charles Hayward was in Quiet Sun, a post-Soft Machinestyle group led by Phil Manzanera. Or look at Peel, who managed to survive the cull on ‘boring old farts’ and went from being the doyen of
pre-punk progressives to the godfather of post-punk DIY.
With the Wyatt-era people the black sources were blues, jazz, soul,
R&B; with post-punk, it had shifted to disco, funk, dub. But it’s the same
syndrome. The big difference is that pre-punk there was a total belief in
playing your instrument very, very well. There was also a lack of guilt
about indulging oneself – musically, with meandering experimentation,
but also in terms of lifestyle, with this sort of dreamy-drifty hedonism.
What punk brought to the table more than anything is a kind of puritanical zeal coupled with anxiety and guilt. That, right there, is the difference between Robert Wyatt and Scritti Politti.
There’s a problem with history, in that it shows connections that
wouldn’t necessarily have been apparent to people at the time, thereby
diminishing the sense of rupture caused by, say, punk. In retrospect, you
can see the build-up through the early seventies, the false starts. That
detracts from punk’s shock-of-the-new and out-of-the-blue impact as felt
by those who lived through it . . .
One of the jobs of history is to point out continuities, but at the same
time you want to also honour how it felt back then, which in itself is an
historical fact. So it’s crucial to emphasize the discontinuity, the sensation of an absolute break with the past. A difficult balancing act. It’s
quite amusing to point out that with, say, Gang of Four, they were influenced by two seemingly conservative bluesy hard-rock bands, Free and
Dr Feelgood. But at the same time, through their use of technology and
influences from dub and just through the way they approached everything with an incredibly premeditated, conceptualized-in-advance coldbloodedness, Gang of Four were able to create something that did seem
without precedent. The only things it reminded me of at all back then
were certain disco records, but it was such an abstraction of disco it felt
absolutely new. I also get a sense that influence worked differently in
those days. Critics, for instance, would sometimes point out the influ422
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One thing that comes across in the book is the idea that post-punk was
much more about the present. There wasn’t the massive reissue industry
there is today vying for youth’s attention. Do you think having all this
vintage music so readily available works to swamp the imaginations of
bands who are forming?
Well, it seems like it. During the post-punk era, a reissued record was a
rare occurrence. I can remember really noticing when there was a review
of an album that had come back into print, like Tim Buckley’s Greetings
from LA, or the Faust albums, which had been unavailable for seven
years and were reissued by Recommended. For a reviewer to be discussing a record that wasn’t current was really unusual. And compilations were also events – like when Julian Cope pulled together his
anthology of Scott Walker’s music, Fire Escape in the Sky. The main
thing I remember, though, is that people just didn’t go on and on obsessively talking about the musical past. I don’t think a magazine like Mojo
could have existed in those days. That kind of sensibility was a fringe
thing, catered to by specialist ’zines like Record Collector, which itself
had only been founded in 1979. There wasn’t the demand for rock retrospection because there was so much going on in the present. We didn’t
watch endless rockumentaries on TV.
That said, you could see the beginnings of today’s archival retro-culture
with New Pop. It started with post-punk, where everything was so
thought-through and analysed, and then that turned into something
much more postmodern and knowing with New Pop. When he was in the
KLF, Bill Drummond once identified ‘irony and reference points’ as ‘the
dark destroyers of music’. That kind of thing started with 2-Tone and
Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and also Elvis Costello: cover versions, retrostyled record covers, pop-about-pop songs like ‘Geno’. Then that developed with New Pop: the games played with pop iconography by Adam
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ence of Can on PiL. But it’s different from the far more replicatory, at
times citational, way that bands today are inspired by earlier groups,
where, even though they’re not using a sampler, they have actually got
the sound. There’s a lot of information available now on how bands in
the past made particular records, machines that can help get precisely
that sonority. PiL’s relationship with Can was much more alchemical.
You don’t hear Holger Czukay in Jah Wobble’s playing in the same way
that there are groups currently operating who’ve got, say, the Neu!
sound nailed.
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Ant or Orange Juice; ABC sampling lyrics from Smokey Robinson and
later doing ‘When Smokey Sings’. New Pop started the whole pick’n’mix
pastiche thing.
Some people don’t understand why there’s the whole second part of the
book to do with New Pop. They’re like, ‘What’s ABC got to do with
Gang of Four?’
I was totally determined to make New Pop part of the story. Because
that’s what it was, historically: coupled to post-punk in a way that people nowadays often don’t realize. Even at the time the connection
between the two phases was not always seen by people who weren’t living in the UK. From an American post-punker’s perspective, New Pop
seemed to be all this flimsy piffle that materialized out of nowhere on
MTV. And when it arrived in America the good stuff was jumbled up
with things like Kajagoogoo, so you can half understand that. In some of
the American reviews and blog reactions to Rip It Up, the writers are
clinging really hard to this idea that there’s ABSOLUTELY NO CONNECTION between the culture that produced The Fall/Wire/Swell
Maps and the one that spawned MTV pop tarts like The Thompson
Twins/Duran Duran/Culture Club. But Thompson Twins are actually a
paradigm of the transition from post-punk to New Pop. Alannah Currie,
the woman with the shaved eyebrows and explosion of albino-blonde
curls, was originally in this all-female punk-reggae band modelled on
The Slits and called The Unfuckables. They used to go around throwing
paint bombs at sexist advertising billboards! The Thompson Twins came
out of the same squatland scene as Scritti and were a totally earnest
bunch into things like shattering the performer/spectactor barrier by
inviting the audience to play percussion. And they followed Scritti’s lead
by moving in a dance-pop direction. But then, some American postpunkers like to maintain that there’s somehow ABSOLUTELY NO
CONNECTION between Scritti Mk 1 and the new pop Scritti, that the
latter is just a total sell-out of the former.
I think this lack of comprehension stems from the way that, in
America, people who are into alternative culture want to situate themselves outside the commercial mainstream. They see that as the domain
of the phoney, the kitsch – showbiz. But in Britain ‘pop’ has never been
a dirty word. There’s always more of a feeling that you can get into the
charts and weird them up. Glam was huge in Britain, but Bowie and
Roxy didn’t make much impression in America. Look at Sparks, who are
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simon reynolds
American, but vastly more successful in Britain than in the US. We have
this tradition of odd people becoming pop stars, strange and quirky
records being hits. So the pop mainstream doesn’t feel oppressive to
British youth like it does to their American counterparts. Pop is seen as
an arena for mischief and infiltration.
The main thing that carries over from post-punk to New Pop, despite
all the differences in sound and image, is this underlying seriousness. The
New Pop groups had an ironic relationship with pop-culture iconography, but in a funny way it was a terribly sincere irony. Rather than the
jaded irony that became dominant later. With The B-52’s or Human
League, there’s a spirit of serious playfulness. Camp, but with a liberating, utopian aspect to it. Perhaps it’s just that camp was still quite a marginal sensibility at that point; it was coming into the mainstream from
gay culture and art school, but it was a long way off becoming the kind
of normalized ‘heterosexual camp’ that pervades our culture.
One of the things that happened during the transition between postpunk and new pop is that certain figures get in touch with their own talent, their latent star quality. The egalitarian facade – that whole pious
side of post-punk – is dropped. Scritti are the paradigm. What’s interesting about the music is its internal struggle between idealism and ideology
on the one side, and Green’s innate pop sensibility and sheer musicality
on the other. You can hear these things battling it out on their early
records. The group were committed to disrupting song-form and doing
all kinds of jarring, deconstructive things, because they thought that was
going to free people’s minds or jolt people into awareness. But underneath all that, struggling to break loose, is this pure melodic beauty.
Green was on this intensely cerebral and hypercritical trip, but the thing
that made it work, that made it worth something as music, really came
from the same place as a figure like Paul McCartney. With New Pop, his
gift as a melodist is set free. And so is Green’s competitive streak. In
rapid succession Scritti goes from being a collective, with all the nonmusical members, to being a band with Green as the leader, to a ‘production company’ with Green as CEO of a production company. The
ideological/idealistic apparatus of being a collective just disintegrates.
There’s a political resonance to that in the sense that New Pop did connect with what was going on in the culture: Thatcherism’s appeal to
ambition and individualism, the genuine desire felt by a lot of people to
make something of themselves and stand out from the crowd. Pop music
is motored by energies that are capitalistic. I don’t mean that they’re a
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product of capitalistic conditioning, and that if only we could end capitalism then a pure pop music would emerge. What I mean is that the
energies that pulse inside pop are the same as those that animate capitalism. They help to explain why capitalism exists and why it is so hard to
eradicate. Because it is seductive – the idea of making it big, the fantasy
of being self-made, your own master. That’s why the American ideology
is so popular, because so many think, ‘I’ll play the game and I’ll win.’
And at that time even people with steadfast socialist allegiances were
partly seduced by that – look at Heaven 17 with ‘Play to Win’.
What do you really think of all the post-punk revivalists of the last several years?
I was quite charitable to them in the outro of Rip It Up, but if I’m honest, I feel like nearly all of them have missed the point. By definition, if
they are harking back to post-punk, they are betraying post-punk, whose
spirit was not to hark back! To the extent to which they sound like specific post-punk bands, like Gang of Four or Wire, they’ve stumbled at the
very first hurdle. Out of all of them, Liars seem to be the ones who’ve
gone back to the attitude and the approach rather than just reconstituting the sound. I do enjoy bands that reconstitute the sound, but I feel
slightly ashamed of myself. Like Franz Ferdinand – ‘This is fun, but we
could all do better than this.’
One thing that seems totally absent is the political content that the
original post-punk groups had. Perhaps the last couple of decades have
beaten out of us the belief that writing protest songs or political critiquewith-a-beat is any use whatsoever. There seems to have been an erosion
of the belief in the power of words. It’s hard to imagine that anyone truly
still believes that anyone’s mind is ever changed by a song. It’s more
likely to confirm what you already believe, expressing it in a really
snappy or beautiful way that you can carry around with you and fondle.
Or it is leading you to things that you’re predisposed towards anyway.
But that said, I do feel that Gang of Four and Scritti and the rest got me
thinking about stuff in new ways. And the whole culture around postpunk, including the writing in the music press, introduced me to a whole
raft of ideas.
In some ways, if you can see an inheritor of post-punk’s confidence in
speaking out and shouting down power and the effectiveness of words,
it’s heavy metal. Which is not genealogically or genre-ologically part of
the punk/post-punk/alt-rock lineage at all. Maybe a few genes have
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In the final judgement, what was it all worth, all that intensity of thought
and belief that ran through the post-punk years? Obviously there’s a
legacy in terms of a vast accumulation of fantastic recordings. But how
about beyond the sonic?
At the end of the book I raise the possibility that all this incredibly
intense involvement in music that my generation had – all this chasing
the future through music, searching for utopia through music – might
have been a deflection from actually changing anything. Maybe we
should have put our energy into politics. I shouldn’t generalize too wildly
as there’s plenty of people, then and subsequently, who did get involved
in politics and activism. But I do sense that a lot of people in my generation got sidetracked. It’s like we had all these ‘revolutions’ in music, but
we didn’t have a revolution in political economy. But, you know, serious
political involvement is really hard work and kinda dreary: endless meetings and organizational drudgery, scheming and means-to-end compromises. Music can seem a lot more pure. It’s more immediate; more
glamorous too. The results are ‘total’ in a way that things rarely can be
in real-world politics. It’s quite a bleak verdict, perhaps, but you could
see rock culture as a whole as being a way of living within capitalism
while remaining opposed to it.
Likewise, in a certain harsh light, Rip It Up and Start Again could be
seen as the story of a bunch of different bands who tried to make politics and pop work together but failed. From Gang of Four to Scritti, it’s
a litany of failure! Arguably, the post-punks didn’t really change anything. The record industry is the same as it ever was. The conglomerates
are still there. Politics didn’t go their way. But it was the striving more
than the failing that matters. My attitude is, at least they tried to do
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drifted over from Goth or industrial, but historically there’s really hardly
any link. As was mentioned before, metal was the enemy, as far as postpunks were concerned. But now, through its own evolution through
thrash and death and black metal, it’s reached a place where much of
what characterized post-punk – the darkness, the dread, the wordiness –
can be found in its most vital contemporary form only in the metal
underground. You’ll also find there that whole set of ideals to do with
musical progression and fusing different styles together. Extreme metal is
totally committed to ideas of innovation and genre-splicing. Which is
why, out of all the ‘neo-post-punk’ groups, I think only Liars could get a
feature in Terrorizer or Decibel.
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something. To be as interesting as they could possibly be. That effort is
worth something in itself. There’s a value to the quickening of the mind
produced by movements like post-punk. The sheer argumentativeness of
the culture. The sense of purpose. The feeling of everything moving forward, fast. The fact that nothing really got changed is, in some ways,
irrelevant.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my editor Denise Oswald and all at Soft Skull; to my
American agent Ira Silverberg; to my research assistant on the original
Rip It Up Geeta Dayal; to cover designer Jason Snyder; and to my wife
Joy Press and children Kieran and Tasmin.
Thanks to the editors who commissioned the various ‘overview’
essays: Dan Fox at Frieze, Chris Chang at Film Comment, Sia Michel at
the New York Times, Dominic Molon at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago and David Annand at GQ Style. Thanks also to those at
Faber & Faber who worked on the original UK edition of Totally Wired,
in particular editor Lee Brackstone and copy editor Ian Bahrami, and to
my UK agent Tony Peake.
Thanks to the interviewees (I shan’t list them again, they’re in the
Contents pages!) for their brilliance, candour and time.
And thanks to the interviewers: the final ‘transcript’ is woven in large
part from interviews I gave around Rip It Up and Start Again and Bring
the Noise, so for their provoking questions, big ups to Gavin Bertram,
Wilson Neate, Julian Weber, Jose Marmeleira, Andy Battaglia, Yann
Pereau, Jonathan Gharraie, Rossano Lo Mele, Tricia Romano, David
Stubbs, Stephen Metcalf, Andreas Hartmann, Anindya Bhattacharyya,
Philip Matthews, Andrea Tramonte, Daniele Cianfriglia and Peter
Smith, plus anyone else who’s slipped my mind.
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Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 431
INDEX
Abba, 122, 259, 292, 337
ABC, 115, 280, 338–42; ‘Date Stamp’, 340;
Lexicon of Love, 294, 332, 338, 340–1;
‘Look of Love, The’, 340, 344; ‘Poison
Arrow’, 339, 341, 346; ‘Tears Are Not
Enough’, 340; ‘Theme from Mantrap’, 340;
‘When Smokey Sings’, 424
Abercrombie, John, 391
Acklam Hall, 185
Adam and the Antz, 400
Adam Ant, 424
Adamson, Barry, 221, 323, 419
Aerosmith, 31
African Brothers: ‘African Love’, 99
Afrika Bambaataa, 343, 353; ‘Planet Rock’,
236, 341
After the Goldrush, 394
Against Nature (Joris-Karl Huysmans), 156,
218, 401
Airway, 392
Akron, 45
Albertine, Viv, 4, 5, 7, 8, 104–5, 199
Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias, 216
Al DiMeola, 391
Alien Sex Fiend, 400
Allen, Dave, 117
Allen, Patrick, 347
Almond, Marc, 153, 180
Altered Images, 290, 316, 328, 416; ‘Happy
Birthday’, 303; ‘I Could Be Happy’, 303;
‘See Those Eyes’, 303
Always August, 396
Ambrose, Dave, 77
American Music (The Blasters), 381
Amis, Martin, 334
Amon Duul, 59, 183
anarchism, 384
Anarchy Tour, 181
Anderson, Gerry, 163–4
Anderson, Jon, 3, 104
Anderson, Laurie: ‘O Superman’, 171
Andi Sex Gang, 400
Angelic Upstarts, The, 297, 326
Angry Samoans, 382
‘Animal Kingdom’ (Meat Puppets), 395
Animals, The, 131
Anticlub, 391
Apollo, Manchester, 205
Arben cinema, 215
Ari Up, 3–15, 100, 369
Arlen, Nancy, 134, 372
Armadillo Tea Rooms, 84
Art of Noise, The, 332, 333, 344–5; ‘Beatbox’,
344; Into Battle, 345; ‘Moments in Love’, 344
Art Workers’ Coalition, 28, 29
Artistics, The, 118
Ascott, Roy, 370
Ashley, Robert, 374
Asian Dub Foundation, 99
Aspinall, Vicky, 198
Associates, The 157, 258–71, 330, 331;
Affectionate Punch, 260, 263, 264; ‘Bap de
La Bap, 267; ‘Club Country’, 262, 264, 269;
‘18 Carat Love Affair’, 260; Fourth Drawer
Down, 259, 261–4; ‘Kitchen Person’, 263;
‘Nude Spoons’, 269; ‘Party Fears Two’, 261,
264, 265, 267, 274; Sulk, 157, 259, 266,
267, 269; ‘White Car in Germany, A’, 263
Aswad, 184
Atrocity Exhibition, The (J. G. Ballard), 248
Au Pairs, The, 113
Auburn, Rachel, 401
‘Aurora Borealis’ (Meat Puppets), 393
Average White Band, The, 420
‘Away’ (Meat Puppets), 395
Ayers, Kevin, 59, 157
Ayler, Albert, 96, 102, 131, 133,
Aztec Camera, 201, 213
B-52s, The, 137, 374, 425
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 34
Bacharach, Burt, 258, 259, 340
431
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Backstabbers, The, 314
Bailey, Derek, 225, 232
Baines, Una, 208–13
Baker, Arthur, 25, 256
Balfe, Dave, 84, 85, 87, 90
Ball, Dave, 39
Ballard, J. G.: Liverpool, 89; Manchester, 89,
360; Paul Morley, 326; Phil Oakey, 279;
Richard H. Kirk, 248; Sheffield, 87, 89;
Siouxsie and the Banshees, 156
Bananarama, 418
Band, The, 110, 116
Bangs, Lester, 35, 133, 356, 369, 413
Banshees, The. see under Siouxsie Sioux
Barbara Gladstone gallery, 30, 36
Barbarella’s, Birmingham, 161
Barrett, Syd, 60, 157
Barrington, David, 159, 165
Barthes, Roland, 335
Bartók, Béla, 35
Basement 5, 419
Basil, Tony: ‘Mickey’, 129
Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 374
Bassey, Shirley, 291, 295, 305
Bataille, Georges, 47, 148
Batcave, 400, 402
Baudelaire, Charles, 95, 98, 156
Bauhaus, 272
Bay City Rollers, The, 75
Bazar, Theresa, 338, 339
Beach Boys, The, 18; Pet Sounds, 312
Beat Farmers, 381
Beatles, The: Bill Drummond, 79, 90; class and,
64; George Martin, 268; Ian McCullough,
83; Jah Wobble, 16, 25; Linder Sterling,
225; music hall, 367; Nikki Sudden, 161,
165; Paul McCartney, 419; Richard H.
Kirk, 244; Scritti Politti, 188; Steve Severin,
156; suits, 311; Zapple, 368 ‘Come
Together’, 127; ‘Rain’, 419; Revolver, 262;
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 195,
262, 369, 406; ‘Strawberry Fields’, 16, 406
Beats, The, 120
Beaver & Krause, 58
Beck, Jeff, 104
Beckett, Samuel, 363
Beefheart, 391
Bee Gees, The, 3, 233
Beggars Banquet, 261
Beginning was the End, The: Now It Can Be
Told, 41
Behrman, David, 374
Beirut Slump, 145, 146–7
Belgium, 226–7
Bell, Maggie, 318
Bell, Thom, 309
Berger, John, 76
432
Bergman, Ingmar, 362
Berlin, 263, 314
Berlin, Irving, 375
Berry, Chuck, 33, 166, 262, 321; ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll
Music’, 197
Bertei, Adele, 135, 373
Bewlay Brothers, The, 48
Bianco, Matt: ‘Get Out Your Lazy Bed’, 316
Big Audio Dynamite, 352
Big Black, 116
Big Four, The, 311
Big in Japan, 83–4, 85
Big Youth, 110
Biggles, 163
Biggs, Ronnie, 378
Birch, Gina, 194–202
Birthday Party, The, 150, 152–3, 416
Bis, 117
Bistrotheque, 402
Björk, 39
Black Flag: formation, 382; galvanizes Hüsker
Dü, 390; ‘Kill Everything Now’ tour, 386;
mid-Eighties output, 396; recording style,
383; work ethic, 384
Black Sabbath, 385
Blackwell, Chris, 104, 332, 345
Blake, William, 25, 102, 190
Blanchot, Maurice, 148
Blasters, The, 381
Blast First, 255
Blasting Concept, The (SST), 385
Blind Idiot God, 396
Blissed Out (Simon Reynolds), 417
Blitz, 399
Blockheads, The, 21, 345, 420
Blondie, 141, 144
Blood on the Saddle, 381
Blue Nile: Hats, 340
Blue Orchids, 208–15; Agents of Change, 214;
‘Agents of Change’, 215; ‘Bad Education,
A’, 214; ‘Disney Boys’, 211, 212; ‘Dumb
Musician’, 213; ‘Flood, The’, 211; Greatest
Hits, 212; ‘Long Night Out, The’, 214;
‘Low Profile’, 213; ‘Sly Man, The’, 213;
‘Sun Collection’, 210–11; ‘Year with No
Head, A’, 214, 215
Blyton, Enid, 164
Bolan, Marc, 59, 63, 160, 161, 166, 188
Bologna, 184
Bomp, 45
Bono, 71, 93, 266
Booji Boy, 45
Boombox, 402
Boon, D.: death, 395; lyrics, 389; politics, 388;
sound, 387
Boon, Richard, 205, 224, 246, 324, 327
Bormann, Martin, 378
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Burg, China, 147, 369, 372
Burnel, Jean-Jacques, 420
Burnham, Hugo, 111, 117
Burns, Karl, 208, 356
Burns, Pete, 82
Burroughs, William, 88, 150, 158, 205, 248, 254
Bush, Kate, 406
Bushell, Gary, 413
Buzzcocks: Bill Drummond, 85; Cabaret
Voltaire, 246; Fall, 205; Martin Rushent,
290, 295–7, 306; Paul Morley, 324, 325,
327, 329; rehearsals, 224; Sex Pistols, 314;
Siouxsie and the Banshees, 155; Swell Maps,
163; United Artists, 76 ‘Orgasm Addict’, 296,
329; Spiral Scratch, 221, 246, 317, 325, 327
Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat (The
Minutemen), 387
Byrds, 229, 262, 311, 313
Byrne, David, 118–30; Bush of Ghosts (with
Brian Eno), 122–5, 127–9; Catherine
Wheel, The, 128; ‘Cloud Chamber’, 128;
‘Cross-Eyed and Painless’, 129; ‘Help Me
Somebody’ (with Brian Eno), 129
Byron, Lord, 98
C&W, 392
Cabaret, 314, 400
Cabaret Voltaire, 244–57, 382; Joy Division,
232; Paul Morley, 330; post-punk, 404, 405;
Sheffield, 283; Young Communist League, 178
‘Crackdown’, 255, Crackdown, The, 255;
‘Eastern Mantra’, 254; ‘Just Fascination’, 255;
Micro Phonies, 254, 255; ‘Nag Nag Nag’,
248; Red Mecca, 254, 256; ‘Seconds Too
Late’, 248; ‘Silent Command’, 248, 252;
‘Sluggin’ for Jesus’, 249, 253; Voice of
America, 253; ‘Western Mantra’, 254;
‘Yashar’, 256
Cadena, Dez, 385
Cage, John, 118, 368, 374, 375; Silence, 95
Cale, John, 59, 99, 132, 198, 230, 368
Callis, Jo, 291, 300
Campbell, Ken, 80–1
Camden Town, 182
Camus, Albert, 206, 272
Can: Banshees, 155; ‘better side of punk’, 324;
Fall, The, 203; influence, 423; Jah Wobble,
16; John Lydon, 352; Richard H. Kirk, 249,
253; Steven Morris, 234; Swell Maps, 164,
165 ‘Peking O’, 234; Tago Mago, 234
Capital Radio, 172
Captain Beefheart, 44, 57–8, 96, 154, 352;
Strictly Personal, 57; Trout Mask Replica, 54
Carducci, Joe: on Hüsker Dü, 390; Meat
Puppets meet, 392; on Minutemen politics,
388; on MRR, 386; SST work ethic, 383,
384
433
index
Bosseur, Jean-Yves, 245
Bostrom, Derrick: background, 391; drumming,
392; Meat Puppets II release, 394; on psychodelic sound, 393; on Rockman, 395
Bovell, Dennis, 8, 103–7
Bow Wow Wow, 5, 75, 378–9
Bower, Paul, 250, 281, 282
Bowery, Leigh, 401–2
Bowie, David: Alan Horne, 314; Alison Statton,
174; Associates, 269; Berlin trilogy, 263;
development, 406; Devo, 48, 50, 55–6; Joy
Division, 232; Lesser Free Trade Hall, 324;
Jackie, 311; Linder Sterling, 216–17; Martin
Bramah, 203, 214; Phil Oakey, 277;
Richard H. Kirk, 244; Steve Severin, 155,
158, 398; Trevor Horn, 341; United States,
424; vocals, 266 ‘Fame’, 269; Low, 314;
‘Station to Station’, 269; ‘Suffragette City’,
335; ‘TVC-15’, 269; ‘Warsawa’, 232; Ziggy
Stardust, 195, 244
Bowie, Joe, 132
Boy George, 278, 283, 400, 401, 402
Boyce, Frank Cottrell, 69
Boy Looked at Johnny, The: The Obituary of
Rock’n’Roll (Julie Burchill and Tony
Parsons), 321
Boyzone, 328
Bragg, Billy, 114, 320
Bramah, Martin, 203–15
Brandon, Kirk, 400
Branson, Richard, 49, 285, 303
Brass Construction, 247
Brave Dog, 391
Bread, 203
Brecht, Bertolt, 115, 410
Bristol, 94
British Phonographic Institute, 345
Brooklyn, 27, 28, 32
Broudie, Ian, 83
Brown, James: Cabaret Voltaire, 247; Devo, 47;
Gang of Four, 110, 116; James Chance,
133, 136, 138, 373; Pop Group, 95; postpunk groups, 419
Brown, Neil, 195
Bruce, Jack, 419
Bruce, Kitty, 143
Bruce, Lenny, 323
BT Express, 94
‘Buckethead’ (Meat Puppets), 395
Buckley, Tim: Greetings from LA, 423
Budgie, 83, 84, 155
Buffalo Springfield, 311
Buggles, 331, 338
Buñuel, Luis, 50, 248
Burchill, Charlie, 263, 310
Burchill, Julie, 312, 320–1, 412
Burden, Ian, 284, 289, 290, 300
totally wired
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 434
Cargo studios, 212, 240
Carlos, Walter, 278
Carrington, Leonora, 226
Carroll, Kay, 207, 208, 315
Cars, The, 33, 37, 52
Carter Family, The: ‘Worried Man Blues’, 66
Carthy, Martin, 178
Casale, Bob, 56
Casale, Gerard, 40–53, 285
Casey, Jane, 81, 82, 83
Castrators, The, 4
Castro, Fidel, 29
Cavanagh, David, 167
Cave, Nick, 153
CBGBs, 32, 132–8, 140, 144, 319, 374
CBS, 171, 380
Celluloid, 38
Certain Ratio, A, 71, 76, 77; ‘All Night Party’,
72; ‘Do the Du (Casse)’, 76
Chance, James, 131–42; background, 373;
disco, 375; Lydia Lunch, 146, 149; Suicide,
37; see also Contortions, The ‘Tropical
Heatwave’, 375
Chartists, 231
Che Guevara, 29, 359
Chernoff, John, 128
Cherry, Don, 12
Cherry, Neneh, 11, 12
Chiang Kai-shek, 136
Chic, 110
Chicago, 88
Christiansen, Don, 135
Chrysalis Records, 202
Chtcheglov, Ivan, 74
Cicciolina, La, 47
Circa, 271
Circle Jerks, 382
Circus Maximus, 401
CISPES (Committee in Solidarity With The
People of El Salvador), 387
‘Climbing’ (Meat Puppets), 393
City College, Brooklyn, 28
City Solution, 166
Clapton, Eric, 104, 156, 369; ‘I Shot the Sheriff’,
421
Clark, Tim, 108, 180
Clash, The: Anarchy Tour, 181; Ari Up, 4; Gina
Birch, 194–6; John Peel, 171; Manchester,
71; Mark Stewart, 96, 97, 100; Pere Ubu,
64; Sex Pistols, 314; Suicide, 33, 37; Tony
Wilson, 71; White Riot tour, 320 ‘Complete
Control’, 171
Cleveland, 57–60
Clock DVA, 249, 257, 283
Clockwork Orange, 278, 285
Club for Heroes, A, 399
434
Cluster, 155, 263
CND, 102
Cobain, Kurt, 395
Cobham, Billy, 390
Cochran, Eddie, 310
Cockney Rejects, The, 418
Cocteau, Jean, 248
coffee, 385
Coleman, Jaz, 170
Coleman, Ornette, 196, 324
Collins, Edwyn, 273, 307–18, 320
Coltrane, John, 131
Communist Party, 183, 190
Compendium Books, 187, 198
Conrad, Joseph, 273
Contortions, The, 133–6, 138–41; camaraderie,
149; James Brown, 373; see also Chance,
James
Control (Anton Corbijn), 361–6
Coogan, Steve, 359
Cooke, Sam, 406
Cooper, Alice, 83; Muscle of Love, 354
Cooper Clarke, John, 76, 184, 206, 209, 246
Cope, Julian, 84, 90; ‘Bill Drummond Said’, 92;
Fire Escape in the Sky, 85, 423; Peggy
Suicide, 86
Copeland, Miles, 207
Corbijn, Anton, 361, 362, 364, 367
Coronation Street, 210
Corso, Gregory, 95
Cortinas, The, 95, 96
Cosmopolitan, 219
Costello, Elvis, 37, 310, 423; Armed Forces, 113
Cotton Club, 142
Count Five, The, 35, 248, 369
Courageous Cat, 151
‘cowpunk’, 381
Cramps, The, 381, 400
Crane, Sumner, 372
Crass, 408
Cravats, The, 169
Crawford, Joan, 202
Cream: Best of Cream, 229; Disraeli Gears, 369
Cream (club), 83, 88
Creation Records, 161, 167, 318
‘Creator’ (Meat Puppets), 395
Creed, Linda, 309
Creedence Clearwater Revival, 150, 312, 388
Crews, Harry, 153
Crime, 166
Cristina: ‘Is That All There Is?’, 375
Crocus Behemoth, 62
Cropper, Steve, 105, 110
Crowe, Dave, 23, 355
Crowley, Aleister, 205
Crown, Birmingham, 161
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 435
Dada (art form): Art of Noise, 333; Devo, 43;
Paul Morley, 324; Pere Ubu, 58, 62;
Richard H. Kirk, 178, 250
Dada (band), 161
Daly, Stephen, 307, 308, 311, 312, 314, 319–22
Damaged (Black Flag), 385, 396
‘Damaged I’ (Black Flag), 382, 385
Damned, The, 154, 181, 391, 398
Danceteria, 242
Dandelion, 168
DaSilva, Ana, 195, 198, 200
David, Hal, 259
Davidson, T. J., 224, 241
Davies, Martin, 295, 296
Davis, Miles, 127, 196, 421; Get Up With It,
356; On the Corner, 96
Day, David Van, 339
Day, Doris, 226 de Freitas, Pete, 87
D.C.3., 385
De Nerval, Gérard, 98
Deacon, Giles, 402
Dead Daughters, The, 280
Dead Kennedys, 386, 393
Deaf School, 82
Debord, Guy, 74
Deep Purple, 230, 385
Def Leppard, 68
Defunkt, 132
Delta 5, 108, 112, 194, 407
Dempsey, Mike, 261
Depeche Mode, 341
Derrida, Jacques, 308
Descendents, 382, 388
Desperate Bicycles, The, 159
Devine, Ian, 225
Devo, 40–56; Adrian Wright, 282; art into rock,
31, 130; Brian Eno, 371; Human League,
285; Johnny Drome, 61; post-punk, 404
‘Come Back Jonee’, 44; ‘Devo Corporate
Anthem’, 48; Duty Now for the Future,
49, 52; Freedom of Choice, 49, 52; ‘(I
Saw My Baby Getting) Sloppy’, 49; New
Traditionalists, 51, 52; Phoenix concert,
391; Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo,
49, 52; ‘Shrivel Up’, 49; ‘Sloppy’, 44, 49;
‘That’s Good’, 51; ‘Through Being Cool’, 52
Devoto, Howard, 205, 218–19, 221, 325, 327
Dexy’s Midnight Runners, 320, 423
Diagram Brothers, The, 224
Dick, Philip K., 279, 282, 286, 326
Dick, Vivienne, 147
Dickens, 222
Dickinson, Bob, 245
Diddley, Bo, 150
Didsbury, 216, 223
Dils, the, 383
Dindisc, 76
Disco Lolitas, The, 142
Dislocation, 224
Disques du Crépuscule, Les, 227, 271, 333
DMX, 99
DNA, 136, 372, 374
Doctor Who, 234, 251, 282
Dollar, 338–9; ‘Give Me Back My Heart’, 338;
‘Hand Held in Black and White, 338’;
‘Mirror Mirror’, 338
Domino, Anna, 227
DooDooettes, 392
Doors, The, 203
Double Nickels on the Dime (Minutemen),
389–90, 395
Doublevision, 255
Douglass, Jimmy, 117
Dream Syndicate, The, 381
Dr Feelgood, 95, 422
Draper, Simon, 255, 285, 290
Drome record store, 60–1
Drummond, Bill, 79–93, 423
Duchamp, Marcel, 145
Dudanski, Richard, 195, 196
Dudley, Anne, 333, 340, 343
Dudziak, Ursula, 225
Dukowski, Chuck, 384
Duran Duran, 161, 395, 424
Dury, Ian, 21, 412, 420
Dylan, Bob: Bob Marley, 421; books about,
406; Howard Devoto, 325; Paul Morley,
323; Phil Oakey, 277; Raincoats, 200;
Swell Maps, 164; Trevor Horn, 340 ‘Like
a Rolling Stone’, 164; ‘Subterranean
Homesick Blues’, 164
Eagle, Roger, 77
Earle, Richard, 163
435
index
Crucial Three, The, 84
Crutchfield, Robin, 372
Cult Figures, 110
Culture, 110
Culture Club, 328, 424
Cunningham, Danny, 360
Cure, The, 91, 289
Curious Yellows, The, 209
Currie, Alannah, 424
Curtis, Deborah, 363–4
Curtis, Ian, 359–64; Cabaret Voltaire, 255;
Edwyn Collins, 313; lyrics, 366; Paul Haig,
275; Paul Morley, 328, 330
Curved Air, 278
Cutler, Chris, 179
Czukay, Holger, 17, 25, 423; Movies,24; ‘Persian
Love’, 24
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Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 436
Earth, Wind and Fire, 419
Ebert, Roger, 377
Echo and the Bunnymen, 77, 84, 87, 90–1, 93,
212; ‘Cutter, The’, 90; ‘Lips Like Sugar’, 92;
Ocean Rain, 92
Eckerd College, 372
Eddy, Duane, 174, 378
Edge, The, 263
Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 245
Edison, Thomas, 66, 67
Eichmann, Adolf, 233
8-Eyed Spy, 145, 150, 374; ‘Dead You Me
Beside’, 150
Einsturzende Neubauten, 153, 391
Electric Boogaloos, 129
Electric Circus, 72
Electric Eels, The, 60
Elektra, 38, 235
Elms, Robert, 400
Emerson, Keith, 54
Emerson, Lake and Palmer, 44, 278, 295
EMI, 117, 379
Energy Flash (Simon Reynolds), 406
Eno, Brian: Alison Statton, 174; approach,
369–72; art and music, 368; David Byrne,
122, 127–9; Devo, 49, 50, 55, 56; Extras,
281; guitar, 235; James Chance, 135–8;
Lydia Lunch, 149; Malcolm McLaren, 379;
Obscure, 323; Pere Ubu, 59; Ultravox, 398
Bush of Ghosts (with David Byrne), 122–5,
127–9; Discreet Music, 371; No New York,
135, 371; No Pussyfooting (with Robert
Fripp), 371
Epic Soundtracks, 159, 160, 163–7
Erasmus, Alan, 70, 223
Eric’s, 77
Eskimo (Residents), 392
Eurythmics, The, 201
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Neil
Young), 394
Extras, The, 281
Face in the Crowd, A (Elia Kazan), 48
Faces, The, 166, 167
Factory Records, 69–71; Cabaret Voltaire, 252;
catalogue, 328; design, 354; Disques du
Crépuscule, 227; Fast Product, 281;
Haçienda, 397; Joy Division, 232; Ludus,
223, 228; Manchester, 89; Martin Hannett,
360; poster, 75; situationism, 219; Tony
Wilson, 360; 24 Hour Party People, 358, 361
Factory Sample, A, 252, 328
Fad Gadget, 180
Fall, The, 163, 170, 203–10, 212, 215, 327;
Bingo Masters Break Out!, 207; Dragnet,
207; Live at the Electric Circus, 207; Live at
the Witch Trials, 207
436
Family Man (Black Flag), 396
Farren, Mick, 254
Fast Product, 76, 114, 281, 329; ‘Damaged
Goods’, 115
Fatback Band, The, 94, 247
Faulkner, William, 64
Faust, 183, 244, 423; Faust Tapes, The, 324
Female Eunuch, The (Germaine Greer), 219
feminism, 208, 219
Fenton pub, 113
Ferry, Bryan, 4, 281
Field, Bradley, 145, 149
File, 372
Fire Engines, The, 272, 328
Fischerspooner, 375
Fisher, Mark, 355
Flesh Eaters, 381
Flintstones, 151
Flipper, 382
Flipper’s Guitar, ‘Let’s Cut Our Hair Like James
Kirk Did Long Ago’, 318; Three Cheers for
Our Side, 318
Flowers of Romance, The, 5
Fluxus, 368
Flying Lizards, The, 285
Fogerty, John, 150, 388
Foo Foo Lamar, 222
Foreigner, 332
Foreman, Richard, 119
‘Fortunate Son’ (Creedence Clearwater Revival),
388
Foxx, John, 284, 294, 397, 398–99
Frame, Roddy, 313
Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 345–7; ‘Power of
Love, The’, 334, 347; ‘Relax’, 332, 334,
345–6, 347; ‘Two Tribes’, 334, 346, 347
Frantic Elevators, The, 327
Frantz, Chris, 119
Franz Ferdinand, 426
Free, 104, 109, 258, 422
Freed, Alan, 60
Friday, Gavin, 413
Friedan, Betty, 219
Friel, Tony, 204–9
Fripp, Robert, 262; No Pussyfooting (with Brian
Eno), 371
Frith, Fred, 179
Froese, Edgar, 263
Fry, Martin, 280, 338, 340
Fugazi, 116
Funhouse, 256
Funkadelic, 19, 100, 116
Funky Four Plus One, 11
Futurism, 333
Gabriel, Peter, 406
Gallo, Vincent, 374
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 437
Gray, Christopher, 76, 219, 376
Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, The, 342, 377
Greer, Germaine, 219, 226
Gregory, Glenn, 249, 279
Gretton, Rob, 77, 230, 232, 243, 256
Grisham, Jack, 386
Grogan, Clare, 303, 418
Grundy, Bill, 410
Guess Who, The, 343
Gun Club, 381
Guns N’ Roses, 352
Gunter Grove, 23, 355
Guralnick, Peter, 406
Gurdjieff, George, 213–15
Guys and Dolls, 339
Gyson, Brion, 248
Haçienda: catalogue, 328; Chicago, 88; closes,
360; creation of, 242–3, 397; name, 74;
Richard H. Kirk, 256
Haig, Paul, 271–6
Hain, Marshall: ‘Dancing in the City’, 234
Haircut 100, 316, 328, 416
Hammill, Peter, 229, 356
Hamsun, Knut, 272
Hannett, Martin, 72–4; Factory, 360; Joy
Division, 234–5, 237, 359, 365
Happy Mondays, The, 72, 76, 215, 358, 360;
Bummed, 72
Happy Squid, 392
hardcore, 381, 385, 396
Hard Times (Charles Dickens), 89
Harder They Come, The, 14
Harper, Roy, 324
Harris, Jody, 135
Harris, Johnny, 304–5
Harris, Sean, 359
Harry, Debby, 137
Harry Partch, 392
Hart, Grant, 390
Hassell, Jon, 124
Hatfield and the North, 308
Hawkwind, 323
Hayles, Martin, 317
Hayward, Charles, 422
Hazelwood, Lee, 152
Head, Jowe, 160
Headington Quarry Morris Dancers, 181
Heartbreakers, The, 145, 181
Heat, 321
Heaton Park, 209–10
Heaven 17, 251, 288, 294, 303; ‘Play to Win’, 426
Hedges, Mike, 157, 266
Henderson, Davy, 272, 273
Hendrix, Jimi: Ari Up, 3; dub, 104; feedback,
111, 268; Gerald Casale, 53; Liverpool, 89;
Monkees, 58; Richard H. Kirk, 249; Are
437
index
‘Games’ (The Minutemen), 389
Gamson, David, 192
Gang Gang Dance, 375
Gang of Four, The, 108–17; ABC, 424; agit-pop,
87, 326; Bertolt Brecht, 410; Bob Last, 76;
Green Gartside, 182, 189; Greil Marcus,
407; influences, 422; innovatory
approaches, 121; inspirations, 409; Orange
Juice, 307; politics, 427; punk-funk, 387;
Swell Maps, 164; ‘Contract’, 114;
Entertainment, 116, 117; ‘Love Like
Anthrax’, 111, 114; ‘Paralysed’, 114;
Return the Gift, 117; Shrinkwrapped, 117;
Solid Gold, 114, 117; ‘What We Want’, 117
Garcia, Jerry, 394–95
Gartside, Green, 177–93, 199, 201, 307–8, 425
General Jacket, 49
Genesis, 56, 91
Genet, Jean, 88
Genetic, 77, 296–7
Gentle Giant, 295, 391
Germs, the, 381
Gibb, Barry, 3
Gilbert, Bruce, 262
Gilbert, Gillian, 419
Gill, Andy, 108–17, 121, 182
Ginn, Greg: Black Flag sound, 382; Gone, 396;
musical influences, 385; musical style, 383;
on SST, 384
Ginsberg, Allen, 88
Girl Trouble, 324
Gist, 176
Give the Anarchist a Cigarette (Mick Farren), 254
Glammore, Matthew, 401
Glasgow, 317–18
Glitter, Gary, 292–3; ‘Rock and Roll Part Two’,
292
Glitter Band, The, 230
G-Mex, 70
Godard, Vic, 309, 314, 319, 320–1
Go-Go’s, 381
Goldman, Viv, 11, 143
Goldsmith’s College, 368
Gone, 396
Gong, 391
Gooseberry Studio, 21, 24
Gordon, Kim, 143
Gramsci, Antonio, 182, 184
Granada, 85
Granada Reports, 70
Grandmaster Flash, 242; ‘Message, The’, 256
Grant, Peter, 355
Graph, 283–4
Grateful Dead, The, 90, 385, 394–95
Graves, Robert, 210
Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), 50
Gray, Barry, 163
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Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 438
You Experienced?, 104; ‘Star-Spangled
Banner’, 111
Henri, Adrian, 7, 815
Henry, Pierre, 95
Henry Cow, 178, 179, 181, 183, 188
Hentoff, Nat, 325
Herman, Tom, 59
Hermosa Beach, 382, 384, 388
Hess, Rudolf, 400
Hewick, Kevin, 241
Hill, Benny, 108
Hi-NRG, 401
Hinton, Jeffrey, 401
hippies, 391
‘History Lesson (Part II)’ (The Minutemen), 389
Hitler, Adolf, 282
Hodgson, Jonathan, 161
Hoffman, Christian, 152, 374
Holiday, Billie, 151, 375
Honsinger, Tristan, 102
Hook, Peter, 365, 420
Horn, Trevor, 331, 332, 333, 337–47
Horne, Alan, 310, 311, 312, 314, 320, 329
Hornsey College, 194, 195
Horse Meat Disco, 402
Hoskyns, Barney, 382, 412, 415–16
Hot Gossip: ‘I Fell in Love with a Starship
Trooper’, 234
‘Hot Pink’ (Meat Puppets), 395
Howard, Rowland S., 152
Howe, Darcus, 101
Hucknall, Mick, 327
Huevos (Meat Puppets), 395, 396
Huizinga, Johan, 219
Human Condition, The, 24
Human Hands, 391
Human League, The, 279–94, 297–305; back-up
singers, 201; Bob Last, 76; Cabaret Voltaire,
249; Clare Grogan, 418; playfulness, 425;
‘pop’ music, 329; Rob Warr, 115 ‘Almost
Medieval’, 286; ‘Being Boiled’, 279, 281,
282, 285; ‘Black Hit of Space’, 286; ‘Blind
Youth’, 284; ‘Boys and Girls’, 288; Crash,
293; ‘Crow and a Baby, A’, 282; ‘Dance
Like a Star’, 286; Dare, 284, 292, 298–302,
306; Dignity of Labour, The, 285; ‘Don’t
You Want Me’, 289, 291–2; ‘Fascination,
289; ‘‘Hard Times’, 298; ‘Human’, 289;
Hysteria, 293, 301–2; ‘Lebanon, The’, 293;
‘Love Action’, 292; ‘Love and Dancing’, 298,
299–300, 302, 306; ‘Mirror Man’, 289;
Reproduction, 286; Secrets, 287; ‘Sound of
the Crowd’, 288, 290–1; Travelogue, 287,
288
Human Traffic, 360
Hunter, Ian, 324
Hurley, George, 387
438
Hurrah’s, 137, 242
Hüsker Dü, 382, 388, 390, 395
Hustle and Flow, 365
Hutchence, Michael, 117
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 156, 218, 401
Hynde, Chrissie, 45
iD, 317
Idol, Billy, 398
‘If Reagan Played Disco’ (The Minutemen), 389
Iggy Pop: Alan Vega, 34; Cabaret Voltaire, 249;
David Bowie, 158, 203; Devo, 55–6;
Howard Devoto, 325; Human League, 284,
285, 292; James Chance, 133, 373; Lester
Bangs, 35; Mark Stewart, 95; Nico, 214;
Steven Morris, 230 ‘Cock in My Pocket’,
249
‘I’m a Mindless Idiot’ (Meat Puppets), 393–94
I’m So Hollow, 283
Immaculate Consumptives, The, 153
Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British
New Wave, 380
In A Car (Meat Puppets), 391
Incredible String Band, The, 59
Interference, 227
Interview, 418
‘In the Ditch’ (Gang of Four), 387
Invaders of the Heart, The, 25
Invisible Girls, The, 209
Ipswich Art College, 370
Iron Maiden, 418
Isherwood, Christopher, 314, 400
Island records, 333
IT, 208
Jackie, 311
Jackson, George, 391
Jackson, Michael; ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get
Enough’, 289
Jacobites, The, 166
Jagger, Mick, 269, 279, 353
Jah Stone, 100
Jah Wobble see Wobble, Jah
Jam, The, 320, 321
Jam, Jimmy, 293
Jamaica, 6, 10, 13, 14
James Chance and the Contortions, 95; Buy the
Contortions, 138, 139; ‘Contort Yourself’,
139, 140; see also Chance, James;
Contortions, The
James Gang, The, 45
James King and The Lone Wolves, 320
James White and the Blacks, 140; ‘Almost Black’,
140; Off White, 138; Sax Maniac, 141
Janet and Johns, The, 183
Jankel, Chas, 21
Japan, 289, 397, 398–99; ‘Nightporter’, 399
Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 439
Kafka, Franz, 272, 273
Kajagoogoo, 331, 424
Kalsoum, Om, 25
Karakos, Jean, 38
Karoli, Michael, 249, 253
Karp, Ivan, 36
Kay, Janet: ‘Silly Games’, 106
Kaye, Lenny, 143–4
Kazan, Elia, 48
KC and the Sunshine Band, 286
Keenan, John, 71–2
Kemp, Gary, 400; ‘Instinction’, 309
Kenny Everett Show, The, 219
Kent State University, 40, 42, 46, 49, 55
Kerouac, Jack, 80, 87–8
Kevorkian, François, 25
Kid Creole, 375; ‘Annie I’m Not Your Daddy’, 106
Kidron, Adam, 308
‘Kill Everything Now’ tour (Black Flag), 386
Killing Joke: ‘Psssyche’, 170
Kimber, William, 181
King and I, The 393
King Crimson, 385, 396
King, Jon, 108, 110, 117
King Mob, 376
King Tubby, 99, 100
Kingways College, 17
Kinks, The, 60
Kirk, Richard H., 178, 244–57
Kirk, Roland, 421
Kirkwood, Cris, 391, 393, 395
Kirkwood, Curt: background, 391; landscape
influence, 394; on MTV, 395; Rockman use,
395; vocal style, 392–93
Kiss, 242
Kitchen, 374
KLF, 83, 93, 407
Knack, the, 381
Knebworth, 56
Koons, Jeff, 40, 47
Korova, 85
Koszinski, Jerzy, 157
Kraftwerk: Alison Statton, 174; Billy Mackenzie,
263; Human League, 281; Martin Rushent,
298, 304; music of, 363; Richard H. Kirk,
249, 256; Steven Morris, 229; Trevor Horn,
337, 338 Man Machine, The, 337; TransEurope Express, 249, 281
Krauss, Alison, 42
Krautrock, 96, 203, 229, 356
Ku Klux Klan, 9
Kusworth, Dave, 166
La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music,
368
Lacan, Jacques, 193
Ladbroke Grove, 195, 253
Lady T, 11
Land Speed Record (Hüsker Dü), 390
Lang, Fritz, 333
Langer, Clive, 82
Last, Bob: Andy Gill, 114–15; charts, 329;
Human League, 281, 285, 288, 303; Tony
Wilson, 76–7
Last Poets, The, 101
Laswell, Bill, 24
Lauder, Andrew, 97, 295, 296
Lautréamont, Comte de, 360
Le Forte Four, 392
439
index
Jarmusch, Jim, 374
Jarre, Jean-Michel, 249
Jarry, Alfred, 62
Jeczalik, J. J., 333, 343
Jefferson Airplane, 183
Jefferson Starship, 56
Jensen, Kid, 171
Jesus and Mary Chain, The, 33, 166
Jesus Lizard, 117
Jimi Hendrix Experience, 390
Jinks, Niall, 177, 178, 181, 190
Jobson, Richard, 273
Joe Clarke Band, The, 337
Johansen, David, 31
John Cage, 392
Johnny and the Self Abusers, 314
Johnson, Holly, 82, 83, 84, 332, 334–6
Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 101; ‘Reality Poem’, 106
Johnson, Robert, 66, 166
Jones, Brian, 362
Jones, Grace, 335
Jones, John Paul, 419
Jones, Mick, 5, 196
Jones, Steve, 321
Josef K, 272–6, 309, 312, 315, 320, 363; ‘Endless
Soul’, 274; ‘It’s Kinda Funny’, 275; ‘Sense of
Guilt’, 274; ‘Sorry for Laughing’, 275
Joy Division, 70–3, 230–9, 358–66; David
Byrne, 126; Edwyn Collins, 313; Fall, The,
203; Genetic, 296–7; Linder Sterling, 224;
Lydia Lunch, 152; Nikki Sudden, 166;
Orange Juice, 307; Paul Haig, 275; Paul
Morley, 327–9; Tony Wilson, 76, 77; 24
Hour Party People, 223 ‘Atmosphere’, 240,
362; ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, 237; Closer,
237–9, 363, 364; ‘Dead Souls’, 240;
‘Decades’, 237; ‘Disorder’, 362; ‘Ice Age’,
296; Ideal for Living, An, 233; ‘In a Lonely
Place’, 241; ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, 234,
236, 238, 363, 364; ‘Shadowplay’, 362;
‘She’s Lost Control’, 234; Still, 237;
‘Transmission’, 232, 233, 296; Unknown
Pleasures, 73, 74, 239
Jung, Karl Gustav, 80
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Totally Wired (Fin):Rip It Up 6/10/10 4:50 PM Page 440
Leander, Mike, 292
Leaving the 20th Century (Christopher Gray), 76
Led Zeppelin, 168, 230, 258, 354, 355, 406;
Led Zep III, 292; Physical Graffiti, 354
Lee, Arthur, 89
Lee, Jeanette, 23, 355
Leeds, 113
Leeds Polytechnic, 179–80
Leeds University, 108
Leiber and Stoller, 151, 375
Leigh, Mike, 365
Lennon, John, 127, 208, 368–9
Lennox, Annie, 201–2, 418
Lesser Free Trade Hall, 205, 217, 324, 359
Let It Rock boutique (later Sex), 94, 247
Letts, Don, 352, 420
Levan, Larry, 25
Level 42, 305
Levene, Keith, 19–22; Alan Rankine, 262; Ari
Up, 9; Flowers of Romance, 5; Jah Wobble,
26; John Lydon, 201; Mark Stewart, 100;
Paul Morley, 329; PiL, 355, 356; Tony
Wilson, 70
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 308
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 33
Lewis, Terry, 293
Libération, 38
Licher, Bruce, 391
Lichtenstein, Roy, 30
Leiber and Stoller,
Liebezeit, Jaki, 17, 24, 25, 229, 234
Light Bulb (LAFMS), 392
Lightning Seeds, The, 83
Life Without Buildings, 173
Lindsay, Arto, 372–3, 374
Liquid Liquid, 374
Live Aid, 71
Liverpool, 77–8, 83, 84, 87–91
Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream
and Pun, 80–1
Lockers, The, 129
Locks, Fred, 11
London, 397–403
London, Jack, 80
London Musicians Collective, 392
Long, Janice, 171
Longo, Robert, 374
Lori and the Chameleons, 85
Los Angeles, 381–96; Los Angeles Free Music
Society, 391–92; social roots, 388; SST,
382–91
‘Lost’ (Meat Puppets), 394
Lounge Lizards, The, 140, 374–5
Lovin’ Spoonful, The, 312
Lowry, Ray, 330
Ludus, 219–28, 369; Damage, The, 224; Danger
Came Smiling, 224–5; Secret Public, The, 221
440
Lulu, 304
Lunch, Lydia, 134–6, 139, 143–53, 369, 373–5;
Adulterers Anonymous, 152; Agony and the
Ecstasy, The/Drunk on the Pope’s Blood
(with Birthday Party), 152; Drowning of
Lucy Hamilton, 147; ‘Gloomy Sunday’,
151, 375; Honeymoon in Red, 152;
Hysterie, 146; ‘Lady Scarface’, 151;
‘Mechanical Flattery’, 151; Queen of Siam,
145, 151–2; ‘Run Through the Jungle’, 150;
‘Some Velvet Morning’, 152
Luongo, John, 255
Lurie, John, 140, 374
Lydon, John, 16–20, 351–6; aspects of, 200;
Flowers of Romance, 201; Malcolm
McLaren, 5; NASA, 26; PiL, 22–3; see also
Rotten, Johnny
Lynch, David, 50
Maas, Steve, 136, 137
Mabou Mines, 119
Mackay, Andy, 278, 281
Mackenzie, Billy, 258–61, 263–9, 274
MacKinnon, Angus, 17
Madame Butterfly, 379
Madonna, 4, 201, 202, 401, 405
Magazine, 221, 363, 419; ‘Shot by Both Sides’,
325
Mahavishnu Orchestra, 385, 390, 391
Maher, Fred, 192
Malevich, Kazimir, 46
Mallinder, Steven, 244, 247–9, 252, 256
Manchester, 69–71, 222–4; Belgium, 226;
bohemia, 216–17; Chicago, 88; left-wing
traditions, 231; Liverpool, 77, 88, 89;
‘Madchester’, 76; Musicians Collective,
224, 232; Paul Morley, 326–8; self-mystique, 358; 24 Hour Party People, 360
Manet, Édouard, 108
Manhattan, 27, 132
Manicured Noise, 95
Mansfield, Jayne, 278
Manson, Charles, 49, 385
Manson, Marilyn, 157, 158
Manzanera, Phil, 422
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 228
Marcus, Greil, 66, 114, 407, 413, 420
Marcus, Tony, 408
Marie et les Garçons, 321
marijuana, 385, 391
Marley, Bob, 420–1; ‘Get Up, Stand Up’, 421
Marr, Johnny, 313
Mars, 134, 135, 147, 149, 369, 372–4
Marsh, Ian Craig, 249, 279–80, 284, 285
Martin, George, 268
Martinez, Cliff, 152
Marxism, 108–9, 190
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Minor Threat, 386
Minty, 401
Minutemen, The, 382, 383, 386–90
Mirage (Meat Puppets), 395
Mitchell, Joni, 339
Mitchell, Mitch, 390
Mitchell, Murray, 152
Moby, 39
Modern Drugs, 338
Modettes, The, 4
Mojave Desert, 391
Mojo, 310, 423
Monitor, 391
Monk, Meredith, 225, 374
Monk, Thelonius, 81, 421
Monkees, The, 58
Monochrome Set, The, 331
Moon, Keith, 230
Moore, Roger, 159
Moore, Thurston, 153, 368, 375
Morley, Paul, 323–36; Barney Hoskyns, 415–16;
Gavin Friday, 413; influence of, 413; John
Peel, 171; Josef K, 275; Tony Wilson, 70
Morley, Tom, 180, 181
Moroder, Giorgio, 234, 304, 333
Morris, Dennis, 355
Morris, Kenny, 155
Morris, Steven, 73, 229–43, 365
Morrison, Jim, 313, 362
Morrissey, 219, 222, 313, 361; ‘Pretty Girls
Make Graves’, 313
Mortimer, Richard, 402, 403
Mothersbaugh, Jim, 55
Mothersbaugh, Mark, 40–6, 54–6
Motley Crüe, 352, 36
Mott the Hoople, 325
Mould, Bob, 390
Mountain, 385
Movimento, Il, 184
Moxham, Philip, 175
Moxham, Stuart, 175, 176
MTV, 51, 129–30, 381, 424
Mudd Club, The, 37, 136, 137
Murphy, John, 261, 267
Murray Flwyd, 187
Museum of Modern Art, The, New York, 28
Music Machine, 58, 320
Musical Vomit, 280
MX-80, 60, 64
Myers, Alan, 44
Mystery Train (Greil Marcus), 66
My War (Black Flag), 385, 386
Nagle, Chris, 238
Nares, James, 135
Native Hipsters, 172; ‘There Goes Concord
Again’, 169
441
index
Massive Attack, 356
Matching Mole, 232
Matlock, Glen, 378
Matumbi, 9, 106, 107
MaximumRockNRoll, 386, 394
Max’s Kansas City, 32, 120, 132–4, 137–8, 143–4
MC5, 34, 58, 60
McCarthy, Cormac, 150, 153
McCartney, Paul, 419, 425
McClymont, David, 315, 316
McCullough, Dave, 230–1, 275, 312, 412
McCulloch, Ian, 83, 84, 86, 91, 93
McGann, Eric, 209
McGee, Alan, 161, 167
McGeoch, John, 155, 156, 262
McGinley, Maureen, 383
McGuinn, Roger, 311
McKay, John, 155
McLaren, Malcolm, 375–81; John Lydon, 355;
Never Mind the Bollocks, 352; New Pop,
341; PiL, 75; Sex (boutique), 247, 351; situationism, 75, 219; Slits, The, 5; svengali figure, 315; Trevor Horn, 332, 342–3 ‘Buffalo
Gals’, 342–3; Duck Rock, 332, 342–3, 379;
Fans, 379; Heavy Metal Surf Nazis, 380;
‘Hobo Scratch’, 343
McVie, John, 419
Meat Puppets, 382, 391–96
Meat Puppets II (Meat Puppets), 393, 394, 395
Meat Puppets (Meat Puppets), 392
Medicine Head, 168
Meetings with Remarkable Men, 215
Mekons, The, 108, 112, 113
Melody Maker, 96, 160, 395, 414
Melton, Johnny, 400
Melville, Herman, 64
Members, The, 285
Men They Couldn’t Hang, The, 407
Mental Torture, 258
Mercer Arts Centre, 31–2, 376
Mercury, Freddie, 261
Messiaen, Olivier, 67
Metal Box: Stories from John Lydon’s Public
Image Limited, 355
Meters, The, 421
Methodishca Tune, 183
Metropack, 273
Metzger, Gustav, 367
Meyer, Russ, 377
Middleton, Ross, 273
Mill, Jeffrey, 42
Miller, Frankie, 318
Miller, Henry, 47, 148
Millett, Kate, 219
Millions of Dead Cops, 386
Mills, Sir John, 167
Mind Power, 382
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Negative Approach, 382
Network, 48
Neu!, 95, 155, 262
Nevison, Stuart, 72
New Age Steppers, The, 11, 12, 100
New Alliance, 388
New Fast Automatic Daffodils, The, 74
‘New Gods’ (Meat Puppets), 393
New Hormones, The, 76, 85, 221, 223, 224
New Order, 235–8; ‘Blue Monday’, 360; Gillian
Gilbert, 419; Joy Division, 358; Richard H.
Kirk, 255–6; Steven Morris, 233; synthesisers,
363; Tony Wilson, 70 ‘Blue Monday’, 73;
‘Everything’s Gone Green’, 73, 241;
Movement, 235, 236, 239, 241, 256;
‘Senses’, 239
New York Dolls, The, 31–2, 95, 143, 376–7,
399
New York Rocker, 329
Newton, Adi, 249, 250, 279, 283
Nico, 209, 213, 214
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 264, 353
Nig-Heist, 394
Nine Inch Nails: ‘Closer’, 47
‘1969’ (the Stooges), 385
NME, 17, 96, 311, 329, 344, , 382, 414–15
‘No Fun’ (Stooges), 385
Noise Fest, 375
Nomi, Klaus, 374
Nort, 254
Nothing (Paul Morley), 72
‘Nothing Left Inside’ (Black Flag), 385
Notsensibles, The, 172; ‘I’m In Love with
Margaret Thatcher’, 169
Nucleus, 232
Nugent, Ted, 323, 355
Numan, Gary, 284, 289, 294
Nu-Sonics, The, 315
Nuttgens, Patrick, 180
Nyman, Michael, 327
Oakey, Phil, 277–94, 299
Object, 224, 327
Oblique Strategies, The, 370
O’Brien, Glenn, 418
Obscure, 323
O’Dell, Dick, 96, 196
O’Hallaghan’s Teashop, 80
‘Oh, Me’ (Meat Puppets), 393
Oi!, 381, 413, 418
O’Jays, The, 121
OK Harris gallery, 31, 32, 35
Old Grey Whistle Test, 237
Oliver, Sean, 8
100 Flowers, 391
Ono, Yoko, 139, 145, 225, 226, 368–9;
‘Amsterdam’, 368; ‘Cambridge 1969’, 368;
442
Fly, 225, 369; ‘No Bed for Beatle John’,
368; Plastic Ono Band, 369; ‘Two Minutes
Silence’, 368; Unfinished Music No 1: Two
Virgins, 368; Unfinished Music No. 2: Life
with the Lions, 368; Wedding Album, 368
Orange Juice, 166, 273, 307–22, 328, 424;
‘Consolation Prize’, 313; ‘Falling and
Laughing’, 316, 317; ‘Poor Old Soul’, 317;
‘Rip It Up’, 315, 316, 318; ‘Simply Thrilled
Honey’, 311, 313; ‘We’re Gonna Have a
Real Good Time Together’, 314
Orchestral Manoeuvres, 76, 77, 87
Orwell, George, 17
Out There, 323
O’Williams, Wendy, 143
Oz, 226
Pablo, Augustus, 110
‘Paisley Underground’, 381
Palmer, David, 339
Palmer, Robert (critic), 140, 374
Palmer, Robert (musician), 421
Palmolive, 4, 7, 9, 195, 197, 200
‘Paranoid Chant’ (Minutemen), 387
Paranoid Time (Minutemen), 387
Paris Is Burning, 402
Parker, Charlie, 131, 133
Parker, Evan, 225
Parker, James, 384–85
Parker, Maceo, 133
Parks, Van Dyke, 161
Parliament-Funkadelic, 78, 121, 193
Parsons, Tony, 312, 320–1
Passage, 208
Pastels, The, 166
Paterson, Jeremy, 69
Patti Smith Group, The, 371; see also Smith, Patti
Peach, Blair, 101
Peacock, Annette, 225
Pearce, Kevin, 321
Peel, John, 168–73; cutting-edge music, 412;
Fall, The, 209; Green Gartside, 178; Linder
Sterling, 226; Orange Juice, 320; Paul
Morley, 329; Swell Maps, 160; transformation, 422
Penetration, 323
Penman, Ian, 330, 332, 412
People United, 101
Pere Ubu, 57–68, 99, 372; Art of Walking, 67;
Dub Housing, 68; New Picnic Time, 67;
Song of the Bailing Man, 67
Perry, Mark, 207, 324; ‘Love Lies Limp’, 200
Pessao, Fernando, 148
Pet Shop Boys, The, 73, 405
Pettibon, Raymond, 384–85
Philips, Anya, 136–7, 139
Phillips, Sam, 33
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Prince Buster, 195
Process of Weeding Out, The (Black Flag), 396
Probe Records, 84
Prodigy, 305
‘progressive punk’, 381–96, 382–83
Project of Living Artists, 28–31
Project: Mersh (Minutemen), 395
Prole, 388
Prometheus, 98
Public Image Ltd see PiL
Pugh, Gareth, 402
Punch Line, What Makes A Man Starts Fire (The
Minutemen), 387, 389
Pursey, Jimmy, 33
Queen, 261, 284
Question Mark, 58
Quicksilver Messenger Service, 229, 311
Quiet Sun, 422
Quine, Robert, 149, 151
Rabid, 76, 224
Race Today, 101
Radar, 77, 97, 98, 115, 296
Radical Alliance of Black Poets and Players, 101
Radio 1, 172
Radio Alice, 184
Radiohead, 356
Rage Against the Machine, 99, 116
Raincoats, The, 12, 87, 183, 194–202;
Odyshape, 12, 200–1; ‘Only Loved at
Night’, 200
Rain Parade, The, 381
Ramones, The: Devo, 54; James Chance, 132,
133, 136; John Peel, 173; Lydia Lunch, 144;
No Wave, 374; Phil Oakey, 280
Ramous, Theodore, 376
Ranch Bar, Manchester, 205, 222
Rankine, Alan, 258–71
Rascals, The, 131
Rastafarians, 6, 9–11, 14–15, 100, 106, 162,
352, 382
Ravenstine, Allen, 61, 6
Read, Mike, 171, 334
Record Collector, 423
Record Mirror, 161
Record Rendezvous, 60
Red Bologna, 184
Red Crayola, 97
Red Hot Chili Peppers, The, 116, 117
Red Therapy, 227
Red Wedge, 70
Redd, Sharon, 242
Redgrove, Peter, 220
Redskins, The, 407
Reed, Lou: Alan Horne, 314; background, 368;
Edwyn Collins, 311; Fall, The, 203; Lydia
443
index
Phoenix, 391
Pigalle, Anne, 333, 335
PiL (Public Image Ltd), 17–26, 352–6; Andy
Gill, 114; disco, 138; Gina Birch, 196; influences, 423; John Lydon, 352; Malcolm
McLaren, 379; Richard Dudanski, 195;
Tony Wilson, 70, 75 ‘Death Disco’, 138,
356; Flowers of Romance, 355;
‘Fodderstompf’, 19; ‘Low Life’, 20; Metal
Box, 20, 21, 200, 331, 352–7; ‘Poptones’,
356; ‘progressive punk’, 382; sound, 390;
‘Suit, The’, 21; ‘This Is Not a Love Song’,
114
Pink Floyd, 324, 406
Pinter, Harold, 363
Pirate’s Cove, 59, 61
Pitman, Bob, 51
Piute Pete and his Country Cousins, 342
Place, Pat, 135, 139, 373
Planck, Billy Ver, 151
Planet Beat, 11
Plank, Conny, 49, 56
‘Plateau’ (Meat Puppets), 393
Plaza, Cleveland, 61
Pogues, The, 407
Police, The, 356, 406
politics, 384, 385–86, 387–88
‘Politics of Time, The’ (The Minutemen), 389
Pollitt, Tessa, 4, 8, 105
Polski, Ruth, 242
Poot Man, 46–7, 55
Pop Art, 30, 211
Pop Group, The, 7–8, 11, 94–102, 115, 138;
‘Blind Faith’, 101; ‘Boys from Brazil, The’,
100; ‘Don’t Call Me Pain’, 100; ‘Don’t Sell
Your Dreams’, 100; ‘Forces of Oppression’,
101; How Much Longer Do We Tolerate
Mass Murder, 100–1; ‘Justice’, 101; ‘No
Spectators, 101’; ‘She Is Beyond Good and
Evil’, 98; ‘Thief of Fire’, 98; ‘We Are All
Prostitutes’, 100, 102; ‘Where There’s a
Will’, 100; Y, 98
Poobah’s, 392
Pop Group, 388
Poppy, Andrew, 335
P-Orridge, Genesis, 252
Portobello Road, 6, 160
Portsmouth Sinfonia, 82
Postcard, 307, 308, 310, 313–16, 318, 329
postpunk, 381–82
Positive Noise: Heart of Darkness, 273
‘power pop’, 381
Presley, Elvis, 33, 39; ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, 66
Press, Joy, 417
Pressler, Charlotte, 57
Pretenders, The, 45
Primal Scream, 167; ‘Higher Than the Sun’, 356
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Lunch, 144; Mark Stewart, 95; Max’s
Kansas City, 32; Paul Haig, 274; Pere Ubu,
63; Berlin, 144
Reeder, Mark, 241
Reflex, 390
Reich, Wilhelm, 227, 228, 418
Reid, Jamie, 70
Reith, Lord, 172
‘Reoccurring Dreams’ (Hüsker Dü), 390
Residents, The, 60, 64, 392
Rev, Marty, 29–33, 35
Revillos, The, 300
Rezillos, The, 300
Reznor, Trent, 99
Rhodes, Bernie, 196, 315
Richard, Cliff, 171
Richard Hell and the Voidoids, 371
Riddle, Nelson, 151, 340–1
Riley, Terry, 44
Rip It Up and Start Again (Simon Reynolds),
381, 405–10, 424
Rip Rig & Panic, 8
‘Rise Above’ (Black Flag), 382
Rivers, John, 162
‘Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts’ (The
Minutemen), 389
Robertson, B. A., 274
Robey, John, 256
Robinson, Smokey, 424
Rock Against Racism, 204, 314, 326, 419
Rockman, 395
Rockwell, John, 374
Rocky Horror Show, The, 397
Rodgers, Paul, 109
Roeg, Nicolas, 23, 334
Rollerball, 48
Rolling Stones, The: Andy Gill, 116; Associates,
269; Brian Jones, 362; David Byrne, 120;
Dennis Bovell, 106; Jah Wobble, 25; James
Chance, 131; London, 327; Nikki Sudden,
167; Pere Ubu, 63, 64; reggae, funk and
disco, 421; Richard H. Kirk, 244, 248; Sex
Pistols, The, 356; Steve Severin, 156; Suicide,
38; Beggars Banquet, 156; Black and Blue,
421; Emotional Rescue, 167; ‘Hot Stuff ’,
421; ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, 269; ‘Miss You’,
356, 421; ‘Street Fighting Man’, 421
Rollins, Henry, 37, 383, 385, 386
roots music, American, 381
Ross, Malcolm, 315
Rother, Michael, 262
Rotten, Johnny, 82, 313, 330, 351, 379; see also
Lydon, John
Rough Trade, 183–5; Andy Gill, 116; Cabaret
Voltaire, 252–3; Orange Juice, 320; Paul
Morley, 328; Pop Group, 97–8; Scritti
444
Politti, 199, 201; SST similarities, 383, 384;
Swell Maps, 162, 164
Roxy (club), 194
Roxy Music: Brian Eno, 368; Cabaret Voltaire,
244; Devo, 54; Human League, 277–8, 281;
Linder Sterling, 216–17; Siouxsie and the
Banshees, 155, 398; Talking Heads, 121
Rushent, Martin, 290–1, 293, 295–306
Russell Club, 69, 71
Rutherford, Paul, 81, 82, 332
Ryan, Tosh, 76
Ryder, Mitch, 131
Ryder, Shaun, 215, 360, 361
Saccharine Trust, 382, 383
Sager, Gareth, 8, 100
Saint Vitus, 396
Salinger, J. D., 273
San Francisco, 88, 381
San Pedro, 388
Sarah Records, 166
Sassoon, Vidal, 283, 312
Savage, Jon, 221, 222, 246
Savage Republic, 391
Saville, Peter, 75, 328, 360, 366
Scargill, Arthur, 250
Scars, The, 273
Scent Organs, The, 161
Schmidt, Irmin, 249
Schmidt, Peter, 370
Scholz, Tom, 395
Schwartz, Delmore, 368
Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, 80
Scientist: Scientist Meets the Space Invaders, 239
Sclavunos, Jim, 146, 147
Scott, Chris, 155–6
Scott, Eugene, 253
Scream, 382
‘Scream’ (Black Flag), 385
Scritti Politti, 177–93; anxiety, 411; Bob Last,
303; changes, 425; early singles, 408; Gang
of Four, 112, 113, 115–16; Gina Birch, 199,
201; Martin Bramah, 213; Nikki Sudden,
163, 165; Orange Juice, 307, 308; politics,
427; Robert Wyatt, 422; Anomie and
Bonhomie, 191; ‘Asylums in Jerusalem’,
191, 192; ‘Bibbly-O-Tek’, 188;
‘Confidence’, 188, 189; Cupid and Psyche,
192, 193; ‘Double Beat’, 188; 4 A Sides,
188, 189; ‘Hegemony’, 185; ‘Jacques
Derrida’, 191; ‘Lions After Slumber’, 190;
‘Little Knowledge, A’, 193; ‘OPEC-Immac’,
186; ‘PAs’, 189; Peel Sessions, 185–7;
‘Skank Bloc Bologna’, 184; Songs to
Remember, 192; ‘”Sweetest Girl”, The’,
190–1, 192
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Sire Records, 160
Situation 2, 261, 264
situationism, 75, 219
Sixties, the, 381, 388
Skids, The, 273
Skrewdriver, 182
Slade, 58, 203, 280, 292, 327, 413
slamdancing, 386
Slave, 117
Slits, The, 3–15; Dennis Bovell, 103, 104; Gina
Birch, 195, 196, 201; John Peel, 170; Pop
Group, The, 99–100; Unfuckables, 424;
White Riot tour, 320; Yoko Ono, 369;
‘Animal Space’, 5; ‘Earthbeat’, 11; ‘Face
Place’, 12; ‘In the Beginning There Was
Rhythm’, 6, 11, 100; ‘Instant Hit’, 8, 9;
‘Man Next Door’, 5; ‘Newtown’, 9; Return
of the Giant Slits, 11–13; ‘Shoplifting’, 9;
‘Spend, Spend, Spend’, 9
Sly & Robbie, 94, 103
Small Wonder, 320
Smegma, 392
Smith, Bruce, 6, 7
Smith, Mark E., 170, 204–9, 312
Smith, Patti: Ana DaSilva, 195; Linder Sterling,
217, 225; Lydia Lunch, 144; New York
punk, 120; Orange Juice, 319; Paul Morley,
323; Pop Group, 95; Subway Sect, 320;
Suicide, 32; Horses, 144; ‘Piss Factory’, 144
Smith, Paul, 255
Smith, Robert, 156
Smiths, The, 228, 313, 358, 360; ‘Wonderful
Woman’, 228
Sniffin’ Glue, 323
Soft Cell, 3, 112, 255
Soft Machine, 59, 232, 421
Soho Weekly News, 149
Some Bizzare, 255
Sonic Youth, 153, 368, 372; Whitey Album,
The, 375
Sordide Sentimentale, 240
Sounds, 221, 230, 413, 414
Space Monkeys, The, 77
Spaceward studio, Cambridge, 160
Spandau Ballet, 112, 297, 342, 400
Spare Rib, 219, 225
Sparks, 234, 424; ‘Number One Song in
Heaven’, 234
Specimen; ‘Stand Up, Stand Out’, 400
Spector, Phil, 83, 84, 234
Spencer, Neil, 96, 328
Spin, 408
Spitfire Boys, The, 332
SPK, 257
‘Split Myself In Two’ (Meat Puppets), 393
Spontaneous Music Ensemble, 323
445
index
‘Seal Whales’ (Meat Puppets), 395
Second British Invasion, 381
Selby, Hubert Jnr, 148
Sellers, Terry, 139
Semiotexte, 192
Sergeant, Will, 91, 263
Serkis, Andy, 74, 359
Severin, Steve, 152, 154–8, 397, 398
Sex (boutique), 94, 247, 351, 377
Sex Pistols, The, 377–80; Anarchy Tour, 181;
Cabaret Voltaire, 245; Edwyn Collins, 313,
317; Fall, The, 205; Gina Birch, 194–6;
John Lydon, 354, 356; Kiss This, 351;
Lesser Free Trade Hall, 324