Despite all the obvious contra-indications, out there in the wider world, I've perversely commenced the new year/decade in a generally positive mood. If, as seems the case, the species is so resolutely keen to embrace calamity, both locally and globally - then perhaps the only way forward is to just ignore all the nonsense, and focus on stuff one has control over, with as much creative energy as can be mustered. If the psychos and idiots are so determined to spread misery and suffering wherever they can - then perhaps seeking joy and constructive fulfilment, in defiance, can become a quasi-political act in its own right. Whatever the philosophical validity of that may or may not be, it feels like I've been able to skate over the first few days of 2020 with relative alacrity, and even make a few small steps forward, in various directions. Is it not then, perhaps equally counter-intuitive, to be starting the new decade with a singularly retrospective post? Well, I never claimed to be a slave to logic - did I?
What this actually is, is one of my occasional playlists - this time stimulated by reading Simon Reynolds' entertaining survey of the immediate Post Punk years, 'Rip It Up And Start Again: Post Punk 1979 - 1984' [1.], over the festive period. It's a book I meant to read for years, but only recently - when chancing upon its cheeky pink cover, whilst Christmas shopping, did I finally get round to doing something about it. It turns out that Reynolds' admittedly solipsistic account of the period's music chimes pretty well with my own memories (and indeed, for the most part, musical biases), and is a substantial, but never less-than-entertaining, read for anyone keen to plunge back through the mists of time.
I myself was a little slow to fully appreciate the raw appeal of Punk, having already emotionally invested in a more Proggy milieu, in my early teens, before the new sounds properly seeped east of the A1. Thus, despite turning 15, in 1977 - my first proper perusal of the Sex Pistols, Clash, etc. was perhaps closer to Reynolds' own, in being experienced slightly second-hand, and already through the filter of what came immediately after. Though we didn't really understand it at the time, there is probably much to commend his central thesis: namely, that Punk, in its purest form, was always destined to be a somewhat reductive dead end - and actually over before it really began.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's really not that difficult to see the basic blueprint of gobby teenage rebellion, shouted over speeded-up Rock & Roll licks (and with an associated distain for anything more literate or musically expansive), as an end of something, as much as a beginning. If the Stalinist approach of many contemporary journalists in 1976 was to assert a kind of year-zero for popular culture, fuelled by the cleansing fire of anarchic nihilism - they were less constructive in suggesting what else one might listen to, once it rapidly became predictable and just a bit tiresome, in 1977. Regardless of whether or not it's all just really Reynolds' attempt to validate his own youthful experience (or, indeed - mine) - it does feel like those acts who emerged or matured over the next few years, were the ones who broke rather more rewarding new ground, whilst still seeking to preserve that revolutionary impulse. They may have encouraged Rock and Pop music to mutate, rather than simply negating it (as some originally desired), but they did so in a variety of unpredictable and cross-cultural forms - admitting previously unheard voices, and often still sounding surprisingly fresh, even today. Certainly, many provided interesting routes out of what had undeniably become something of a cultural impasse, even if only at the second attempt.
It's perhaps worth noting that the turn of that decade was also one of political and social turmoil - just as is this. Back then, however, it still felt like much was up for grabs - and that doing something interesting and energetic with a guitar, synthesiser (or trumpet), might even, one day, just help to topple Racism, Sexism, Capitalism, traditionalism (or whatever else you've got). However naive and misguided that may now seem, it is difficult not to feel just a little nostalgic for such a time. Mostly though, it's just a load of popular entertainment - is it not? Anyway, regardless of their cultural significance (or otherwise), here are a few of my own personal faves from the period...
1: Magazine, 'The Light Pours Out Of Me'
Magazine's second album, 'Secondhand Daylight' is, for me, their most complete artistic statement. However, I've enthused about that on here before - so here's one of the stand-out's from their slightly more energetic debut outing, 'Real Life'. The opening bars are as atmospherically doomy as anything by fellow Manchester miserablists Joy Division, and Devoto's lyric and vocal delivery certainly prioritise paranoia and sourness, over mere aggression. John McGeoch's guitar slashes and screeches abrasively enough, but Dave Formula's keyboard work is all about adding ambience and texture. As many have pointed out, the very presence of a keyboardist alone, was enough to distance the band from many Punk purists - let alone one with the faintly proggish virtuosity Formula would demonstrate on numerous other Magazine recordings.
2: A Certain Ratio, 'Sextet'
A little like Magazine, and also from Manchester - A Certain Ratio never really capitalised on their considerable early promise. They have stood the test of time pretty well, though - and continue to garner critical acclaim to the present day. I first heard them during my Art Foundation Course year, when they were sometimes mentioned in the same breath as Factory label-mates Joy Division. If both bands exuded the same, post-industrial despondency (underlined by eerily similar lead vocal stylings), ACR distinguished themselves by attempting to incorporate polyrhythmic percussion and brass into the mix. Awkward though the results could sometimes sound, they were correct in their belief that 'bringing the funk' might provide a better route out of stale rock traditionalism, than simply accelerating the same old guitar licks.
Second album, 'Sextet' is their real masterpiece (the debut, 'To Each...' having been somewhat flattened by Martin Hannett's overly-meticulous production). There's a pleasing angularity to many of the songs, and a genuine strangeness in the marriage of downbeat, even robotic, vocals with what would, in another context, be regarded as party music. Joy Division might later reinvent themselves as New Order, and go on to achieve something a bit similar with programmed keyboards, but ACR were there first, and with trumpets (and whistles), and real percussion.
3: The Pop Group, 'Thief Of Fire'
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| The Pop Group (Mark Stewart Really Is A Very Tall Man) |
I arrived in Bristol, in 1981, just as local Post Punk pioneers, The Pop Group, were ceasing to operate as a unit. I sometimes like to tell myself I might have just caught one last live outing, perhaps without really even knowing what I was witnessing (there were a few nights like that) - but it seems unlikely really. It's more likely I remember Rip Rig & Panic - the outfit that featured two former Pop Group members, existed in parallel for a few months, and outlived it by yet more. Either way, that original band still stand out as one of the most vivid and experimental acts of the period - as well as precursors of much of what would later be labelled 'The Bristol Sound'.
The Pop Group's debut album 'Y', is a long way from any form of smoked-out Trip-Hop, however. It's a twisted melange of Funk, Dub and Free Jazz, topped off by Mark Stewart's frantic, highly politicised, vocals. At certain points, the album detaches itself almost completely from anything resembling accepted musical logic, with only Dennis Bovell's capable production holding it all together. 'Thief Of Fire', is a completely convincing opener, for all that - utilising a propulsive, stuttering, rhythmic structure to pull the listener in, before abandoning them amongst a morass of free-form sax and fragmented rhythm guitar. By the time you've reached the song's last squawks , there's no real way back. You might as well just submit to what follows.
4: The Au Pairs, 'Playing With A Different Sex'
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| The Au Pairs: Pretty Much As I Remember Them - Back In 1981 |
I definitely did see The Au Pairs though (whose debut album this is), one enjoyable evening, at Bristol Polytechnic. Being located on the very periphery of the city, and well removed from its more happening locales, our place of study attracted rather less visiting bands than any self-respecting art college probably should. As a result, I went to a variety of the events that did occur, on spec. (particularly in my first year), on the principle that something is better than nothing; also that it's definitely what a proper art student should be doing. The Au Pairs were far better than just 'something' though, and I retain fond memories of their gig, after nearly forty years.
They were another band to successfully explore the interface between Punk attitude, and danceable rhythms, and it's easy to forget how, even just restricting the guitar to a largely rhythmic role, and affording the bass a more active one (albeit within a standard four-piece format) could feel radical at the time. This was, after all, an era in which Disco could still be dismissed - often on largely homophobic grounds, and making 'credible' music was generally assumed to be a boy's game. The Au Pairs further bucked that trend with a fifty-fifty gender split, and (more importantly) by dealing with contemporary subjects, including the overtly political, from a resolutely female perspective. Leslie Woods' dispassionate approach to songwriting, and the band's overall purposefulness, indicated that young women would no longer be satisfied to just look fetching in a bin bag and ripped nylons, while the boys made all the racket.
5: The Slits, 'Cut'
When it came to the girls having a go, things didn't get much more rambunctious, or the racket - more glorious, than the slits first album. Ari Up, Viv Albertine, Tessa Politt and Palmolive took Punk's do-it-yourself ethos to heart, and simply got up and played - regardless of instrumental (in)ability, or the sensibilities of boring (usually male) musos and connoisseurs. Giving absolutely zero shits, proved their greatest strength. Lacking the ability to play serious, blues-based music, even if they'd wanted to - they invented their own stripped down, angular kind of bastard Pop-Reggae hybrid thing instead. Characterised by Ari's atonal, Germanic vocals, and a truly infectious sense of abandon - their songs often touched on 'real' topics, but avoided any earnestness. They just don't get stale.
If I'm honest I came a little late to the Slits, although I do remember the album laying around on our battered sixth form Hi-Fi in 1979. It was hard to miss that artwork, really. The band may have chosen to go topless but, by also plastering themselves in mud - they represented an Amazonian antidote to passively decorous femininity. I saw the light a few years later - but in '79, was still probably a little too much in the camp of the aforementioned 'connoisseurs' to fully appreciate the album's ramshackle charms. How dim can you be?
6: The Durutti Column, 'The Return Of The Durutti Column'
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| 'The Return Of The Durutti Column': Early Copies Had A Situationist Sandpaper Sleeve, But This Is The Rather More Benign Version I Bought. |
I spent the my few months after leaving home, in a traditionally spartan bedsit, in Bristol's Redland area. I'd started to make a few new friends, but still had a pretty restricted social life away from college. My room was in a large, dilapidated Victorian villa, each of whose implacable doors appeared to obscure a discrete life into which I had no insight. I'd occasionally hear muffled noises behind one door or another - but rarely met anyone in the hallway. However, one evening, I did bump into a vaguely friendly young woman, who lived in the attic room. She invited me in for a pot of tea, and this was what she played as we chatted.
Recorded in 1979, Vini Reilly's most memorable album wasn't quite like anything else I'd heard before. I knew some of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's ambient work, was familiar with at least one Leo Kottke album - and could hear certain similarities with both. Nevertheless, the combination of Reilly's plangent, jazz-inflected guitar work, and Martin Hannett's primitive programmed beats, invented treatments and typically glacial production, chart their own distinct territory - with that slightly awkward quality that seems to characterise so much material of the period. I've treasured the music, along with the small, isolated memory, ever since. Hang on - have I told this story before?
7: Martin Hannett (With Crispy Ambulance), 'Concorde Drone'
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| Martin Hannett |
The late Martin Hannett wasn't just Factory Records' contrary production genius of choice - he generated a quantity of original material too. This darkly atmospheric and beatless curio, from 1981, could have been recorded yesterday, and demonstrates just what a pioneer Hannett was, at a time when Eno was still pretty much the only widely-known Ambient game in town. I certainly had no inkling of this stuff back then, and only discovered it relatively recently - amongst a wealth of other fascinating excavations, on the retrospective compilation, Martin Hannett & Steve Hopkins, 'The Invisible Girls'.
8: The Beat, 'Mirror In The Bathroom'
Reggae and its Dub variants gained a lot of much-needed traction during the Punk and Post-Punk years. There was a shared rebel sensibility between bands like The Clash or The Ruts, and Britain's much put-upon black youth. An implicit critique of festering British values, and the deep racism at their core, became explicit in such movements as The Anti-Nazi League, and Rock Against Racism. But for all that, when bands like The Clash (or, more questionably - The Police), attempted to emulate black musical tropes - it was still essentially white kids trying to nick black sounds. However, the Post-Punk Ska revival (or 'Two-Tone Movement' - after the label with which many of its proponents were initially associated), did at least get as far as multi-racial line-ups, and a little deeper investigation of some of Jamaican music's pre-Reggae heritage.
At its worst, the genre could easily degenerate into retrogressive heritage schtick, and all the bands involved experienced some questionable relationship with certain sections of their, often-skinhead, audience. But the top tier, of The Specials, The Beat, The Selector, Madness (at the time), et al, did manage to advance a progressive blend of politically-inflected Pop, Ska, and Soul, usually delivered with genuine Punk energy. My particular favourite was always The Beat, and 'Mirror In The Bathroom' is still my pick of the slew of untouchable singles from their 1980 solo album, 'I Just Can't Stop It'. Its musically perfect study of narcissism descending into mental illness, seems even more apt today. It's also a fine showcase for the talents of saxophonist, Saxa (aka. Lionel, Augustus Martin) - a man who had played with both Prince Buster and Laurel Aitken, back in the day.
9: Steel Pulse, 'Handsworth Revolution'
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| Steel Pulse: Definitely Some Of The Best Locks In The Business |
After which, it would seem churlish not to include this, from another of Birmingham's finest. Steel Pulse sounded as committed and convincing as anything actually from Jamaica, when they emerged. This, their 1978 anthem, still sounds as effective a call to arms as anything by Bob Marley (still the only conscious Reggae artist many people had actually heard, at the time). I myself, arrived in Bristol in the wake of the St. Paul's Riot - an event that effectively blew the safety valve off what was still a heavily ghettoised city). Other cities would follow suit in the coming months, as the fault lines in British society became ever more exposed. I myself, went on to expand my musical education, and gain further insights into the true state of the nation, in bass-heavy Bristol (even if only from the perspective of a privileged white art student).
10: Wire, '152'
I have a bizarre half-memory of first encountering Wire on the 'Magpie' children's TV show. It must have been very early in their history, and I can only suppose some researcher was tasked with finding some band that might exemplify the new(ish) Punk(ish) sounds, but be relied upon to resist gobbing at the camera, or calling Mick Robertson a 'long-haired fucker'. But the earliest it could have been was 1976, and I'm not quite sure why I was still watching 'Magpie' at 14.
Wire started out with a pretty minimal Punk blueprint, but by 1979, and this - their third album, they were really fulfilling their potential amongst Post-Punk's premier Art Rock experimentalists. Its release on the old, Prog-heavy Harvest label was a pretty major clue - as was the refined abstract artwork (lacking any identifying text - a la Pink Floyd, and still a particular favourite of mine). The music retained many of their typical sharp edges and instantly-recognisable chugging guitars. But it also covered a far-wider range of musical possibilities than before - shuffling weird instrumental passages and spoken tone poetry into the pack, alongside their often infuriatingly hooky melodies. By turns, it managed to be as shadowy and portentous as Joy Division, as impassively oblique (not least - lyrically) as Eno, and as infectious as The Buzzcocks. Not a bad trick, if you can pull it off.
[1.]: Simon Reynolds, 'Rip It Up And Start Again: Post Punk 1979 - 1984', London, Faber & Faber, 2005.
