Rip It Up and Start Again (39 page)

By 1982, the original 2-Tone bands had all faded: The Beat had released an energy-sapped second album (aptly titled
Wha’ppen
), while the Selecter disappeared off the face of the Earth. Only Madness seemed to prosper and grow. Gradually they shed their nutty-boys image and became something of a modern-day Kinks, singing wistful songs about the dead ends and fleeting glories of life in England (or, more specifically, London). The only major ska revival group not spawned in the West Midlands, Madness all hailed from the Camden/Chalk Farm/Primrose Hill area of North London. The sense of place, always present in their music (the cover of
Absolutely,
their second album, showed them outside Chalk Farm subway station), gradually intensified, climaxing with 1982’s
The Rise and Fall
. Here Madness shouldered past the new-Kinks tag and lunged for new-Beatles status. The front cover of the gatefold sleeve was a
Magical Mystery Tour
–like tableau of the band atop Primrose Hill and garbed in semisurreal attire. Inside, “Our House” (their one real hit in the United States, where it cracked the Top 10) was Madness’ “Penny Lane,” bittersweet nostalgia for the familiar surroundings of childhood.

The group’s McCartney figure, keyboard player Mike Barson, had always cowritten the majority of the songs and fulfilled a Dammers-like role as musical director. Like Dammers, Barson had gone to art college, although his interest was in commercial art and cartoons. “Commercial art” is actually a good tag for Madness’ genius pop, but in truth
Rise and Fall
saw the group overreaching a tiny bit, retracing the historical path from mod into progressive art pop. For “Primrose Hill” (their “Strawberry Fields”) they even hired progressive-rock arranger David Bedford to write brass-brand orchestration. After a few more Top 5 hits in the U.K., the group seemed to lose their knack, along with their sense of fun. Then in 1984 they made the disastrous decision to leave Stiff and found Zarjazz, their own foredoomed equivalent to the Beatles’ Apple label.

As for Kevin Rowland and Dexys Midnight Runners, in 1982 they did something almost unprecedented. They became pop stars for a second time, and on an even bigger scale than before. Rowland’s
new
“new soul vision” was heralded in March 1982 with “The Celtic Soul Brothers,” a manifesto of a single that replaced the old Dexys’ horn fanfares with the jaunty jangle of mandolins and roisterous, folksy violins supplied by the Emerald Express Fiddlers. Along with the new sound came a new Dexys image, of course, a rag-tag mixture of gypsy, rural Irish, and Steinbeckian Okie, with the group dressed in overalls, neckerchiefs, leather waistcoats, shawls, frayed jeans, and sweaters with big holes. “Celtic Soul Brothers” faltered on the edge of the Top 40, but the follow-up, “Come On Eileen,” was a massive number one in the summer of ’82, not just in Britain, but in America, too. Accompanied by an unexpectedly playful video, “Eileen” was an actual love song. Rowland archly admitted to having impure thoughts: “You in that dress/My thoughts I confess/Verge on dirty.” Another big hit, a cover of “Jackie Wilson Said” by Van Morrison, acknowledged the new Dexys’ heavy debts to the latter’s “Caledonian Soul” sound of Irish folk–infused R&B.

The success of these singles and the album
Too-Rye-Ay
brought Dexys a new middle-of-the-road audience of moms and dads and grannies, and this fucked with Rowland’s head even more than his first encounter with fame circa “Geno.” He felt like a sellout, a fraud. Rowland’s response was the calculated career-suicide move of 1985’s
Don’t Stand Me Down.
Instead of rousing sing-along hit material in the “Eileen” mold, the album consisted of eleven-minute songs featuring bizarre comic dialogues, such as “This Is What She’s Like,” rants against the English upper classes, and metasoul exercises such as “The Occasional Flicker.” On the front cover, Dexys made a final confounding image shift, appearing wearing ties, pin-striped suits, and neatly combed hair, looking for all the world like investment bankers in a photo for some corporate prospectus. “So clean and simple. It’s a much more adult approach now,” declared Rowland, rationalizing what in some senses was mod style logic taken to the ultimate limit: dressing like the ruling class.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A MOVEMENT
and a fad, the ska resurgence only really lasted two or three years. But the 2-Tone adventure stands as one of the few examples in pop history of a revival that is not inferior to the music it’s reviving. It may actually be
better
than the original sixties ska—more musically expansive, more resonant, and ultimately more defining of its own epoch.

“We are reviving something that never existed in the first place,” Jerry Dammers declared, his insight pinpointing the creativity involved in 2-Tone’s “secondhand culture.” Where postpunk was resolutely modernist and obsessed with innovation, 2-Tone shared the postmodern sensibility of the New Pop movement that followed. Rather than meticulously re-creating a single, specific genre, 2-Tone sifted through pop’s archives and mixed and matched elements of different styles—ska, Northern soul, easy listening, rockabilly—along with flavors from contemporary music such as disco and dub. postpunk bands rarely did cover songs, but 2-Tone signposted its sources and reference points with countless remakes and tributes—a citational compulsion shared by New Pop artists that sometimes took the form of wholesale interpolation of lyrics from classic pop singles.

2-Tone was cusp music, a transitional moment between postpunk and New Pop. Politically, 2-Tone had more in common with the postpunk groups, from its goal of independent-label autonomy (albeit propped up by major-label support) to its antiracist and anti-Thatcher politics, to the grim social realism of so many of its songs. But 2-Tone’s emphasis on livening up the radio with dance energy and catchy accessibility looked ahead to New Pop. The Specials, Dexys, and above all Madness were also early masters of the pop video. The 2-Tone movement’s awareness of the importance of image and style, though monochrome, paved the way for the full-color explosion of New Popsters such as Adam Ant, the Human League, and ABC.

IN THE SPRING OF 1979,
Malcolm McLaren looked finished. His hopes of turning Sid Vicious into a global superstar were dashed when Sid died of an overdose on February 1. A week later, the court case John Lydon had mounted against McLaren to extricate himself from the latter’s managerial clutches and recover the Sex Pistols’ earnings resulted in the worst possible outcome. The two other surviving Pistols, guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook, defected to the singer’s side, and McLaren lost control of the band that had made him infamous. With his management company, Glitterbest, now administered by a court-appointed custodian, McLaren had to walk away from his beloved Pistols movie
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
, leaving director Julien Temple in charge.

Swindle
was McLaren’s self-aggrandizing rewrite of recent history. The Pistols figured only as puppets with McLaren tugging the strings. Punk was portrayed not as a movement of working-class kids discovering their own power, but as a tour de force of cultural terrorism perpetrated by the arch-strategist McLaren according to a step-by-step master plan. But offscreen, the kids—Lydon, Jones, Cook—had finally wised up and kicked McLaren out of the picture. Exiling himself to Paris, McLaren licked his wounds and wondered what to do next. To tide him over, his friends at Barclay Records gave him the opportunity to put together soundtracks for some soft-core porn films using their vast library of African music as a resource.

The idea appealed to McLaren, who wasn’t a feminist by any stretch of the imagination. His original choice for director of
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
had been porn auteur Russ Meyer, the Bresson of the breast, whose surreal soft-core movies had a cult following of trash aesthetes. McLaren teamed up with a pair of French screenwriters to write a “soft-core rock ’n’ roll costume musical for kids” called
The Adventures of Melody, Lyric, and Tune
, which involved three fifteen-year-old girls and their sexual exploits with adults against the backdrop of various Parisian tourist landmarks. The blatantly pedophilic material scared away any potential backers, so McLaren and his collaborators penned another script,
The Mile High Club,
this time limiting the underage nookie to kids shagging other kids. A cross between
Lord of the Flies
and
Emmanuelle,
the screenplay concerned a tribe of teenage primitives who discover an abandoned jet formerly used by the Mile High Club (an organization dedicated to having sex while cruising above the clouds) and transform it into “a children’s club for sex gang babies to make love.”

While McLaren struggled to break into the porn world, the Sex Pistols posthumously enjoyed a seemingly interminable run of chart success. Virgin released single after single from the
Swindle
soundtrack, which was released in February 1979, long before the movie was even finished. Cadaverous Sid Vicious got to number three twice in short succession with covers of Eddie Cochran’s “Something Else” and “C’mon Everybody.”

In his more paranoid moments, McLaren was convinced that Virgin boss Richard Branson had “out-swindled” him, nullifying the Pistols’ threat through hippie-liberal tolerance. To his dismay, the record mogul had been prepared to go along with even the most offensive escapades McLaren proposed, including the desperate gambit of replacing Rotten as lead singer with escaped convict Ronnie Biggs of Great Train Robbery notoriety. After McLaren lost control of the band, Virgin surpassed even his cash-from-chaos cynicism. In the summer of 1979, Virgin released
Some Product: Carri On
, a hastily assembled album of Pistols radio interviews, complete with a cover depicting imaginary Pistols spin-off merchandise, such as “Fatty Jones” chocolate bars, a “Vicious Burger,” and a Sid action figure complete with coffin. Later came the sick joke of
Flogging a Dead Horse,
a Pistols “greatest hits” album.

Virgin had blithely turned McLaren’s punk critique of commodification into a commodity. As a good situationist, McLaren should have known all along that “the spectacle” could absorb any disruption, no matter how noxious, and convert it into profit. But this didn’t stop him from trying to pull off exactly the same stunts and scandals with his next group. This time, though, he’d do it
right
. Others might have learned something from being sued by their clients (that people don’t like being manipulated), but not Malcolm. The experience of losing control of the Pistols just made him more determined to find some truly pliable human material to work with next time. What he found was Bow Wow Wow.

AFTER FAILING TO GET HIS PORN
musical off the ground, McLaren ended up halfheartedly managing a London band called Adam and the Antz. Adam was an ex-art-school punk who’d built up a devoted cult following with mildly kinky songs such as “Whip in My Valise” and “Beat My Guest.” Despite scoring a number one independent chart hit with “Zerox” and appearing in Derek Jarman’s punk movie
Jubilee,
Adam felt stalled in his career. Impatient to become a real star, he eventually coaxed McLaren, whom he revered, to provide some career guidance. For a flat fee of one thousand pounds McLaren shared the ideas percolating in his head about pop’s “next big thing,” and developed a whole new image and lyrical approach for Adam.

McLaren astutely perceived that after punk there would be a return to swashbuckling glamour and heroic imagery as an inevitable backlash against punk’s “no more heroes.” Returning from Parisian exile, he’d discovered that his partner in couture, Vivienne Westwood, had been spending time down at the Victoria and Albert museum researching eighteenth-century fashions. Emboldened by McLaren’s absence, she’d really found her own identity as a designer. “When Malcolm came back I think he got a bit of a shock,” says Fred Vermorel, coauthor of the first biography of the Sex Pistols and an old art school comrade of McLaren’s. “But seeing all the stuff that Vivienne had already done, he said, ‘Why don’t we hitch a band onto this look?’ Because that’s how it worked last time with the Pistols. Then Malcolm added his own touches. The pirates element came from him.”

The other key components of McLaren’s new pop vision were tribal rhythms and taboo-tweaking lyrics about teenage sexuality (as rehearsed in his abortive porn musicals). In Paris, McLaren heard African music for the first time. The city teemed with immigrants from former French colonies, and another old art school pal, Robin Scott (soon to score a worldwide smash with M’s “Pop Muzik”), was dabbling with Burundi rhythms. McLaren hired Simon Jeffes, the classically trained musician who’d arranged the strings on Sid Vicious’s “My Way,” to teach the Antz the rudiments of African polyrhythm.

During his short period of involvement with Adam and the Antz, McLaren detected the germ of something special. Drummer Dave Barbarossa and bassist Lee Gorman developed a fresh, distinctive sound, all tumbling tom toms and frisky slap bass. Adam seemed like a star in waiting, but the singer also had a mind of his own, and McLaren flinched at the prospect of dealing with another Lydon. Sensing that the band would be far more malleable, he conspired with the Antz to fire their leader as 1979 drew to a close.

The Adam-less Antz had the sultry, exotic sound, and the fashion side of McLaren’s would-be subculture was in place, courtesy of Westwood. All he needed now was a subversive angle, something to really goad the music industry and media. After getting involved in a TV series called
An Insider’s Guide to the Music Business,
McLaren became interested in home taping, the industry’s scapegoat for a sharp decline in record sales. Foreshadowing today’s record industry panic about peer-to-peer file sharing, back in 1980 the big worry for music executives was that teenagers were taping music off the radio and copying each other’s albums. McLaren, naturally, thought the ruination of the record industry was cause for celebration. He penned lyrics praising cassette piracy and asked the ex-Antz to write Burundi-rumbling backing music. The plan was to use the song “C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!” as the TV series’ theme song, and end the program with the slogan “Music for life for free,” a poke in each eye for the record biz.

But
An Insider’s Guide to the Music Business
died in the development stages. Feeling a twinge of guilt for getting the band all fired up, McLaren finally committed himself to managing them. Now he had to find a new singer. A friend of McLaren’s discovered a fourteen-year-old Anglo-Burmese girl, Annabella Lwin, working part-time in a West Hampstead dry cleaner’s and singing along to Stevie Wonder on the radio. She eagerly agreed to join the band. Her mother, understandably concerned, was to prove a constant thorn in McLaren’s side, however.

McLaren threw himself into “training” the three male members of the group, now called Bow Wow Wow, with a nocturnal regime of whoring in Soho’s red-light district. McLaren put up the cash for the boys as part of his plan to systematically deprave them. Although reluctant—Barbarossa had a wife and baby—the hapless lads complied. Because the fourteen-year-old Annabella initially had problems fitting in with a bunch of men who were much older, McLaren even persuaded the guys that the problem was her virginity. To get her out from under her mother’s sway and make her commit to the group, one of them had to do the dirty and deflower the underage singer. Reluctantly, the band drew lots, and guitarist Matthew Ashman was dispatched to perform the task. He failed.

Gradually everything came together for McLaren. He was convinced that British youth, starved for ideas, would embrace his vision as an antidote to the gray postpunk and 2-Tone music of the day. Like punk, Bow Wow Wow was a patchwork of ideas plucked from history, topical issues of the day, and forward-looking elements that drew on McLaren’s knack for sniffing out an approaching trend on the cultural breeze. His “discovery” of African rhythm anticipated the vogue for world music by a good few years. When McLaren hailed Africa as the cradle of rock ’n’ roll, his rhetoric prefigured the way ethnic music would be celebrated as a “raw” antidote to the overcooked and slickly synthetic pop of the eighties.

The other idea McLaren touted, a return to heroic glamour, was already happening in an emerging scene called New Romanticism at nightclubs such as Blitz. McLaren’s connecting pirate clothes with cassette piracy was a witty twist. But where he was truly farsighted was in predicting a massive transformation in the way people consumed music. Rather than reverently listening to albums at home, listeners in the eighties and beyond would increasingly use music as a functional soundtrack to other activities. In one interview, McLaren described being rapt by the sight of “a tall elegant black man” sauntering down the street with a ghetto blaster on his shoulder (just like a pirate with a parrot), seemingly “oblivious to everybody else.” Sony’s Walkman—then called the Stowaway—had also arrived on the market. Sooner than just about everybody, McLaren grasped that the rise of portable playback technology would make music more omnipresent in people’s lives, but
less important,
and that it would eventually become mere disposable software for sleekly designed, highly fetishized pleasure-tech devices, such as today’s MP3 players and iPods.

Most of all, Bow Wow Wow was McLaren’s retaliation against postpunk. He found angst-wracked groups such as Joy Division drab and sexless. Postpunk was music for students, all atmosphere and mystique. A fan of fifties rock ’n’ roll, he felt that postpunk was progressive rock resurrected, with its albums that were solemnly treated as works of art, and that
looked
like works of art, what with their lavish, pretentious packaging. Above all, McLaren scorned the path taken by the former Johnny Rotten, saying “I don’t find [PiL] musical. And, if they’re not musical, I don’t care how experimental they are. He’s asking you to take a course in music before you understand it.”

Despite his own seven-year stint in art college, McLaren hated the new art school rock. The middle class had taken over rock once more, he complained. “They didn’t like punk because it was too hard and nasty, so they cleaned it up. They’ve used synthesizers because they think it’s smart and new: ‘Let’s experiment with music.’ Why do they take their lives so seriously? They’re so hung up,” McLaren despaired of the eighteen-year-olds, school-leavers too close to real-world economic pressures to really cut loose. He put his faith in thirteen-year-olds instead. This younger generation, unrestrained by any harsh reality principle, would rise up and “kick out that eighteen-year-old-university-graduate art school generation.”

McLaren also despised independent labels such as Rough Trade. He saw them as a new crypto-hippie aristocracy, politically correct but “poverty stricken in terms of imagination, street suss, and feeling.” By contrast, the old record biz giants such as EMI—who signed Bow Wow Wow despite the company’s troubled past relationship with the Pistols—seemed more trustworthy precisely because they had no countercultural pretensions. EMI-style conglomerates also had the gigantic marketing and distribution machinery that could make pop sensations happen in the most massive way possible. By comparison, the indie labels resembled small merchants, mere “grocers” as McLaren put it witheringly. This cunning sleight of rhetoric artfully connected Margaret Thatcher (“only a grocer’s daughter,” her opponents jeered) to postpunk tradesmen such as Geoff Travis. Both were products of the same dreary English provincialism, Napoleon’s “nation of shopkeepers.” McLaren saw himself as a different kind of entrepreneur: not a petty bourgeois bean counter and ledger filler, but a dandy spendthrift, a cunning con man, a pirate upholding the grand British tradition of ransacking other cultures.