Rip It Up and Start Again (58 page)

Unlike Echo and the Bunnymen, who kept the nature of their mission deliberately nebulous, U2’s fervor had an unmistakable moral charge. This was the
real
positive punk, an attempt to finally do something constructive with rock’s energies. In one early interview, Bono rejected the Sex Pistols’ form of insurrection as “just a con…. Can’t you see we’re really rebelling against the idea of rebelling?” Three of U2’s lineup—Bono, the Edge, and drummer Larry Mullen—were converts to a nonsectarian Christian group called Shalom. “I loved the idea of being reborn,” Bono told
Mother Jones
in 1989. “I think people should be reborn every day, man!” At twenty years old, the idea of “surrender every day” and self-sacrifice for a cause thrilled Bono and his brethren to the core.

Belief infused every particle of U2’s early sound, from the cold incandescence of the Edge’s guitar to what the critic Richard Cook described as “the beckoning ecstasy” of Bono’s voice. “It would be wrong for me to say, yes, we can change the world with a song,” Bono told
Trouser Press
. “But every time I try writing, that’s where I’m at!” The band’s role models were Bob Marley, who fused religious faith and political ire, and the Clash, though U2 chose more universal, liberal-humanist touchstones than the latter—Martin Luther King and Poland’s Solidarity movement rather than the Red Brigade and the Sandinista.

What saved U2 from sanctimony was the sheer exhilaration of their post-Television rock. “I Will Follow” could be a Dublin cousin to PiL’s “Public Image.” The Edge’s radiant chords and Bono’s ardent vocals create the classic U2 sensation, a chesty surge that elevates the spirit by neglecting the body. Nothing in the music appealed to the hips. The music was stirring, but sexless and resolutely undanceable. Crucial to this feeling of martial urgency was the unsyncopated drumming of Larry Mullen, who had learned to play in his school’s all-boy marching band.

“Boy” is the key word when it comes to understanding U2, from the soldier boy rhythms to Bono’s choirboy vocals, to the beautiful blond six-year-old on the back cover of their debut album,
Boy
. Inside were songs such as “Stories for Boys” and “Into the Heart,” in which Bono sang about retreating “into the heart of a child,” finding the naïve purity of spirit lost with adulthood. Around this time, Bono talked about wanting their live audience to feel spiritually cleansed and reborn.

Everything about U2 was large-scale: their lyrical themes, Bono’s voice, the size of their sound, their sense of purpose, and their ambition (U2 always obviously wanted to be the biggest band in the world). “If we stay in small clubs, we’ll develop small minds, and then we’ll start making small music,” Bono told
Trouser Press
.
War
propelled U2 into the big leagues in 1983, topping the album charts in the U.K. and reaching number twelve in America. The U.S. tour that followed was documented on the live album
Under a Blood Red Sky,
a concert at Colorado’s Red Rocks open-air amphitheater that was broadcast on MTV and generated a shorter clip of the band playing “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” When this promo went into heavy rotation on MTV, U2 reached the threshold of megastardom. In 1984, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” smashed down the door.

The accompanying album,
The Unforgettable Fire,
was surprisingly understated, however, largely shunning anthems for atmospherics. Coproducer Brian Eno encouraged the band to create sonic landscapes that turned ears into eyes, gazing into the far distance, literally
visionary
music. The Edge also made a conscious decision to sidestep his burgeoning guitar hero status and poured his creative energy into keyboards and “general atmospheric work.” This was actually the logical destination for his guitar playing, which always had a curiously disembodied, synthlike quality, composed of swirling texture strands rather than riffs or power chords. Avoiding solos and shunning the grittiness of distortion, the Edge instead used effects and techniques such as echo, slide, harmonics, and extremely prolonged sustain, all of which blurred the link between the physicality of his playing and the amorphous sounds that came out of the speakers. On
The Unforgettable Fire,
he emerged as guitarist-as-cinematographer par excellence. The title track resembles a first-class sunset or the Milky Way on the clearest of nights.

Echo and the Bunnymen, meanwhile, deftly maintained a balance between using big gestures and retaining a humorous detachment. McCulloch used words such as “heaven” as vague signifiers for some kind of beyond or unimaginable perfection, but kept the spirituality undefined and deflated any pomposity with wisecracks. “There was a crossover between the audiences for Echo and U2,” McCulloch recalled in 1989. “But I think U2’s audience liked the rally call, and our following liked the sarcasm.”

Following the Bunnymen’s torturously transitional third album,
Porcupine,
1984’s
Ocean Rain
was lush, orchestrated, and with the orgasmic moans of “Thorn of Crowns,” overtly erotic for the first time. The Bunnymen’s music had always been gloriously gray, but now on
Ocean Rain
it went Technicolor and swoony with string-laden songs such as “The Killing Moon.” Deliberately distancing the Bunnymen from the other Big Music bands of the day,
Ocean Rain
veered away from rock toward pop. “Kissing music” is how McCulloch described the record, a phrase that drew attention to the Bunnymen’s number one teenybop selling point: the singer’s magnificent lips. The strategy worked. By a strange twist, Echo and the Bunnymen, the group who’d helped bring rock back during the era of New Pop, became proper pop stars. “Missing the point of our mission/Will we become misshapen?” McCulloch had sung on the confused and overripe
Porcupine.
But unlike U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, for all their camouflage gear and abstract urgency, ultimately didn’t really
have
a mission beyond banishing the soul shadows and celebrating the wild wonder of being.

IN THE TWILIGHT PHASE
of his tenure as Bow Wow Wow’s manager, Malcolm McLaren had come to New York in August 1981 for the launch of the group’s debut tour of America. During his stay, he was taken on a kind of ethnomusicological field trip to the South Bronx, his guide being Gray’s Michael Holman, an early downtown ambassador for graffiti and hip-hop. McLaren witnessed breakdancing, scratching, and rapping
in situ
and came away convinced that hip-hop was black punk. The way DJs used old records to make new music was just the sort of cultural piracy to warm the cockles of his
bricoleur
’s heart.

In 1982, as New Pop reached its peak of U.K. chart dominance, McLaren also became convinced that a massive rediscovery of the earthy and ethnic was all set to be music’s next big thing, that anything “raw”—South African township pop, Appalachian hillbilly music, Dominican merengue, Cajun music, Cuban rhythms—would be embraced as a backlash against “cooked” pop. Hip-hop, too, he saw as a kind of urban folk music. The Bow Wow Wow debacle also convinced McLaren that he had to front his next project and become a star in his own right. But he still needed a producer who could turn his latest ragbag of subversive concepts—hip-hop’s scratching ’n’ rapping meets folk rhythms from around the world—into coherent music.

Ironically, McLaren turned to a man synonymous with the super-glossy pop he wished to extirpate, Trevor Horn. After the monstrous success of ABC’s
The Lexicon of Love,
everybody was clamoring for Horn’s Midas touch. Most prominent among the would-be beneficiaries was Spandau Ballet, the former New Romantic band that had faltered when they switched from synthpop to white funk. Spandau craved the deluxe
Lexicon
sound, and the conservative side of Horn saw the logic of repeating a winning formula. But McLaren appealed to his sense of adventure. “I fancied Malcolm, he seemed like a hoot,” Horn recalls. It was a turning point for his career and for British pop.

The ex-Svengali and the superproducer could not have been a more chalk-and-cheese pair. McLaren saw Horn as a key architect of the sexless and edgeless New Pop he despised, while Horn had always thought the Sex Pistols to be fraudulent, his producer’s ear enabling him to tell that
Never Mind the Bollocks
was a skillfully concocted studio creation. Despite their differences, the pair got on. “It’s impossible not to be charmed by Malcolm,” says Horn. McLaren, meanwhile, became taken with the idea of expanding Horn’s horizons by dragging him across the planet for the project, whose working title was
Folk Dances of the World
.

Budget limitations meant that McLaren’s planned around-the-world-of-music trek got reduced to a stint in South Africa and a longer sojourn in cosmopolitan New York, whose vast range of ethnic musics meant that it was easy to simulate the panglobal vibe. In the South African township of Soweto, McLaren found musicians on the streets, and Horn recorded them playing popular and traditional tunes, some of which McLaren later registered as his own compositions. One of these reworked Afropop tunes became the basis for “Double Dutch,” a huge U.K. hit in the summer of 1983.

McLaren was already a chart veteran by then, though, having scored a U.K. Top 10 single in the winter of 1982 with “Buffalo Gals,” a bizarre fusion of hip-hop and Appalachian square dancing, which sold half a million copies despite McLaren’s tone-deaf and rhythmically challenged vocals. In the larcenous spirit of hip-hop, “Buffalo Gals” nicked its main melody and title from a traditional square dance. McLaren recited lines such as “Four buffalo gals go ’round the outside/And do-si-doh with your pardners” in a shaky amalgam of hillbilly dance master and hip-hop MC. DJ/rapper crew the World’s Famous Supreme Team contributed scratching (the first appearance of this technique in the pop mainstream) and cryptic sound bites such as “she’s looking like a hobo” jutted out of the mix. In U.K. dance culture, “Buffalo Gals” is regarded as an old-school hip-hop anthem, its collage of beats, bass, and samples making it a foundational track for genres such as jungle and trip-hop.

To weld together this delightfully daft composite, Horn used a crack team of musicians and technicians, comprised of engineer Gary Langan, arranger/keyboardist Anne Dudley (both of whom had worked on
Lexicon of Love
), and programmer/computer whiz J. J. Jeczalik. A nonmusician, McLaren generated a surfeit of inspired ideas, but little actual musical material. For “Buffalo Gals” and the accompanying album (now called
Duck Rock
), Horn’s team had to piece everything together and fill in the considerable gaps. “Anne was the music department, J. J. was the rhythm department,” says Horn. During these volatile McLaren sessions, a creative esprit de corps coalesced among Langan, Jeczalik, and Dudley. This became the kernel of the Art of Noise, Horn’s next and most audacious production project. “
Duck Rock
proved you could make a record out of very disparate material,” says Dudley, whose crucial role earned her one-third of the songwriting credit. “In that sense it was a prototype Art of Noise album.”

McLaren was so creatively scatty that even before
Duck Rock
was completed, his mind was on his next nutty notion, an album combining pop and opera. He would score another hit with the Puccini rip-off “Madame Butterfly,” but by then Horn had moved on. Working with McLaren had been chaotic, but the whole experience left Horn with a massively enlarged sense of possibilities. “I got more from that one album with Malcolm than from working with any other artist,” he admits. McLaren’s love of concepts and provocations rubbed off. It was going to be hard for Horn to go back to glitzing up dull pop groups.

One thing that superproducers can do instead of turning sow’s ears into silk purses is start their own labels, where they have much more control, and can also earn a lot more money. Horn’s wife/manager, Jill Sinclair, had the business skills and ruthless streak to make this idea work. Horn had the spectacular sound. But he really wanted the label to have a strong identity, and knew that wasn’t his forte. The Buggles, the group he’d fronted, had an international hit with “Video Killed the Radio Star,” but became one-hit wonders largely because of their lack of image. What Horn needed was a McLaren-like figure, a magus of rhetoric and presentation who knew how to work the media. One person came to mind: Paul Morley,
NME
’s hotheaded prophet of New Pop.

“I’d spent a whole year wanting to
belt
Paul,” Horn laughs. Morley had interviewed the Buggles and headlined the feature
DIRTY OLD MEN WITH MODERN MANNERISMS
, meaning that they were just prog-rock session hacks disguising themselves as New Wave. “He wasn’t wrong in a way,” concedes Horn. “It was one of the Buggles’ failings that we didn’t have a manifesto. When I was working with ABC, I watched Martin Fry and saw how well he had the music paper thing worked out.” Morley and Horn both had cameo roles in “The Look of Love” video and, on the set, Morley tried to kiss Horn. “I was taken by surprise and pushed him away!” Then Morley profiled Horn for
NME,
hailing him as the hippest producer of 1982. “In the interview, he took all the things I said and presented my ideas so much better than I did,” recalls Horn. “I was impressed.”

Morley, meanwhile, found himself in a similar quandary to Horn at the end of ’82. After six years of crusading for postpunk and New Pop, he felt exhausted with music journalism and quit his job as a staff writer at
NME
. In the age of glitzy, full-color magazines like
Smash Hits
and the
Face,
the monochrome music papers were no longer at the center of pop culture. The blander Wham!-Duran types were ousting the brighter minds that Morley had championed and it felt like the music business, for so long thrown off balance by punk, was now back in control. “By 1983, both Trevor and me were questioning the value of what we did, from our different positions,” recalls Morley. “I was going through a period of guilt, feeling that all I did was comment and carp from the sidelines. As a critic I’d
tried
to make things happen, but ultimately I felt parasitical. I had this romantic idealism that I should contribute.” Then Horn called Morley up and said, “Let’s have an adventure.”

Creating an identity for Horn’s label—christened Zang Tuum Tumb—came naturally for Morley. He’d always celebrated those independent labels who managed to shed the dowdy-shopkeeper aura that often clung to all things “indie” and instead cultivated a mystique through seductive packaging and witty allusions. Fast Product was a favorite for its design sense, as was Factory for its gorgeous, enigmatic artwork and dadaist japes, such as giving catalog numbers to things that weren’t records. “Even moods and sneezes got cataloged,” claims Morley. “And a cat.” Morley was also influenced by arty European labels such as Sordide Sentimentale and Les Disques Du Crepuscule, the latter run by a clutch of Factory-worshipping Belgian aesthetes who released esoteric compilations such as
The Fruit of the Original Sin
. Other Morley faves included Fetish, which had groups such as 23 Skidoo and covers designed by ultrahip graphic artist Neville Brody, and ZE.

Although often described as ZTT’s marketing director, Morley never had an official title. “I worked like a fucking demon, to be honest. I did about five jobs—A&R, helping design sleeves, commissioning, writing all the label copy, the sleeve notes.” Playful, pretentious (in the best sense), and liberally peppered with quotations from philosophers and novelists, Morley’s notes became ZTT’s hallmark, captivating some with their wit and intellectual panache, while irritating others immensely. Although Horn himself didn’t always understand what Morley was on about in the sleeve notes, he says, “I loved the idea of a manifesto, because musicians are rarely any good at romanticizing themselves. Unfortunately, those sleeve notes caused Paul to fall out majorly with most ZTT artists quite quickly.”

ZTT’s output was divided into two streams, the Action Series and the Incidental Series. The latter consisted of experimental and contemplative music. In a piece for
NME
grandiosely titled “Who Bridges the Gap between the Record Executive and the Genius? Me,” Morley argued that a new “blockbuster” mentality had taken over the industry and it was rendering extinct cult figures such as John Martyn, the kind of “midlist” artists once allowed to make record after record with only middling sales. The Action Series, meanwhile, was designed to compete in precisely this brutal new chart pop
realpolitik
oriented around singles and videos. The word “Action” signaled ZTT’s aggressive intent. “I was sick of the people that were getting all the attention, such as Gary Kemp and Simon Le Bon, so I wanted to muscle in, push these offensive characters aside,” Morley told
Melody Maker
. “We hate videos and all that rubbish, but unfortunately we’re stuck with it now,” he told another interviewer. “So our philosophy is to get in there and do it better, to do it
richer
.” If Horn’s job involved ensuring ZTT records
sounded
sensational, Morley’s was to engineer
sensations
that convulsed their way through the media. Like McLaren before him, Morley wanted to use hype, scandal, and staged confrontation to conjure instant pop myth.

Zang Tuum Tumb was a phrase Morley found in Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto for a futurist music, “the Art of Noises.” In it, Russolo quoted from a letter by the movement’s leader, F. T. Marinetti, who used onomatopoeia to poetically describe a battle during the Balkan Wars.
“Zang-Tumb-Tuumb,”
as Marinetti rendered it, evoked the sound of Bulgarian siege cannons bombarding the Ottoman Turks. The military connotations of Zang Tuum Tumb appealed to Morley’s sense of the label as declaring war on a New Pop gone wrong. In this martial spirit, the first Zang Tuum Tumb release was
Into Battle with the Art of Noise.

Although the McLaren album laid the groundwork for the group, the actual trigger for the Art of Noise came from something far less cool: Horn and his crew’s nine months of laborious production work on Yes’s
90125.
During one of the many recording session hiatuses, Jeczalik and Langan got bored and started messing around on a Fairlight CMI Series II sampler, the first keyboard-based digital sampler. They took Alan White’s drum track from an aborted Yes song as raw material, but instead of the usual practice of sampling individual drum hits they shoved a whole drum break into the Fairlight. When Horn heard the crashing monsterfunk stampede of looped rhythm, he realized that Langan and Jeczalik had unwittingly reinvented hip-hop’s wheel. When it came to making rap records, hip-hop producers in those days used drum machines or live musicians, simply because the Fairlight sampler was priced out of their league. Beating the likes of Marley Marl to the punch by a couple of years, the Art of Noise pioneered one of the foundations of hip-hop: the sampled and looped break beat.

Sampling was at the core of the Art of Noise. In the early eighties the only people who could afford Fairlights were art rock superstars such as Yes, Peter Gabriel, and Kate Bush. But being a wealthy superproducer and a fiend for state-of-art machinery, Horn owned a Fairlight. In Jeczalik, he also had a burgeoning sampler virtuoso, which was fortunate, because in addition to its prohibitive cost, the Fairlight was “very difficult to operate,” says Anne Dudley. “It also sounded dreadful,” she says, at least by today’s standards. The Fairlight reproduced sampled sounds at low resolution and could only capture 1.2-second sound bites. Yet restriction proved to be the mother of invention. “We had to be incredibly ingenious to make this thing work,” says Dudley. “I had to think of ways of using short sounds all the time. That’s why Art of Noise’s music is so stabby.” You can hear this on “Beat Box,” the track built around the Yes drum loop, and throughout the
Into Battle
EP. Everything is staccato and punchy. Clipped orchestral fanfares jab and joust. Sampled vocals, stretched across the octaves of the Fairlight keyboard, are played in stuttering patterns. A baritone belch becomes a strange oompahlike bass pulse. Bright bursts of unidentifiable sound ambush your ears. It’s like being in an audio cartoon version of Marinetti’s Balkan battlefield.