Rip It Up and Start Again (61 page)

Pleasuredome
almost totally eclipsed
Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise?
as both debut albums were unwisely released near-simultaneously. Propaganda, likewise, never really managed to get out from Frankie’s shadow. ZTT spent a fortune on Propaganda’s
A Secret Wish,
using the most costly state-of-the-art machinery and top-tier session musicians (including Yes guitarist Steve Howe). Yet the album’s chart profile fell far short of expectations, as did the single “Duel”/“Jewel,” which was two versions of one song, the first candy coated and catchy, the second harsh and metal-percussive. “Duel” sounded dazzling in the charts, but for all Morley’s talk of “the private moment,” Propaganda’s music sounded too overlit to take into one’s bedroom, or heart. ZTT, as always, were too schematic, too up-front about their designs on the listener. It wasn’t enough just to refer to dreams, obsession, visions, crime, or to slap a Ballard quote on a Propaganda single sleeve about the Baader-Meinhof Gang and madness as “the only freedom” in a world of bland, soul-crushing sanity. The pop song must be a spell, Marc Bolan said. The music itself had to enforce the magic. Here,
A Secret Wish
failed singularly. The sound was characterless. Holly Johnson had the sheer lung power to impose himself on Frankie’s records, to rival Horn with his own belting bombast, but there was no such presence in Propaganda, either vocally or in terms of the “band voice” that makes any truly great rock band recognizable within a few bars.
A Secret Wish
sounded like a ZTT record.

This is the downfall of all labels with a strong identity. In the end, no self-respecting band wants to be so totally subsumed by the brand. Eventually good new bands aren’t keen to sign, while those already on the roster start to chafe. Indeed, all of ZTT’s original big three—first the Art of Noise, then Propaganda, and finally Frankie—would eventually extricate themselves from their contracts, all of which were financially invidious. To this day, Horn still doesn’t quite get it. With surprisingly enduring bitterness, he complains that “Artists want record labels to be businessmen they can curse to give them an excuse when their own mediocrity shines through. The last thing they want is a creative record label. They want to keep the creative part all to themselves.” Morley is a little closer to grasping why the acts got frustrated. “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, you still feel manipulated. You want to do it yourself.”

ZTT’s fatal flaw was its adherence to the gospel according to Malcolm. Like McLaren with the Pistols, the label saw itself as the artist and the performers as raw material, mere pigment and canvas. Like McLaren with Bow Wow Wow, ZTT believed in an ill-conceived notion of revolution catalyzed from above. And as with McLaren, this was part of ZTT’s self-conception as renegade capitalists outwitting the pea-brained corporate dinosaurs, warriors pitting abstract values (imagination, verve, elegance) against the equally undefined negatives (mediocrity, sameness, dulled efficiency) that smothered the record industry.

In a curious echo of what happened to the Sex Pistols, Frankie’s seemingly unstoppable ascent received a reality check when it confronted the sheer size and impregnable imperturbability of America. Not only are U.S. listeners innately more hype resistant than the British, but the country’s fragmented regional markets and vast number of radio, TV, and print outlets actually make it much harder to manipulate the media. Unlike in Britain, records tend to build momentum more slowly, a process that weeds out stuff that lacks “substance.” Initially, Frankie’s attempt to conquer America fared much better than the Pistols’.
Never Mind the Bollocks
stalled at 106 on
Billboard,
but “Relax” reached number ten. However, it took a toned-down repackaging of the single and a new video purged of S&M imagery to get the song onto the American charts. “Two Tribes” failed altogether, saddling the group with the dreaded one-hit-wonder tag as far as America was concerned, while the
Pleasuredome
album peaked at number thirty-three.

In a bold gesture, Frankie’s first tour of America started in Washington, D.C., on Election Day 1984. But in their eagerness to prove themselves a potent live band (and not just Horn’s puppets), Frankie came across as bombastically rockist and, ultimately, rather conventional. Furthermore, during the tour, an already existing divide between the aesthete-diva Johnson and the boorishly hetero Lads widened further (with Rutherford caught in no-man’s-land), recalling the fissure between Lydon and the rest of the Pistols that became unbridgeable as the band traipsed across the United States in the first weeks of 1978.

“Trevor and Jill really wanted to sell Frankie in America,” Morley ruefully recalls. “I said, ‘You’ll never sell them there.’ In America, they thought Frankie were the Village People.” One of Morley’s favorite conceptual japes was
Pleasuredome
’s cover of “Born to Run,” Frankie bringing out the latent homoerotic element of Springsteen’s appeal, along with that song’s phallic imagery. According to Morley, audiences at Frankie’s live shows in America responded to the cover version as sacrilege. By 1985, Springsteen was the figurehead of the New Authenticity, his “Born in the U.S.A.” imagery striking a power chord with the Anglophobic backlash against the flouncing gender-benders who dominated MTV.

American audiences tend to set a huge premium on live performance as the benchmark of a band’s authenticity and worth. Live performance is where contact between band and audience forges “community” in that old rock(ist) sense. In Britain, though, ZTT had prevented Frankie from playing live as long as possible, fearing they couldn’t come anywhere near to simulating the sound of the records. Instead, they created buzz through the singles, videos, and brilliantly engineered controversy. Simon Frith, one of ZTT’s more acute critics, argued that this made Frankie a band without genuine fans, a marketing-driven phenomenon with no real social energy behind it.

With respect to long-term reverberations, Frankie couldn’t compare to the Pistols, who despite their initial lack of impact in the United States, ended up steadily selling over a million albums there and inspired thousands of American bands. No legion of groups formed in Frankie’s image, not even in the U.K. Nor are the
FRANKIE

SAY
T-shirts prized as talismanic relics of an epochal moment, like punk memorabilia still is.

On one level, Frankie can be seen as punk’s last blast. But on another deeper, structural level, Frankie were a taste of pop things to come—the return of the boy band. Perhaps that accounts for the curious hollowness, even at the very height of Frankiemania, of the phenomenon. In the end, both the consumers, left clutching the lavishly appointed bombast of
Pleasuredome,
and the band, bemused by the faint trickle of royalties coming through and humiliated by the general perception of them as ZTT’s puppets, might have justifiably felt an ancient plaint rising in their throats.
Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

THE POSTPUNK YEARS
felt like one long rush of endless surprise and inexhaustible creativity. You were constantly anticipating the next twist, the next leap forward. By 1985, though, it seemed like almost all of that energy had dissipated, as every trajectory from punk reached an impasse or petered out.

New Pop had plunged into decadence, something audible and visible in the overripe arrangements and bloated videos for Culture Club’s “The War Song” and Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys,” both released at the end of ’84. The all-star lineups of Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” and Live Aid in the summer of ’85 defined a new pop ruling class as sharply as 1971’s Concert for Bangladesh had done for the rock royalty of its day. An unimpeachable cause, of course, but you couldn’t help agreeing with Tony James of Sigue Sigue Sputnik when he quipped, “Live Aid was great for Ethiopians but terrible for pop music.” That orgiastic spectacle of noblesse oblige fit all too neatly within the shared worldview of Thatcher and Reagan (both recently reelected), who promoted private philanthropy over government intervention.

But more than Live Aid, the true spirit of 1985 was embodied by Madonna. A one-woman American distillation of New Pop, she beat the Second British Invasion at its own game, repackaging ideas from black dance pop and gay culture to massive commercial effect. Madonna was a product of New York’s club culture of the early eighties, the era of mutant disco and fashionable Anglophilia. She’d hung around the edges of Soft Cell’s Manhattan milieu and taken fashion notes from the Slits. Ari Up once defined the Slits’ anti-Babylon stance with the declaration “We ain’t no material girls.” Can it really be pure coincidence that Madonna used the exact same phrase to identify her ruthless brand of postfeminism in her 1985 smash “Material Girl”?

The really depressing thing about 1985, though, wasn’t the mainstream tyranny of nouveau riche pop so much as the unimpressive state of the alternative scene. The collective sense of purpose that bound together the diverse initiatives of postpunk had seeped away. Everything seemed desperately disparate and therefore somehow diminished. John Peel caught the shape of the lack well when he admitted, “I don’t even like the records I like.” More than musical inspiration per se, what began to sink into a coma was the
discourse
around music. The rock press was demoralized; the fanzines, mourning punk, struggled to keep faith with its lost spirit in ways that were increasingly counterproductive. Writing in the music papers and zines alike suffered from relentless specificity, as it shied away from taking a big-picture overview and instead monitored the scene’s scattered output, the pernicious adequacy of which kept you hanging in there, just dimly aware that the motion and meaning might be going nowhere and meaning…
less
.

In retrospect, one can go back to the mideighties and find harbingers of future revolution. Rap was about to enter its most exciting phase yet, and there were early stirrings that would evolve into house and techno. But hindsight distorts. At the time, it felt grim. Scanning the independent charts in those days, you’d confront a smorgasbord of the stale and second-rate: past-its-prime Goth, rancid psychobilly, third-wave avant-funk, Fall copyists, trad-rock Americana, and a motley handful of moderately interesting bands. Likewise, the leading British independent labels of the era (Abstract, Illuminated, Kitchenware, 53rd and 3rd, Sweatbox, Ron Johnson) didn’t have the legendary aura of Rough Trade and Factory, neither of which was doing especially well by the mideighties. America at least had SST, Twin Tone, Touch & Go, and Dischord to preside over the transition from hard-core punk to the more stylistically diffuse alternative rock emerging at the time.

But by and large, the heroic phase of the independent movement was past. By the mideighties, it had settled into steady but unspectacular growth. Independent culture no longer imagined it could supersede or even challenge the mainstream. The indie labels either functioned as a farm system for the majors (as soon as their groups attained a certain level of success, a big label poached them) or maintained microcult artists at a level just above subsistence. The average sales of an independent single in 1985 were half what they were in 1980. Rough Trade enjoyed a decent turnover (two million pounds annually), but they couldn’t propel their artists to the next level, despite having adopted the competitive practices needed to navigate the
realpolitik
of eighties pop. After hit-hungry acts such as Scritti Politti and Aztec Camera left Rough Trade for majors, Geoff Travis found a “solution” of sorts. While still running Rough Trade, he founded Blanco Y Negro, a label that looked “indie” but actually operated in partnership with WEA.

The semantic shift from “independent” to “indie” contains its own story. “Independent” had once been a neutral term indicating a record’s conditions of production and distribution. By 1985, “indie” referred to a musical genre, or gaggle of subgenres, with increasingly narrow parameters. The term “college rock” also gained currency in the United States because of the music’s links to student tastes and the college radio circuit. “Indie” indicated a distinct sensibility, too, a sort of resentfully impotent opposition to mainstream pop.

In the mideighties, most chart pop was glossy, guitar free, black influenced, soulfully strong voiced, dance oriented, high-tech, and ultramodern. Indie made a fetish of the opposite characteristics: scruffy guitars, white-only sources, weak or “pale” folk-based vocals, undanceable rhythms, lo-fi or Luddite production, and a retro (usually sixties) slant. Periodization is always a tricky thing when it comes to culture (messy at the best of times, always overspilling whatever lines you draw), but one of the primary reasons the main body of this book ends in 1984 is the shift in orientation from futurism to retro that took hold of independent culture around then. Postpunk’s essence was its vanguard mind-set of constantly looking
forward
. This impatience to reach the future had continued with that side of New Pop concerned with exploring the latest electronic technology while drawing inspiration from modern black dance music.

Postpunk and New Pop had both been impure, mixing up black and white, celebrating the eclectic, the hybrid, the polyglot. But by 1985, purism came back in favor. People craved “the authentic.” Some found it in raw roots music, ranging from acoustic-guitar-strumming protest singer Billy Bragg and the folk punk of the Pogues and the Men They Couldn’t Hang, to the populist Americana of the Blasters, Jason and the Scorchers, and Los Lobos. Others—the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Membranes—posited noise as both pure and purifying. They embraced the abrasive sounds of distortion and feedback as harsh, scouring forces that would purge the decadent luxury of chart pop and scuff its glossy synthetic surfaces.

At the start of this book, I mentioned that I hardly ever bought old records during the postpunk era because there was simply too much happening in the present. Starting in 1983, that changed, not just for me but for many other people who grew up during the punk and postpunk period. Suddenly the past started to seem alluring and intriguing, especially the sixties. It was the beginning of the now familiar syndrome whereby consumers use the abundance of the past to make it through the dry spells of the present. The reissue industry, puny by today’s standards, unleashed a torrent of sixties garage punk compilations and psychedelic anthologies.

There were particular qualities about sixties music—cosmic openheartedness, Dionysian abandon, a certain freedom in the playing—that made it attractive and refreshing to people coming out of a long period in which music had been uptight, hyperrational, and concept driven. After postpunk’s demystification and New Pop’s schematics, it felt liberating to listen to music rooted in mystical awe and blissed-out surrender. Postpunk had taken whole swathes of music off the menu for being too trippy, too excessive, too flamboyantly virtuosic. Discovering that you could listen to and actually enjoy a guitar solo by Jimi Hendrix was a revelation and a thrill, the frisson of forbidden fruit.

It wasn’t just that people started listening to the original sixties music again. All the good new bands seemed to be drawing from that era. Jangly guitars, folk rock harmonies, and psychedelic dreaminess were everywhere. Hüsker Dü covered the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”
and
the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” And while not explicitly retro, the Smiths and R.E.M.—the two most important alt-rock bands of the day—did seem sixties-redolent because of their plangent guitar-chimes and folk-styled vocals. R.E.M. and the Smiths were eighties bands only in the sense of being
against
the eighties. The Smiths shunned synths in favor of guitars and for a while adamantly refused to do videos. Their whole stance was predicated on their British audience being a lost generation, exiles in their own land. Ditto R.E.M., who wistfully and abstractly conjured visions of new frontiers and fresh starts for America. All the great groups of this time, such as the Replacements and the Mekons (who brilliantly reinvented themselves as a folk-and-country band), dealt in similar feelings: bewilderment, impotence, resignation, a forlorn and dreamy yearning. This alt-rock sensibility finally reached the mainstream in the early nineties with Nirvana, its mixed emotions crystallized in Kurt Cobain’s voice, a half snarl of defiance and half whimper of defeat.

Harking back to the sixties in order to make it through the eighties, indie bands invoked the very decade that Reagan and Thatcher were attempting to discredit. Of course, there was also an element of nostalgic fascination, and fashion. Revisiting the sixties was a solution to the
post
-postpunk quandary “where next?” Bands could draw on the decade as a pop archive of sound and imagery, as there were several “sixties” to be picked over for period details, increasing the range of recombinant possibilities: the Jesus and Mary Chain with their Beach Boys-meets-Velvets classicism, college radio’s flocks of Byrds clones, Los Angeles’s paisley underground of retro-psych bands such as the Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade, the Sisters of Mercy with their Stooges homages and 1969 fetish, and the Cult circa
Love
with their leather tassels, Steppenwolf riffs, and Jim Morrison vocals.

Of course, there had long been revivalist currents in rock music (look at seventies glam’s echoes of fifties rock ’n’ roll). But circa 1984, a shift occurred in which retro became dominant even within the vanguard of independent rock. The result was an aesthetic that could be called “record collection rock.” Obviously, rock bands have always included record collectors in their ranks (the Rolling Stones, for instance, were connoisseurs of obscure blues sides). Postpunk was no different. Just look at the crucial role played by the esoteric musical taste of John Lydon, a nonmusician, in shaping the PiL aesthetic. But from the sixties through postpunk, bands generally used their influences as inspirational fuel rather than as citational material. It was neither obvious to the ear nor necessary to know that PiL loved Can. What changed in the mideighties was that bands increasingly signposted their reference points and that spotting these allusions became an integral part of the listener’s aesthetic response and enjoyment.

Essentially sampling without actually having a sampler, Jesus and Mary Chain pioneered “record collection rock.”
Psychocandy,
the Scottish group’s 1985 debut, deserves its classic status because of the thrilling way they juxtaposed their always faintly déjà vu melodies (equal parts Ronettes, Beach Boys, and Ramones) against a serenely shimmering wall of feedback, with the two elements of their sound—the noise and the pop—not really integrated at all. But when JAMC stripped away the torrential head rush to leave their songs exposed, what remained was pure blank homage. One song on their second album,
Darklands,
even stole the “woo woo” backing vocals from the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” I didn’t know whether to smile or weep.

Creation, the JAMC’s original label, was a prime purveyor of this kind of reproduction antique retro pop. Its roster included Nikki Sudden, the former front man of DIY pioneers Swell Maps, who by 1985 had reinvented himself as a Keith Richards–style rock ’n’ roll gypsy troubadour. Creation’s leading lights, though, were Primal Scream, fronted by rock scholar Bobby Gillespie (who also moonlighted as JAMC’s original drummer). Talking eloquently of music being like a library, Gillespie articulated the Creation approach to rock history. Just as one could pluck books off the shelf from any era—Dickens followed by DeLillo followed by Dostoyevsky—similarly you could flit from Love to the Velvet Underground to Big Star. It sounded persuasive, except that this is how people
listen
to records, surely. Creating music ought to involve more than just making a patchwork out of the stylistic traits and lyrical tropes of your hallowed ancestors.

Primal Scream were icons for the scene known variously as cutie, shambling bands, or
C86
. The latter comes from an
NME
cassette—its title a deliberate echo of the epochal
C81
—that documented the resurgence of indie noise pop bands that began in 1985 and peaked the following year. Although the Jesus and Mary Chain were catalysts for this scene, and the sixties were the major reference point, the
C86
groups—the Soup Dragons, the Pastels, June Brides, Shop Assistants—also drew on postpunk sources such as the Postcard bands, Swell Maps, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, and the Fall. But it was postpunk with the most radical elements—the politics, the black/white fusion, the studio experimentation—purged. For instance, the
C86
shamblers left out Orange Juice’s disco-funk influence but kept the sparkly guitar jangle and Edwyn Collins’s “worldliness must keep apart from me” naïveté.