Rip It Up and Start Again (62 page)

This cult of innocence, reflected in schoolkidlike clothes and hairstyles and chastely romantic lyrics, was the most intriguing element of the scene. Filtered through the American shambling band Beat Happening and its K record label, the cutie sensibility would enjoy something of a resurgence in the nineties in the form of Riot Grrrl, which drew heavily on
C86
’s bands’ androgyny-oriented sexual politics of cutesy but tough girls and male wimps. In 1986, however, the shambling movement ultimately foundered, despite strong major-label interest, because the ideal of “perfect pop” it espoused was cruelly out of step with what modern mainstream pop actually was. Yet this was kind of the
point
of the scene: its anachronistic defiance of the present.

In America, a parallel rediscovery of the sixties took place as bands worked their way forward through that decade, starting with garage punk, the Byrds, and early psychedelia. By 1986, the hipper bands had begun to move into the later sixties—the era of long hair, wah-wah pedals, heavy riffs, and acid rock. Sonic Youth recorded the Charles Manson–inspired “Death Valley 69” and got increasingly trippy-sounding. Butthole Surfers resembled a mobile “acid test” with their back-projected films, naked female dancer, and occasional onstage sex acts supplementing the group’s effects-saturated music and weird vocal treatments. Buttholes’ guitarist Paul Leary played full-blown, orgiastic guitar solos, as did J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Neil Young, Blue Cheer, even the Grateful Dead, were new hip reference points. Drugs were compulsory.

The spirit of futurism that drove postpunk and New Pop seemed to have almost completely departed from the alternative scene in the mideighties. One could see traces of its modernist ambition here and there in the second-and third-wave industrial music aka Electronic Body Music (Front 242, Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and eventually Nine Inch Nails) or the more studio-savvy post-Goth music on labels such as 4AD (Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance). But “alternative” defines itself as pop’s other, and this meant that the majority of independently released bands shunned synths, sequencers, and samplers, and recoiled from the dance floor. The Jesus and Mary Chain took this to the extreme with their music’s utter lack of rhythmic thrust, the drumming listlessly marking time, the neurasthenic noise enfolding the listener’s immobilized body in a rapt trance.

As for the original postpunk vanguardists and New Pop futurists who’d tried to unite music for the body and music for the head, they almost uniformly had a rough time of it in the mideighties. Some, such as Billy Mackenzie and Marc Almond, drifted through dwindling solo careers. Others, such as the Human League, Heaven 17, and ABC, were ground down by the music industry way of doing things. Scritti’s Green got lost in the studio. John Lydon went “rock” in a big way with 1986’s
Album
(Zep riffs and Ginger Baker from Cream on drums!). The Banshees and the Bunnymen lost their spark. Gang of Four gave up. Malcolm McLaren and ZTT, meanwhile, should have quit at their peak, but naturally didn’t.

ZTT’s decline was bizarrely precipitous. After their world-shaking 1984, it seemed like the label developed the anti–Midas touch in 1985. Their new acts—Gallic chanteuse Anne Pigalle and Andrew Poppy, a Philip Glass/Michael Nyman–style systems music composer—barely dented the charts. Propaganda’s
A Secret Wish
underperformed severely. The label’s sole triumph that year was Grace Jones’s hit single “Slave to the Rhythm,” Trevor Horn’s most sumptuous production to date. But the accompanying album,
Slave to the Rhythm: A Biography
—an adventurous exercise in deconstructing an icon and extending a single song through remixing—fell on deaf ears.

Things then got much worse for ZTT. Pissed off with the stingy royalty rates, J. J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan, and Anne Dudley decided
they
were the Art of Noise and parted company with Horn and Morley. By the end of 1985 the Art of Noise were signed to another label, where they scored a few more middling hits with a series of postmodern novelty singles. Frankie Goes to Hollywood started to act up, too. In yet another echo of the Sex Pistols, the band resisted ZTT’s plan to make a
Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle–
style Frankie movie, which was to have been a postapocalyptic fantasy scripted by Martin Amis with Nic Roeg lined up to direct. Instead, Frankie were determined to follow the conventional rock band path of consolidating their success with further recordings and tours. For their second album, the band insisted on playing all the music, which took twice as long. The sequel to
Pleasuredome
swallowed up an astronomical £760,000. Morley came up with the title
Liverpool
for the album, because that’s where the group came from and, he knew, that’s where they would soon return. Sure enough, the album flopped, and before long Holly Johnson fell out with both the band and ZTT, suing to be freed from his contract.

There were exceptions to the general rule of entropy. New Order cut a lustrous path through the eighties pop charts. Cabaret Voltaire kept making cool records. Mark Stewart’s solo career was spasmodic but compelling. U2 had droves of detractors, but with the aurora borealis swirl of “With or Without You” and crystal drive of “Where the Streets Have No Name” they took the puritan postpunk guitar sound—massive but minimal, majestic but free of pomp—and made it hugely popular. Depeche Mode, too, became most unlikely stadium stars in America, even as their music got ever more adventurous and emotionally subtle. One could also see postpunk’s legacy surfacing here and there in newer bands. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ brand of funk metal owed a lot to Gang of Four’s funk punk (they got Andy Gill to produce their debut album), but with a frat boy rowdiness that went over better in America than Gang of Four. You could also hear Gill’s splintered guitar sound in groups like Fugazi and Big Black.

Turning its back on the idea of dance, indie rock (with a few notable exceptions) was determinedly funkless in the mid-to late eighties. In 1988, that side of postpunk began to reemerge from the gay, black Chicago house scene. The first acid house tunes seemed like the resurrection of avant-funk, half a decade after its demise. In the neurotic rhythms, ominous basslines, and desolate dub space of tracks like Phuture’s “Your Only Friend” and Sleezy D’s “I’ve Lost Control,” you could hear uncanny echoes of PiL, D.A.F., ESG, and 23 Skidoo. Even the imagery evoked by the track titles and stripped-down vocal chants—trance-dance as mind control—harked back to death disco.

First in the U.K. and Europe, then a few years later in America, this lost future of the early eighties came back with a bang in the form of the early nineties rave explosion. Thanks to the mind-opening effects of Ecstasy, the hard-core electronic side of postpunk and industrial found a mass audience. Perhaps this explains why in British and European rave culture you’d find such a surprising number of postpunk and synthpop veterans rubbing shoulders with Ecstasy-gobbling teenagers and born-again clubbers. Dormant careers were instantly revitalized by the new context created by the cultural synergy of house and Ecstasy. Richard H. Kirk, for instance, scored the dance floor success that always eluded Cabaret Voltaire as the bleep-techno outfit Sweet Exorcist. In the early eighties, Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge had formed a new band, Psychic TV, and had undertaken his own rediscovery of the sixties, dedicating himself to creating “hyperdelia” and releasing a tribute to Brian Jones called “Godstar.” In 1988, exhilarated by the emergence of a full-blown psychedelic dance culture, P-Orridge plunged into the acid house scene and put out an album called
Jack the Tab
. That same year, the Hacienda, once the site of Factory’s unsuccessful attempt to transplant the New York club vibe to Manchester, suddenly took off as Northern England’s rave mecca.

Rave music teemed with futuristic textures and strange noises that came straight out of D.A.F. and Cabaret Voltaire, but the context (crazed collective hedonism) and the emotion (euphoria with a mystic tinge) were totally different. Acid house essentially fused postpunk futurism with sixties Dionysian frenzy. At the same time, rave culture represented an explosion of new independent labels, an epidemic of self-organizing activity. Teenagers made their own records on computers in their bedrooms, self-released them as white labels, and self-distributed them by personally selling them directly to specialist record stores. The hard-core rave underground was the ultimate expression of the do-it-yourself principle.

Postpunk continued to have a subliminal half-life in rave culture well into the midnineties. Darkside jungle tracks came out that sounded uncannily like This Heat, Byrne and Eno’s
Bush of Ghosts,
or Japan. The Chemical Brothers based the agitated B-line of their MTV hit “Block Rockin’ Beats” on the bass part in 23 Skidoo’s classic “Coup.” In the latter part of the decade, however, the clubbing industry became professionalized, with the once chaotically creative culture degenerating into a sort of Dionysianism on a leash, and gradually losing any of its lingering affinities with the postpunk spirit.

At the turn of the millennium, a new generation of young hipsters emerged who understandably thought club culture totally edgeless and lacking appeal. Rather than house’s ease of release or trance’s nullifying ecstasy, they craved tension music. As a result, the early eighties came back into vogue. Cold synthpop, punk funk, mutant disco, early industrial…for the first time in almost two decades, the angular, not-quite-fluid rhythms of postpunk dance music felt more exciting than the feel-good, go-with-the-flow fare offered by modern club culture. And it wasn’t just the original music being rediscovered by fans and played by DJs, new bands started to form that were inspired by that era.

The resurgence of interest in postpunk was just a glimmer on the horizon when I first conceived this book early in 2001. In the subsequent four years, the revival has taken off, with a tidal wave of retro anthologies and reissues (bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, TG, 23 Skidoo, ESG, DNA, Scritti Politti) and clubs dedicated to playing vintage punk funk and electropop. Gang of Four and Mission of Burma have reunited to tour and record. There’s been a highly successful movie about Factory Records and Joy Division,
24 Hour Party People
. Another,
Control,
based on the Ian Curtis memoir written by his widow and directed by Joy Division video maker Anton Corbijn, is in the pipeline. And a seemingly endless legion of new postpunk-influenced bands—the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Liars,!!!, Wolf Eyes, Bloc Party, to name just a few—have swarmed over the music scene. Andy Gill’s guitar sound has enjoyed yet another lease on life.

Many of these groups are great and it’s both thrilling and enjoyably disorienting to hear the sounds of my youth resurrected. There’s a sense in which today’s postpunk-inspired bands treat the era as unfinished business, a set of sonic potentials with plenty of room for further extension and exploration. They are also responding to the aura of urgency and missionary zeal that pervades the music of that period (without necessarily knowing that much about the original context those bands operated in). It’s not clear, though, that the neopostpunk groups are fired up in the same way. Vocally these bands have the sound of militancy down, but lyrically they’re rather more opaque. It’s not as though there isn’t a context that could function for them in the same way that the geopolitical turmoil and reactionary backlash of the late ’70s and early ’80s fueled postpunk. As I write, someone even worse than Reagan just got reelected. But perhaps overt resistance seems not so much futile as difficult to do convincingly, given that the nineties sensibility of irony and disengagement has yet to relinquish its grip on the culture. How to make politics in pop work without it being preaching to the converted, politically correct, or overearnest was one of postpunk’s primary quandaries. Today, it seems that most bands deal with the problem by avoiding it altogether.

Yet the very thing that seems most worth resurrecting from postpunk is its commitment to change. This belief was expressed both in the conviction that music should keep moving forward and in the confidence that music can transform the world, even if only through altering one individual’s perceptions or enlarging one’s sense of possibility. Which brings me right back to where I started this book, the realization that it was punk and postpunk that originally made me believe music could matter so much. All this looking to music for answers, all this following of every twist and turn in the postpunk story, which in some ways continues to this day—was all that just a waste of energy that could and should have been spent on something “worthwhile”? Was the idea of change—
in
music and
through
music—just a diversion? I still don’t know, but I’ll always be grateful to this period for giving me such excessive expectations of music.

Massive love and gratitude to my wife, Joy Press, for her encouragement, advice, practical help, patience, and, not least, discipline. Love and thanks to my little boy Kieran for
his
patience.

Very special thanks to Geeta Dayal, my research assistant, for her invaluable contributions to the project. I’m also grateful to Jason Gross for the loan of his transcription machine, to my U.S. agent, Ira Silverberg, to my U.S. editors, Cliff Corcoran and Wendy Wolf, to my publicist Ami Greko, and to the book’s copy editor Jason Brody and production editor Sharon L. Gonzalez.

Thanks to Jonathan O’Brien for coming up with the title
Rip It Up and Start Again,
and to everyone else who participated in the book-naming competition at Blissblog (blissout.blogspot.com). Thanks to Nalin Taneja for designing and maintaining the
Rip It Up
site at www.simonreynolds.net.

Lots of people helped with contacts, ideas, information, illustrations, making interviews happen, and providing hard-to-find music and other historical material: Pat Blashill, Paul Kennedy, Jonathon Dale, Christian Hoeller, Matthew Ingram, Bas Van Hoof, Jez Reynolds, David Stubbs, Dan Selzer, Adrian Curry, Heiko Hoffman, Hillegonda Rietveld, Tony Renner, Vivien Goldman, Alan Licht, Paul Lester, Mike Appelstein, Mark Sinker, Liz Naylor, Graham Sanford, Simon Frith, Tony Van Dorston, Joe Carducci, Richard H. Kirk, David Toop, Paul Smith, Robert Poss, Karl Blake, Jane Haughton, Marvin J. Taylor, Mike Kelly, Ian Craig Marsh, David M. Todarello, Jim Sellen, Phil Turnbull, Jason Gross, Jon Savage, James Nice, Todd Hyman, Kevin Pearce, Stuart Argabright, Michel Esteban, Gerard Greenway, Steve Swift. Apologies to anyone I forgot.

Thanks to the 125 people who gave interviews for the book: Mike Alway, Martin Atkins, Una Baines, Charles Ball, Blixa Bargeld, Steve Beresford. Bond Bergland, Bob Bert, Adele Bertei, Gina Birch, Karl Blake, Chris Bohn, Richard Boon, Derrick Bostrom, Dennis Bovell, Martin Bramah, Steve Brown, Conny Burg, Hugo Burnham, David Byrne, Joe Carducci, Gerald V. Casale, Monte Cazazza, James Chance, Robert Christgau, Edwyn Collins, Clint Conley, Robin Crutchfield, Mark Cunningham, Steven Daly, Howard Devoto, Bill Drummond, Anne Dudley, Paul Du Noyer, Vanessa Ellison (aka Vanessa Briscoe Hay), Tony Fletcher, Gavin Friday, Tony Friel, Martin Fry, Bruce Gilbert, Andy Gill (Gang of Four), Andy Gill (journalist), Vic Godard, Vivien Goldman, Robert Gotobed, Tom Greenhalgh, Gudrun Gut, Paul Haig, Dave Haslam, Charles Hayward, Michael Holman, Peter Hook, Trevor Horn, Gary Indiana, Joseph Jacobs, John Keenan, Richard H. Kirk, Scott Krauss, Bob Last, Andrew Lauder, Thomas Leer, Keith Levene, Graham Lewis, Arto Lindsay, Jeffrey Lohn, Bruce Lose, Lydia Lunch, Steve Maas, Ann Magnuson, Ian Craig Marsh, Maureen McGinley, Richard McGuire, Iain McNay, Mick Mercer, Daniel Miller, Roger Miller, Paul Morley, Steven Morris, Martin Moscrop, Mark Mothersbaugh, Stuart Moxham, Colin Newman, Adi Newton, Phil Oakey, Glenn O’Brien, Frank Owen, Cole Palme, John Peel, Ian Penman, Mark Perry, Pat Place, Robert Poss, Peter Principle, Alan Rankine, Malcolm Ross, Martin Rushent, Luc Sante, Jon Savage, Steve Severin, Bruce Smith, Neville Staple, Linder Sterling, Stevo, Mark Stewart, Nikki Sudden, Jim Thirlwell, David Thomas, Mayo Thompson, Mike Thorne, David Toop, Roy Trakin, Geoff Travis, Steve Tupper, Alex Turnbull, Johnny Turnbull, Ari Up, Fred Vermorel, Martyn Ware, Mike Watt, Tony Wilson, Dick Witts, Jah Wobble, Michael Zilkha.

All interviews were conducted by the author except for Blixa Bargeld, Monte Cazazza, Clint Conley, Joseph Jacobs, Cole Palme, and Mike Thorne, which were done by Geeta Dayal.

Large nod to Simon Frith and Howard Horne for
Art into Pop,
their classic analysis of the unique role of the U.K. art school system in postwar British pop culture—and a significant influence on
Rip It Up and Start Again

RIP John Peel.

Finally, I’d like to offer a fervent salute to the journalists and editors of the weekly rock papers of the late seventies and early eighties—the
real
golden age for music journalism, whatever you might have heard to the contrary. Alongside the original interviews done for the book, back issues of the three main U.K. weeklies—
NME, Sounds,
and
Melody Maker
—served as my prime research resource. Reading the “inkies” back in the day was what made me want to be a music writer in the first place; rereading them for
Rip It Up and Start Again,
I was freshly impressed by the critical insight and stylistic brilliance of the writing, the quality of the reportage, and, most of all, by the ways in which the writers made a genuine contribution to the scene of their day by generating new ways of thinking about music. Impressed—and inspired all over again.