by Bob Stanley
The Stranglers’ ultraviolence was not something you would associate with other new-wave acts. Most, like the Boomtown Rats, looked rather like Showaddywaddy on their way to a swingers party. People who were generally scared of punk rock saw new wave as a way of de politicising the new music: referring to Talking Heads as new wave meant colour-coding them, a little more beige than the Sex Pistols, a little less blood-red than the Damned. New-wave music was largely adrift from punk’s moral bearings. But by the time its practitioners ended up on Top of the Pops, alongside David Essex or Donna Summer, they looked rather similar and adhered to a style thought of as ‘punk’ (wild eyes and skinny ties) by most viewers. It joined some but not all of punk’s dots in a slightly cock-eyed manner (see the Regents’ ‘7 Teen’, or the Leyton Buzzards’ ‘Saturday Nite beneath the Plastic Palm Trees’, or Tonight’s ‘Drummer Man’), and this meant that new wave provided a few real gems, quite by accident, as well as a whole lot of piffle.
For a genre that was basically punk boiled down, its threatening elements removed, new wave somehow had its own musical logic and boundaries. The vocals tended to be performed in a self-conscious, permanently surprised manner, an exaggerated hangover from glam, with Sparks’ ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us’ as the unspoken blueprint; choruses ended with hysterical question marks, while, on a record such as Lene Lovich’s ‘Lucky Number’ (UK no. 3 ’79), you got the impression the singer was continuously jumping on and off a chair to avoid a mouse. In the background, punk’s power chords were often augmented by cod-reggae rhythms – a third-generation photocopy of the real thing via the Clash – and a Blondie/Costello toyshop organ. The look was like the undead (bulging eyes, mouth agape, with furrowed brows indicating at least two decades among the living) in tight-fitting suit jackets, leather ties and spray-on Lee Coopers. New-wavers often had careers that lasted into the eighties, while punk-rockers were frequently burnt out by the turn of the new decade, or had moved on to something entirely new like Buddhism (Poly Styrene) or working for the Royal Mail (Vic Godard). Punk had structural hatred, revolution in its heart; new wave had its magpie eyes on the big cash prize.
The new-wave band who had the genre’s spirit, sound and comical contradictions in a bottle were the Boomtown Rats, who had a spirited punky hit in ’77 with ‘Looking after Number One’2 (UK no. 11) before settling into their groove. Singer Bob Geldof felt outré enough to get away with ripping up a picture of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on Top of the Pops when ‘Rat Trap’ deposed ‘Summer Nights’ as the UK’s number one in November ’78. Their next single was also a number one, and bigger yet; an important record, even. ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ blended Elton John balladry with righteous ire about a playground shooting in San Diego. It was as morally vague as the Stranglers’ ‘Five Minutes’, but Geldof was an angry man. Things going wrong made him blunt and vengeful. The parlous state of the world meant his focus soon drifted away from the Rats. They remain one of the few acts, huge in their day, who are now resolutely unlovable. They were ersatz in the clumsiest way – why listen to ‘Rat Trap’ when you’ve got ‘Born to Run’? How did they fool us all?
It was easier to see how the Police got away with it, scoring four UK number-one singles between 1979 and ’83 – three moody blond dudes, not that ugly, and a pared-back sound that was instantly recognisable. Singer Sting had a high, mewling voice that, appropriately, sounded a little like the whine of a police siren. They hit their stride on fourth single ‘Message in a Bottle’, economical and irresistible, enthusiastic whoops not out of place, and it was a UK number one in the summer of ’79. But the feeling that something wasn’t quite right crept in early. Sting’s faux-Jamaican accent was always problematic, and he did himself no favours in a 1979 Smash Hits interview. Did the Police have a master plan? Yes, said Sting. ‘We’ll try and beat the Beatles. I’m interested in appealing to a great mass of people without going for the lowest common denominator, which is dead easy – you become Gary Glitter.’
The dumb lyric to ‘Walking on the Moon’, their second number one in ’79, was compensated for by impressively spacey dub holes in the production. By the following summer the Police were big enough to go straight in at number one with ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’. The lyric this time wasn’t lazy but tortured: former teacher Sting drew on his experience, relating the story of an illicit classroom affair, and shoehorning in a reference to Nabokov to show us how well read he was. Sting seemed to wind his bandmates up as much as his detractors.3 In 1983 he had a dream in which he looked outside his bedroom window to see three blue turtles, stranded on their backs, gasping for air. He interpreted this as the death of the Police, quit the group and called his first solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. This wasn’t meant to be funny.
Most often, new-wave acts simply took advantage of the new rock rules and adapted their existing style to suit. Skeletal guitarist Ric Ocasek and bassist Benjamin Orr had been in a Crosby, Stills and Nash-like folk-rock group called Milkwood in ’72 but, under the name Cap’n Swing, had progressed to Velvet Underground covers by ’77. They then worked hard on their image, emphasising Ocasek’s gaunt, almost alien presence, and hid him behind huge mirror shades to make him look like a human fly; dressing in red and black they relaunched themselves, with new-wave economy, as the Cars. Their love of pop lore and Anglophilia was borne out on their first album, which was recorded in London with sly references to new kids in town, dancing under stormy skies and ‘suede blue eyes’. Described in MTV’s Who’s Who in Rock Video as ‘cool, mysterious and slightly vulnerable’, they peppered their power pop with slick harmonies, rockabilly riffs and melodic synth lines, and on ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ (UK no. 3, US no. 35 ’78) and ‘Just What I Needed’ (UK no. 17, US no. 27 ’79) they managed to both predict eighties American AOR and echo American Graffiti’s processed rock ’n’ roll history – call me a lowbrow, but I reckon some of their teen beat lyrics (‘I don’t mind you coming here and wasting all my time, ’cos when you’re standing oh so near I kinda lose my mind’) were worthy of Buddy Holly.
A slew of balding and/or bespectacled singer-songwriters appeared from the suburbs to take out their physical shortcomings on the public. Graham Parker also wore shades at all times but peddled soul-based pub rock (‘Hey Lord Don’t Ask Me Questions’, UK no. 32 ’78) that was agitated but had no lasting effect. Elvis Costello wore a surgically enhanced arched eyebrow and wrote pun-packed songs while singing as if he was standing in a fridge; ‘The only two things that matter to me,’ he said, ‘the only motivation points for writing these songs, are revenge and guilt.’ With his mad-owl stare and over-tight suits, Costello symbolised the difference between punk rock and new wave. His songs were strong, he evoked sickly London on its knees, he gave love a bad name, and if punk hadn’t happened he’d have maybe been Kilburn’s own Bruce Springsteen. But the Sex Pistols opened the door and so the likes of Costello were blown in and snapped up and packaged as easily processed punk-lite. ‘He’s a very young, unassuming, talented person,’ said Costello’s American A&R director, Gregg Geller. ‘We certainly succeeded in creating a kind of mystique about him. He can be kind of pleasantly antagonistic.’
Like a caricature of a caricature, there was Joe Jackson, who changed genre with each album and confused absolutely everyone. Initially he barked like a pissed-up accountant, all thick-necked and red in the face, and scored bitter-love hits with ‘Is She Really Going Out with Him’ (UK no. 13 ’79) and ‘It’s Different for Girls’ (UK no. 5 ’80). But off stage he was smart and unassuming. In ’82 he released the Night and Day album, which included New York City’s unofficial, neon-pretty early-eighties anthem ‘Stepping Out’, a Top 10 hit in Britain and America. Night and Day blended lounge jazz with lyrics about cancer and break-ups, and it was good enough to make his strange journey – from cod reggae to jumpin’ jive to Big Apple anthems – worthwhile, if not comprehensible. He reckoned that American radio stations loved him because ‘people were lo
oking for an alternative to the established American rock star groups which wasn’t disco. Something new which wasn’t punk. They picked up on Costello, the Police, and me. I think a lot of these people want to appear hip and play something new and English.’ While his favourite band were Public Image Ltd, Night and Day sounded like a superior Billy Joel – this may not have been Jackson’s intention.
The NME reckoned that XTC and Squeeze were heirs to the Kinks and Small Faces, a new, classically English pop. The former started out as the most bug-eyed, itchy new wave imaginable (‘This Is Pop’, ‘Life Begins at the Hop’) before switching to a bucolic sixties sound, marred by Andy Partridge’s mannered vocals, which somehow suggested he hated his audience. Squeeze were harder to work out – they hit big in ’79 with kitchen-sink playlets ‘Cool for Cats’ and ‘Up the Junction’ (both UK no. 2), made the exemplary Kentish concept album Argybargy in 1980 (‘My mother didn’t like her, she never peeled the spuds’), dabbled with Camden Town country and western (‘Labelled with Love’, UK no. 4 ’81), then got progressively more serious, added pun upon pun to every song and, quite self-consciously, grew up in public. Keyboard player Jools Holland eventually became the official face of grown-up music in Britain on his BBC series, Later … with Jools Holland.
But if new wave was generally Pepsi to punk’s Coca-Cola, with Britain’s half-arsed rebels soon to be sweetly absorbed into the John Hughes era, a few unlikely acts emerged who acted as a bridge between punk and the eighties’ new pop to come. The more genuinely strange included synthesizers, which, for a start, meant they weren’t just former country-rockers with a squirty flower in their lapel. New Musik were a bunch of borderline geriatrics led by Tony Mansfield, who looked like a field vole in a check suit. They had a clear love of both the Beatles – unmentionable as an influence in 1979 – and electronics. Similar were the Buggles, the new wave’s Peter and Gordon, who had a UK no. 1 with the prescient ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ in 1979. Both groups were all clean-cut, straight lines, and as zippy as Tupperware. They had melodies you could slice cheese with, and a retro-futurist melancholy: the Buggles sang of B-movie memories (‘Elstree’) and ‘Living in the Plastic Age’ (‘I wish my skin could stand the pace!’), while New Musik served up Brill Building pop with a dollop of cold war angst on ‘This World of Water’ and ‘Living by Numbers’ (UK no. 13 ’80) – ‘they don’t want your name, just your number.’
The Buggles saw themselves as well beyond punk’s scruffiness, ‘a total rejection of all those poor recordings,’ singer Trevor Horn told Smash Hits, ‘the banal songs, “Babylon’s burning yeah yeah yeah” and that type of thing. That’s why we took a different line and almost went the opposite way to most new-wave bands. We felt that it was about time somebody started making good, well-produced pop records again.’ In this, they predicted new pop, the most exciting sound of the early eighties, and just when it looked like they had found a new way forward, going back to early-seventies Brit Building pop and covering it in dayglo dots, the Buggles went and screwed with the whole linear progression of the thing by joining Yes in 1980.
I’ve been hard on new wave, but it did give some stranded singers of a former age the chance to reinvent themselves without dyeing their hair green. Robert Palmer was a debonair singer from Batley, Yorkshire, who, prior to 1980, was mainly known for making records that had naked girls and high-life photos on the cover. They sold relatively poorly. The synth boom and the new minimalism saw him step back and record the bleak and repetitive electro ballad ‘Johnny and Mary’ (UK no. 44 ’80) about a couple’s bleak and repetitive life; it was moving and catchy. Then he asked Gary Numan to guest on his Clues album, which was bolder than Pete Townshend or Ray Davies or Mick Jagger ever got. Best of all, he cut a single called ‘Some Guys Have All the Luck’ (UK no. 16 ’82), whose chorus was pure drivetime but whose verse was made up of nothing but hiccups, growls and unhinged squeaks. Like new wave as a body of work, it wasn’t about to shape the future of pop or rock or disco. Yet it was fast fun and, dear lord, it made for a hilariously diverting three minutes on Top of the Pops.
In the end, new wave was the sound of the old order trying to come to terms with punk. And often succeeding, commercially at least. Post-punk and new pop took the signals and flares, the politics and inspiration of punk, made music that throbbed and oscillated, that wept rain rhythms, that conquered the charts with string sections and references to sex and death, while nodding to Smokey Robinson and Jacques Derrida. Over the next four or five years, this would result in some of the bravest, most truly inspiring pop music ever made; elemental stuff that took punk from a fourteenth-floor council flat and spirited it to previously unimagined musical realms. New wave, on the other hand, took punk no further than a shopping centre in Harlow.
1 Emil and the Detectives also covered the Everly Brothers’ ‘Man with Money’, a tough number that would have suited the Stranglers to a tee.
2 The lyrics (‘I’m alright Jack!’) were proto-Thatcherite, and one particular line (‘Don’t give me charity’) would have sounded self-contradictory coming from Geldof a few years later.
3 Initially the Police was drummer Stewart Copeland’s band. Sting took over songwriting duties once Andy Summers replaced Henry Padovani as guitarist. Resentment simmered quite openly, and Copeland once got through a whole tour by shouting a monosyllabic cuss word at Sting every time he hit the snare.
42
SUPERNATURE: DISCO
In 1968 Andrea True arrived in New York as a wide-eyed innocent with the age-old American dream of becoming an actress. She’d been a boarder at St Cecilia Academy, an all-girl Catholic school in country-music capital Nashville. She was clean and pure as she packed her case and headed for Broadway. Clean, pure Andrea True. Any ideas where this story is going?
After a while she got herself a bit part in The Way We Were, but that wasn’t going to pay two years’ rent. For a leggy blonde, though, roles in Illusions of a Lady and Deep Throat 2 certainly were. True started to divide her time between porn and directing low-budget commercials. At no point did she think about singing until, while filming in Jamaica in 1975, she found herself stranded during the country’s political crisis: no one was allowed to leave the island with any money. Not wanting to lose her hard-earned cash, True asked a friend called Gregg Diamond to fly in and produce a track for her, which she would finance with her $400 acting fee; maybe she could use the track in her next movie. Diamond was no big shot, but he was capable. A journeyman drummer, his career highlights included sessions with Joey Dee and the Starliters and James Brown. But by ’75 he’d decided to give production a try. The sum of all he had come up with when True called was one basic backing track, with himself on piano and brother Godfrey on drums. He arrived in Jamaica, and True breathily cooed some hastily written lyrics over his demo: ‘How do you like your love? How do you like it? More, more, more …’ As luck would have it, also staying in Diamond’s hotel was the calypso star Mighty Sparrow, whose horn section added some suitably loose parps, and that just about used up True’s fee. They flew home, Diamond’s lawyer arranged a deal with Buddah Records in New York, and DJ Tom Moulton mixed the track at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound studio. ‘More, More, More’ – with possibly the only transcendental cowbell break in pop history – ended up as a hypnotic, saucy floor-filler across Europe. It went Top 5 in Britain and America in the spring of 1976. Andrea True, by now in her mid-thirties (or ‘twenty-six with a bullet’, as she told the press), never had another major hit and returned to the world of porn in 1980.
There are two ways of approaching disco. One is that it was all about surface, for good or bad. To the mid-seventies music press and many soul fans it was rootless, as visceral as cornflakes, an end to the struggle, a precipitous drop into vapidity. Porn actresses could have huge disco hits recorded on a whim. Donna Summer, one of the very few stars to emerge from the genre’s amorphous anonymity, described her performance on her first hit, ‘Love to Love You Baby’, as ‘Marilyn
Monroe singing, not me. I’m an actress.’ Disco picked up on Bowie’s cold distance from the art of pop, kept the artifice, removed his furrowed brow and stuck a smiley face on his Kentish forehead; it was all about pleasure, the end rather than the means. It was often gay, European, machine-made, female-led (Cerrone’s ‘Supernature’, Voyage’s ‘From East to West’). Disco couldn’t have been further away from serious, male-dominated, dues-paying classic rock (Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’) if it had taken a three-year course in contrariness.