by Bob Stanley
2 None of these projects materialised, and it would be logical to think that Robin was trying to get good press with a few outlandish claims. Except ‘To Heaven and Back’ finally surfaced on bootlegs in the late nineties and was just as out there and vast as you might expect.
3 If ‘Charade’ was a city, I’d move there tomorrow.
44
ROUTINE IS THE ENEMY OF MUSIC: POST-PUNK
The truth of it is, I didn’t know how much I loathed rock and roll, how much I deeply resented it – that was part of the motivation behind PiL – that deep resentment, and a longing for new forms.
Keith Levene, Public Image Ltd
I hate rock and roll like I hated school. I hate it because, like school, it parades before you the capitulation of the individual under the pressures of convention and the outside world. People get broken, friends get straight, they stop rebelling and gradually start edging closer to normalcy. Rock stars and their audiences blindly perpetuate and correspond to each other. Rock becomes a habit. People collect rock like they collect stamps or old clothes. They can’t break off the habit and face that frightening foe called change.
Dave McCullough, Sounds, 1979
Punk had put music back on the streets but with no road map. People knew what they loved, what they hated, and why they felt passionate. Post-punk was a free-for-all, love in a void. If punk was the sound of kids from council estates, post-punk was the sound of post-war architecture itself. It was abstract, sometimes confused, frequently surprising.
From 1964 up to 1977 Britain had fashioned modern pop as the multinational lingua franca. The Beatles, David Bowie and Elton John travelled the world as a sound recognised and agreed on as something we all shared. With post-punk, the UK unilaterally revolted against the lingua franca, and the vanguard of British music vanished from the international pop landscape: Siouxsie Sioux was not Sandie Shaw; PiL’s ‘Death Disco’ would not be heard on cruise ships. There was a huge cost to be paid for the embrace of a consciously anti-communicative avant-garde line as the way forward, however strikingly fruitful it was locally. Which it was – the agenda was terrifying, but more than worthwhile.
‘You’ve got to keep learning and keep discovering and keep going forward all the time,’ said Bruce Smith of the Pop Group. The shift towards non-rock forms, bringing in values that were antipathetic to classic rock, would utterly transform modern pop. It eschewed the relentless speed of the remaining straight-ahead punk groups, with their power chords played so fast that the poor little drummer boy struggled to keep up, and decided it was much more rewarding to dance in inner space.
Post-punk groups also didn’t tend to look like any groups that had gone before. They didn’t pose in a traditional way; in photos they had more in common with the surrealists, existentialists or Dadaists than someone who had just signed to Chrysalis and was about to play the Keele University freshers’ ball – it’s no coincidence that many of these groups were only seen in monochrome. All of this gave them a sense of danger, romance, of unknowable things. When you finally heard them, chances were you’d be disappointed. They might sound a bit like PiL (Section 25), or even a bit like Chris Rea (the Psychedelic Furs), but once in a while someone like Joy Division came along and then it would be unlike anything you’d heard before and your faith was restored.
Post-punk was a secret garden, and John Peel’s Radio 1 show – post-punk’s main platform, outside of the music press – seemed to provide new paths, new life forms within it on a weekly basis. Radio 1’s daytime DJs were Noel Edmonds, Tony Blackburn, Paul Burnett, Kid Jensen and Dave Lee Travis, none of whom gave much indication of their personal taste, and seemed as happy to play Boney M as Buzzcocks. Peel was clearly a pop obsessive. His show was on late every night, between ten and twelve, after programmes as random as the military-brass show Listen to the Band or live commentary on an FA Cup fourth-round replay. Like Top of the Pops, the Peel show informed school conversations – most importantly, it included sessions specially recorded for the show. These could be by acts without a record deal, ones you’d read about in the NME but – if you were too young, or too far from the action – had never heard before. With things moving fast and in so many directions, the Peel sessions were a way of making sense of the new scene. They would be recorded onto cassettes and swapped at school, at gigs, a secret underworld, an alternative pop universe, beyond the reach of the music industry.
Liverpudlian Peel was the fly in the ointment at the BBC. He had his first DJing experience in sixties California, where anybody with an English accent was automatically fast-tracked to the top. Returning to Britain, he presented The Perfumed Garden on Radio London. When Radio 1 was launched in September ’67, he took over Top Gear from Brian Matthew and it became a hippie haven, wall-to-wall Tyrannosaurus Rex. The late-night slot was his – out of harm’s way, as the BBC saw it, where he could (and did) play Tubular Bells from beginning to end if he so desired.
The Peel show became a totem for the punk generation as soon as he played the Ramones’ ‘Judy Is a Punk’ in May ’76; in October he aired a session by the Vibrators, and then one by the Damned, before either group had a record out (nor had any other British punk act). Peel’s show was the only place on Radio 1 where you could hear ‘Anarchy in the UK’. Astonishingly, the BBC rewarded him with a nightly hour-long extension to the programme. After the watershed, under the covers, a balding man fast approaching forty became a teenage hero.
His favourite group, and the one who would record more Peel sessions than anyone else, was the Fall. Their truculent leader Mark E. Smith combined a love of M. R. James’s ghost stories, Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist manifesto and an anti-fashion stance – flares, tank tops, cheap beer and fags. Smith was witty, bloody-minded, and had little time for any music beyond Can, Lou Reed and sixties garage punk. His contemporaries got a kicking on songs like ‘Slags, Slates, Etc.’ (‘The Beat, Wah! Heat … male slags’), and audiences weren’t treated any better; on 1980’s live Totale’s Turns album, he asks someone, ‘Are you doing what you did two years ago? Yeah? Well, don’t make a career out of it!’ Though band members were sacked or quit, and the line-up changed constantly, the Fall were the definition of independent music.
Factory Records’ Tony Wilson described their sound as ‘urban folk’, though Ewan MacColl would never have approved; it was the sound of trashed cotton mills, speed abuse and plastic bags caught on the branches of stunted trees on Burnley estates. It could also be very funny, which set it apart from much post-punk. Their Grotesque album painted a picture of England in 1980, a land of container drivers, cash and carry and the liberal classes who ‘talk about Chile while driving through Haslingden’ with its ‘sixty-hour weeks and stone toilet back gardens’. It included a political murder mystery, ‘New Face in Hell’, with fine kazoo work. Smith mulled over what was wrong with this country on ‘English Scheme’. His conclusion: ‘Peter Cook’s jokes, bad dope, army careers, fancy groups … if we were smart we would emigrate.’ They went on to record more than thirty albums and, smart as Smith was, he stayed in Manchester.
John Peel played cuts from a bunch of new DIY compilations with names like East of Croydon, Norwich: A Fine City and Avon Calling. Regionalism was one of punk’s victories – while it had been a given in American soul and sixties garage punk, pop in Britain had always been London-centric. But by 1979 Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow all had quite distinct sounds.
The Pop Group were from Bristol, and they were the embodiment of post-punk. Many assumed their name was ironic – instead it was a challenge thrown down to every other pop group. They first surfaced on a summer ’78 Peel session. Their politics were anarcho-syndicalist, they claimed to owe nothing to the past, they binged on dub reggae, free jazz and itchy funk. Most impressively, they figured out their sound from scratch – none of the group could play a thing when they formed in May ’77. Bristol was out on a limb, which gave the Pop Group the same invigorating isolation that the Saints had had in Brisbane. �
�They have no contemporaries,’ said the 1978 NME Book of Modern Music,1 ‘and carry few, if any, comparisons, forcing audiences to respond on immediate instincts. It’s a very open music and an unexpected, in explicable pleasure.’ The Pop Group were on the cover of the NME in September ’78, before they had a record out.
In 1979 they released their first single – produced by Dennis Bovell, who was best known for his work with Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson – and it was called ‘She Is Beyond Good and Evil’. It featured free-jazz blowing, deep dub holes and guitars that scratched out a partially sketched Memphis rhythm. Above this Mark Stewart’s echo-drenched vocal proclaimed: ‘I’d exchange my soul for her, there’s no antidote for her … western values mean nothing to her.’ The single’s absolute weirdness was liberating; as promised, this was a new form of pop. They played shows for Amnesty International, Rock Against Racism, a fundraiser for Cambodia, and, in the process, the Pop Group quickly locked themselves into a formula that soon became more depressing than liberating. A year later came an album entitled For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder. Now the lyrics were crystal clear, the dub was gone, and everything sounded as skeletal as trees after a forest fire: ‘All that we ask for is our very own garden of Eden. All that we get is a garden of interballistic missiles.’
All of their early promise dissolved on first listen, their flow had stiffened and calcified – compared to the Fall’s ‘New Face in Hell’ it was embarrassingly dogmatic and predictable. On their 1979 album Y, they had refused the comforts of form itself: on the second, they sheepishly accepted that the one form they wanted to nurture was the political earnestness of the radical student newspaper. Just the act of releasing records had made them part of the system, which led to deep self-criticism and, inevitably, their demise. Absolute refusal ended in absolute silence. They were a magnificent, preposterous failure.
Joy Division’s post-punk was less a total repudiation of rock than a rewriting of it. They were modern pop viewed through night-vision goggles – grainy and murky. Like the Pop Group, the NME put the barely born Joy Division on their front cover in summer ’79. It was an atmospheric Kevin Cummins shot, and the group had their backs to the camera. Joy Division were signed to Factory, a Manchester label started by local TV presenter Tony Wilson. With Bauhaus-inspired sleeve designer Peter Saville and pharmacist-by-day producer Martin Hannett, Factory had an integrated and entirely distinctive look, feel and sound.
Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures had been released in the late summer of 1979. Like the early Pop Group, its sound revelled in space – in this instance the underpasses, the empty streets of post-industrial Victorian Manchester. It had haste. Producer Martin Hannett was not averse to stripping the songs back, adding reverb that made everything sound like it was recorded in a deserted cotton mill, and sneaking in sound effects. It also had guitar parts that were simple but – with Hannett’s fondness for effects and chemically induced trickery – had hints of a dark psychedelia. This was brought out further on their ‘Transmission’ single at the end of the year. In no time Joy Division were the most influential sound in town.
They weren’t without contemporaries: Public Image and Siouxsie and the Banshees were likewise twisting guitar and bass sounds, working in dark and difficult territory. And there were nods to the forbidden pre-punk era: the spectre of Spector can be heard in the chorus of ‘Atmosphere’ (‘Be My Baby’) and in the guitar line on the tail of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (‘Then He Kissed Me’), while ‘Novelty’ pinned Cream’s ‘Badge’ to its raincoat. Joy Division’s melodies tended to be carried by bearded bassist Peter Hook, who played his lines an octave higher than usual; their sound was echoing, abandoned, the buzz of a streetlight and the low purr of the city always in the background.
Singer Ian Curtis based his phrasing on Jim Morrison, and moved easily from a whisper to a scream.2 On stage he was taut, with an electric wiriness. He would look to the skies in agitation, deliver the chorus of ‘She’s Lost Control’, then break into a windmill dance, sweat on his brow, grey eyes glazed. If it caught you at the wrong moment – say, if you were a Buzzcocks fan watching Joy Division as a support act, and you were impatient to hear ‘Orgasm Addict’ – this was pretty comical. But as their songwriting improved, and took you deeper into the woods, Curtis as compelling front man and Joy Division as masters of a new sound became undeniable. They joined an elite list of acts that were so plainly superior to everything around them that it became too obvious to call them your favourite group: the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, Joy Division.
Joy Division were not relatable to most teenagers; they were about exceptionalism and self-isolation. Was this how anyone else felt? Did they engage with teenage ennui like Nirvana or Morrissey, or high drama like Goffin and King? No. ‘She’s Lost Control’, ‘Decades’, ‘The Only Mistake’, these songs were a private apocalypse, closer to the unknowable despair of Roy Orbison.
‘Transmission’, almost as soon as it came out, started to appear in pop stars’ all-time top-ten lists; Wah! Heat’s Pete Wylie said in Smash Hits that they would listen to it backstage to get themselves going before they played. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, released in July 1980, went beyond number one in the independent chart and reached number thirteen on the actual chart; their second album, Closer, entered the album chart at number six. Unknown Pleasures had been monochrome, restless, investigating new spaces. By contrast, Closer was as black and dense as oil. The four songs on Side 2 were funereal, climaxing in the stately, icy ‘Decades’: ‘Here are the young men,’ groaned Curtis, ‘a weight on their shoulders.’ Factory owner Tony Wilson saw Joy Division as a group that would earn gold discs, grow in wealth and importance, play Wembley and Madison Square Garden. But this would never happen; Ian Curtis had hanged himself a few weeks before ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was released.
This branch of post-punk, described by Jon Savage as English Gothic, was a landscape of steely rain, bare wintry trees and dirty snow, like a Lowry without people. Under Joy Division’s dark wing were a nest of groups playing in the shadows, and most of them came from the industrial north: Comsat Angels (Sheffield), A Certain Ratio (Manchester), Sisters of Mercy (Leeds) and Liverpool’s Echo and the Bunnymen. The latter were blessed with a fierce drummer, Pete de Freitas, and a guitarist, Will Sergeant, who wasn’t afraid to play Hank Marvin-like single-note guitar solos, minimal and lightly psychedelic. Then they saw Apocalypse Now and never recovered; their pretty, tousle-haired singer Ian McCulloch now believed himself to be next in line to Brando and Jim Morrison. This new psychedelia and intense self-belief led to one of 1981’s best albums, Heaven Up Here, which hummed ominously throughout, like a distant overhead helicopter.
U2 were dubbed a ‘flashy Irish showband’ by the NME but, like the Bunnymen, had a guitarist called the Edge who could play his guitar just like ringing a bell, harmonics a speciality. Their first album, Boy, came out in October 1980 and could be summed up by one of its song titles, ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’. Martin Hannett produced their third single, ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’ (released in the same month as ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’), added an eerie children’s choir to the Edge’s fire, and the results suggested they really might be Joy Division’s sonic successors. The Cure, having released the Palitoy power pop ‘Boys Don’t Cry’3 as recently as June ’79, were never the same after Closer came out: their 1981 album Faith may as well have been called Even Closer. The Cure took Joy Division’s angst and channelled it in a more teenage, sulky way. Singles like ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ and ‘The Hanging Garden’ packed in an album’s worth of melancholy and flanged guitars inside three minutes, but it was all somehow powdery and a little slight. The Cure were more about stubbing your toe than taking your life.4
By using the examples of Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen or Liverpool’s brass-driven, psychotropic voyagers the Teardrop Explodes, and adding the textured guitar work pioneered by Public Image’s Keith Levene and Magazine/the Banshees�
� John McGeoch, here were ways for modern pop to go forward, ways that avoided the rock clichés that made Sounds’ Dave McCullough feel sick, and ways which wouldn’t tie themselves in philosophical knots as the Pop Group had done. With a few subtle adaptations, though – after a few sweaty, large-scale gigs, after the word ‘baby’ began to sneak back onto the lyric sheet – these sounds could be all too easily tweaked to re-emerge as pre-punk rock, as if nothing had changed.
* * *
I hope it never gets that big again. I hope nobody gets so big that they have to play to two hundred thousand people in a field. What happens if you’re the two hundred thousandth person? What can you possibly hope to see?
Jake Burns, Stiff Little Fingers
Tony Wilson had imagined Joy Division playing stadiums. By 1983 Echo and the Bunnymen were playing at the Royal Albert Hall; by the end of the decade the Cure were playing the MTV awards at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. But it was U2 who grew into the world-swallowing pop group Wilson had wanted his charges to become. By 1988, when they released Rattle & Hum, they were the biggest-selling act in the world. They had become a complete inversion of everything post-punk had appeared to stand for: backward-looking, triumphalist, built for arenas. Bono had climbed up the stage curtain when they played the Moonlight in West Hampstead in 1980; now he stood on top of a towering speaker stack, messianic, wagging his finger, promising a cure-all for the cold war and the common cold. Rattle & Hum managed the unlikely and awful feat of patronising the future. ‘Music’s become too scientific,’ said the Edge in 1988, ‘it’s lost that spunk and energy that it had in the fifties and sixties. And that quality, that missing quality is something we were trying to get back into our own music. What I like about “Desire” [the first single from Rattle & Hum] is that if there’s ever been a cool number one to have in the UK, that’s it.’