by Bob Stanley
U2 rejected post-punk’s own rejection of pop as lingua franca, its hunkering down in regional particularity, and its raised finger to populist communication. While they were aware of how exciting this all was, U2 were also aware of how much it was throwing away; ‘Desire’ was a recycled Bo Diddley riff which turned 180 degrees on post-punk’s anti-rockist beliefs. Their all-things-to-all-people generality made them an international success story but, from 1983’s War onwards, it became increasingly hard to tell what U2 stood for, or what their purpose was – their vastness and their complete avoidance of detail made them hard to read, let alone love. One day someone will explain to Bono that pop is always more expressive when it is trying to mend a broken heart than when it’s trying to save the world.
Unlike U2, Joy Division were an important group to like, and have stayed that way ever since. Very few groups since have tried to sound like them,5 but they were the most significant influence of their generation. They made you want to form a group, or write something, but not necessarily something that read or sounded like Joy Division. In this, they were the most abstract influence of an abstract pop era.
Post-punk was pop without boundaries, without signposts of any sort, and not everyone was brave enough to see it through to the next stage. How do you ‘sing’ when all conventions of music are meant to have been smashed? Ian Curtis, Ian McCulloch, Mark Stewart, Mark E. Smith, Robert Smith and Bono all ended up with highly distinctive voices, but were any of these voices the solution? In the end, post-punk groups found themselves facing exactly the same difficulties their predecessors had come up against – in time, almost all were defeated by the problems of scale: what do you do when your records go from single to album, your career goes from six months to six years, your fanbase from the local pub to the local arena?
You couldn’t blame the Edge for panicking and reverting to rockist moves, and U2 became huge in America while the Pop Group remained of minor cult interest. Yet the less cowardly moved on, in unexplored and often unexpected directions, some looking to the past and some looking to America. They found a way of harnessing the abstract energy and scoring Top 10 hits without needing a guest appearance from B. B. King.6
1 This appeared in weekly instalments, shortly after the softback NME Encyclopedia of Rock was published, reinforcing the wall between punk and all that had gone before.
2 In 1979 and 1980 issues of the NME, the Doors are mentioned frequently, treated with exactly the same weight (an influence, untouchable canon) as the Velvet Underground. Their critical fall from grace coincided with Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which (unintentionally) painted Morrison as a drunken ass with a Native American monkey on his shoulder.
3 This isn’t meant as an easy insult. ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ is a terrific song, and should have been a hit in 1979, but the guitar and drums – hear that cymbal go tish! – sound like they were bought at Hamley’s.
4 Robert Smith’s miserabilism, it turned out, was a much more sensible way through teenage angst than Ian Curtis’s. Curtis wore his inexperience like an angry badge of bold courage and radical difference, but Smith survived into his less self-absorbed twenties, when he recorded much lighter, more radical and, arguably, much better singles like ‘The Caterpillar’ (UK no. 14 ’84) and ‘Close to Me’ (UK no. 24 ’85).
5 For a while, every other act on Factory – Section 25, Crispy Ambulance, A Certain Ratio, Tunnel Vision, the Names – sounded quite a lot like Joy Division, but then most were also produced by Martin Hannett. The unwanted legacy of their English Gothic was its stubby cousin, goth. Though blaming Joy Division for the rise of goth is as cruel as blaming Jimi Hendrix for heavy metal.
6 The beneficiaries of their efforts wouldn’t surface for many years. Post-punk was picked up by the young groups at the turn of the century – the scratchy Pop Group end of the spectrum – and this in turn led to a re-evaluation and reissues for the Glasgow school (Orange Juice, Josef K, Fire Engines), New York’s no wave (Liquid Liquid, ESG) and the Ze roster, while Leeds’s political funk-scratchers Gang of Four re-formed to play far bigger shows than they ever had first time round. Even now, it is the single biggest influence on new young guitar bands, though it is now devoid of political chemistry. Post-punk needed years to bed in, to be appreciated, to inspire. And, for this to happen, it needed to be heard outside of the intense pop politics of the late seventies – between 1978 and 1981, there was simply too much going on. The latter-day groups may record for independent labels for reasons of peer cool rather than as an attempt to up-end the music industry but, if nothing else, they have elevated and validated the efforts of their forebears.
45
BACK TO THE FUTURE: TWO TONE AND MOD
Everyone’s praising us and saying, ‘Great album, but can they follow it?’ – so I do tend to get paranoid about it. I think the best thing for us is to go back to doing something really simple, even more simplistic than we’ve done in the past, towards the old R&B roots of the stuff we was doing.
Paul Weller, Melody Maker, 1979
Not everybody wanted to hit fast forward and shape the twenty-first century twenty years early. Post-punk’s open door simultaneously attempted to shut out rock while allowing in the past, which had been forbidden ground since the Clash had declared year zero.
There were two main beneficiaries of this schism. First, the Jam, who had always looked to the sharpness of sixties mod imagery as much as they had to punk’s two-minute buzz, something that had separated them from the year-zero ideologues, damaged their punk credentials and initially worked against them. They hailed from Woking, Surrey, the site of Britain’s first mosque and the town where the Martians landed in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. But there was little that was futuristic about the Jam. Rat-thin Paul Weller was the introverted leader of the first punk-generation group to appear on Top of the Pops,1 a writer of lyrics like ‘staring at a grey sky, try to paint it blue, teenage blue’. He was pop-savvy, and his group were heavily Who-influenced. Their following grew exponentially with the release of the 1978 album All Mod Cons; its artwork was a scrapbook of nostalgic sixties imagery. The era it evoked had only existed fifteen years earlier, but it felt like several generations. Reissues were randomly released in the late seventies, and they were largely greatest-hits packages – you couldn’t walk into a shop and buy the Who’s first album, nor any of the Kinks’ sixties albums. Weller had a key and he was scattering clues to a lost world. In 1978 the Jam performed the Kinks’ ‘David Watts’ on Top of the Pops and suddenly their fans were buying Lambrettas, turning up at their shows decked out in voluminous green parkas; Weller had singlehandedly created a mod revival.
This isn’t quite as cosmically odd as it may sound. It’s often overlooked that a large part of punk’s aesthetic had been its razor-edged look, and this was largely borrowed from the mods of the sixties. The early punk sound, likewise, had the tightness and brevity of the Who, Kinks and Small Faces – the Sex Pistols had even covered the Who’s ‘Substitute’. Punk, it should also be remembered, was over very quickly. And punks were proud that it was over, proud that they had moved on before it was killed by stereotypes and part-timers. Sixties mod had been much the same. Also, not all punks were ready to embrace the headspace of Metal Box or Unknown Pleasures – some still wanted verse/chorus structures and danceability in their pop, and this is where the mod revival found its support. Mod was one of punk’s constituent parts, sonically the main ingredient, so while it appeared backward-looking it was an easy and in some ways logical next step, and it blew up in 1978.
So were these new mods checking out the latest French films, scouring the jazz-import section of Dobell’s or picking up on new American short-story writers? No. Unlike their forefathers, the mod revival was about the audience as stars. They marched through towns singing ‘We are the mods’; they wore parkas as uniforms, and saw the early-sixties seaside battles with rockers as the high point of original mod. Few, if any, mod revivalists were autodidactic or style l
eaders. Paul Weller, looking out on a sea of green when the Jam played in 1979, was quite uneasy with this.
Many of the new mods were younger brothers of punks who just wanted a riot of their own – punch-ups with Teds in Clacton, that sort of thing. Possibly the second-best mod-revival group were the Purple Hearts (‘Millions Like Us’, no. 57 ’79), and, while they could write existential lyrics like ‘My life’s a jigsaw, what am I here for?’ they also pulled down their trousers and farted when they were interviewed on TV. No backstage discussions of Joseph Losey, Tommy Nutter or John Coltrane for these boys.
The other main beneficiary of the post-punk peek over the shoulder was 2 Tone, a Coventry label set up by mad-eyed, gap-toothed Jerry Dammers. His own group, the Specials, were a mixed-race act whose timing couldn’t have been better. As the mod revival blossomed, it created a parallel skinhead revival – again a short-haired, short-lived working-class cult from the sixties that had fed directly into punk’s edge and energy. Specials singer Terry Hall had seven-stone-weakling vocals which sounded neatly blank alongside Dammers’s finger-wagging lyrics and the sped-up ska backing – this was more of a Punky Reggae Party than anything Bob Marley or the Clash had envisaged. Their first single, ‘Gangsters’, reached number six in August ’79; by February 1980 their live version of ‘Too Much Too Young’ was number one.2
The NME called the Specials’ debut album ‘a speed and beer-crazed ska loon, all coitus interruptus jerks, raucous party soundtracks sugarcoating moralistic homilies about sexual and other social mores. The adolescent intensity comes across as patronising.’ Lyrically they wanted to have their cake and eat it, humiliating young pregnant girls on ‘Too Much Too Young’ (‘try wearing a cap!’) while recreating the horror of a rape scene (narrated by Rhoda Dakar) on ‘The Boiler’ – the first Top 40 hit that really dared you to listen to the end. The Specials’ worldview was bleak. But these were tough times.
Quarantined from second-wave mod and ska, but another mode of anti-intellectual class and style, were the various strands of continuity punk. Those slightly too young for the first wave of punk, whose older brothers might have seen the Clash in ’77, carried on as if nothing was changing. Some grew their mohicans taller, dyed them dayglo colours and became internationally known for their appearances on London postcards; the most dayglo and pointy-headed were the Exploited, a Scottish group who made it onto Top of the Pops and into the Top 40 with the breakneck-speed ‘Dead Cities’ in 1981. They called their album Punk’s Not Dead (here’s another rule of pop – if someone claims something is ‘not dead’, it definitely is. Likewise, if somebody claims a scene is dead, it definitely isn’t).
Others cut their hair as short as possible. Taking the violent, oikish aspects of punk and deleting everything else were groups christened ‘street punk’ by Sounds’ Garry Bushell but more usually called ‘Oi!’ Like mod, Oi! was about audience as mass. Oi! groups were stuck in a ’77 timewarp and had a blunt thuggishness. Many were from London’s East End and all of them were working-class and white. The Cockney Rejects, wearing West Ham shirts on stage, had a Top 40 hit with the club’s anthem, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, in the spring of 1980. Mawkish East End sentimentality and boot-boy punk with a dash of music hall – quite a combination. It would have been more diverting if nothing else was going on, but in 1980 there were more than enough groups pushing forward, exploring and creating new worlds to keep Oi! in the shadows.
While the Cockney Rejects were just happy to defend West Ham from all comers, and certainly weren’t racist, others sailed too close to the wind for comfort. Slap-happy National Front skinheads began to flood Sham 69 gigs, eventually causing the group to discontinue; when the same thing happened at a Specials show, Terry Hall took to the stage on his own and sang ‘Doesn’t Make It Alright’ until the beer bottles and racist chants subsided.
Just behind the Specials were a raft of other ska acts who also scored instant chart success in late ’79. From Birmingham, and also on 2 Tone, the Beat anticipated the Afro-influenced pop of Paul Simon’s Graceland, and their songs (‘Mirror in the Bathroom’, ‘Hands Off She’s Mine’, ‘Too Nice to Talk to’) were interchangeable goodtime stuff. UB40, again from Birmingham, specialised in super-bleak lyrics (‘Food for Thought’, ‘The Earth Dies Screaming’, ‘One in Ten’, a cover of Randy Newman’s ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’) over needle-eye thin, minor-key reggae, usually complemented by an electric harpsichord. Their rainy confusion and sense of resignation summed up 1980 as well as anything in pop – it was a rare year when the national mood could send a re issued ‘Theme from M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless)’ to number one mid summer. Like most of their contemporaries, UB40 were stumbling by 1983, but were then unexpectedly offered a velvet bag of gold coins marked ‘Red Red Wine’. The Neil Diamond song – which had been a reggae hit for Tony Tribe (UK no. 46 ’69) – was from an album called Labour of Love, versions of songs the group had grown up with, and it was easily their best seller, diverting their career into a form of post-punk cabaret. Fourteen Top 10 hits, including four number ones, followed,3 and all bar two were cover versions. They were so lazy it sounded as if they had all been recorded on a keyboard with a special UB40 preset; by the time of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ (no. 1 ’93), Ali Campbell sang as if he couldn’t even be bothered to pronounce consonants.
Bad Manners were true fairground fare; listening to them was like being on a waltzer when you’ve had three pints and desperately need to find a toilet. Singer Buster Bloodvessel came across like a cross between Ghostbusters’ Mr Stay Puft and Archie Rice, John Osborne’s music-hall monster in The Entertainer. They gave the world ‘Lip Up Fatty’ (no. 15 ’80) and a two-speed ska ballad in ‘Special Brew’ (no. 3 ’80), and ended up with more hits than any ska group bar Madness. A joke, but a slightly frightening joke.
Madness themselves were a well of nostalgic optimism. Even their debut on 2 Tone, ‘The Prince’ (no. 16 ’79), was a tribute to Prince Buster. It commenced a run of twenty straight Top 20 hits, and the Nutty Boys brought such un-nutty subject matter as schooldays, mixed marriages and homelessness onto Top of the Pops, assisted by videos that echoed Help!-era Beatles. They were the new Coasters: ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ was ‘Little Egypt’, ‘My Girl’ was ‘Poison Ivy’, and ‘Baggy Trousers’ channelled ‘Charlie Brown’’s playground twist. The clunky productions of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley made some of them unwieldy, but on ‘Our House’ (no. 5 ’82) and ‘The Sun and the Rain’ (no. 5 ’83) songwriter Mike Barson wrote himself into the Great English Songbook. When they broke up in 1986, the NME’s Mark Sinker wrote that ‘they were a group who made growing up and the getting of wisdom as public, palpable – and silently painful – as could ever have been imagined … from pre-adolescent kids-gang japes, to post-political weary adulthood, seven earning lads changed to seven earning dads.’ Their Englishness and openness was what finally did for them; as the eighties wholegrain-soul era of Paul Young and Wet Wet Wet was ushered in, Madness sounded like they were stranded on a bomb site, and too cute for the CD age. They belonged on seven-inch singles.
Madness’s longevity was the exception – mod and ska were born to be short-lived crazes, as they had been first time around. What seems odd from this distance is how revered these revivalists have become, as much if not more so than their sixties predecessors. Ska became a massive pop force some two decades later in the US, with Gwen Stefani and No Doubt reaping the commercial benefit. Paul Weller, meanwhile, became the UK music media’s most respected spokesman of the early eighties. The Jam created an astonishing sequence of jagged pop singles, from ‘Strange Town’ in early ’79 to ‘Beat Surrender’ three years later. Ever the contrarian, Weller called his first bona fide classic single ‘Going Underground’ – which is exactly where they weren’t going; in March 1980 it became the first single in seven years to go straight in at number one.
In a rare combination of heavy commercial success and the highest peer respectability, the Ja
m were a band apart. Weller set up his own label (Respond, which signed Dolly Mixture, the best girl group of the era) and publishing house, Riot Stories. He never lost sight of how he had seen pop as a kid – back then he had taken the train from Woking to London just to walk around, capturing the sounds of the city streets on a cassette recorder. With the Jam, he capped ticket prices and always made sure their shows finished early enough for fans to catch public transport home. Musically, they forged forward with acoustics and atmospherics, pulling away from their mod roots and, like Madness, growing ever more English without losing their ire. On the Tamla-tracing ‘A Town Called Malice’, their third number one in ’82, Weller sang affectingly of a past and present England disappearing before his eyes: ‘Rows and rows of disused milk floats dying in the dairy yard. A hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts, hanging out their old love letters on the line to dry.’
Of their less well remembered hits, ‘Funeral Pyre’ (no. 4 ’81) was remarkable, a relentless, drum-drubbing, chorus-free 45 that sonically matched the fear, mistrust and hatred stalking pre-Falklands Britain: ‘As I was standing by the edge I could see the faces of those who led, pissing themselves laughing.’ The more successful the Jam got, the more political Weller became. In conversation he was always defensive, coming across as almost wilfully dim, scared to pronounce French words properly in case he looked like a sell-out. But, on record, he kept on burning: 1980’s Sound Affects album was their most varied, acerbic and melodically strong. It included the heart-tugging ‘Monday’. Seemingly recorded by producer Vic Smith on a deserted Surrey heath, ‘Monday’ is at once a yearning, everyday classroom/office crush (‘Oh baby I’m dreaming of Monday, oh baby, when I see you again’), while also reflecting Weller’s shy, retiring, raging persona: ‘When I start to think that I’m something special, they tell me that I’m not. And they’re right … I will never be embarrassed about love again.’