by Bob Stanley
Blondie’s cute masterstroke on Parallel Lines was to use producer Mike Chapman, until that point best known in Britain for writing glam classics like ‘Block Buster’, ‘Can the Can’ and ‘Tiger Feet’, and the marriage of band and producer was one of pop’s finest. ‘I Know But I Don’t Know’ was as arch as they ever got, ‘Sunday Girl’ as classical and ‘Heart of Glass’ as zeitgeist. In a move of definitive postmodernism, the group named the latter (which had been kicking around since 1975 as ‘Disco Song’) after a Werner Herzog film none of them had seen. It blended their NYC punk stance with sleek sequenced disco at a time when the two forms were still seen to be diametrically opposed; they had the confidence to toy and taunt with a mirrorball in the video, Destri checking his hair in its reflection. ‘Heart of Glass’ became their first UK number one. While their next LP, Eat to the Beat, released in ’79, was in many ways a paler retread of Parallel Lines, it did include their most beautiful song, ‘Union City Blue’. Chapman’s production was impossibly loud and the song was epically evocative (‘Skylines, passion, union city blue’), a movie of the mind, part noir and part rooftop party. The unusually structured ‘Atomic’ was another number-one single: it had no verse. Entirely made up of bridge and chorus – tension and release, tension and release – it was almost pornographic, the Chris and Debbie show.
By 1980 Blondie were international pop stars and could do pretty much anything that took their fancy, making film cameos (Roadie, Union City and American Gigolo), working with Giorgio Moroder (‘Call Me’, their biggest US hit and only transatlantic number one) and covering old rocksteady tunes (the Paragons’ ‘The Tide Is High’, their fifth and final UK number one). Their wildest diversion was ‘Rapture’, which moved from a distinctly cinematic first half into a rap that sounded like a Sugarhill Gang remake of ‘Monster Mash’. It worked, but the accompanying LP Autoamerican was a cultural grab bag that lacked focus and featured a surfeit of saxophones – always a telltale sign. Blondie’s decline was swift. The Hunter, from 1982, was dire beyond belief, a collection of novelty songs the B-52’s would have thought twice about. It sold nothing and Blondie, soon after, were no more.
While they are a constant play on oldies radio and at wedding receptions, Blondie’s place in the rock-history books has never been that secure. There are a number of reasons: the hits have been repackaged and even remixed (on the embarrassing Once More into the Bleach) so often that it isn’t until you hear such obscure but stellar LP tracks as Eat to the Beat’s ‘Shayla’ that you realise how special the records still sound. Secondly, Debbie Harry’s solo career was so incomprehensible – working with minor leaguers like the J. Geils Band and the Thompson Twins, and nobody interesting since Chic in 1982 – that it has watered down the relevance of Blondie, especially when record companies continually suggest that Debbie Harry was Blondie.
But largely, you suspect, it’s down to the fact that some rock writers still can’t accept that a cracking blonde was capable of writing some of the best pop songs of the era; they await a Mojo retrospective.5 The same chroniclers have no such problem lauding the likes of Janis Joplin or Patti Smith, which suggests that if Debbie Harry had looked like a crow then Blondie would be accepted as the finest group of their generation, shapeshifting, forward-looking and endlessly melodic – ‘shake and finger pop’, as Smash Hits dubbed them.
Debbie Harry’s grin may have won over men and women alike but it’s her music, her sassiness and her obvious strength that made her a lasting influence. Madonna, Courtney Love and the Spice Girls drew deep from Blondie’s well. Classic art-school dropouts, they were true pop fans who became true pop stars without sacrificing their true pop ideals. It was quite a feat.
Blondie and Ze provided a rare commercial harbour between the chaos of punk and disco’s aftermath and the nascent electro and freestyle sounds of 1983/84. Elsewhere, in parts of the country where disco would remain a cuss word until the twenty-first century, UK punk’s trad guitar/bass/drums set-up was used to find a more conventional path forward.
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Early California punk wasn’t just anti-longhair and anti-Eagles – the scene’s first single was the Weirdos’ nihilistic ‘Destroy All Music’. Based around Hollywood’s Masque club, other groups soon rose up – the Dils, X, and Darby Crash’s Germs, who included a doll-faced drummer called Dottie Danger. All of them played fast, energetic, British-inspired punk and read the imported NME. Some of the records weren’t bad at all, a garnish to London’s ’77 red meat, but when John Lydon had said ‘I want more bands like us,’ this probably wasn’t what he had in mind. By 1981, when the Dead Kennedys breached the UK Top 40 with ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’, Joy Division had been and gone, and New Order were progressing from post-punk to shimmering proto-house. Two-chord punk with go-faster stripes seemed as relevant to pop’s present as trad jazz.
Still, some American punk groups kept the faith, reducing their straitjacketed Pistols sound to something that became more muscular, faster still, and this was labelled ‘hardcore’. After a while, these groups realised they had to build a new value system in place of the one they’d just trashed: hardcore wasn’t anti everything, it was pro plenty. Darby Crash had been a punk caricature. Washington DC’s Black Flag and Minor Threat were far more interesting, an inversion of macho rock etiquette; they had a credo of self-will, discipline and clean living, and the musical accompaniment was intense and very loud.
‘It’s so funny reading interviews with English punk bands,’ Black Flag’s Henry Rollins told the NME in 1982, ‘because they’re literally disgusted with American bands. They don’t dress right, they don’t sing about anarchy, nuclear war, or the dole. Or they’re rich white kids, their hair is long, and they’re wearing sneakers instead of combat boots.’ Hardcore gigs had no fancy lights, no theatrics, just musicians hunched over their instruments and keen focus. No one spoke, smoked, drank or interacted. Coming from Washington DC’s ‘straight edge’ scene (no drugs or alcohol), Rollins was an ex-Häagen-Dazs manager and compulsive skateboarder when he met Black Flag in New York. ‘I hope what I’m giving is not a macho thing, like David Lee Roth, like “come and get it girls” … What I’m trying to get across to people, a girl could do the same thing. It’s just a physical and emotional release of energy – it’s an intensity. I put myself on the line.’ This obsession with self-analysis and primal-scream pop therapy found fewer supporters in the UK. ‘I don’t understand why American music has to be so military and aggressive,’ said Brett Anderson a few years later. ‘Look at Henry Rollins; he’s like a sergeant major or something.’
Hardcore was no fun at all. But in the super-commercialised early eighties it was easy to see why a section of pop fans looked to the rubicund, unsmiling figure of Black Flag’s Rollins, and to Big Black’s pale-faced leader Steve Albini. Here are the roots of emo – or emotional hardcore as it was originally known – which would become a chart-topping phenomenon in Britain and America by the early twenty-first century. Unlike Oi! and sundry post-punk British dead ends, hardcore had a manifesto, and if its followers turned twenty and still didn’t know what to do with their lives, at least they didn’t blindly follow the Sid Vicious school of nihilism.
The Feelies owed nothing to straight edge, or Black Sabbath, or New York mutant disco. Post-punk children of quite another stripe, they did up the top buttons on their polo shirts and couldn’t have sounded less intense and emotionally hardcore if they were paid a million dollars. They were from Frank Sinatra’s home town of Hoboken, New Jersey, and in 1978 the Village Voice hailed them as ‘The Best Underground Band in New York’. All this promise and after one album, 1980’s Crazy Rhythms, they split – but not before they had left a strong impression on a freshly formed Athens, Georgia, group called REM. Like Subway Sect in Britain, the Feelies understood the more oblique possibilities of punk. Their songs were quite beautifully vague and uncommitted: ‘Get a message out to Mary Ann, everything is alright. Get a message out to Mom and Dad, everything is alright.’
They had harmonies, layered guitars played with utmost simplicity, sometimes wavering like static on an untuned radio, and underneath were unchanging, trance-inducing drum patterns – essentially they came across like the Monkees playing Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’.
Meanwhile, the Germs’ former drummer Dottie Danger – under her real name of Belinda Carlisle – had formed a new group in LA called the Go-Go’s. They started out as rama-lama punk, before signing – like the Feelies – to Stiff Records in Britain, where they spent six months on tour with Madness, picking up on the melodic Jam/Madness/Dexys strain of UK post-punk. Returning home, their first album, 1980’s Beauty and the Beat, included the waterfall-fresh singles ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ (US no. 20 ’81) and ‘We Got the Beat’ (US no. 2 ’81). It became the first US number-one album to be written and performed by an all-female band. A year later they were dressed as surfing cheerleaders on the cover of Vacation. Here was another way beyond post-punk’s impasse. Ze, Blondie, the Feelies, the Go-Go’s – they all showed that ugliness really wasn’t necessary.
1 In 1990 Milli Vanilli’s producer Frank Farian told reporters that front men Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan didn’t sing on the records. The media attention meant Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was withdrawn, their career was over, and the shamed Pilatus turned to crime and drugs. He died of a suspected overdose in a hotel room on the eve of a comeback tour in 1998.
2 Among the acts who have sampled ESG’s tiny catalogue are Public Enemy, Ice-T, Marley Marl, LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Miles Davis, Tricky, DJ Shadow, the Beastie Boys, Q-Tip, TLC, the Wu-Tang Clan, Ja Rule, Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur.
3 These include Cristina’s beautifully bleak festive single ‘Things Fall Apart’, which failed to chart in spite of heavy play on late-night Radio 1. At least it now receives annual spins at the most fun Christmas parties. Gorgeous and dry-humoured, with a poker-faced delivery, Cristina deserved to become famous. Husband Zilkha was possibly less than keen for this happen, and was happy for her to remain a cult singer.
4 The group were formed from the remnants of Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, who had peddled a similar blend of zoot-suit swing and high-life disco for some years – check the sublime and self-descriptive ‘Sunshower’.
5 They were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, but that was still four years after their peers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads and the Ramones.
47
THIS IS TOMORROW: KRAFTWERK AND ELECTROPOP
Our reality is an electronic reality.
Chris Petit, Radio On, 1979
Since the beginning of modern pop, New York and London had taken it in turns to set the agenda. In the seventies California had tried to forcibly suck all the creativity out of both, as well as from renegade outposts like Detroit and New Orleans, and shift the balance of power onto the west coast. Pockets of resistance had remained. Liverpool. Stockholm. Düsseldorf.
There was an unlikely romance to Düsseldorf in the 1970s. Its football team, with the almost Romany name Fortuna Düsseldorf, laid claim to the little obvious glamour the city offered. But in its sleek, blank, slightly detached post-war West German way, this city – the most typical in a forbidding, divided country caught up in the midst of a terrorist campaign – held a compelling attraction. Its very blankness, an empty canvas, inspired a type of music no one in New York or London or California had come close to realising. Düsseldorf was the home of Kraftwerk.
The first electronic hit in the UK had been Frank Chacksfield’s ‘Little Red Monkey’ (no. 12 ’53), which featured the clavioline of Jack Jordan in place of Chacksfield’s usual lush string sound. High-pitched, whining and eerie, more like a giant pissed-off wasp than a red monkey, it must have cut through the airwaves in 1953 like a ray gun through a pea-souper. Quickly forgotten, ‘Little Red Monkey’ lacked the stickability of Britain’s single most important piece of electronic music, the theme tune for the children’s TV series Doctor Who. Ron Grainer’s melody was recorded by an anonymous collection of musicians and technicians in a BBC Maida Vale studio known as the Radiophonic Workshop.1 Beamed out with suitably cosmic visuals to a pre-teen audience from 1963 onwards, it’s safe to say this thirty-second burst of electronica was the basis for a revolution that started at the turn of the eighties. There would be other fleeting diversions into electronic music during the sixties – Max Crook’s musitron on Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ and the clavioline on the Tornados’ ‘Telstar’ came before it, Moog squiggles by Micky Dolenz on a couple of ’67 Monkees tunes, and the Beatles’ squelchy noises on Abbey Road came soon afterwards – but the Doctor Who theme remains arguably the most influential electronic record ever made.
In these early electronic experiments you could detect the sound of progress and optimism. Electronic pop could have been the sound of the space age, if only someone had tried to streamline it by taking out the rock affectations and leaving a pure electronic heartbeat. In 1972 one group scalped the guitars, torched the drumkit and left the Moog to ride alone, not just placing it centre stage but making it the heart of their sound, the reason for their existence. The name of the group? Chicory Tip.
OK, so ‘Son of My Father’ (UK no. 1 ’72) lacked gravitas. It was still the first international hit written and produced by Giorgio Moroder. I was seven years old in 1972 and its newness sounded strange and important. Chicory Tip didn’t write their own songs, looked slightly embarrassed to be electro-bubblegum pioneers, were deemed a novelty act and only managed a couple more Moog-powered Top 20 hits. Kraftwerk, on the other hand, were the biggest rupture in pop since 1955. In 1975 ‘Autobahn’ delicately made everything else look try-hard or plain dull.
How did Kraftwerk differ from the synth pioneers before them? There were no furrowed brows, as you had with Silver Apples’ repetitive oscillations or Tangerine Dream’s sleepy soundscapes; no attempt to mimic existing instrumentation like Walter Carlos and his million-selling Switched On Bach; no squelchy camp like Hot Butter (whose instrumental ‘Popcorn’ was a US number one in ’72) or Chicory Tip. Kraftwerk made synthesizers sound effortless, and – crucially – they made them seem part of our world. Their power was the reversal of expectation; they humanised synthesizers through their intensity of melody and tone. ‘We are not into morality, but realism. We’re not trying to create some kind of safe, “Baby I love you” kind of atmosphere, but to put some realism into it,’ Ralf Hütter told Interview magazine in 1977. They were romantic realists, though, and described ‘Autobahn’ as the sound of cars singing. Kraftwerk sparkled where forebears frowned. Unlike Walter Carlos, they didn’t pretend that synthesizers would replace entire orchestras or could be programmed to write future symphonies. They already sounded utopian. The perfection of the future was already here with ‘Autobahn’, a UK number-eleven hit in 1975, pop’s most fallow year. The effect of ‘Autobahn’ on David Bowie was enormous; his influence on the electric eighties was, in turn, exponential.
Kraftwerk were metric where progressive rock had been indecipherably imperial – pounds, shillings and pence, farthings, guineas, emersons, lakes and palmers. English in the most clotted way. ‘They sound so detached,’ reckoned a bemused NME in ’76, ‘the kind of guys who could blow up the planet just to hear the noise it made.’2 Their image was robotic, which helped to confirm their detractors’ worst fears about cold, mechanical, efficient German electronic music, yet 1977 album Trans-Europe Express was an excursion across a trashed, transforming continent that conveyed hope, sympathy and unity just thirty years after the war. The music and the artwork were geometrical – machine music, machine art, from the pulse waves of their (UK only) debut album sleeve to the constructivist red/black/white of 1978’s The Man-Machine.
Wasn’t a constructivist sleeve rather the opposite of futuristic? Yes, because in spite of their clear, far-sighted construction, Kraftwerk’s songs were frequently looking back to Germany’s past, Europe’s past. On the insert for 1975’s Radioactivity they dressed not at all like robo
ts, but like members of a thirties swing band in front of a pointedly vintage but super-modern microphone. Kraftwerk were political, thoughtful, at a time when most British and American music, disco aside, was decidedly inward-looking. Few groups have set themselves so far apart from pop and yet done so much for it. And they drove on, barely releasing anything new but sounding like the sound of now, right through the eighties and into the techno explosion.
‘Autobahn’ was Kraftwerk’s only UK Top 40 hit in the seventies. ‘Are “Friends” Electric’ by Tubeway Army spent a month at number one in the spring of 1979.
Tubeway Army were fronted and created by a shy boy with bad skin and a receding hairline called Gary Webb. Heavily leaning on David Bowie’s impassive turn as Mr Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Webb became Gary Numan, filling in his pockmarks with chalk-white powder and dyeing his thinning hair jet black. Tubeway Army had already recorded a middling new-wave album in 1978 when, while working one day in the studio, Numan found a Korg synthesizer. He pressed a key; the volume and frequency made the whole room shake. Numan decided to utilise this new machinery at once.
A short sleevenote on the Japanese release of ‘Cars’, the first single under Numan’s own name, poetically explained his future-shock appeal: ‘he is a man who escaped from a black hole, now heading for an endless journey’. Jon Savage saw him in a lineage that stretched beyond Kraftwerk, beyond Bowie, back to ‘the ice cream fiction’ of the Tornados’ ‘Telstar’. ‘Numan’s success’, he wrote in Melody Maker just after ‘Cars’ gave him a second number one, ‘has shown that, in pop, plagiarism doesn’t matter: what does is being on the ball.’ On stage Numan created theatre, robots around him, dressed in alien uniform, and he acted out freeze-frame pop-star poses. You could call it proto-voguing; you could also, quite easily, imagine him pulling the same poses in front of his bedroom mirror. He was a very suburban extraterrestrial.