by Bob Stanley
Housed in high-eighties graphics, Culture Club’s pop was biodegradable. Lightly soulful (‘Time (Clock of the Heart)’, UK no. 3, US no. 2 ’82) and mallow soft (‘Karma Chameleon’, UK and US no. 1 ’83), it was taken by some as genuinely classic – Dave Rimmer called 1982’s Colour by Numbers one of the albums of the decade, if not of all time. Loved by the country like a mischievous son, a prodigious daughter, a favourite, soft-haired pet, George had a future wide open as the new Gracie Fields or Cilla Black – and somehow he screwed it up. Disappearing after Culture Club’s shamefully weak 1984 album Waking Up with the House on Fire, he went into heroin hell before re-emerging with a final UK number one, 1987’s weak-kneed cover of Bread’s ‘Everything I Own’. By the decade’s end he wasn’t a legend or a national treasure, he was a cult star, DJing in Ibiza and back to cat-scratching gossip. Maybe he was happier that way.
Culture Club’s career set a standard of boom and bust which others were depressingly happy to follow. Leeds duo Soft Cell were heavy on red-light, small-hours sleaze, and singer Marc Almond sounded endearingly like Shirley Bassey with a touch of asthma. For a short while they were magnificent: Dave Ball, a keyboard pimp with his pencil moustache and furtive eyes; Almond in leather, looking like a cross between a Jewish mother and a camel. All he needed was a whip to crack – it was perfectly perverted. After scoring five UK Top 5 hits (‘Bedsitter’ was worthy of Ray Davies, ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ of Cole Porter) they committed pop hara-kiri with an unlistenable third album entitled This Last Night in Sodom. Almond briefly toyed with a fascinating side project – Marc and the Mambas – which blended heavily rouged Mediterranean originals (‘Black Heart’) with hushed covers of his teenage heroes (Scott Walker’s ‘Big Louise’, an eggshell-fragile take on Peter Hammill’s ‘Vision’). Going solo in 1984, he somehow had his pin-sharp sense of kitchen-sink drama pickled by one too many covers. There would be occasional triumphs (‘Tears Run Rings’, UK no. 26 ’88) but too often he would play to the gallery, disco-fied Jacques Brel to order, and rather wasted his talent.
Arguably new pop’s greatest triumph was its acceptance and transformation of some strictly old pop acts who wanted in. Kim Wilde had emerged in 1981 with a three-years-too-late budget-Blondie sound she’d bought from a petrol station in Hertfordshire. ‘We’re the kids in America,’ she sang, and it was as catchy as Chinnichap, pastiche bubble-pop that time would be very kind to. In 1981, though, it made you screw up your face whenever it came on the radio – ‘B-b-but’, you wanted to say, ‘it’s not true. You’re clearly from Welwyn Garden City.’ No matter. A few months on and Kim’s subject matter was the romance of suicide (‘View from a Bridge’, UK no. 16 ’82) and the psychological results of America’s 1970s foreign policy (‘Cambodia’, UK no. 13 ’81). The latter, especially, was an astonishing record: morose, phased electronics on the verse with Kim’s keening voice implying noir tragedy from the off (‘She was an air-force wife, he used to fly weekends, it was the easy life’), blended with a full Cossack lament on the chorus. Her career inexplicably nosedived soon after; she returned in the late eighties with an American number one (a hi-NRG cover of the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ in ’87), green fingers and a few classy MOR hits (‘You Came’, ‘Never Trust a Stranger’, ‘Four Letter Word’ – all UK Top 10 in ’88) and became Britain’s favourite gardener. She smiled a lot more. Everyone was pleased for her. She had always sounded so stressed as a teenage pop star.
More astonishing was the evolution of a bunch of end-of-the-pier acts, real bleached-blonde Seaside Special no-hopers. In 1982 Paul Morley claimed that Tight Fit’s ‘Fantasy Island’, a UK number-five hit and a rejected Dutch Eurovision entry, was better than Led Zeppelin III. It was an outrageous statement. For Christ’s sake, he was saying, let’s get away from rock history because 1982 is pretty fucking great. If you were fifteen when you read that, read that the past was less significant than the present, your present, it confirmed your place in the world. It both riled the old guard and appealed to young minds. Morley did a good job.
Tight Fit were a trio of models miming to pre-recorded tracks, and ‘Fantasy Island’ was a glorious one-off with a constantly climbing chorus melody. Bucks Fizz also had Eurovision heritage, but prevailed a while longer. Two boys, two girls, all blond, they won the contest with ‘Making Your Mind Up’ in ’81 and racked up three number ones, including ‘My Camera Never Lies’, a crazed, jittery mix of new wave and new pop. Possibly the shiniest number one ever, the overlapping vocals, overriding sunniness and (almost over-) abundance of good ideas were reminiscent of 1965 Beach Boys. Ushered in with a near-ambient ‘click-click’ intro, it jumped to an acoustic-guitar line as hard and glinting as a polished pool ball. ‘My Camera Never Lies’ was all production over song – buskers wouldn’t touch it – but I think that’s something to applaud in itself. I mean, how good a song is the Honeycombs’ ‘Have I the Right’ without its floorboard-busting stomps and Joe Meek-gnarled guitar break?
Dollar were very short and very blond, even blonder than Bucks Fizz, and they stole a march by having ex-Buggle Trevor Horn at the controls. David Van Day and Thereza Bazar had managed a brace of hits in ’79 (‘Shooting Star’, ‘Who Were You with in the Moonlight’) but were flailing in cabaret land when Horn took them on in ’81, producing a run of singles that defined new pop’s blend of auteurism and greasepaint: ‘There was something sweet about them,’ said Horn, ‘these little people living in this techno-pop world.’ ‘Mirror Mirror’ (UK no. 4 ’81) had Van Day and Bazar playing a pair of loved-up budgies; ‘Videotheque’ (UK no. 17 ’82) found them in a cinema, watching themselves as lovers on the screen; and ‘Give Me Back My Heart’ (UK no. 4 ’82) threw the warm vocal breeze of 10cc’s ‘I’m Not in Love’ into the mixture – it sounded like Phil Spector producing the Carpenters’ ‘Goodbye to Love’. Dollar weren’t likely to survive as lovers or pop stars. Their sound was entirely gaseous, and when things toughened up in ’83, they left the stage.
Trevor Horn, on the other hand, was so talented he could probably have turned a malfunctioning alarm clock into an international sex symbol. After Dollar he worked with ABC, who seemed built to last, all silk and Sheffield steel. This impression was bolstered by singer Martin Fry, who looked like an emaciated but victorious lion. Their first album, Lexicon of Love (1982), was Horn’s masterpiece. It was hot, hi-tech soul with knowing references and radio-ready melodies: ‘Poison Arrow’, ‘The Look of Love’, ‘All of My Heart’ – all were UK Top 10 hits in ’82. Though he was now using full orchestration, Horn was always big on technology and J. G. Ballard, and Lexicon of Love was a romantic but cold soundscape: ‘We had this idea that at some future point there’d be a record label that didn’t really have any artists – just a computer in the basement and some mad Vincent Price-like figure making the records.’
Yet ABC didn’t sustain their momentum. Though Martin Fry told Smash Hits he wanted their records to be the sound that future generations would associate with the eighties, their second album – the guitar-heavy Beauty Stab – saw them fall fast. The first single from it was the crunching ‘That Was Then but This Is Now’ (UK no. 18 ’83), almost psychedelic in places and heavy on the effects pedals, but it was sunk by a line that rivals Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’ in its notoriety: ‘Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble, help yourself to another piece of apple crumble.’ Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame called it the worst lyric he had ever heard. I always assumed that it was meant to be funny – check out the sniggering saxophone that follows it – but that one line was enough to see Fry’s dreams of soundtracking the eighties turn to dust.
That honour fell instead to Birmingham’s Duran Duran. It’s hard to say why this is such a disappointing conclusion. At the start, they were endearingly provincial Blitz kids, and all of them worked at the Rum Runner club, where they eventually became the house band. Their first three singles, released in ’81, sourced ‘I Feel Love’ and Roxy Music for ideas and came up trumps: ‘Plan
et Earth’ (UK no. 12) had zip, ‘Careless Memories’ (UK no. 37) had panache, ‘Girls on Film’ (UK no. 5) had impact. And flash. They were not ugly, and when the nascent MTV picked them as brand leaders for their ‘Second British Invasion’ they couldn’t fail, eventually scoring fourteen UK Top 10 hits, and eleven in the States.
So why did their music feel so trivial? Possibly because they quickly began to smear the chacka-chacka Moroder rhythm track with pre-punk, hard-rock guitar. Partly because the further they got into their career, the more it sounded like each musician was trying to upstage the rest. Partly because singer Simon Le Bon got progressively more yelpy (it’s hard not to wince as he goes for the high notes on 1984’s ‘Wild Boys’). And partly because – like the hackneyed rockers of old – they indulged themselves in tedious side projects. In this way, they coarsened and inflamed the simplicity of new pop: Arcadia and the Power Station were possibly the two worst groups of the decade. So much huff and puff. You’d hear Arcadia’s lead-weighted ‘Election Day’ (UK no. 7, US no. 6 ’85), with its Grace Jones voiceover and authentic old-timey brass, and the clean lines of the Human League’s ‘Love Action’ seemed a long, long time ago.
1 Post-punk had split the vinyl market almost down the middle, just as it had been before punk. While the progressive wing didn’t shy away from releasing singles, they had brought the album back as a desirable format with Unknown Pleasures, Crocodiles, Metal Box; the Jam, the Specials and the continuity punks were all singles specialists. As with the progressive/metal split at the turn of the seventies, this split was largely along class lines.
2 UK number-one albums in 1980 included McCartney II, Peter Gabriel 3, Gary Numan’s Telekon, Kate Bush’s Never Forever and David Bowie’s Scary Monsters, all of which sound like they are the last stop on the line.
3 McLaren let two future superstars slip through his fingers – Boy George was also hired and fired as Bow Wow Wow’s singer.
4 The other half of the group formed Heaven 17 with singer Glenn Gregory and, with ‘Temptation’ (UK no. 2 ’82) and albums Penthouse and Pavement and The Luxury Gap, were almost as commercially successful as the mark-two League.
5 The perfect title for ‘Souvenir’ would have been ‘French Film Blurred’, but art-school punks Wire had already nabbed it.
50
AMERICAN ROCK (OOH YEAH)
Imagine criss-crossing America in 1981, from Des Moines, Iowa, to Savannah, Georgia, from Pine Springs, New York State, to Tupelo, Mississippi (to see where Elvis was born). You’re in a Studebaker, with your wife and kids. Or maybe a convertible coupé with the top down, and at your side is a girl in a denim skirt with long brown legs, a girl who was thumbing a ride and you thought, why not? Either way, the radio’s on; it’s a local FM station. And either way, the sound of young America on this station is not Blondie, or the B-52’s, or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It is canyon deep, its harmonies are mountain high, it talks of cars and girls with bar chords and Cali-rich piano. It jumps out, it’s big and it is super-melodic. It asks, quite directly, ‘Do you like, uh, American rock? Well now you’re talking!’
People pick a Holiday Inn more for its familiar logo than anything else. For similar reasons, groups like REO Speedwagon, Foreigner and Journey were enormous in early-eighties America. Abroad, they barely registered. This was America (New York aside) looking in on itself, re-establishing its identity in the early Reagan years after being shaken to the core by the successive Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon/Carter eras, years when FM stations had been dominated by British bands, years when disco records could claim the Billboard Hot Hundred’s top spot for months on end; now it was feasting on a notion of what its rock, American rock, had once been. In fact, it had never been this way, but everyone conspired to convince themselves otherwise.
American rock was the grandchild of an early-fifties state of mind – for Doris Day’s ‘Black Hills of Dakota’ read Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Darlington County’; for Frankie Laine’s ‘High Noon’, there’s the small-town nobility of John Cougar Mellencamp’s ‘Jack and Diane’. It added a rock beat and a rock style of singing, but the feel and the subject matter were extremely similar. American rock didn’t sweat any more than a Marlboro Man sweats. It glistened, and in this respect it’s a counterpart to new pop; it was hi-tech and chart-primed. Equally, it was about dressing up, at least metaphorically – Springsteen’s factory-floor messiah was as much about role-playing as Adam Ant’s dandy highwayman. And as Britain tried to escape rockism, so America tried to escape itself, becoming intensely caught up in imagined notions of freedom and a safe, utopian community, a myth of a myth.
What images does this music conjure up? An auto mechanic in Flint, Michigan, oil on his hands but no real prospects, just happy that the world isn’t on fire any more and he won’t get drafted (‘Your Love’ by the Outfield); tan-skinned fourteen-year-olds, sitting on a fire escape after school, and she’s crying to their song (‘Keep on Loving You’ by REO Speedwagon); guys just turning thirty, two kids already, sat in a Chicago bar and reminiscing about their lost youth (‘Summer of ’69’ by Bryan Adams). Every image is gauzy, the film stock suggesting a golden era that is present but somehow already gone. Mostly this music is beautifully, expensively produced, uses all the top session musicians. And occasionally there is a little stab of melancholy, the unlikely tug of a strange emptiness, a slight weirdness, and then you’re hooked.
In the early eighties it worked as cruising music. Fifties kids who had just got a licence would have been driving around town on a Friday or Saturday night listening to Alan Freed or Wolfman Jack on the radio. Instrumentals like the Duals’ ‘Stick Shift’ or Duane Eddy’s ‘Peter Gunn’ did the job back then, guttural rock ’n’ roll, mimicking the low rumble of T-birds and pink Cadillacs – or whatever your dad’s crappy car was.
A few years later the records on the same radio stations would have been by Grand Funk Railroad or (naturally) America, a spectrum of rock from quite hard to quite soft. More chug than rev. By the early eighties a new car was a standard prize for passing your driving test, and it needed a new teenage soundtrack. So the turn of the eighties marked the return of cruising music and, like the cars, the sounds became more compact and shinier: the steady, solid pace of John Waite’s in-the-pocket ‘Missing You’ (US no. 1, UK no. 9 ’84); Rick Springfield’s jealous teen trauma ‘Jessie’s Girl’, lyrically an update of Elvis’s ‘The Girl of My Best Friend’ (US no. 1, UK no. 43 ’81), and – for that late-night last kiss, leaning against the car – Heart’s swollen rhapsody ‘These Dreams’ (US no. 1 ’86, UK no. 8 ’88). The band names suggested travel – REO Speedwagon, Boston, Chicago, Foreigner, Journey – and the artwork suggested hotel rooms and space ships, both nothing but a dream to most of the people buying the albums. An American dream.
This brand of American rock had started in 1976 with Boston’s ‘More than a Feeling’ (US no. 5, UK no. 22), a song written for the actress Mariel Hemingway, and you get the idea she’d have been confused but rather flattered by it. There were hints of George Harrison arpeggio on the opening mumbled verse as it faded in, before it exploded with a tightly wound electric snake of a guitar hook, and then hit another level of greatness on a chorus that both echoed ‘Louie Louie’ and predicted ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Pulling away, on the second verse it drifted off into the past, on a Greyhound bus, down a hundred miles of bleak highway, and the world got dimmer and bluer: ‘I closed my eyes and she slipped away.’ Climaxing with Brad Delp’s falsetto scream – which would doom it as a karaoke number – the song ended on an infinite unresolved chorus.
‘More than a Feeling’ was years ahead of its time,1 with a highly buffed sheen that was all down to the song’s writer, Tom Scholz, who played pretty much everything on the record. Every penny he had made from his job working for Polaroid was used to build a recording studio in his basement, and Boston, formed in 1970, took their sweet time to create a unique, aureate sound: guitars harmonised in thirds, Brad Delp’s long-h
eld notes, the clean electricity of Scholz’s largely home-made effects boxes. The record took Scholz five years to complete, and you can tell. It was trapped between eras. It sounded futuristic, an American rock equivalent to Kraftwerk, even though Scholz cited the Left Banke’s ‘Walk Away Renee’ as its main influence, which, by the time ‘More than a Feeling’ peaked at number five in the Hot Hundred in 1976, was a spectacularly arcane reference. The story behind ‘More than a Feeling’, its atmosphere of a lost blue-collar American dream and its high-gloss production laid the blueprint for a new American rock. And, in keeping with the one-shot nature of the genre, nothing else Boston recorded came close.
American rock’s exhibit two is REO Speedwagon, who had begun as a covers band in 1967 and chipped away until 1981, when they scored a massive hit album with Hi Infidelity; it spent fifteen consecutive weeks at number one in the US, longer than Purple Rain or even Thriller. The band’s history was only interesting for its longevity and gaping lack of thrills: they once approached a singer called Greg X. Volz,2 who didn’t join them because he had just converted to Christianity; they released a live album titled, with joyless Ronseal efficiency, You Get What You Play For; in 1988 their drummer Alan Gratzer retired. Retired! Nobody in rock ‘retires’.
REO Speedwagon earned a million-seller through graft and an acknowledgement that they had to gloss up and pop up a little once the seventies became the eighties. They were an archetype who, like Boston, had one stupendous single in them that their whole career hinged on. ‘Keep on Loving You’ (US no. 1, UK no. 7 ’81) was a hard-rock ballad3 with power chords held at bay underneath a piano and triangle intro. Singer Kevin Cronin had a featureless, line-drawn face under a mass of permed curls, and he sang through his teeth, which added a weird tension to the song as it built through a sinister, David Lynch-styled verse (‘You played dead but you never bled. Instead you lay still in the grass, all coiled up and innocent’). It also suggested maturity, a long-term relationship of unusual depth, and a longevity to match REO’s career (‘And though I know all about those men, still I don’t remember. ’Cos it was us, baby, way before them, and we’re still together’). The sustained vibrato of the guitar break starts with a single note held for what seems an impossibly long time, then it dive-bombs in harmony, a sound that punk band Discharge were mastering in Stoke-on-Trent in the exact same month. Its pristine production gave the central theme of ‘Keep on Loving You’ – ‘When I said that I love you, I meant that I love you forever’ – a purity that no other REO Speedwagon song could manage. ‘Take It on the Run’, ‘Keep the Fire Burnin’’, ‘Can’t Fight This Feeling’ – they also sounded similar, but they all sounded boring.