Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Such incidents hardly rivalled the gangster violence and government crackdowns endemic in Kingston’s shanty towns and concrete estates. This was no formulaic outburst of adolescent machismo, but a reflection of the febrile political atmosphere of the Jamaican capital from the mid-1960s onwards. Although most reggae music was rooted in love and sex, the genre’s tight, electrifying rhythm was the perfect soundtrack for messages of sectarian or spiritual dissent – between rival political parties, between gangs striving for ghetto supremacy, and between police and the Rasta community. Little of this was evident when reggae broke into the British pop scene. Hits such as Desmond Dekker’s ‘It Miek’ and ‘The Israelites’ were regarded as novelty dance numbers, a belief reinforced by Toots & the Maytals’ 1968 release ‘Do the Reggay’. Official disquiet was reserved for Max Romeo’s outrageously rude ‘Wet Dream’, which wasn’t so much suggestive as pictorial: ‘lie down, gal, make me push it up’.

  In the wake of London’s first Caribbean Music Festival in 1969, Trojan Records, who controlled the rights to many Jamaican releases in the UK, prepared a series of budget-priced compilation albums entitled Tighten Up. With their frequently lascivious cover designs, they offered recalcitrant white teenagers a gentle route into Jamaican culture. By 1971, reggae was sufficiently familiar to British ears for Dave Barker and Ansel Collins to top the chart with the proud boasts of ‘Double Barrel’ – thereby introducing the pop audience to the art of ‘toasting’.

  While the producers of rock, pop and soul records were employing ever more overblown and flamboyant arrangements, Jamaica was reconstructing the very nature of recording. Sound-system disc jockeys such as King Stitt and U Roy declaimed a mixture of onomatopoeic vocal outbursts and catchphrases over instrumental tracks (often contemporary hit songs with their singers removed). Stitt’s ‘Fire Corner’ and U Roy’s ‘Dynamic Fashion Way’, both from 1969, exemplified the art of the toaster, their apparently spontaneous interventions offering an extra layer of syncopation over the precise, tight tracks prepared by producers Clancy Eccles and Bunny Lee respectively. These tracks would also be stripped bare of vocals to act as the B-side ‘version’ of a single, providing additional fodder for the dance floor.

  With the reggae audience acclimatised to tracks with their most obvious (vocal) hooks removed, the stage was set for a more daring act of sonic creativity. The producer had become an increasingly engaged participant in the recording process since the invention of multi-dubbing technology, to the point where such auteurs as Phil Spector and Joe Meek could claim that their distinctive personal sound was more valuable than the songs which it ostensibly served. In Jamaica, producers such as King Tubby and Lee Perry became the creators of ‘dubs’ – originally a term for the acetate discs used to preview new recordings, and by extension a description of their sonic landscapes. In dub, the basic unity of a track would be subverted and shattered, as producers isolated and accentuated individual elements, such as the bass guitar and drums; applied cavernous echo delay as a form of sonic disruption; or sent instruments or vocals juddering across the speakers, emerging with tracks which were both spacey and studded with aural events. Dub manipulated and mutated the standard dimensions of recorded sound. If psychedelic rock translated the colour spectrum into ecstatic sound, dub dealt in a more menacing world that was prone to surprising shifts of gravity.

  When dub was allied with the increasingly radical spirit of roots reggae, and Rasta rhetoric with toasting, reggae was transformed from a rendering of Caribbean sunshine into a searing portrayal of a society on the edge of collapse. ‘The base of the music4 is really oppression, depression, anger, deep passion’, Jimmy Cliff insisted. This was the ethos which hypnotised the Clash and John Lydon, who channelled the inventiveness of dub into his early records with Public Image Ltd. But reggae culture in the 1970s was far from a monotone medium. Alongside dub and toasting, Jamaica was bursting with vocal groups who took their spiritual and musical inspiration from 1960s soul acts such as the Impressions, just as the Wailers had done; with voices of love, such as the ‘Cool Ruler’, Gregory Isaacs; and with the revolutionary anthems of Rastafarianism, preaching an unsettling mixture of apocalypse and salvation.

  In Bob Marley, Rasta found its prophet and broadcaster, although he became an increasingly controversial figure in his homeland. Signed to the British label Island, his band the Wailers let their 1973 album Catch a Fire be overdubbed by session musicians to make it more acceptable to white audiences. (For the rest of his career, Marley continued to release rough-edged tracks in Jamaica which were smoothed and sweetened for the international market.) By 1975, when the Wailers recorded a landmark live album in London, the rock community was prepared to recognise Marley as an equal to its own icons, such as Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. Yet that was also the year when his group splintered, its other creative forces, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, unwilling to accept Marley’s dominance of what had once been a democracy. Marley became a global idol, whilst his recordings grew ever more distant from their Jamaican soil – his influence more apparent in African reggae than in the Caribbean.

  Whether you regarded him as a hero or an apostate, Marley broadened the musical taste of millions who might otherwise have been intimidated by reggae’s experiments with sound and form. The process had been accelerated by tourists such as Paul Simon and Paul McCartney, both of whom cut tracks in Jamaica. Mellifluous hits such as Ken Boothe’s ‘Everything I Own’ slid comfortably on to Top 40 playlists, although the dub-inspired playfulness of Rupie Edwards’s ‘Ire Feelings’ so puzzled BBC programmers in 1974 that the single was banned from daytime airplay, in case it proved to have obscene implications. Marley aside, however, reggae vanished from pop radio for the second half of the decade, until 2-Tone revived the fifteen-year-old rhythms of ska, and the Police employed dub dynamics on ‘Roxanne’.

  Britain’s most influential reggae recording emerged in 1982 from a three-quarters white group whose androgynous (and unashamedly gay) vocalist sported chest-length braids and pancake make-up. Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ was a gentle rendering of the predominantly female and black-British style known as lovers rock, which eschewed Rastafarianism and revolutionary rhetoric in favour of charmingly naïve expressions of teenage romance. After topping the UK charts, it all but repeated the feat in America, a nation where Bob Marley never achieved a Top 50 hit, and where a Broadway musical called Reggae had been staged in 1980 with barely a trace of Jamaican identity. Although the US would never adapt to Jamaican beats with the same ease as Britain, reggae was now a universal language, ripe for augmentation across Africa and South America, and assimilation into the planetary melting pot of rhythms and cultures.

  Yet reggae was no more static than the culture which produced it. While Britain and America clung to the Bob Marley model as a language that they could interpret and comprehend, music in Jamaica was mutating. DJs began to exert a more profound hold over the sound of Kingston, the pleasure of rhythmic innovation supplanting political or Rastafarian rhetoric. With Jamaica undergoing an economic squeeze during the first half of the 1980s, record-makers seized upon new digital technology to simplify their craft. Their purpose was apparent from the name which was applied to their music: dancehall. But there were other descriptions – digi, ragamuffin, ragga – for records which, from around 1984, replaced the rhythm sections of old with instruments run by computer chips. By then, almost every sector of the music business was witnessing the same, sometimes involuntary, revolution.

  Pretty soon a bunch5 of kids are going to come along and change all this and then no one’ll want to know about the Rolling Stones or any of us. It’ll probably be three 12-year-olds with Moog synthesisers.

  Stephen Stills, 1973

  They can get all the Moog6 synthesisers that they want, but nothing will take the place of the human heart.

  Johnny Cash, 1973

  ‘As a matter of very serious7 principle I will never enjoy a record with synthesiser on it’,
announced the Smiths’ vocalist Morrissey in 1984. His defiant refusal to entertain the possibility that music could be created by computerised technology was as conservative, and as ill-fated, as the judgement of those who had been equally suspicious of the electric guitar or the saxophone. A decade earlier, keyboard player Roger Powell had dismissed the qualms of those who protested that the Moog synthesiser – the first step in the revolutionary march of technology – was both unmusical and devoid of emotion. ‘You can develop a physical8 relationship with the instrument’, he insisted. ‘It’s just that people don’t normally look at turning a knob or pushing a wheel as being an expressive way of playing an instrument.’

  The invention in the late 1950s of Wurlitzer’s Side Man, an electrical rhythm machine, first raised the apparently hideous possibility that men might be replaced by machines. These fears coincided with Isaac Asimov’s best-selling science-fiction tales about man’s ambiguous relationship with robots – reflecting the widespread dread that humans might one day become the servants of their own creations. Side Man (its very name was robotic) and its competitors were built into electric organs, the precursors of the drum machines to follow.

  It was the Moog synthesiser, however, with its keyboard, modulating oscillator, tonal controls and contour generator, which transported the electronic machine into the heart of popular music. Even after the success of Walter Carlos’s Switched-On Bach album, the Moog was primarily used as a method of augmenting music rather than creating it. But by the mid-1970s, entire rock albums were being composed and performed on the Moog. Its seemingly limitless capacity to generate diverting tones and noises lent itself to exploration on a grand scale, and the Moog was therefore welcomed by progressive-rock musicians. The launch of the Polymoog in 1977 widened the instrument’s palette from single notes to chords, enabling it to be substituted for virtually any sound at a rock band’s disposal.

  While acts as varied as Paul McCartney and Emerson, Lake & Palmer incorporated the Moog into rock and pop, the synthesiser’s capabilities were explored most radically in Germany. Its tradition of what was dubbed (by British journalists) ‘krautrock’ explored the limits of electronic composition, psychedelia and experimental (indeed, progressive) rock, in a merging of classical and popular techniques unmatched elsewhere in the world. Two bands broke out of the avant-garde field to attract a mainstream audience. Kraftwerk enjoyed a worldwide hit single with ‘Autobahn’, compressing a side-long album track into three minutes. It exposed the synthesiser as both plaything and tool of hypnosis, conjuring up the seamless eternity of a journey along one of Germany’s highways. ‘We are the first German group9 to record in our own language, use our electronic background and create a Central European identity for ourselves’, explained Ralf Hütter. Both futuristic and reminiscent of the novelty vocal group ditties of the rock ’n’ roll era, ‘Autobahn’ was only recognised in retrospect as a key moment in the transformation of the synthesiser into a vehicle for a dance groove.

  A different kind of modernity was on offer from Tangerine Dream, whose atmospheric evocations of space and time imagined a fantasy world in which American minimalist composers were providing science-fiction film soundtracks. The sixteen-minute title track of Phaedra (1974) was a clear influence on David Bowie’s 1977 collaborations with Brian Eno, while the latter’s early ventures into ambient music extended the mood of the same album’s closing piece, ‘Sequent C’. This was sound for a trip into inner space – for gently stoned meditation, perhaps – without any of the kaleidoscopic and potentially unsettling explosions of the senses found elsewhere in German rock.

  On his Low and ‘Heroes’ albums, Bowie explored different aspects of the ‘krautrock’ legacy to produce music which reflected the fragility of his own psyche, and the sonic disruption triggered by the arrival of punk. Both albums were divided between brittle deconstructions of traditional rock, and synthesiser mood music. His stature as an icon of visual style as well as sound ensured that his experiments left an impact on an entire generation of British musicians, who had grown to trust him as a guide through a turbulent decade. With Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980, Bowie used his synthetic music to reconnect with fragments of his own past: as a white soul singer, a genius of image-mongering, and a master of the anthemic single.

  The video made to promote Bowie’s 1980 hit ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was filled with extras recruited from Blitz, a weekly club in London’s Covent Garden. Within its walls, fashion intersected with synthesised pop and electronica, Bowie and Roxy Music acting as the venue’s absent saints. (Indeed, the club grew out of the Bowie nights staged by Rusty Egan at Billy’s in Soho the previous year.) ‘It was very gay10 and there was lots of make-up’, recalled DJ and label owner Stevo. ‘That was the scene which engendered the New Romantics.’ Dance-music historian Sheryl Garratt saw this as ‘a time of experimentation11: bebop, African pop, rumba, rockabilly, salsa, ska, blues. Zoot suits, cowboy hats, fifties Americana, berets and braces.’ Amongst the so-called Blitz kids were the future members of many of British pop’s most successful acts of the decade ahead: Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Visage, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Ultravox and Sade. For each of them, to varying degrees, style was as crucial and defining as music. Children of glam, survivors of punk, they eschewed the jagged aggression of the recent past, sidelining guitars in favour of the cheap, mass-produced synthesisers which had flooded the market.

  The missing link between punk and the New Romantics was to be found in the experimental sonic textures of artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Chrome and Cabaret Voltaire, who – like the Velvet Underground before them – were better known for their inspiration than their own recordings. Kraftwerk’s extended synth-scapes were also a profound influence; likewise David Bowie and Brian Eno’s anglicised take on ‘krautrock’. Three hits from 1979 – M’s ‘Pop Muzik’, Lene Lovich’s ‘Lucky Number’ and Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ – added an inescapable quirkiness to the New Muzik (the name of the artists behind a formative synth-pop hit, ‘Living by Numbers’, from the first days of 1980). The ease with which the synthesiser could be used to create a portentous wash of sound, as demonstrated by Tangerine Dream, enabled Gary Numan and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark to create sinister, almost pompous pop, a trend which reached its zenith (or nadir) in the emotionless drama of Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’.

  That was one spirit of the times, as Cold War tensions were heightened, and the British charts were suddenly filled with songs exploring the dread of nuclear apocalypse or enforced militarism. But after the paranoia of the punk years, and amidst economic gloom, young club-goers preferred to sweat away their fears. While Dexy’s Midnight Runners (‘Dance Stance’) and Elvis Costello (‘Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down’) self-consciously reprised mid-1960s soul, Roxy Music (‘Dance Away’) and David Bowie (‘Fashion’) provided a more contemporary approach to hedonism.

  By early 1981, while rock classicists mourned the loss of John Lennon (whose final recording was a chilling rock-funk collaboration with Yoko Ono, ‘Walking on Thin Ice’), the likes of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet combined the rhythms of the dance floor with a bright, brittle pop sensibility pulled as much from Abba and Dollar as from Bowie and Roxy Music. Meanwhile, Depeche Mode’s ‘New Life’ from summer 1981 premiered synth-pop as the new amateurism: the raucous cacophony of punk replaced by simple, one-finger synth lines, supporting bouncy pop tunes. The decadence and flamboyance of one strand and the youthful energy of the other combined in two of the biggest-selling records of the year: a revival of the 1960s soul hit ‘Tainted Love’ by Marc Almond, who would soon reveal himself as a sublime chronicler of emotional and sexual life on the margins; and the almost deliberately banal ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by the Human League, one-time electronic experimentalists now offering sly vignettes of teenage trauma.

  The era of synth-pop, decadent or otherwise, altered the sound, the image and the presentation of popular music. In the wake of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, the el
ectric guitar had attracted an encyclopaedia of sexually potent poses and moves, lending even the weakest of performers a borrowed sense of cool and machismo (the instrument was crucial to ‘cock rock’, the strutting, thrusting, hard-rock style of the 1970s). Standing behind a synthesiser or another electronic keyboard was a less obvious way of displaying one’s sexual prowess. As Kraftwerk were the first to realise (and to satirise), one risked being mistaken for a technician or a robot. Synths were also accused of removing emotion from music; even Soft Cell’s Dave Ball admitted that ‘Groups that are dominated12 by sequencers I find a little boring, actually.’ For him, the touch of fingers on a keyboard – rather than the replaying of programmed sound – was vital: ‘I play manually13, rather than relying on really precise machines that lose that human sort of feel.’ For Bernard Sumner, a veteran of glacial post-punk band Joy Division, and a founder of New Order, who specialised in synthetic dance rhythms, ‘The important lesson to be learned14 from punk, which everyone gets wrong, is that it doesn’t matter how you play, it matters what you play.’ Technique, in this philosophy, was as irrelevant as it had been for the Sex Pistols; what counted was the emotional impact of the music, however it was procured. Yet, as Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter insisted, ‘With better machines15, you will be able to do better work.’