Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  In the fertile territory of the 1990s and beyond, there was scarcely a hit artist from the previous four decades who could not be assured of at least the vestige of a flourishing career. Those unable to draw a crowd alone were united on nostalgia tours, veterans of the 1950s to 1970s soon being outranked by packages of MTV-era stars. Those venues which were not filled with remnants of the distant past found that they could ensure a reliable income by booking tribute acts – who in less tolerant times would have been termed impersonators, and booed off stage after a couple of minutes. The most enduring of these acts are the Bootleg Beatles, whose live career (from 1980 to the present day) has lasted four times longer than that of the original Fab Four. The Abba tribute act, Bjorn Again, exploited the mid-1990s penchant for kitsch, and survived to join the Bootlegs (as their fans call them) and the Counterfeit Stones amongst the upper echelons of this surreal industry. Clubs which would once have been the breeding ground for young bands have been overrun by these much-loved imposters, while sophisticated restaurants, hotels and cabaret clubs present imitators of Tom Jones or Elvis Presley, Tina Turner or Madonna, with all the finesse that they would award an appearance by the stars themselves. There is a vast audience for whom it barely matters whether they are witnessing an authentic pop idol or a workmanlike facsimile: all they want is the chance to relive some precious pop memories.

  Remakes break across9 the demographic spectrum. They’re familiar to the parents, and they’re quality records the kids haven’t been exposed to.

  New York radio manager, 1989

  Listening to rock radio10 today is like stumbling into an audio time warp in which the hip sounds are the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Listen to the Music’, Jethro Tull’s ‘Bungle in the Jungle’ and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’.

  Michael Goldberg, Rolling Stone, 1989

  By the 1980s, many of those who had lived out their adolescent fantasies of rebellion through rock ’n’ roll, beat, R&B or rock were old enough to inherit seats of power in the mass media. By the 1990s, these generations effectively controlled the Western world. Bill Clinton (saxophonist less than extraordinaire) became the first rock ’n’ roll president, while former Ugly Rumours guitarist Tony Blair symbolically took his Fender Stratocaster into 10 Downing Street as prime minister. Children of the baby boomers were instructed that (a) the period from 1956 to 1977, give or take a few years, was the pinnacle of modern human history; (b) the culture of that era would never be equalled; and so (c) they had better compensate for their deprivation by lapping up the crumbs of the past before they disappeared.

  This was now the culture that pop built, albeit a carefully edited version of pop, whereby drugs were fine in the past but not today; likewise political activism; likewise rock music. Oldies radio exploded from a format – a means of reaching a particularly wealthy demographic – into a global form of artistic tyranny, omnipresent and inescapable. It was as if a culture could only hold so many collective memories, and the West had chosen to fetishise the songs and sound of the 1960s for eternity. Young children grew up knowing the Beatles’ songs (especially those from the Yellow Submarine animation movie) before they could form a sentence. Those in their teens or 20s flocked to see heritage rock acts, so they could tell their own children that they had once sat in an enormous sports hall while men in their 50s or 60s struggled in vain to sound like their 25-year-old selves. It was quite possible (speaking personally) to be enraptured by this naked exploitation of the star/fan relationship, whilst at the same time wanting to echo the words of Johnny Rotten at the final Sex Pistols concert (until, of course, the first of their five reunions): ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’

  The invasion of nostalgia could be traced back to the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, which the pop business commemorated in the only way it knew how: commercially. The impulse which led Presley’s fans to bulk-buy his back catalogue, and Lennon’s to send the nine-year-old ‘Imagine’ to the top of the sales charts, became a ritual: thereafter it was close to sacrilege not to mark a performer’s demise with a tribute in cash. Such public tragedies sparked feverish debate about eras ending, generations passing and their relevance to the present day. But neither Presley nor Lennon would ever disappear. There was always an anniversary to celebrate and exploit, each revival widening the audience demographic for the next.

  The fervour after Lennon’s death prompted heavy sales for ‘Stars on 45’, an anonymous medley of soundalike covers of 1960s songs, dominated by Lennon/McCartney material, set to a disco beat by a Dutch producer. The theme wasn’t new: there had been a brief craze for disco medleys (‘Best Disco in Town’, ‘Uptown Festival’) in 1977, and even, in Canada, an Elvis Presley tribute, ‘Disco to the King’. But ‘Stars on 45’ triggered a manic reaction, as vast swathes of pop hits from recent decades were subjected to the same fate.fn2 Gidea Park’s ‘Beach Boys Gold’ was so lifelike that it won its creator, Adrian Baker, a place in the Beach Boys’ touring line-up. Soon original recordings by the Hollies, the Beach Boys and the Beatles were being snipped and pasted into something that might pass for disco fare, while the vogue was extended to the big bands (Larry Elgart’s ‘Hooked on Swing’), music hall (Chas & Dave’s ‘Stars Over 45’) and even classical themes (the RPO’s ‘Hooked on Classics’).

  Public acceptance of these records illustrated a strange phenomenon: at a time when contemporary pop was unmistakably modern, in tone and execution, there was an unending demand for records which sounded like the past. They ranged from straight revivals (the Pretenders’ ‘I Go to Sleep’, complicated by lead singer Chrissie Hynde’s relationship with the song’s composer, Ray Davies) to open homages to bygone glories (Billy Joel pastiching the Four Seasons on ‘Uptown Girl’, and doo-wop on ‘The Longest Time’). At a time of chattering percussion and synthetic backdrops, the blandness of Shakin’ Stevens’s cover of Ricky Nelson’s ‘It’s Late’ sounded positively radical. Likewise the Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, a blatant throwback to the British garage rock of 1964. So shocking was the sound of Elvis Costello crooning George Jones’s Nashville hit ‘Good Year For the Roses’ to the British pop audience in 1981 that his accompanying LP, Almost Blue, was emblazoned with a warning: ‘This album contains country & western music and may cause offence to narrow-minded listeners.’

  Much of this revivalism induced a sense of pathos, of illusions being crushed and ideals trampled: comedy star Nigel Planer (as ‘Neil’) copying Traffic’s once startling ‘Hole in My Shoe’ in the name of light entertainment, for example, or the Toy Dolls suggesting that punk was only ever a music-hall joke with ‘Nellie the Elephant’. (All punks eventually returned to the music they really loved: John Lydon to progressive rock, Joe Strummer to rockabilly, Paul Weller to mod soul and late 1960s British rock, the Damned to the acid pop of Love’s ‘Alone Again Or’.) Planer joined the remainder of TV’s The Young Ones, and Cliff Richard, for a single which inaugurated a new tradition: vintage pop songs being mistreated for charity. Stars who had once attempted, like Artie Shaw, to venture outside their niche in pursuit of artistic fulfilment discovered that they would only be rewarded if, like the Beach Boys with ‘Kokomo’, they stepped back inside their box. The Traveling Wilburys, a five-man retro supergroup formed in Bob Dylan’s garage, turned this duty into a collective pleasure. Not that this was a failsafe manoeuvre: so tightly did John Fogerty adhere to his trademark sound on his 1985 comeback hit ‘The Old Man Down the Road’, that he was sued by his publisher for plagiarism of his own material.

  When a performer was no longer available, industry and public alike attempted to find solace in his children: the Reddings (scions of Otis), Julian Lennon (schooled to sound like his father), even Lisa Marie Presley. By the 1990s, there was an entire tribe of these simultaneously entitled and cursed offspring in New York, some of whom (Rufus Wainwright, Jeff Buckley) were destined to set their fathers in the shade, while others endured careers fuelled by curiosity value alone.

 
As that decade began, the dominance of grunge, electronic dance music and hip hop left commercial room for any remotely contemporary American act prepared to pay homage to the baby-boomer heritage: the Black Crowes with ‘She Talks to Angels’, for instance, reviving memories of the Allman Brothers or the Faces; Queensryche’s ‘Silent Lucidity’, tapping into the forgotten legacy of the Moody Blues; or R.E.M.’s ‘Losing My Religion’, the midpoint on an imaginary spectrum spanning Neil Young and the acoustic Led Zeppelin. The biggest arena rock acts of the 1990s, such as Hootie & the Blowfish and the Dave Matthews Band, were living replicas of 1970s traditions. In Britain, revisiting the past in the name of progress was also about to become a full-blown career option.

  There is now a formula11: getting somebody to do a dance remix, getting rid of your drummer who can’t play anyway, and getting some hack to put a good beat underneath. It’s brought back this dull conformity. Rock music in England is terrible.

  Mike Edwards, Jesus Jones, 1991

  Most music is lazy12; it speaks in pop-speak, prodding your memory about things you’ve heard before.

  Brett Anderson, Suede, 1993

  The club mix of the Happy Mondays’ ‘Hallelujah’, prepared by DJs Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall in late 1989, drilled Chicago’s house beats into the core of the British indie rock scene. After several years of self-enforced distance from black music, indie was once more acknowledging its ecstatic rhythms, just as the punk generation had encompassed reggae a decade earlier. Weatherall also collaborated with Primal Scream, as the Byrds’ copyists of the mid-1980s re-emerged as champions of acid house – with a simultaneous desire to recreate the magisterial late 1960s sound of the Rolling Stones, as the singles from their groundbreaking Screamadelica album revealed.

  What began as inspiration drifted into cliché, as Mike Edwards was quick to point out. His band (alongside the more anarchic Pop Will Eat Itself) had pre-empted their peers, merging punk attitude, the piledriver impact of industrial metal and acid house into music which emphasised the sheer thrill of being alive ‘Right Here, Right Now’ (in the words of their 1990 hit). With 1991’s ‘International Bright Young Thing’, Jesus Jones retrieved the inadvertently futuristic rhythm of the Beatles’ 1966 tape-loop experiment, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, and fused it with utterly contemporary dance beats. My Bloody Valentine explored another rendering of the equation whereby pain would bring pleasure. Their tumultuous soundscapes found sensuality in ear-damaging waves of volume, the minor 1991 hit ‘To Here Knows Where’ making their sonic precursors, the Jesus & Mary Chain, sound conservative by comparison. Less confrontational versions of this technique briefly created reclusive pop stars out of bands – Lush, Ride, Curve – dubbed ‘shoegazers’ by the iconoclastic press, for their lack of conventional stagecraft and shy inability to engage with their audience.

  Not everyone who was gathered into this self-conscious gaggle of post-adolescents shared their wilful timidity. Damon Albarn, the central figure of Blur, was a stage-school graduate who had been groomed as a slick New Romantic, before reinventing himself, with Bowie-like ebullience, as an indie disciple. He was at the forefront of what seems, in retrospect (and retrospect was the lifeblood of this era), to have been a deliberate move to relocate British indie rock to the heart of Swinging London, somewhere between 1965 and 1970. Many of his contemporaries, such as Ocean Colour Scene and Teenage Fanclub, were already channelling American folk rock from the same era. Albarn, however, led the charge towards a sound that would be unashamedly English – indeed, faux cockney – as he began to abandon his middle-class vowel sounds with the same eagerness as Mick Jagger in the mid-1960s.

  An alternative route to the past was being mapped by what Rolling Stone, in May 1993, called ‘this month’s English Band of the Century’: Suede. Their destination was the David Bowie of the Ziggy Stardust era, and their early hits (‘The Drowners’, ‘Metal Mickey’, ‘Animal Nitrate’) matched up to his influence. But it was Blur whose agenda triumphed, their past–present connection running from the Kinks, the Beatles and the Small Faces to the spikiness of post-punk. Between 1993 and 1996, a parade of British bands embarked on similar journeys, each with their own route: Saint Etienne’s nods to the sophisticated pop of Burt Bacharach and mid-1960s France; Dodgy with their spirit-of-1967 effulgence; Supergrass with punky snapshots of the Monkees and the Small Faces. Blur inspired their own followers, including Elastica and Menswear, while Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, fifteen years into a career which had appeared to be static, was revealed as the Ray Davies de ses jours, an idiosyncratic social analyst with a droll sense of humour.

  For many tastes, however, all this music was too considered, too cerebral, too self-conscious. Their needs were served by a Manchester band called Oasis, who embodied what journalist Sean O’Hagan dubbed ‘the new lad’. Though that phrase identified a middle-class young man indulging in pleasures traditionally associated with working-class culture, such as beer, football and mindless drunken violence, it was soon embodied by the figureheads of Oasis. Liam and Noel Gallagher were raised in Mancunian poverty, a milieu where they reckoned that only petty thieving would supply the rent. Noel Gallagher could pen melodies so accessible that they sounded immediately familiar (and sometimes dangerously familiar). Liam Gallagher sang with a defiantly Northern rasp that was nothing like John Lennon’s voice, but shared his quality of being in your face with a pint of beer in hand, looking for a fight. The Gallaghers wanted to be the Beatles, and like their heroes they spawned a host of imitators: Longpigs, Heavy Stereo, Cast, Bluetones. But unlike the Beatles, who enacted constant musical revolution over seven frantic years, Oasis refused to move forward: their only development was to make their records longer and more layered, as if excess was the same as progress.

  In 1995, there was a media-inspired war between Blur and Oasis – echoing, so excited commentators claimed, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, although veterans of the 1960s seemed to remember that it had been perfectly possible to adore them both. Blur won that staged chart battle, Oasis commanded bigger audiences, but it was Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker who emerged triumphant from the so-called ‘Britpop’ era, while the Gallaghers slipped ever deeper into self-parody and repetition. Britpop, meanwhile, lost its lustre as quickly as the prime minister who positioned himself as its patron saint: Tony Blair proving to be no more reliable a source of British pride than the graceless, sexist drunkenness of the new lads.

  The notion of being a pop star13 in the 90s is an anachronism, really. It’s a bit like being the last of the dinosaurs.

  Damon Albarn, Blur, 1995

  I think a lot of women14 like our music because we’re not calling them names … We know these young women will grow up to be somebody’s mother.

  Nathan Morris, Boyz II Men, 1995

  It is one of the most calculating formulae in the history of popular music: you assemble four or five good-looking young men, of sufficiently diverse appearance to appeal to all female tastes, and then let them loose on the adolescent or pre-teen markets of the world. But the original boy band – the first male group whose public imagined that they knew them – emerged organically from the rock ’n’ roll scene in their native Liverpool. Their success, and the wave of lookalike, soundalike beat groups who flourished in their wake, encouraged the formation of the first prefabricated example of the genre: the Monkees.

  Prolific parents, such as the Osmonds or the Jacksons, could mould their offspring into a commercial proposition, sometimes at the expense of the children’s psychological health. Both Michael Jackson and Donny Osmond were on stage before they were in school, the latter’s more close-knit family relationship providing a stability which his more talented rival lacked.

  In the black vocal group tradition, kids would gather in school classrooms or on street corners, perfecting their harmonies and dance moves, before being discovered (or exploited) by a perceptive mentor. One such was Maurice Starr, who in 1982 took control of a young black Boston q
uintet named New Edition – a title awarded by a former manager, to denote that they were the natural successors to the Jackson 5. As with the British family group Five Star, their early records were blatantly intended to recall the effortless exhilaration of the Jacksons. New Edition’s relationship with Starr survived barely two years, but the group would eventually spin off three successful acts: trio Bell Biv DeVoe, Johnny Gill, and Bobby Brown, who before his troubled marriage to Whitney Houston had established himself as a distinctive R&B voice with such hits as ‘My Prerogative’.

  Having glimpsed his holy grail, a percentage of a worldwide phenomenon, Maurice Starr consciously set out to create a more commercially viable version of New Edition – comprising boys who were white. To be exact, Starr insisted that New Kids on the Block were ‘white kids who are black15. They have white skins but they are black. They have soul.’ Initially they sounded, to nobody’s great surprise, not unlike the Jackson 5, mixing classic teen pop with just enough hip-hop influence to make them hip, as least to the satisfaction of a 12-year-old fan base. They were then free to purloin pop history, their 1990 hit ‘Tonight’ mixing elements of ELO, the psychedelic Beatles and the Bee Gees. Their stardom endured approximately five years: any longer would have entailed their alienating their younger listeners by progressing into a more adult vein.

  Suddenly boy bands were everywhere. Boyz II Men rekindled Motown’s commercial fortunes with their contemporary ‘jack swing’ sound, and retro-styled vocal harmonies. Their 1993 single ‘End of the Road’, a throwback to the sweet, sultry soul groups of the early 1970s, became the longest-running No. 1 US hit since the heyday of Elvis Presley. The 13-year-old duo Kris Kross sparked a rush of pre-teen rappers, some black (Da Youngsta, Lil’ Romeo), some white (the trio Immature and duo Hooliganz), some already famous (child actress Raven-Symoné from the Cosby Show), some nearer to nappies than maturity (4-year-old Jordy from France lamenting the misery of being treated like a baby).