As a result, the music press had enormous influence, and individual writers—the driven ones, those with a messianic complex—enjoyed prestige and power barely imaginable today. By identifying (and exaggerating) the connections between groups and articulating the unwritten manifestos of these fledgling movements and city-based scenes, the critics could actually intensify and accelerate the development of postpunk music. In Sounds, from late 1977 onward, Jon Savage championed “New Musick,” the industrial/dystopian science fiction side of postpunk. Paul Morley at NME progressed from mythologizing Manchester and Joy Division to dreaming up the concept of New Pop before going on to help invent the groups Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Art of Noise. Sounds’s Garry Bushell was the demagogue/ideologue of Oi! This combination of activist critics and musicians whose work was a form of “active criticism” fueled a syndrome of runaway evolution. Trend competed with trend, and each new development was swiftly followed by a backlash or a swerve. All of this contributed to the surging-into-the-future feeling of the period, while simultaneously accelerating the disintegration of punk’s unity into squabbling postpunk factions.
Musicians and journalists fraternized a lot during this period, a kinship related perhaps to a sense of solidarity as comrades in the culture war of postpunk versus Old Wave as well as in the era’s political struggles. Roles shifted around. Some journalists played in bands or made records, and there were musicians who wrote criticism, such as Pere Ubu’s David Thomas (under the pen name Crocus Behemoth), Joy Division’s Steven Morris, and Manicured Noise’s Steve Walsh. Because so many people involved in postpunk were nonmusicians initially or came from other artistic fields, the gap between those who “did” and those who commented wasn’t nearly as wide as in the prepunk era. Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge, for instance, described himself as a writer and thinker first and foremost and not really a musician at all. He even used the word “journalist” as a positive descriptive term for TG’s documentarian approach to harsh postindustrial realities.
Changes in the style and methods of rock writing heightened the postpunk sensation of hurtling into a bold new era. Music journalists in the early seventies typically blended traditional critical qualities (objectivity, solid reporting, authoritative knowledge) with a New Journalism–influenced rock ’n’ roll looseness and informality. This jammed-out, chatty style—juiced with “ain’t”s, hep slang, and sly, winking references to drugs and chicks—didn’t suit postpunk. The intellectual underpinnings of this older rock criticism—notions of male misbehavior as rebellion, madness as genius, the cult of street credibility and authenticity—were some of the very things being scrutinized and challenged by the antirockist vanguard. A new generation of music journalists took over whose writing seemed to be made of the same stuff as the music they championed. The stark urgency and clean lines of their prose mirrored the light-metal severity of groups like Wire, the Banshees, and Gang of Four, just as the record design aesthetic of the time emphasized a bold, bracing geometry of hard angles and primary-color blocks. The new school of music writing merged puritanism and playfulness in a way that simultaneously undercut the casual tone of the old rock journalism while puncturing its stodgy core of certainty, all those hidden assumptions and taken-for-granted notions about what rock was all about.
What bands and journalists actually talked about also contributed to the sense of entering a new era. An interview with a rock band today tends to become a laundry list of musical influences and reference points, such that the story of a band’s life typically gets reduced to a journey through taste. This sort of “record collection rock” didn’t exist in the postpunk era. Bands referred to their musical inspirations, of course, but they had so many other things—politics, cinema, art, books—on their minds, too. Some of the politically committed bands actually felt that it was self-indulgent or trivial to talk about music per se. They felt duty-bound to discuss serious issues, which nowadays sounds somewhat puritanical, but at the time reinforced the sense that pop wasn’t a segmented category insulated from the rest of reality. This lack of interest in discussing musical influences also created a sense of postpunk as an absolute break with tradition. It felt like the culture’s eyes and ears were trained on the future, not the past, with bands engaged in a furious competition to reach the eighties a few years ahead of schedule.
On a mission and fully in the now, postpunk created a thrilling sense of urgency. The new records came thick and fast, classic after classic. Even the incomplete experiments and interesting failures carried a powerful utopian charge and contributed to an exhilarating collective conversation. Certain groups existed more on the level of an idea than a fully realized proposition, but nonetheless made a difference just by existing and talking a good game in the press.
Many groups born in the postpunk period went on to enjoy huge mainstream fame, including New Order, Depeche Mode, the Human League, U2, Talking Heads, Scritti Politti, and Simple Minds. Others who were minor or background figures at the time went on to achieve later success in a different guise, such as Bjork, the KLF, Beastie Boys, Jane’s Addiction, and Sonic Youth. But the history of postpunk is definitely not written by the victors. There are dozens of bands who made landmark albums but never achieved more than an abiding cult status, earning the dubious consolation prize of being an influence and reference point for ’90s alt-rock megabands (Gang of Four begot Red Hot Chili Peppers, Throbbing Gristle sired Nine Inch Nails, Talking Heads even supplied Radiohead with their name). Hundreds more made just one or two amazing singles, then disappeared with barely a trace.
Beyond the musicians, there was a whole cadre of catalysts and culture warriors, enablers and ideologues who started labels, managed bands, became innovative producers, published fanzines, ran hipster record stores, promoted gigs, and organized festivals. True, the prosaic work of creating and maintaining an alternative culture lacks the glamour of punk’s public gestures of outrage and cultural terrorism. Destroying is always more dramatic than building. But postpunk was constructive and forward looking. The very prefix “post-” implied faith in a future that punk had said didn’t exist.
Punk’s simple stance of negation, of being against, briefly created unity. But as soon as the question shifted to “What are we actually for?” the movement disintegrated and dispersed. Each strand nurtured its own creation myth of what punk meant and pursued its own vision of the way forward. Yet underneath the fractious diaspora of the postpunk years there still remained a common inheritance from the punk moment, namely, a revived belief in the power of the music, along with the feeling of responsibility that came with this conviction, which in turn made the question “Where to now?” worth fighting over. The by-product of all this division and disagreement was diversity, a fabulous wealth of sounds and ideas that rivals the sixties as a golden age for music.
PART 1
POSTPUNK
CHAPTER 1
PUBLIC IMAGE BELONGS TO ME:
JOHN LYDON AND PiL
“EVER GET THE FEELING you’ve been cheated?”
Johnny Rotten’s infamous parting words to the audience at Winterland in San Francisco on January 14, 1978, weren’t a question so much as a confession. Despite being the front man of the most dangerous band in the world, John Lydon was bored—sick of the Sex Pistols’ music, tired of his own “Rotten” persona, and disappointed with how punk as a whole had panned out. Winterland was the last date of the Pistols’ turbulent debut tour of America. Within days, the band would disintegrate in acrimonious confusion.
Lydon’s disillusionment had been brewing for months. The first public sign occurred during “The Punk and His Music,” a July 1977 show on London’s Capital Radio station, during which Lydon voiced his frustration with the predictability of most punk bands, saying he felt “cheated” by the genre’s lack of diversity and imagination. Splicing together interview segments with Lydon and records he’d personally selected, “The Punk and His Music” revealed that the singer had far more so
phisticated and eclectic taste in music than his, er, public image suggested. Those who tuned in anticipating punk rock were immediately thrown for a loop by the first selection, Tim Buckley’s “Sweet Surrender,” a lush, sensual R&B song swathed with orchestral strings. Over the next ninety minutes Lydon further tweaked expectations, playing languid roots reggae, solo tracks by former Velvet Underground members Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico, a surprising amount of hippie-tinged music by Can, Captain Beefheart, and Third Ear Band, and two tracks by his hero Peter Hammill, a full-blown progressive rocker. Just about everything Lydon played on Capital Radio contradicted the punk myth of the early seventies as a musical wasteland. If this wasn’t treasonous enough, Lydon broke with his Malcolm McLaren–scripted role as cultural terrorist by effectively outing himself as an aesthete. Along with his hipster music choices, the interview revealed a sensitive, thoughtful individual rather than the monster of newspaper legend.
For Lydon, this image makeover was a matter of survival. A month before his Capital Radio appearance, the Pistols’ anti-Royalist single “God Save the Queen” had been released to coincide with the Jubilee celebrations marking the twenty-fifth year of Elizabeth II’s reign. Defying radio bans and record retail embargoes, “God Save the Queen” became the best-selling single in Britain. Demonized by the tabloids, Johnny Rotten was repeatedly assaulted by enraged patriotic thugs. Scarred, scared, and in practical terms virtually under house arrest, Lydon decided to take control of his destiny. His anarchist/Antichrist persona—originally Lydon’s own creation, but hyped up by manager Malcolm McLaren and distorted by a media eager to believe the worst—had spiraled out of control. Agreeing to do the Capital Radio interview without consulting his management, Lydon embarked on a process of persona demolition that would result in “Public Image” the song and Public Image Ltd the group.
During “The Punk and His Music,” Lydon sounded fragile and vulnerable as he discussed the attacks by angry Royalists. “It’s very easy for a gang to pick on one person and smash his head in. It’s a big laugh for them, and it’s very easy for them to say ‘what a wanker, look at him run away!’ I mean, what’s he meant to do?” Positioning himself as victim and revealing his feelings of humiliation, Lydon deliberately rehumanized himself. This naturally incensed McLaren, who accused Lydon of dissipating “the band’s threat” by revealing himself as a “man of taste.” McLaren saw the Pistols as antimusic, but here was Lydon waxing lyrical about his esoteric record collection and gushing, “I just like all music…I love my music,” like a fucking hippie! From that point onward, McLaren decided that Rotten was at heart “a constructive sissy rather than a destructive lunatic,” and focused his energy on molding the more suggestible Sid Vicious into the Pistols’ true star, a cartoon psychopath, wanton and self-destructive.
In the latter months of 1977, a chasm grew between Lydon and the other Sex Pistols that mirrored the polarization of punk as a whole into arty bohemians versus working-class street toughs. Lydon came from an impeccably deprived background, but his sensibility was much closer to the art school contingent. He wasn’t the unemployed guttersnipe mythologized by the Clash, but earned decent money alongside his construction worker dad at a sewage plant and worked at a playschool during the summer. Although he often professed to hate art and despise intellectuals, he was well read (Oscar Wilde was a favorite) with fierce opinions (Joyce was not). Whereas Steve Jones and Paul Cook left school at age sixteen, Lydon even made a brief foray into higher education, studying English literature and art at Kingsway College. Above all, Lydon was a music connoisseur. He couldn’t play an instrument or write melodies, but he had a real sonic sensibility and a much more expansive sense of possibilities than his fellow Pistols.
The reggae and art rock that Lydon played on “The Punk and His Music” sketched out the emotional and musical template for Public Image Ltd. When he talked about identifying with Dr. Alimantado’s “Born for a Purpose,” a song about being persecuted as a Rasta, Lydon gave his audience an advance glimpse of PiL’s aura of paranoia and prophecy, casting himself as a visionary outcast in Babylon, U.K. Musically, what he loved about Captain Beefheart and the dub producers was their experimental playfulness, the way “they just love sound, they like using any sound.” Effectively, “The Punk and His Music” offered a listening list for a postpunk movement yet to be born, hints and clues for where to take the music next.
PUNK SEEMED TO BE “OVER” almost before it really got started. For many early participants, the death knell came on October 28, 1977, with the release of Never Mind the Bollocks. Had the revolution come to this, something as prosaic and conventional as an album? Bollocks was product, eminently consumable. Rotten’s lyrics and vocals were incendiary, but Steve Jones’s fat guitar sound and Chris Thomas’s superb production—thickly layered, glossy, well organized—added up to a disconcertingly orthodox hard rock that contradicted the group’s reputation for chaos and ineptitude. Lydon later blamed McLaren for steering the rest of the band toward “a regressive mod vibe,” while admitting that his own ideas for how the record should have sounded would have rendered it “unlistenable for most people” because the listeners “wouldn’t have had a point of reference.”
Journalist Jon Savage reviewed Bollocks for Sounds and today recalls it feeling “like a tombstone, airless, no spaces in the music,” a comment that pinpoints the record’s failure as a deficiency of dub. Compared to the miragelike unreality of reggae production—all glimmering reverb haze, disorienting effects, and flickering ectoplasmic wisps—most punk records sounded retarded, stuck in the monochromatic and mono midsixties, before psychedelia’s expanded palette of timbres and stereophonic sorcery. The sharper bands coming out of punk knew they had serious catching up to do. Some groups, such as the Clash and the Ruts, picked up primarily on the protest aspect of roots reggae—the blunt sloganeering and sermonizing of the Wailers’ “Get Up Stand Up,” the radical chic of Peter Tosh’s Rasta guerrilla persona. At the other extreme, the more adventurous postpunk bands responded to reggae as a purely sonic revolution, an Africanized psychedelia, shape shifting and perception altering. During the half decade from 1977 to 1981, reggae’s spatialized production and sophisticated yet elemental rhythms provided the template for postpunk bands looking to experiment.
In Jamaica itself, roots militancy and dub ethereality were indivisible. The glue that held them together, Rastafarianism, is a millenarian creed, “part journalism, part prophecy,” in the words of critic James A. Winders. Rasta spirituality was something most white Britons couldn’t buy into easily. This was partly because of its illiberal traits, such as the nasty streak of antifeminism, but mostly because the absolutism of Rasta’s blood-and-fire visions was temperamentally alien to secular British youth, whose idea of religion generally derives from Anglicanism (noncommittal, wishy-washy, as close to being agnostic as one can get without pissing God off). From the ranks of postpunk, perhaps only one person really tapped into a spiritual ferocity to rival Rasta: John Lydon.
Raised in London as the child of Irish Catholic immigrants, Lydon had his own window into the postcolonial dislocation of the former British Empire’s neglected subjects. It’s no coincidence that his autobiography bears the subtitle No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, the phrase many English landlords put in classified ads or window signs when looking for tenants before the Race Relations Act outlawed such blatant discrimination. Lydon’s identification with the black British experience of “sufferation” and “downpression” and his passion for Jamaican riddim and bass pressure suffused his post-Pistols music, desolating PiL’s sound with eerie space and heavy dread.
Now an ex-Pistol, Lydon arrived in Britain after the disastrous American tour only to be immediately invited to board another jet plane, this one heading out to Jamaica, by Virgin Records bigwig Richard Branson. Lydon, renowned for his reggae expertise, would accompany Branson as an A&R consultant for Virgin’s roots and dub imprint, the Front Line. This “working holiday” would give Lydon
time to consider his future. Nice work if you can get it: Lydon spent most of his time lounging poolside at the Kingston Sheraton Hotel, gorging on lobster and hanging with the cream of Jamaican reggae, including several of his heroes, such as Big Youth, U Roy, Burning Spear, and Prince Far I.
Just a few days after the Pistols’ breakup, Lydon announced his intention to form a new band that would be “anti music of any kind.” On his return from Jamaica, he started recruiting. Lydon invited his friend John Wardle—an East Ender with piercing blue eyes who had reinvented himself as Jah Wobble—to play bass, despite his being barely acquainted with the instrument. Lydon also tracked down Keith Levene, who had played guitar in the earliest incarnation of the Clash.
Reggae was the crucial point of intersection for these three core members of PiL, otherwise a motley crew both musically and personally. “The whole reason PiL worked at all was that John, Wobble, and myself were just total dub fanatics,” says Levene. “We were always going to ‘blues.’” Blues were illegal reggae dances somewhere between a house party and a sound system (those massively amplified dances featuring DJs and MCs, rather than bands, and held inside halls or outdoors on lawns). Blues generally took place in someone’s apartment, with money raised by selling alcohol and sometimes weed. Long a fanatical reggae collector, Lydon had been introduced to sound system culture by his friend Don Letts, a black DJ who played at legendary punk venue the Roxy and who is often credited with turning the punk audience on to reggae. With Letts as his escort, Lydon frequently found himself the only white person inside ultraheavy clubs like the Four Aces in East London. “You’d feel a bit dodgy sneaking into the blues,” says Wobble, “but it was fine on the whole. Black people were just cool about it. It’d be like, ‘what’s these white kids doing here?’ But no one would hassle you. In fact, as a punk rocker you were safer in those days at the black dances than you were going down to the local white-boy pub. For me, hearing the bass that loud was a huge thing. The physical nature of it just left me gobsmacked.”
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 3