“Being a woman is both feeling female, expressing female, and also (for the time being at least) reacting against what a woman is told she ‘should’ be like,” wrote Ana da Silva in a Rough Trade booklet on the Raincoats. “This contradiction creates chaos in our lives and if we want to be real, we have to neglect what has been imposed on us, we have to create our lives in a new way. It is important to try and avoid as much as possible playing the games constantly proposed to you.” The Raincoats’ way of bypassing the pressure to be feminine was to look ordinary, adopting a scruffiness that would have been unremarkable in an all-male band during this era. Coming from women, though, it took on the quality of a radical gesture, a strident refusal of glamour. “We were quite shy, really,” Birch said. Raincoats shows were less performances than “like watching a process, which the audience kind of felt they were privileged to kind of spy in on.” Kurt Cobain, a passionate fan, used the same eavesdropping metaphor in his liner notes for a Raincoats reissue. Listening to the records, he wrote, felt like “we’re together in the same old house and I have to be completely still or they will hear me spying from above and, if I get caught—everything will be ruined because it’s their thing.”
Although feminism was pervasive in universities, art colleges, and squatland, the music industry was still in the dark ages when it came to awareness about sexism. Advertisements commonly used chauvinist copy or imagery suggestive of rape scenarios. In this context, the postpunk groups’ obsession with “ideological soundness” had moral force. The Raincoats “Off Duty Trip,” for instance, concerned a notorious rape trial of the day, in which the perpetrator was treated leniently by a judge to avoid damaging his military career. But most Raincoats songs were more oblique explorations of the personal-is-political zone. And their rambunctious, near shambles of folk-tinged punk was far from dour or didactic. “We rehearsed for hours. You probably couldn’t find a band that rehearsed more than we did, but we always fell apart,” says Birch. “We always pushed ourselves a little bit beyond where we were capable of going.” Unlike many punk-inspired musicians who embraced the anyone-can-do-it idea of nontechnique but were actually pretty skilled players, the Raincoats really did learn to play in public.
After the gloriously ragged debut The Raincoats, a whole world of exotic influences seeped into the group’s music, from ethnic field recordings to Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis. The band started to pick up “odd instruments from junk shops and markets,” says Birch, “like the balophone, this Mali instrument that’s got gourds underneath it and beautiful bits of wood and misshapen holes.” The result of all these nonrock inputs—Odyshape, the Raincoats’ second album—is postpunk that’s been totally unrocked. “My basslines started to get more and more sprawling and all over the place,” says Birch. The Raincoats’ rhythms had always been loosely tethered. Palmolive had “lots of tiny little toms, so it was always quite tribal. She wasn’t so much driving the music as we were all clattering along together.” By Odyshape, though, Palmolive had quit and many of the songs were written without a drummer in mind. Percussion parts were added afterward courtesy of a series of guest drummers, including Robert Wyatt (who’d been coaxed out of retirement to record a brilliant series of politically charged singles for Rough Trade). “Only Loved at Night” is like a gamelan music box, the different patterns interlocking like intricate cogs. On this song, as with much of Odyshape, the group swapped instrumental roles (a common postpunk ruse to keep things fresh), with Aspinall playing bass and Birch contributing drony guitar while da Silva produces wistful chimes from her kalimba, an African thumb piano. Charles Hayward’s clockwork percussion on the track, added after the fact, is decorative, just one of many parallel pulses.
All through this period Birch was moonlighting in the Red Crayola, having developed a rapport with Mayo Thompson, who had coproduced the first Raincoats album. “From my point of view, the stuff we did in the Red Crayola was a continuation of what I was doing in the Raincoats, take something quite normal and twist it out of alignment,” says Birch. The original Red Krayola (spelled with a K in the United States to avoid trademark infringement) emerged out of the same midsixties Texas psychedelic scene as Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Krayola simultaneously partook of the era’s freak-out spirit while going slightly against the grain of the times. This “dissident among the dissidents” stance became Mayo Thompson’s signature. He imbued the group with a certain dry conceptualism that was at odds with late-sixties let-it-all-hang-out mysticism. The group’s second album, Coconut Hotel, recorded in 1967 and rejected by their original record company for being too experimental, featured songs with titles like “Vocal,” “Free Guitar,” and “Piano.”
In the early seventies, Thompson moved to New York. He fell in with Art and Language, attracted by the sheer combative nature of their stance—“They were looking for trouble, and I’ve always been looking for trouble”—and made an album with A and L, Corrected Slogans. He then moved to England in time for punk—just the sort of “action and edge” he craved. In the U.K., Thompson befriended Pere Ubu and in 1979 used them as his backing band to record a new Red Crayola album, Soldier-Talk. Meanwhile, he was becoming an increasingly pivotal figure in the Rough Trade collective, producing or coproducing (with Geoff Travis) many of the best postpunk bands of the era and taking on the role of public spokesperson for the label. As an in-house ideologue, he often collided with Green, a rival theory-guru figure in the Rough Trade milieu. Unlike the tortured Green, though, Thompson found a certain bone-dry humor in the grotesque ironies of capitalist reality. Explaining his penchant for fractured musical structures, he observed, “I didn’t fragment the world—I just happened to notice that it is fragmented.” Released on Rough Trade in 1981, the Red Crayola’s Kangaroo? featured lyrics from Art and Language that addressed various “monstrosities” generated by the internal contradictions of bourgeois culture.
Simultaneous with the revived Red Crayola, Thompson started playing guitar in Pere Ubu (who by then had abandoned the major-label sector and signed to Rough Trade). Some commentators blamed Thompson for the whimsical, unrock direction Pere Ubu pursued at Rough Trade, but that process was already under way before he joined. Influenced by his Jehovah’s Witness background, David Thomas suddenly decided that rock ’n’ roll was reprobate music that stirred up selfish passions. By 1980’s The Art of Walking, the first Ubu album for Rough Trade, the group had jettisoned not just heavy riffs but dread, decay, and all the other signifiers of “industrial” in favor of bucolic imagery, ecologically motivated anthropomorphism, and songs about fish and dinosaurs. “The birds are saying what I want to say,” trilled Thomas on one song, while “Go” counseled attentiveness to “the small things that give pleasure.”
Despite this disconcerting shift, Ubu remained one of Rough Trade’s biggest bands, but the jewel in their roster, both sonically and commercially, was Young Marble Giants, a trio from Wales who, like Ubu, went in for a kind of postrock pastoralism, but did it much better. The group’s debut (and only) album, Colossal Youth, became one of Rough Trade’s biggest-selling records of the postpunk period. Young Marble Giants’ music exuded a spare stillness that felt wondrously fresh in 1980. Conceived as a revolt against punk by founder and primary songwriter Stuart Moxham, Young Marble Giants’ sound was partially inspired by the soft mood music of light classical and easy listening, fairground music, and “cheesy organ sounds” such as the Wurlitzers at the old movie palaces. Moxham developed a dry, choppy, suppressed-sounding style of rhythm guitar using an ultra-trebly Rickenbacker and a technique called “muting” (resting his strumming hand on the strings to damp the vibrations), which resulted in a peculiar mélange of Duane Eddy’s twangy tremolo riffs and Steve Cropper’s crisp rhythm guitar. His brother Phil’s bass—high, melodic, often mistaken for another guitar—was a beetling, scurrying presence. Moxham describes the interplay between the two instruments as “almost like knitting,” a strikingly unmanly metaphor that beautifully captures the quiet radical
ism of YMG’s music. The rhythms, generated from a rudimentary drum machine, were played live on a crappy-sounding mono cassette player. Augmenting this sparse sonic palette were occasional keyboards and subliminal wisps of weirdness produced using a ring modulator or devices cobbled together by a tech-whiz cousin of the Moxhams.
But what really made Young Marble Giants special was the low-key, almost spoken singing of Alison Statton. She was Phil’s girlfriend, and in truth Stuart never really wanted her to join the band. Indeed, when NME readers voted her the eighth-best singer of 1980, Stuart spluttered, “But Alison’s not a singer! She’s someone who sings. Alison sings as if she was at the bus stop or something. A real singer sings with more control.” Inadvertently, he captured precisely what was so perfect about Statton’s undemonstrative vocals: a seductive ordinariness, a cool pallor of tone. Her image—print dresses, white tennis shoes, ankle socks—also fit the music’s aura of fresh-faced provincial naïveté.
Young Marble Giants felt like music by introverts, for introverts. Moxham recalls seeking to create a sound “like a radio that’s between stations, listening to it under the bedclothes at four A.M…. these fantastic short-wave sounds and snatches of modulated sounds.” Without knowing it, a lot of people had been waiting for a sound as subdued and insidious as this. YMG were practically adopted by the Rough Trade family. Moxham likens Geoff Travis to a father figure and describes the Raincoats as “feisty aunties who took us under their wing. On one level, they were kind of frighteningly feminist in a way that was new to us—they didn’t shave their legs, for instance—but on the other they were very kind to us.” YMG’s un–rock ’n’ roll behavior (they often brought their dog with them to gigs) fit perfectly with the Rough Trade style.
Sadly, internal tensions split the band only ten months after the March 1980 release of Colossal Youth. In between, they also released the Final Day EP. Its title track is perhaps their best, and is certainly YMG’s best-known song, thanks in large part to its receiving heavy rotation on John Peel’s ten o’clock show on Radio One. “That song just came out perfectly formed,” says Moxham. “It took as long to write as it does to listen to.” To get the single-note whine that runs through the whole track and evokes what Moxham calls “the low-level dread” of living with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, he stuck a matchstick in one of the organ keys. But what’s most chilling about “Final Day” is its brevity (just one minute and thirty-nine seconds) and Statton’s fatalistic tone as she sings, “When the light goes out on the final day/We will all be gone having had our say.”
In the early seventies, John Peel was the BBC’s resident hippie DJ, playing a mix of folk rock, prog, reggae, and cult weirdness. But he was quick to embrace punk and by 1979 had become a massively important figure for the postpunk do-it-yourself culture. “If you knew that one of your favorite bands was doing a Peel session, that was as important as going to one of their gigs,” says Jamming’s Tony Fletcher. “If you had to be out for some reason, you’d get one of your mates to tape it.” Records that Peel discovered would sometimes trickle down into other Radio One DJs’ shows, resulting in some unlikely U.K. chart hits. Downtown New York performance artist Laurie Anderson reached number two in the winter of 1981 with “O Superman,” an eerie, eight-minute piece based largely around her electronically processed vocals, while the Pop Group offshoot Pigbag made number three in the spring of 1982 with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag.”
Peel’s support of the marginal and maverick was all the more crucial because Radio One, before deregulation of the airwaves, enjoyed a near monopoly over pop music in the U.K. Yet paradoxically it was precisely this centralized, nationwide nature of British radio that created the possibility of real cultural decentralization. Peel received strange self-released records from every corner of the country and was not only conscientious about sifting through them, but an ardent regionalist inclined to give provincial groups preferential treatment. If Peel liked your record, you were instantly granted a national audience. “You’d get records sent in by these stroppy lads from tiny towns in Lincolnshire, places you had to look up on the map,” Peel said a couple of years before his death. “And I’m a great sucker for cheerful amateurism. Another thing I liked was that a lot of these bands were almost entirely without ambition. Their goal was often just to put out a single, or do one session with us.” Sometimes a session recorded at the BBC specially for Peel’s show actually became a single, as happened with Scritti’s Peel Sessions EP. That was also the case for the Prefects, irreverent cacophony makers from Birmingham, whose anthem, “Going Through the Motions,” took the piss out of professionalized-to-living-death rock bands, and whose material ranged from the twelve-minute dirge “Bristol Road Leads to Dachau” to an eight-second cover of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“John Peel band” practically became a genre of music during the period from 1979 to 1981. All kinds of eccentrics with four-track tape recorders in their bedrooms sent off singles and, if the track caught Peel’s ear, they’d enjoy a brief reign of glory on the national airwaves. One classic example is “There Goes Concorde Again” by (And The) Native Hipsters. The brainchild of two Wimbledon School of Art graduates, William Wilding and Nanette Greenblatt, this 1980 single blended cloying whimsy with genuine psychedelic strangeness. Buoyed by keyboards that capered like tipsy aliens, Greenblatt played the loopy housewife peering through net curtains and cooing, “Oooooooh, look—there goes Concorde again!” Peel recalled, “That was one of those records, where you put it on and thought, ‘This will be fantastically irritating in a fortnight, but until then let’s play it to death.’” Also on the wacky side, Notsensibles’ “I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher” tapped into that often downplayed side of postpunk based in not taking anything seriously. “Postpunk’s thought of as something rather po-faced and somber,” recalled Peel. “But a lot of it was funny. We used to go to gigs and laugh like a drain.”
Not that the Peel show was nonstop silliness. Another late-night hit in 1979 was Fatal Microbes’ “Violence Grows,” on which the baleful tones of fifteen-year-old punk starlet Honey Bane survey London’s frayed social fabric during what proved to be a banner year for street violence. Noting how bus conductors had learned to keep their mouths shut when thugs refused to pay, Bane taunts the listener, “While you’re getting kicked to death in a London pedestrian subway/Don’t think passersby will help, they’ll just look the other way.” Slowdrone guitar midway between the Doors’ “The End” and the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” swirls ominously behind her. Family Fodder managed to fuse scary and silly on “Playing Golf (with My Flesh Crawling),” a macabre yet jaunty ditty sung from the point of view of a man who’s in a state of arrested putrefaction (“There’s times I feel fungus growing on me”) and wishes he could get it over with and be dead.
On the furthest edges of the John Peel universe, the do-it-yourself principle proliferated in the form of the cassette underground. Groups who thought that vinyl was too costly or too careerist released their music in tape form instead, sometimes selling it for a nominal sum, sometimes giving it away for free if you mailed them a blank tape. There were hundreds of cassette bands across the U.K., typically with absurdist/puerile names like God and the Turds, the Night the Goldfish Died, Anthrax for the People, or the Scrotum Poles. There were even a handful of cassette-only labels, such as Smellytapes and Deleted Records. The absolute kingpin of this microscene, its Rough Trade, was Fuck Off Records.
Fuck Off was run by Kif Kif, formerly of the hippie band Here and Now. He had ended up playing noise punk in his own group, the 012, whose motto was “Bad music is soul music.” Fuck Off’s catalog boasted over thirty cassettes. The label’s star act was Danny and the Dressmakers, creators of such immortal classics as “Come on Baby Lite My Shite” and “Going Down the Sperm Bank Four Quid a Wank.” But the label’s strongest conceptual statement was releasing a cacophonous cassette by the Teen Vampires, much of which consisted of an argument betwe
en the singer and bassist. Kif described it as “the worst tape I’ve ever heard.” But he felt compelled to release it “just because it was so awful.” Whether anybody actually sent off for the cassette is irrelevant. The purity of the gesture—the do-it-yourself/messthetics principle taken to the limit—stands.
CHAPTER 12
FREAK SCENE:
CABARET NOIR AND THEATER OF CRUELTY IN POSTPUNK SAN FRANCISCO
“SAN FRANCISCO’S the kook capital of the world,” Residents’ spokesman Jay Clem once observed about the city that has long rivaled New York as America’s bohemian capital, a sanctuary for artistic experiment and nonconformist living. “What this city means to me is the last stand on American ground,” Damon Edge of Chrome declared in 1979. “People who don’t fit in anywhere else come here…. There’s no place else to go in America.”
The 1950s Beat milieu of poets and writers that clustered around City Lights bookstore and the late-sixties scene of hippies and happenings focused around Haight Street and the Fillmore are both well documented. Far less attention has been paid to the third golden age of San Franciscan bohemia, based around punk rock, industrial culture, and art/music synergy in all their most outré manifestations in the late seventies and early eighties. Blaine L. Reininger, cofounder of the theatrical electronic cabaret ensemble Tuxedomoon, wrote of this era as “our own ‘Belle Epoque’…. San Francisco seemed to befull of geniuses then, and the scene which arose around places like the Mabuhay Gardens and the Deaf Club felt like Paris must have felt when people like Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin were meeting in the cafés in Montmartre. We felt possessed by some demon or god, and we went about our business in what I can only call a state of grace.”
Like New York, San Francisco in those days was a city in which it was possible to live on virtually nothing, which allowed artists to avoid full-time jobs and concentrate on their creative work. All over the city there were faded-looking Victorians, large houses that could be rented dirt cheap. “I had a fourteen-room Victorian for six hundred dollars a month which I shared with four other people,” says Tuxedomoon’s bassist Peter Principle. “You could get by because things were inexpensive and the community was supportive.”
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