BY MID-1981, Postcard Records had reached an impasse. In many ways, the label had achieved astonishing things in an incredibly short period. Orange Juice’s second single, “Blue Boy,” sold nearly twenty thousand copies and has been described as the Scottish “Anarchy in the U.K.” for its galvanizing effect on new bands north of Hadrian’s Wall. With Orange Juice’s, Josef K’s, and Aztec Camera’s singles barraging the upper reaches of the independent charts, Postcard took Scottish pop from a buzz in 1980 to the Sound of 1981. London’s myopic A&R scouts took heed and started flying up to Glasgow and Edinburgh in droves.
Try as they might, though, Postcard couldn’t propel its groups onto the pop charts. In April 1981, Orange Juice’s fourth single, “Poor Old Soul,” was number one on the independent charts but it only reached number eighty on the “real” charts, where penetrating the Top 75 was the industry definition of a hit. Frustrated, Horne began to contemplate the previously abhorrent notion of hooking up Orange Juice with a London-based major label before the momentum they’d built dissipated. It seemed it might even be necessary to slap a coat of gloss over the group’s music. Orange Juice still sounded too scruffy and scratchy in the pop-chart context.
Meanwhile, Josef K took the next logical step and recorded their debut album. What should have been a triumph turned into a debacle. Sorry for Laughing, as the LP was originally called, sounded too glossy for the band’s liking. “The manic and abrasive edge apparent when we played live was missing,” says Haig. Josef K proceeded to rerecord the entire album (jettisoning some of their best songs in the process). Retitled The Only Fun in Town, it was released in June 1981. “Only Fun was all recorded in a couple of days, like a Velvet Underground record would have been,” recalls Haig. “We purposely drowned the vocals out with guitars in order to get a more live sound. It was an unconscious act of commercial suicide, definitely!” In hindsight, Malcolm Ross regrets the decision. “We should just have released the first version, Sorry for Laughing. It would have been out six months earlier than Only Fun, so we wouldn’t have lost all that momentum we had.”
Josef K’s critical champions, Morley at NME and McCullough at Sounds, were horrified by The Only Fun in Town, feeling the group had betrayed its pop promise and their expectations. Despite the bad reviews, the album actually sold well, climbed the independent charts, and even enjoyed something of a legacy through its influence on a breed of abrasive indie guitar pop, exemplified by such mideighties bands as the June Brides, the Pastels, and the Wedding Present. But in 1981, the perception was that Josef K had missed their moment. By autumn, the group had split up, with Haig leaving to pursue an electronic-dance direction as Rhythm of Life.
In the last months of 1981, Postcard looked out of step. Synths, string sections, and a slickness beyond Horne and his groups’ reach were the new state of the art. Fatally, the Postcard sound was a rock scholar’s idea of “pure pop.” It played fantastically well within the circuit of the music press and the independent charts, but compared to “proper” pop music it sounded spindly and amateurish.
Still, Postcard had played a huge role in turning hipster opinion against the dowdy seriousness of postpunk. Almost single-handedly they’d made melody, fun, and love songs cool again. “Funk” was the big buzzword of 1981, but few remembered that Orange Juice’s “Falling and Laughing” featured a disco-y bassline or that the group had precociously celebrated Chic. Postcard and Orange Juice had put the concept of “pop” back on the table, but pop, that cruel mistress, had moved too fast for them to keep up. Or had it?
CHAPTER 18
ELECTRIC DREAMS:
SYNTHPOP
THE HUMAN LEAGUE ARRIVED with as much fanfare as a new group could hope for. Signed to Virgin, they were touted as the next big thing. David Bowie proclaimed that “watching them is like watching 1980.” Admittedly, he said this in 1979. Still, to be decreed a full year ahead of the pack by the glamdaddy of all things cutting-edge was indeed a fabulous endorsement. When 1980 actually rolled around, though, the Human League seemed stuck. They’d been one of the very first postpunk outfits to talk up “pop” as something to aspire to. Yet they’d failed to become pop. Their first two albums for Virgin, 1979’s Reproduction and 1980’s Travelogue, sold modestly. Compared to Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco production of Donna Summer and Sparks, Reproduction’s version of electrofuturism sounded creaky and strangely quaint, and the League knew it. “We wanted our records to be more brutal on the rhythmic level, but at that point the engineers and producers available in Britain weren’t up to it,” says Ian Craig Marsh.
Travelogue sounded slightly more forceful and glossy, but a hit single continued to elude the group. As if to rub salt in their wounds, on the eve of its release, pop punkers the Undertones ridiculed the Human League in their Top 10 hit “My Perfect Cousin.” “Kevin,” the song’s goody-two-shoes subject (he’s got a degree “in economics, maths, physics, and bionics”), starts an electronic band with some art school boys. “His mother bought him a synthesizer,” spits singer Fear-gal Sharkey with disgust, “Got the Human League in to advise her.” Now that he’s in a band, Kevin gets girls chasing him, “But what a shame/It’s in vain…Kevin, he’s in love with himself.” The song crystallized the early Human League’s public image as music for narcissistic art school poseurs and science geeks.
The group’s cold, off-putting aura was exacerbated by the science-fiction subject matter of many of their early songs. Reproduction’s big single, “Empire State Human,” concerned a man who keeps on growing. Travelogue’s “The Black Hit of Space” imagines a record so monstrously bland that it turns into a kind of predatory cultural void sucking up everything in its path. As it climbs the charts, the rest of the Top 40 disappears, “until there was nothing but it left to buy.” All the witty astrophysical details in the lyric (gravity being so multiplied in proximity to the disc that your record player’s tonearm weighs “more than Saturn,” and so forth) only confirmed the band’s geeky image. These were the sort of people who read New Scientist and Omni and who watched James Burke’s Connections.
In a bid to stake their claim on being “tomorrow’s pop today,” the Human League came up with the ambitious and slightly loony idea of doing fully automated shows. “Talking Heads asked us to be the support group on their 1980 U.K. tour and we said, ‘We’ll do the gigs but we wanna be in the audience and watch the show,’” grins Marsh, still enthused by the idea over twenty years later. “We’d got these new synchronization units that operated the slide show in sync with the music. We guaranteed that while we wouldn’t be onstage we’d be at every gig talking to the audience, shaking hands and signing autographs.” Says Martyn Ware, “We’d got a long way down the line, all the programming was done. It was going to be this big multimedia show, but Talking Heads changed their minds. Maybe they thought they were going to be upstaged.”
It was as if a curse thwarted the Human League at every step. In May 1980, the League’s Holiday 80 double single scraped the lower end of the Top 75, and Top of the Pops, almost in an act of charity, invited them to appear on the show to perform their cover of Gary Glitter’s “Rock ’n’ Roll, Part One.” Even after this fabulous exposure to the British record-buying public, Human League didn’t make the true Top 40 hit parade. What really hurt was that by mid-1980 it seemed like virtually anybody wielding a synth could become a pop star. One year earlier, Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” had reached number one, the first in a string of huge hits for the group’s singer and mastermind, Gary Numan, and the trigger for a deluge of synth-laced chart incursions from acts such as John Foxx, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Ultravox, Visage, and Spandau Ballet. Everybody but the Human League. In the year since Bowie had heralded them, the group had gone from being ahead of their time to lagging behind the futurist pack.
Numan had become a synthpop pioneer almost by accident. Making the first Tubeway Army album in Spaceward Studio in the summer of 1978, he stumbled across a Minimoog left behind
by another band. “Although I liked some electronic music I still associated it mainly with pompous supergroups [and] disgusting, self-indulgent solos that went on for half an hour,” Numan said. Before the rental company took the synth back, Numan messed around with it. “Luckily for me the synth had been left on a heavy setting, which produced the most powerful, ground-shaking sound I had ever heard.”
Following this revelation, Tubeway Army’s debut album abruptly swerved from its guitars-only conception to an electronically turbocharged New Wave. This was a transitional sound, hard rock with a futuristic sheen, rooted in the clean punchy riffs of glam. “I was just a guitarist that played keyboards,” Numan said. “I just turned punk songs into electronic songs.” The Moog sound was fat and doomy, not so far from the down-tuned bombast of Black Sabbath, and the way Tubeway Army’s music moved had nothing to do with the sequenced pulse beat of Moroder. On Replicas, the group’s breakthrough album, the rhythm section was human and potent, with Numan playing guitar as well as keyboards. The next album, The Pleasure Principle—which was released under Numan’s name—upped the futurism and abandoned guitars for synths. Numan still avoided programmed rhythm, however, working with a bass guitarist and flesh-and-blood drummer. Numan’s music rocked, and even when it didn’t, it possessed an almost symphonic grandeur. Just listen to the chillingly beautiful “Down in the Park,” a sort of dystopian power ballad.
Critics, possibly disconcerted by the way he bypassed the music press en route to the top of the charts, unjustly pegged Numan as a Bowie clone. They sourced his image in Bowie’s aristocratic alien from The Man Who Fell to Earth and his sound in Low. But what he actually derived from Bowie was the art of creative synthesis—or as Numan put it with characteristic and admirable frankness, “plagiarism”—weaving together an original identity out of pilfered bits and bobs. He also inherited glam rock’s penchant for theater and spectacle. Punk’s “antihero thing” and back-to-basics simplicity were “against everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” Numan explained. He didn’t believe in “being the same as the audience.” He liked distance, a literal gulf between the stage and the crowd. His tours featured stunning lighting, set design, and even robots. “Showbiz for showbiz’s sake more than anything,” Numan explained. “I think I’m just taking it back to cabaret.”
Numan had no time for social realism or everyday subjects, instead adapting his lyrics from a science-fiction novel he’d tried to write. The saga concerned a city in the near future administered by a “wise” megacomputer originally created by humans to bring their society back from the brink of anarchy. The machine decides that humans are actually the problem and embarks on a secret program of elimination. Numan’s lyrics feature a menagerie of “types.” The “friends” of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” are cyborg buddies or sexpals. The Grey Men perform the IQ tests that determine who gets culled first. The Crazies are guerrillas hip to the Machine’s master scheme who fight back.
Lost to all but the most hard-core Numanoids, the details of this dystopian metropolis weren’t important so much as the moods—isolation, paranoia, emotional disconnection, hints of sexual confusion—conjured by the song scenarios. In his autobiography, Praying to the Aliens, Numan discussed the way Replicas teems “with images of decay, seediness, drug addicts, fragile people and the abandonment of morals. The bisexual allusions are partly based on encounters I had with gay men, most of who were much older than me, who had attempted to persuade me to try things. I was never interested in gay sex…but the seediness of those situations left an impression which I used in Replicas.”
Beyond the futuristic sound and imagery, what really hooked Numan’s legion of fans was the vulnerability. Gary’s sullen pout and wounded eyes made for a perfect pinup in the classic teenybop tradition. Numan had transgender appeal. Girls could dream of thawing the iceman, bringing him back to life. Boys could identify with his loneliness, allegorized in songs such as “M.E.,” in which Numan sang from the point of view of “the last living machine” on an Earth where all the people have died. “Its own power source is running down. I used to have a picture in my mind of this sad and desperately alone machine standing in a desert-like wasteland, just waiting to die.”
Teen dreams of technoir alienation, Replicas and The Pleasure Principle were like cartoon versions of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer. But Numan’s true contemporary parallel and inspiration was the far less revered Ultravox. Despite having a fairly fierce sound, Ultravox’s artifice and mannerism sat uneasily with punk, and critics generally wrote them off as glam Johnny-come-latelies. Guitars dominated their sound at first, but by 1978’s synth-laden Systems of Romance, they verged on a kind of electropunk. Numan was listening and taking notes.
What really made Ultravox crucial precursors of 1980’s synthpop explosion was their European aura and singer/lyricist John Foxx’s frigid imagery of dehumanization and decadence. He told ZigZag that the group’s style was based in rejecting rock’s standard “Americanisms.” Billy Currie, the band’s keyboardist, was a classically trained viola player, and he determinedly avoided blues scales. “We feel European,” said Foxx, when NME asked why they’d recorded Systems with Kraftwerk producer Conny Plank at his studio near Köln. “The sort of background and melodies we tend to come out with just seemed to be Germanic even before we came here.” As for the atmosphere of numb anomie and alienated sexuality, Ultravox laid it all on the table with the debut’s manifesto-like “I Want to Be a Machine” and “MySex,” which bore the heavy imprint of J. G. Ballard’s Crash. “MySex is a spark of electro flesh,” sings Foxx, “A neon outline on a high-rise overspill…skyscraper shadows on a car-crash overpass…”
After three unsuccessful major-label albums, Ultravox were in an even worse place than Human League, and at the end of 1978, Island dropped them. Foxx went solo and totally synthetic, abandoning not just guitars but real drums, too. On his debut solo album, Metamatic, Foxx developed the cinematic (and cinephile) quality already glimpsed in Ultravox songs such as “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” The imagistic lyrics resembled fragments torn from an avant-garde screenplay: “A flicker of flashback, background dissolves…Underneath the green arcade/A blurred girl.” Foxx’s unveiling as a solo artist coincided with Numania, and benefited from it. The singles “Underpass,” “No One Driving,” and “Burning Car” dented the lower end of the pop charts, but Foxx didn’t achieve anything comparable to the success of his young admirer.
Meanwhile, two other former members of Ultravox, Billy Currie and guitarist Robin Simon, had stumbled on an entire scene based around electronic music and the romance of all things European and cinematic. After being junked by Island and ditched by Foxx, Currie and Simon drowned their sorrows at a Soho nightspot called Billy’s where Rusty Egan deejayed a weekly event called A Club for Heroes. Bowie was the patron saint. His “Heroes” defined the musical mood of grandeur and decay, while his wardrobe of images and personae set the fashion tone somewhere at the intersection of aristocracy, androgyny, and alien. Egan’s soundtrack mixed the Berlin sound of Bowie and Iggy with Moroder, Kraftwerk, early U.K. electropop such as “Being Boiled” and “Warm Leatherette,” and new synthpop outfits such as Belgium’s Telex and Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra. When the party moved to a larger venue called the Blitz, its crowd became known as Blitz Kids.
At the core of the scene was Egan’s flatmate, Steve Strange. He was the club’s doorman, weeding out the riffraff and preserving the atmosphere of in-crowd elitism, while his ever changing image defined the Blitz Kid style as a blend of retro (bolero hats, toy-soldier coats, Russian cummerbunds, pillbox hats) and futuristic (geometric haircuts, stylized makeup that turned the face into an abstract canvas). Strange soon became the front man of Visage, a confederacy of punk failures looking for a second shot at stardom. Founding member Egan had drummed in the Rich Kids, the much hyped but unsuccessful group formed by Glen Matlock after leaving the Sex Pistols. Another Rich Kid, Midge Ure, played guitar. Filling out the lineup
were Ultravox’s Billy Currie on keyboards and violin and no less than three members—keyboardist Dave Formula, guitarist John McGeoch, bassist Barry Adamson—of Magazine, another postpunk band that had failed to deliver on high expectations. Strange had the least impressive résumé of the lot, his sole exploit to date being a brief involvement with a punk outfit tastelessly named the Moors Murderers who’d garnered a few outraged tabloid headlines.
Visage’s timing was perfect. The Blitz scene was the vanguard of a general shift in pop culture back toward fantasy and escapism. Strange described the new breed—now confusingly known as New Romantics, Futurists, and Blitz Kids—as “people who work nine to five and then go out and live their fantasies. They’re glad to be dressed up and escaping work and all the greyness and depression.” Yet for all its brisk electrodisco rhythms, Visage’s music was sepia toned and at times almost funereal, with Strange’s vocals exuding a fey sadness. The hit singles “Fade to Grey” and “The Damned Don’t Cry” both conjured what Mark Fisher called “the Euro-aesthete’s ‘exhaustion from life.’” The effect was compounded by the band’s videos, which evoked a between-the-wars desolation derived from Cabaret. With impeccable timing, Bowie staged a comeback in the late summer of 1980 with his number one hit “Ashes to Ashes,” which tapped into the same mood of washed-out and washed-up melancholy and used a similar European electronic sound, as if to remind everybody he’d done it first with side two of Low. Steve Strange, looking like a Pierrot, made an appearance in the “Ashes” video.
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