Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  Unlike the Leeds groups—Gang of Four’s ambivalence about entertainment, the Mekons’ cultivated ordinariness—the Liverpool postpunks had no embarrassment about their desire to be famous. “Stars are stars and they shine so hard,” McCulloch sang on Crocodiles’s “Stars Are Stars.” The lyrics are typical Bunnymen widescreen imagery, but McCulloch could equally be singing about his feelings about rock’s firmament—a mixture of awe and absolute confidence that he’ll be up there, too, sooner rather than later. Obsessed with Bowie (for a period he insisted on being called Duke, as in Thin White Duke), McCulloch spent his teenage years feeling as if “there was this big movie camera in the sky,” he said. “The first line in ‘Going Up’ on Crocodiles—and it’s a terrible line—is ‘Ain’t thou watching my film.’ It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but that was what spurred me on.”

  McCulloch didn’t particularly look like star material in the early days. Appallingly shortsighted, he wore “aviator blue-tinted glasses, really crap, and often with tape at the corner ’cause they were also falling to bits,” recalls Drummond. But behind his spectacles and shyness, he was a natural. Luminously pretty, luscious-lipped and tousled, he’d also been perfecting the art of presence and projection through many narcissistic hours of self-contemplation before a mirror. McCulloch was so certain of his destiny that he skipped the opportunity to go to college and spent two years doing nothing, just waiting for the absolutely perfect group to coalesce around him. And it did.

  NME’s readers voted Echo and the Bunnymen the number two group in the country in early 1982, while decreeing Heaven Up Here to be the previous year’s best album. This was essentially an anti–New Pop protest vote by postpunk’s silent majority, who’d chafed during the past year when it seemed that anything and everything was hip except made-in-Britain, all-male guitar bands, the one thing they actually liked. The Bunnymen were effectively picking up the slack left by the demise of Joy Division. But they weren’t alone. U2 also placed well in various readers’ charts.

  Not coincidentally, around this time, Ian McCulloch started to make bitchy comments about U2, describing their anthemic songs as “music for plumbers and bricklayers” while boasting that the Bunnymen were “an oceans and mountains band.” Behind the dissing lay an astute perception of threat. U2 were the Bunnymen’s nearest rivals when it came to capturing that post–Joy Division audience. True, some of the abandoned flock had joined in New Pop’s celebration of shiny surface pleasures. “What’s been called the ‘new pop mentality’ is a resignation,” suggested Andy McCluskey, singer of Liverpool-based synthpop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. McCluskey diagnosed New Pop as a mass retreat from the sheer visionary intensity represented by Ian Curtis. “I think Joy Division were the very last band who could come along and look for something.” But those who didn’t buy the New Pop dream still pined for a band that represented some sort of vision quest, a band worth being devout about.

  U2 stepped forward to fill that role. Their first really successful single, “I Will Follow,” made it clear that they were in the market for converts. Prior to that, they’d recorded their debut single, “11 O’Clock Tick Tock,” with Martin Hannett, and done another single, “A Day Without Me,” that was actually inspired by Ian Curtis. On that track, Bono sang as the departed Curtis looking back on “a world I left behind.” It was almost as if Bono was consciously preparing to take on the role vacated by Curtis. According to Tony Wilson, that was pretty much the case. “Two months after Ian died, U2 were brought round to my office at Granada TV by this plugger looking to break them, and I remember Bono sitting on my desk saying how incredibly sorry he was about Ian’s death, how it had really hurt him…how Ian was the number one singer of his generation, and he, Bono, knew he was always only ever going to be number two!” laughs Wilson. “And he said something else. Something like, ‘Now he’s gone, I promise you I’ll do it for him.’ Not quite that silly, but along those lines!”

  In 1983, the glory boys broke through, with all those not seduced by Goth’s vampy ways rallying to the new transcendence, aka the Big Music. In February, both the Bunnymen and U2 enjoyed their first U.K. Top 10 hits, with “The Cutter” and “New Year’s Day,” respectively. After briefly intersecting with New Pop, Simple Minds reverted to their true calling, stadium-ready art rock, and produced an increasingly bombastic series of hits, on which Jim Kerr’s panoramic lyrics, teeming with lofty intangibles, invoked wanderlust and wonder.

  Elemental imagery was all over British music in 1983–84, from the Waterboys’ songs such as “The Big Music,” “A Pagan Place,” and “The Whole of the Moon,” to Big Country’s hits “Fields of Fire (400 Miles)” and “In a Big Country.” It wasn’t just a mainstream phenomenon, either. Formed by ex-Fall members Martin Bramah and Una Baines, the Blue Orchids topped the indie charts with The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain), a magnificent album of acid-soaked neopsychedelia teeming with pagan and pantheistic poetry. Their anthem “Dumb Magician” ended with the defiant call to transcendence—“The only way out is up”—while “Mad as the Mist and Snow” used verses by W. B. Yeats as its lyric. The Blue Orchids had supported Echo and the Bunnymen on the latter’s 1981 U.K. tour, and in some ways the two groups were underground and mainstream versions of the same quest for “a glory beyond all glories,” as Bill Drummond put it. You could see the affinity in the groups’ record covers: The Greatest Hit showed the setting sun glinting over a silhouetted mountainscape, while Heaven Up Here gorgeously pictured the four Bunnymen staring into a navy blue sea while standing on an ebb tide beach whose wet sand reflects the dark turquoise sky.

  Along with lyrical and pictorial imagery of natural grandeur, the Big Music groups shared a Celtic connection. They were all from Scotland, or Ireland, or the heavily Irish Liverpool and Manchester. They also often gave the quest for “indefinable glory” a vaguely military or messianic aura. The Bunnymen tapped into this spirit with their 1980 shows, using camouflage, dry ice, and inventive lighting to create an Apocalypse Now atmosphere. U2 turned pacifism itself into a crusade on their third album, War. On the ensuing tour, Bono marched about onstage clasping a white flag.

  Unlike Echo and the Bunnymen, who kept the nature of their mission deliberately nebulous, U2’s fervor had an unmistakable moral charge. This was the real positive punk, an attempt to finally do something constructive with rock’s energies. In one early interview, Bono rejected the Sex Pistols’ form of insurrection as “just a con…. Can’t you see we’re really rebelling against the idea of rebelling?” Three of U2’s lineup—Bono, the Edge, and drummer Larry Mullen—were converts to a nonsectarian Christian group called Shalom. “I loved the idea of being reborn,” Bono told Mother Jones in 1989. “I think people should be reborn every day, man!” At twenty years old, the idea of “surrender every day” and self-sacrifice for a cause thrilled Bono and his brethren to the core.

  Belief infused every particle of U2’s early sound, from the cold incandescence of the Edge’s guitar to what the critic Richard Cook described as “the beckoning ecstasy” of Bono’s voice. “It would be wrong for me to say, yes, we can change the world with a song,” Bono told Trouser Press. “But every time I try writing, that’s where I’m at!” The band’s role models were Bob Marley, who fused religious faith and political ire, and the Clash, though U2 chose more universal, liberal-humanist touchstones than the latter—Martin Luther King and Poland’s Solidarity movement rather than the Red Brigade and the Sandinista.

  What saved U2 from sanctimony was the sheer exhilaration of their post-Television rock. “I Will Follow” could be a Dublin cousin to PiL’s “Public Image.” The Edge’s radiant chords and Bono’s ardent vocals create the classic U2 sensation, a chesty surge that elevates the spirit by neglecting the body. Nothing in the music appealed to the hips. The music was stirring, but sexless and resolutely undanceable. Crucial to this feeling of martial urgency was the unsyncopated drumming of Larry Mullen, who had learned to play in his school’s all-boy marching b
and.

  “Boy” is the key word when it comes to understanding U2, from the soldier boy rhythms to Bono’s choirboy vocals, to the beautiful blond six-year-old on the back cover of their debut album, Boy. Inside were songs such as “Stories for Boys” and “Into the Heart,” in which Bono sang about retreating “into the heart of a child,” finding the naïve purity of spirit lost with adulthood. Around this time, Bono talked about wanting their live audience to feel spiritually cleansed and reborn.

  Everything about U2 was large-scale: their lyrical themes, Bono’s voice, the size of their sound, their sense of purpose, and their ambition (U2 always obviously wanted to be the biggest band in the world). “If we stay in small clubs, we’ll develop small minds, and then we’ll start making small music,” Bono told Trouser Press. War propelled U2 into the big leagues in 1983, topping the album charts in the U.K. and reaching number twelve in America. The U.S. tour that followed was documented on the live album Under a Blood Red Sky, a concert at Colorado’s Red Rocks open-air amphitheater that was broadcast on MTV and generated a shorter clip of the band playing “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” When this promo went into heavy rotation on MTV, U2 reached the threshold of megastardom. In 1984, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” smashed down the door.

  The accompanying album, The Unforgettable Fire, was surprisingly understated, however, largely shunning anthems for atmospherics. Coproducer Brian Eno encouraged the band to create sonic landscapes that turned ears into eyes, gazing into the far distance, literally visionary music. The Edge also made a conscious decision to sidestep his burgeoning guitar hero status and poured his creative energy into keyboards and “general atmospheric work.” This was actually the logical destination for his guitar playing, which always had a curiously disembodied, synthlike quality, composed of swirling texture strands rather than riffs or power chords. Avoiding solos and shunning the grittiness of distortion, the Edge instead used effects and techniques such as echo, slide, harmonics, and extremely prolonged sustain, all of which blurred the link between the physicality of his playing and the amorphous sounds that came out of the speakers. On The Unforgettable Fire, he emerged as guitarist-as-cinematographer par excellence. The title track resembles a first-class sunset or the Milky Way on the clearest of nights.

  Echo and the Bunnymen, meanwhile, deftly maintained a balance between using big gestures and retaining a humorous detachment. McCulloch used words such as “heaven” as vague signifiers for some kind of beyond or unimaginable perfection, but kept the spirituality undefined and deflated any pomposity with wisecracks. “There was a crossover between the audiences for Echo and U2,” McCulloch recalled in 1989. “But I think U2’s audience liked the rally call, and our following liked the sarcasm.”

  Following the Bunnymen’s torturously transitional third album, Porcupine, 1984’s Ocean Rain was lush, orchestrated, and with the orgasmic moans of “Thorn of Crowns,” overtly erotic for the first time. The Bunnymen’s music had always been gloriously gray, but now on Ocean Rain it went Technicolor and swoony with string-laden songs such as “The Killing Moon.” Deliberately distancing the Bunnymen from the other Big Music bands of the day, Ocean Rain veered away from rock toward pop. “Kissing music” is how McCulloch described the record, a phrase that drew attention to the Bunnymen’s number one teenybop selling point: the singer’s magnificent lips. The strategy worked. By a strange twist, Echo and the Bunnymen, the group who’d helped bring rock back during the era of New Pop, became proper pop stars. “Missing the point of our mission/Will we become misshapen?” McCulloch had sung on the confused and overripe Porcupine. But unlike U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, for all their camouflage gear and abstract urgency, ultimately didn’t really have a mission beyond banishing the soul shadows and celebrating the wild wonder of being.

  CHAPTER 22

  RAIDING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:

  ZTT, THE ART OF NOISE, AND FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

  IN THE TWILIGHT PHASE of his tenure as Bow Wow Wow’s manager, Malcolm McLaren had come to New York in August 1981 for the launch of the group’s debut tour of America. During his stay, he was taken on a kind of ethnomusicological field trip to the South Bronx, his guide being Gray’s Michael Holman, an early downtown ambassador for graffiti and hip-hop. McLaren witnessed breakdancing, scratching, and rapping in situ and came away convinced that hip-hop was black punk. The way DJs used old records to make new music was just the sort of cultural piracy to warm the cockles of his bricoleur’s heart.

  In 1982, as New Pop reached its peak of U.K. chart dominance, McLaren also became convinced that a massive rediscovery of the earthy and ethnic was all set to be music’s next big thing, that anything “raw”—South African township pop, Appalachian hillbilly music, Dominican merengue, Cajun music, Cuban rhythms—would be embraced as a backlash against “cooked” pop. Hip-hop, too, he saw as a kind of urban folk music. The Bow Wow Wow debacle also convinced McLaren that he had to front his next project and become a star in his own right. But he still needed a producer who could turn his latest ragbag of subversive concepts—hip-hop’s scratching ’n’ rapping meets folk rhythms from around the world—into coherent music.

  Ironically, McLaren turned to a man synonymous with the super-glossy pop he wished to extirpate, Trevor Horn. After the monstrous success of ABC’s The Lexicon of Love, everybody was clamoring for Horn’s Midas touch. Most prominent among the would-be beneficiaries was Spandau Ballet, the former New Romantic band that had faltered when they switched from synthpop to white funk. Spandau craved the deluxe Lexicon sound, and the conservative side of Horn saw the logic of repeating a winning formula. But McLaren appealed to his sense of adventure. “I fancied Malcolm, he seemed like a hoot,” Horn recalls. It was a turning point for his career and for British pop.

  The ex-Svengali and the superproducer could not have been a more chalk-and-cheese pair. McLaren saw Horn as a key architect of the sexless and edgeless New Pop he despised, while Horn had always thought the Sex Pistols to be fraudulent, his producer’s ear enabling him to tell that Never Mind the Bollocks was a skillfully concocted studio creation. Despite their differences, the pair got on. “It’s impossible not to be charmed by Malcolm,” says Horn. McLaren, meanwhile, became taken with the idea of expanding Horn’s horizons by dragging him across the planet for the project, whose working title was Folk Dances of the World.

  Budget limitations meant that McLaren’s planned around-the-world-of-music trek got reduced to a stint in South Africa and a longer sojourn in cosmopolitan New York, whose vast range of ethnic musics meant that it was easy to simulate the panglobal vibe. In the South African township of Soweto, McLaren found musicians on the streets, and Horn recorded them playing popular and traditional tunes, some of which McLaren later registered as his own compositions. One of these reworked Afropop tunes became the basis for “Double Dutch,” a huge U.K. hit in the summer of 1983.

  McLaren was already a chart veteran by then, though, having scored a U.K. Top 10 single in the winter of 1982 with “Buffalo Gals,” a bizarre fusion of hip-hop and Appalachian square dancing, which sold half a million copies despite McLaren’s tone-deaf and rhythmically challenged vocals. In the larcenous spirit of hip-hop, “Buffalo Gals” nicked its main melody and title from a traditional square dance. McLaren recited lines such as “Four buffalo gals go ’round the outside/And do-si-doh with your pardners” in a shaky amalgam of hillbilly dance master and hip-hop MC. DJ/rapper crew the World’s Famous Supreme Team contributed scratching (the first appearance of this technique in the pop mainstream) and cryptic sound bites such as “she’s looking like a hobo” jutted out of the mix. In U.K. dance culture, “Buffalo Gals” is regarded as an old-school hip-hop anthem, its collage of beats, bass, and samples making it a foundational track for genres such as jungle and trip-hop.

  To weld together this delightfully daft composite, Horn used a crack team of musicians and technicians, comprised of engineer Gary Langan, arranger/keyboardist Anne Dudley (both of whom had worked on L
exicon of Love), and programmer/computer whiz J. J. Jeczalik. A nonmusician, McLaren generated a surfeit of inspired ideas, but little actual musical material. For “Buffalo Gals” and the accompanying album (now called Duck Rock), Horn’s team had to piece everything together and fill in the considerable gaps. “Anne was the music department, J. J. was the rhythm department,” says Horn. During these volatile McLaren sessions, a creative esprit de corps coalesced among Langan, Jeczalik, and Dudley. This became the kernel of the Art of Noise, Horn’s next and most audacious production project. “Duck Rock proved you could make a record out of very disparate material,” says Dudley, whose crucial role earned her one-third of the songwriting credit. “In that sense it was a prototype Art of Noise album.”

  McLaren was so creatively scatty that even before Duck Rock was completed, his mind was on his next nutty notion, an album combining pop and opera. He would score another hit with the Puccini rip-off “Madame Butterfly,” but by then Horn had moved on. Working with McLaren had been chaotic, but the whole experience left Horn with a massively enlarged sense of possibilities. “I got more from that one album with Malcolm than from working with any other artist,” he admits. McLaren’s love of concepts and provocations rubbed off. It was going to be hard for Horn to go back to glitzing up dull pop groups.

  One thing that superproducers can do instead of turning sow’s ears into silk purses is start their own labels, where they have much more control, and can also earn a lot more money. Horn’s wife/manager, Jill Sinclair, had the business skills and ruthless streak to make this idea work. Horn had the spectacular sound. But he really wanted the label to have a strong identity, and knew that wasn’t his forte. The Buggles, the group he’d fronted, had an international hit with “Video Killed the Radio Star,” but became one-hit wonders largely because of their lack of image. What Horn needed was a McLaren-like figure, a magus of rhetoric and presentation who knew how to work the media. One person came to mind: Paul Morley, NME’s hotheaded prophet of New Pop.