Pete Shelley

Pete Shelley tribute

Pitchfork, December 8 2028

by Simon Reynolds

The first and only time I saw Buzzcocks play live was in 2012, at the Incubate festival in Holland. They seemed an incongruous choice for a festival otherwise dedicated to experimentalism and dark cutting-edge fare. Although I love the band’s late-1970s output, I never would have actively sought out their live incarnation as a pop-punk legacy act; it was exactly the sort of nostalgia-appealing operation that would usually earn my stern disapproval. It was mild curiosity, really, that drew me into the big hall—only to be stunned by the power and glory of the noise wrought by the worse-for-wear-looking survivors on the stage.

 

Classic after classic smashed into the crowd’s collective face like surf. I found myself doing something embarrassingly close to a pogo. It was wonderful, every bit of it—even a strange new mid-section to “Harmony In My Head” that involved Steve Diggle delivering a kind of quasi-insurrectionary rap. This appeared to bemuse Pete Shelley as much as the audience and prompted him to gasp into the mic, “What the fuck was that?”. I had turned up expecting something rote and stale; instead I was jolted alive.

 

Whenever I listen to Buzzcocks’ music, what always strikes me is how modern it still sounds. But that is actually how it works with true innovation. No matter how much time passes—decades during which a breakthrough is assimilated and worn out by repetition, whether by others or by the artist repeating themselves—something of that initial shock of the new rings out and cuts through. And if you think about it, nearly everything handed down to us as “classic” was, in its own time, a break with tradition.

 

Buzzcocks severed ties with the blues-rooted rock of the early ’70s. No Chuck Berry chug for them: instead, Shelley cited Can’s Michael Karoli as his favorite guitarist and said that his idea of a great solo was John Lennon’s abstract noise eruptions on Yoko Ono’s “Why.” The name Buzzcocks could almost be onomatopoeia for the noise made by Shelley and rhythm guitarist Diggle: a serrated surge, at once coarse and sleek, with a hint of kinky mischief. Shelley and the band’s original singer Howard Devoto found that name from the chance conjunction of words in a magazine headline about the buzz-worthy TV show “Rock Follies,” rock-biz satire featuring a tough-girl singer who cheekily addresses everyone as “cock.”

 

Although they were in the original core cluster of groups that invented UK punk, Buzzcocks would always be an anomaly within that movement—misfits among the misfits. There had never been words, a voice, a personality, like this in rock before. Shelley sang love songs when every other major punk vocalist rejected them as trivial next to political themes, or—if they did deal with desire and heartbreak—laced the words with spite and hostility. The aggression in Buzzcocks was all in the sound; the animating spirit was sensitive, open-hearted, vulnerable. There’s a lovely clip of Shelley circulating on the internet, interviewed by a TV documentary crew in 1977 when punk gigs in Britain were getting banned by local councils and picketed by hordes of outraged citizenry. Twinkling and grinning adorably, the singer is incredulous at the idea that he could be deemed “vile and obscene.”

 

When punk evolved into post-punk, Buzzcocks didn’t fit there either. Although Shelley was well-read and philosophically searching, and although the group’s graphic presentation was arty and stark, their tunes and riffs went straight for your pleasure centers; the words were direct, colloquial, accessible to all. Nor did Buzzcocks have much truck with the militancy or didacticism of the post-punk era. The band’s politics were personal, verging on private—to do with radical honesty, the struggle to be an individual, to disentangle oneself from games and masks and role-play.  

 

“I think people need a new way of living—inside themselves,” Shelley offered gently, when asked about the idea of a political movement by TV interviewer Tony Wilson. People generally assume that Peter McNeish renamed himself Shelley after the Romantic poet, but in that same TV mini-doc about Buzzcocks, Wilson says that Shelley was the name that his parents would have given Peter if he’d been a girl.  

 

That invocation of the she that he might have been connects to a genuine innovation that Shelley introduced to rock and that reflected his fluid sexuality: the deliberate use of gender non-specific pronouns in love songs, something that would hugely influence later lyricists like Morrissey. "There isn't any implied gender in our songs now because we think it's boring singing about one thing when it could apply to both sexes,” Shelley told the music paper Sounds in 1977. “Our songs our bisexual."

 

This elasticity of gender and sexual attraction was one aspect of Shelley’s desire to invent a new kind of love song. In a 1978 interview with NME, he described himself as “a modern romantic…  trying to find out what modern romance is..  I’m trying to find something new… All the old kinds of romance are self-destructive because they don’t take account of realities.” On the Buzzcocks’ debut album, Another Music From A Different Kitchen, “Fiction Romance” was about the gap between the entrancing dreams propagated by movies and magazines and the aching mess of real-life desire: “I love this love story/That never seems to happen in my life.”

 

Shelley’s solution was a radical mundanity, using pained humor to sketch scenarios of humiliation, inadequacy and shortfall, coupled with melody that promised resolution or transcendence. Again, this tension between romance and reality points ahead to groups like Orange Juice and the Smiths. In the Buzzcocks’ case, the delicate balancing act between beauty and bathos was never more (im)perfect than on the group’s second and third singles: the perpetual unfulfillment of “What Do I Get?” (the answer: sleepless nights in an empty bed), the amorous asymmetry of “I Don’t Mind” (“this pathetic clown’’ll keep hangin’ around, that’s if you don’t mind”).  

Although “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)” continues the theme and is a fan favorite as well as Buzzcocks’s biggest UK chart hit, this triptych of anti-romantic love songs is really completed by “You Say You Don’t Love Me.” The aim here is clarity achieved through a kind of positive disillusionment, serene acceptance of things as they are: “I don’t want to live in a dream, I want something real… Though I’ve got this special feeling, I’d be wrong to call it love/For the word entails a few things that I would be well rid of.” In interviews, Shelley talked of his new approach: starting out as friends and hoping romance would grow, rather than falling head over heels and then trying to turn that idealized half-figment of a person into a friend and companion.

 

In the punk and new wave era, people who would never have previously been considered to be pop star material—on account of their looks or their vocal inadequacies—became household names. Part of the shock of Buzzcocks was the sheer ordinariness of Pete Shelley materializing in the glitzy TV context of “Top of the Pops.” With his open-neck button-shirts and slightly shaggy hair, he looked like neither a punk nor a pop star, but more like an office clerk on his lunch break. And he sang like one too.

 

Shelley might never have become the band’s lead singer and lyricist if Howard Devoto had stayed in Buzzcocks. Like Bernard Sumner following the death of Ian Curtis, Shelley took on the frontman role because he and the other members of the band figured it would be easier for an insider to take over singing duties rather than accommodate a new person who might have his own ideas.

 

But Shelley would have already been a historically significant figure in British punk even if he’d never sung a single tune or written a line of lyric. It was he and Devoto who arranged for the Sex Pistols to play their debut Manchester gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4 1976: a much-mythologized event said to have seeded the city’s entire punk scene, sparking the careers of Joy Division, the Fall, and Morrissey.

 

It was also Shelley who persuaded his dad to take out a loan for 250 pounds, the decisive investment in the recording and pressing of Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP, which the band and manager Richard Boon put out on their own New Hormones label. Released in February 1977, Spiral Scratch would be the beacon that mobilized the DIY hordes of punk and post-punk Britain and beyond, inspiring outfits like Desperate Bicycles, Scritti Politti, and Swell Maps to demystify and democratize the means of musical production. Do-it-yourself and release-it-yourself was seen as a righteous war waged against the apathy and ennui so acutely anatomized by Devoto in his lyrics for “Boredom,” Spiral Scratch’s killer track.

 

By the time of the EP’s release, though, Devoto was bored of punk itself and left the band, taking with him an epic guitar riff generously gifted him by Shelley that would eventually serve as the hook of “Shot By Both Sides,” the debut single of his new group Magazine. Shelley and Buzzcocks, meanwhile, decided that persevering on their own regional independent label was not viable and they signed with the major United Artists. In swift succession, over just two compressed and hectic years, there followed the immaculate debut album Another Music in A Different Kitchen and its uneven but endearing follow-up Love Bites (both released in 1978), then the underrated third album A Different Kind of Tension the following year. The last of these was overlooked in its own time, as the rapidly evolving UK scene left Buzzcocks behind.

 

There was also a string of eight perfect singles, starting with “Orgasm Addict” (a hilarious masturbation anthem that was, in fact, construable as “vile and obscene”). Together these made up Singles Going Steady, the greatest “greatest hits” LP this side of the Supremes, even if most of the inclusions had barely been hits. I vividly remember the disbelief, aged 16, when the gorgeous melodic swirl of  “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” and the glittering chimes of “Harmony In My Head” both failed to pierce the Top 20.

 

In punk-pop perfection terms, Buzzcocks were rivalled only by the Undertones and there was a feeling, albeit a minority viewpoint, that they were the era’s Beatles, or should have been. Each single deserved to go straight in at Number One. But there was more to Shelley than power pop, as was revealed on the second side of Singles Going Steady, dedicated to the group’s B-sides. These grew steadily less straightforward, culminating in “Why Can’t I Touch It,” nearly seven minutes of loping almost-funk and radically stereo-separated guitar-slashes, and “Something’s Gone Wrong Again,” which resembles suspended-animation Stooges, glistening with a coat of frost. The entire second side of A Different Kind of Tension was a Shelley mini-concept album, permeated with existential doubts and askew with a disassociated feeling influenced by LSD. And 1980’s “Are Everything,” one of the first-phase Buzzcocks’ last singles, was even more psychedelic: Shelley took acid for every stage of the process, from recording to mixing, hoping for the rush of revelation to overcome him.

 

But it wasn’t a case of Buzzcocks getting weirder as Shelley expanded his horizons: he’d always  had an experimental streak.  A few years before punk, Shelley recorded several albums worth of abstract electronic music and some of this 1974 material saw belated release in 1980 as the album Sky Yen. Another 1980 side project was The Tiller Boys, in which Shelley partnered with a Manchester teenager called Eric Random to record the clangorous Neu!-like stampede “Big Noise From the Jungle”, which became a favorite on John Peel’s BBC radio show. Both Sky Yen and “Big Noise” bore a relationship to a pair of “theoretical groups”  Shelley had conceptualized in the years before Buzzcocks: a heavy, hypnotic Krautrock-inspired project called Smash and an electronic entity known as Sky.  Unlike Smash, Sky actually “became real… but consisted solely of me,”  Shelley recalled to Trouser Press in 1983. Made at home with hand-built oscillators and cheap-and-nasty organs, Sky’s squalls of abstract electronic noise couldn’t have been further from the prim precision and candied catchiness of  “Ever Fallen In Love” . Any Buzzcocks fans who splashed out for Shelley’s solo album were likely mystified. 

 

When Shelley and Devoto first met it was actually through the Electronic Music Society at the Bolton Institute of Technology in Greater Manchester, where they both studied: Devoto was looking for someone to soundtrack a film he was making. “Peter was an electronics engineer and he was into computers even at that stage,” Devoto told me in 2003. With this deep and long-established interest in electronic music and technology, it’s hardly surprising that Shelley was quick to notice the potential of the affordable synths and drum machines that became available in the last few years of the ’70s.

 

After the band split up exhausted in 1980, Shelley started working on a solo album with Martin Rushent, the producer who had crucially shaped the Buzzcocks’ raw-but-glossy sound on record. The result was the pioneering synth-pop single “Homosapien,” yet another in the long line of Shelley should-have-been-a-smash songs (although this time the problem was a BBC ban, on account of its impishly suggestive homo-erotic lyric), and a 1981 album of the same title that blended synths and drum machines with electric guitars. Another parallel universe / alternate history scenario tantalizes here: a world where Shelley pipped the Human League to the post (they also worked with Rushent, to massive success) or became a kind of one-man Pet Shop Boys. You could even imagine a Buzzcocks that didn’t split but embraced electronics, gradually becoming a New Order-like force.

 

Instead, after a couple more unsuccessful electro-pop solo records, Shelley joined with the other ex-Buzzcocks to reform the group along their classic lines. They released their fourth album Trade Test Transmissions in 1993, the first in a series of half-a-dozen albums that were solid but never quite ignited the old spark. In 1994, at fanboy Kurt Cobain’s invitation, they toured with Nirvana, a preview of the next 20 or so years of sustained live work.

 

In the days following Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, Shelley—an early adopter of the internet—could be found on a bulletin board of the now-defunct Compuserve commiserating with fans and sharing his very recent memories of hanging out with Kurt. He cycled between self-reproach for not being able to help the troubled singer and deliberately irreverent comments intended to deflate overly pious laments for the fallen rock savior—attitudes he clearly felt missed the point of punk and of Cobain himself.  

 

Shelley’s own aim was to be exactly the same size as life, and somehow put that across onstage or on record, despite the inherent artifice of being a performer. That was his interpretation of what punk represented—the artist as unheroic hero, on the same level as the fans. Approachable, unassuming, self-deprecating, Shelley lived out that ideal until the end.

 

New Beat: A Split Second, A Taste of Sugar, Erotic Dissidents "live" - Melody Maker - January 21 1989

A Split Second / A Taste of Sugar / Erotic Dissidents

Sin, London 

Melody Maker, January 21 1989

by Simon Reynolds

 

RIP Ozzy

 

Melody Maker, November 18, 1989

BLACK SABBATH
The Complete 70's Replica CD Collection 1970-78
(Sanctuary Records)
Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds


The mystery of the riff--so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics. Or perhaps not so strangely, given that riffs are almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one monster-riff slays you where another one fails to incite. Riffs just seem to bypass the aesthetic faculties altogether and go straight to the gut. A killer riff is by definition simplistic--which is why self-consciously sophisticated rock tends to dispense with them altogether in favor of wispy subtleties. Riff-based music seems lowly, literally "mindless" because it connects with the lower "reptilian" part of the cerebral cortex which governs flight-or-flight responses, the primitive emotions of appetite, aversion, and aggression.

Talking of reptiles, Black Sabbath--perhaps the greatest riff factory in all of rock---irresistibly invite metaphors involving dinosaurs. For a group that wielded such brontosauran bulk, though, Sabbath were surprisingly nimble on their feet. Listening to this box-set, which comprises all eight albums of the classic Ozzy-fronted era, I was surprised how fast many of their songs were, given the Sabs' reputation as torpid dirgemeisters for the downered-and-out.

Even at their most manic, Sabbath always sound depressed, though. Rhythmically as much as lyrically, Sabbath songs dramatise scenarios of ordeal, entrapment, affliction, perseverance in the face of long odds and insuperable obstacles. Tony Iommi's down-tuned distorto-riffs--essentially the third element of the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler--create sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, slightly viscous terrain. Joe Carducci, Sabbath fiend and theorist supreme of rock 's "heavy" aesthetic, analyses about how bass, drums, and guitar converge to produce "powerfully articulated and textured tonal sensations of impact and motion that trigger hefty motor impulses in the listener." But let's not discount Ozzy's role: his piteous wail is one-dimensional, sure, but it sounds utterly righteous in this abject context. And he's effectively touching on forlornly pretty ballads like "Changes" too.

With a few exceptions (Lester Bangs, notably) the first rock-crit generation abhorred Sabbath. Criticism typically lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques more appropriate to earlier genres. So the first rock critics, being postgraduates in literature, philosophy, and politics, treated songs as mini-novels, as poetry or protest tracts with tasteful guitar accompaniment. Expecting rock to get ever more refined, they were hardly gonna embrace Sabbath's crude putsch on Cream, which stripped away all the blues-bore scholarship and revelled in the sheer dynamics of heaviosity. Riff-centered rock--Zep, Mountain, ZZ Top, Aerosmith---was received with incomprehension and condescension. 

                                               Not original in real-time Rolling Stones reviews but written in the                                                                             1980s for the Rolling Stone Albums Guide - when the legacy would have already been becoming apparent  -

But while Seventies critical faves like Little Feat and Jackson Browne have sired no legacy, over the long haul Sabbath's originality and fertility have been vindicated by the way their chromosones have popped up in US hardcore (Black Flag/Rollins were massively indebted), grunge (Nirvana = Beatles + Sabbath x Pixies), and virtually every key phase of metal from Metallica to Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age to Korn. Sabbath are quite literally seminal.

Sabbath dressed like hippies: check the groovy kaftans and loon pants in the inner sleeve photos of these CDs, which are miniature simulacra of the original gatefold elpees. And they clearly hoped to contribute to the post-Sgt Pepper's progressive tendency: hence pseudo-pastoral interludes like the flute-draped "Solitude," an idyll amidst Master of Reality's sturm und drang. But critics deplored them as a sign of rock's post-Sixties regression , mere lumpen bombast fit only for the moronic inferno of the stadium circuit, and as a symptom of the long lingering death of countercultural dreams. In retrospect, with Sixties idealism seeming like a historical aberration, Sabbath's doom 'n' gloom seems more enduringly resonant, tapping into the perennial frustrations of youth with dead-end jobs from Coventry to New Jersey: headbanging riffs and narcotic noise as a cheap-and-nasty source of oblivion. Sabbath's no-future worldview always becomes extra relevant in times of recession, like the economic down-slope looming ahead of us right now. Looking back, the much-derided Satanist aspects seem relatively peripheral and low-key, especially compared with modern groups like Slipknot. In old TV footage of Sabbath, the group seem almost proto-punk, their sullen, slobby demeanour recalling The Saints on Top of the Pops. There's little theatrics, and the music is remarkably trim and flatulence-free.

But then no one really goes on about Iommi's solos, do they? The riffs are what it's all about, and Sabbath's productivity on that score is rivalled only by AC/DC. "Sweet Leaf", "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "Children of the Grave," "Wheels of Confusion", the list goes on. So we're back with the mystery.... just what is it that makes a great riff? Something to do with the use of silence and spacing, the hesitations that create suspense, a sense of tensed and flexed momentum, of force mass motion held then released. If I had to choose one definitive Sabbath riffscape, I'd be torn between the pummelling ballistic roil of "Supernaut" and "War Pigs", whose stop-start drums are like slow-motion breakbeats, Quaalude-sluggish but devastatingly funky. "War Pigs" is that rare thing, the protest song that doesn't totally suck. Indeed, it's 'Nam era plaint about "generals gathered... like witches at black masses" has a renewed topicality at a time when the military-industrial death-machine is once more flexing its might.

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This is my favorite 

I remember this came on the radio once when we were in the car.  I turned up the volume and started air-drumming to those great breakbeat-like rolls. And then - a second after Ozzy's voice came in, like it was the final straw - this indignant voice piped up from the back seat:   "This is the WORST music in the world!!!". Kieran, aged 11, sounding genuinely appalled. I drily replied, "no, this is in fact one of the most purely powerful pieces of recorded rock, actually". He wasn't having it.

Mind you, I would probably have felt the same at his age. 

Well, more to the point, I felt the same when I was about 18. Not based on any deep exposure. Passing hearing of "Paranoid". Mostly just postpunk indoctrination, high-minded disapproval of all things metal.

Then two things changed my mind: I read that Black Flag were fans of Black Sabbath, which explained the grueling dirge of "Damaged I"

And then my friend Chris Scott played me one of their albums - maybe the Greatest Hits. "Iron Man" was the one that turned my head around. 

And then "War Pigs".

Then within a few years you had the Beasties sampling Sabbath, there was Buttholes's with "Sweat Loaf", etc

Over time I've come to really like the dreamy hippie-ish side to Sabbath

What were they going for here? Santana? Something from the San Francisco scene? 

It actually reminds me a bit of "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic 

And then there's this pretty instrumental 

And this is a beautiful ballad 

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The first time I paeaned Sabbath was indirectly, via the greatest of their epigones: Saint Vitus

January 16 1988

The album had actually been out at least a year, possibly two, when I reviewed it, but it came in a big box of STT albums mailed to MM, which I pounced on.

At that time I didn't realise "St. Vitus Dance" is a Sabbath song. 

Also discovered much later that  Born Too Late - which is not only epigonic but an analysis of the epigone mindstate - was produced by Joe Carducci. 

JC's analysis of "heavy" is unbeaten - check this piece, spun off Rock and the Pop Narcotic but not an extract, with some great probing into the Sabbath riff-and-rhythm engine.  

Carducci has opined that "Supernaut" is the most physically dynamic and potent example of recorded rock in existence

Now I could have sworn I spoke to one of Saint Vitus on the phone for a piece on STT and its late 80s splurge out into heavy, proggy, jammy-bandy expansiveness - but all I can find is this small patch of exaltation, quote-free. But yeah I distinctly recall a distant voice, a subdued mumble. 

Another Sabbath-related speck of writing is this piece on the unfortunately named 1000 Homo DJs aka Al Jourgensen who covered "Supernaut". He does address the isssue of the name in the conversation.

How weird to think I spoke to Mr Ministry on the phone!

I wonder what Mr Carducci would have made of this cover? I'm sure he would have disapproved of the inelastic rhythm section (a drum machine?) and diagnosed it as a typically top-heavy misunderstanding of rock music - taking it to be all about attitude rather than phatitude. Literally top-heavy:  all noise and distorted vox, no bottom. Fatally lite - devoid of heaviness. 

In that sense almost as bad as British things like The Cult and Grebo. 

He would further have diagnosed the Wax Trax thing as bound up with a fatal Chicago failing: Anglophilia - which he also diagnosed as a ruse of projecting to London to bypass New York. 

I have strayed far from Ozzy...  

Repeated exposure on the radio here in LA over the years has made me a fan of this, even though its clean frantic high-energy style is a million miles from the Sabbath dirge style. 

I'm sure Carducci thought this was a terrible waste of Ozzy's wail. 

a Rolling Stones biography + a Bill Wyman autobiography reviewed in The Observer (1990)

When I wrote this snide review of the dirty old man's memoir I'd clean forgotten that if nothing else he had made the best Stone-involved record of the last  - well now it would 3 and a half decades - but in 1990 just a decade.  

This and "Start Me Up", the last great actual Rolling Stones record, were released the same year.

Nuggets x 2

Spin, October 1998

 

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond
Uncut, 2001

Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP.

 Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.

Back then, singles made their point and left. This short 'n' sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems.

Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. 

Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. 

The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. 

The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. 

Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"

One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. 

Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. 

No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. 

"Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. 

"A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.

John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. 

At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.

Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. 

The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. 

But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous omissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

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Pointedly not reviewed: Nuggets 3, which was a selection of 80s-onwards garage revivalism. 

RIP Sly Stone

 

Belated RIP... there's been a lot going on...

You have to wonder about these two great Californians, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, dying the week that troops are sent into LA. "I've seen enough... I'm outta here". 

Today, it's the government that's rioting... 

At the bottom you will find my circa 1990 review of the first-time-on-CD reissue of There's A Riot Goin' On, rather in the shadow of the Greil Marcus reading in Mystery Train

It remains a fantastic album, but I must say the stuff that means the most to me these days is the classic run of uplifting smash singles: "Dance To the Music", "Everyday People", "Stand!", "Everybody Is a Star", "Hot Fun in the Summertime", "Thank You Falettinmebe Mice 'Elf Agin".... 

Sly and the Family figure in a class I teach on the cartoon continuum.

See, rather than Staggerlee, what I think of when I hear "Everyday People" is Sesame Street. 

I did some research into whether the "scooby dooby doo" in "Everyday People" predates Scooby-Doo the  kids cartoon show but it turns out the catchphrase goes back a decade-plus earlier (some say Sinatra came up with it). 

Given what's going on in this country (the Confederacy winning a stealth war),  it's really painful to listen to this stuff - the hopefulness hurts!

 

Then there is this  - an ecstasy of anguish, bitter but still reaching for a transcendence of division...  

Future blues (is he putting the guitar through a talk box)

This must be one of the most sonically radical Number 1 singles ever

Another favorite, wonderfully covered by S'Express

SLY & THE FAMILY STONE
There's A Riot Goin' On
(Edsel CD reissue)
Melody Maker, 1990?


The definitive reading of There's A Riot Goin' On is to be found in Greil Marcus' Mystery Train.  Marcus invokes the folkloric figure of Staggerlee as the prototype of the superfly guy for whom criminality signifies total possibility.  Breaking all the rules, Staggerlee escapes the fate (servitude, anonymity, death) assigned blacks by a white supremacist society, and wins it all -women, wealth, drugs, a court of sycophantic hangers-on.  Staggerlee is the cultural archetype that connects Robert Johnson to Jimi Hendrix to Sly to the gangster rappers of today.

Smashing racial boundaries with an image and sound that merged bad-ass funk and hippy freak-out, Sly Stone triumphed with a secular gospel of affirmation, expressed in songs like "Everybody Is A Star", "Stand!", "Thank You Falettinme Be Mice 'Elf Agin".  In 1970, like Staggerlee, Sly had it all. But suddenly, at the height of his fame, the euphoria soured; Sly disappeared into a miasma of drug
excess, unreliability and paranoia. It was from this mire that There's A Riot Goin' On emerged in late 1971.

 Although the title alluded to the bitter racial conflict of the time, Riot was really about an interior apocalypse. The utopian hunger that fired Sly's music ultimately had to choose between two options: insurrection or oblivion. As Marianne Faithful once put it: "drugs kept me from being a terrorist...  either I was going to have to explode out into violence or implode." Death or dope are ultimately Staggerlee's only destinations. According to Marcus, Riot defines "the world of the Staggerlee who does not get away...who has been trapped by limits whose existence he once would not even admit to, let alone respect".

Riot turns the Sly Stone persona inside out, inverts all the life-affirming properties of the Family's music. The sound of Riot is deathly dry, drained of all the joy and confidence that once fueled its fervour. This is funk-as-prison: locked grooves that simulate the impasses and dead ends faced by Afro-Americans. To get into this music requires, in Marcus' words "a preternatural sharpening of the senses". Submit to the sensory deprivation, and you come alive to the psychotic detail, the electrifying nuances of the playing and the vocal harmonies.

This totally wired sound has everything to do with the conditions under which "Riot" was recorded: a coked-out frightmare,with Sly and co staying up 4 nights at a time, the air thick with paranoia, everyone carrying guns. Being strung-out has a lot to do with Sly's vivid-yet-cryptic imagery and unearthly vocals: the sound of a soul in tatters, teetering on the edge of the void. The slurred, ragged rasp of "Africa Talks To You", the decrepit yodel of "Spaced Cowboy", are unnerving enough. But try the disintegrated death throes of "Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa" for a glimpse of someone at the threshold of the human condition.  A rewrite of "Thank You Falettinmebe Mice 'Elf Agin", this song turns the original's upful swagger into agonised intertia: the sound of going nowhere slow. Sly spits out the chorus with bitter, exhausted irony. The self-expression incarnated by Sly's persona is exposed as an act, a role he can no longer sustain, but a pantomime in which his audience would gladly cage Sly so that he might continue to live out their fantasies. The allusion to "Africa" hints that the fight for blacks to feel at home in America has succumbed to despair. Sly dreams of fleeing to the safe arms of the mother(land).

Riot set the agenda for early Seventies black pop, inspiring the ghetto-conscious soul of "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" et al. Sly, meanwhile, was all burnt-out, unable either to resurrect his pre-Riot poptimism or continue to dwell on the negative. For how can you turn eternal exile into a home? But Riot still burns, cold as ice.

Taking the cartoon continuum thing into consideration, I find this comical now rather than harrowing

On The Corner is surely a reply, a nod of the hat, almost imitation 

In Full Bloom (LCD / DFA)

LCD Soundsystem, live, a week ago, Bowery Ballroom…

… was more exciting than I’d thought. Came with minimal expectations really (a guy and a synth and a drum machine?) and was ambushed by the physical full-band force of it. The sheer rockfunk. Shades at times of the Contortions, Happy Mondays, even a hint of Stooges attack. An American Lo-Fidelity Allstars? As well as a fine flesh-and-blood drummer there was a percussionist (who knew a cowbell could be so exciting?) who doubled as a guitarist; another guitarist (or was it a bassist? ) plus a chick on synth/tech. The singer (is that the guy who used to front Six Finger Satellite? He’s pudged out a bit) wore an Oxford University T-Shirt. But underneath the obligatory irony, the masking metacasm, something seemed to be burning, a real deal HOWL, a scorching sense of “we mean it man” (although what the meaning might actually consist of remained unclear--the yearning to mean itself against all the heavily stacked odds, the over-acculturation that is a generational curse?). Not a massive fan of “Losing My Edge” (the weakest moment here anyhow) I couldn’t have been more surprised. In the end, I suppose I didn’t really know what to make of it--the best possible outcome.

from Blissblog Friday, October 17, 2003

LCD Soundsystem

LCD Soundsystem

(DFA)

Blender, 2005

As co-founder of New York’s painfully hip record label DFA, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem specializes in fusing dance groove and punk attack.  The label’s trademark raw-yet-slick sound first made waves in 2002 with the dancefloor success of The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers,” which Murphy co-produced with DFA partner Tim Goldsworthy. Next came the first LCD single, “Losing My Edge,” the hilarious lament of an aging hipster who feels eclipsed by youngsters with even more esoteric reference points.  Included here on a bonus CD that gathers up all three of the group’s excellent early singles, “Losing” sets the emotional template for a good chunk of LCD’s debut full-length. Several of the best tunes are inspired by Murphy’s love-hate relationship with music: his struggle between wanting to be cool and feeling the very impulse is absurd and loathsome,  between his attachment to rock’s heritage and his equally powerful urge to rip it all up and start again. Out of all these clashing emotions emerges a prime contender for Best Album of 2005.

Too omnivorously eclectic to operate as a period stylist, Murphy weaves together beats and sounds from the last 25 years of dance music. There’s a heavy slant towards early Eighties mutant disco--spiky Gang of Four rhythm guitar, punkily funky basslines that aren't computer-programmed but played on an electric bass.  But there’s also more recent flavors from house and hip hop. “Too Much Love,” a brilliantly eerie song about overdoing the party potions and nightclubbing, pivots around a grating synth noise that whimpers like a burned-out brain, while the Suicide-like “Thrills” rides an utterly contemporary and boombastic groove inspired by Missy Elliott’s "Get UR Freak On."

Sonically, LCD Soundsystem is near-immaculate, then. But what really pushes this record into the realm of genius is the double whammy of Murphy’s witty lyrics and wonderfully tetchy vocals.  “On Repeat” expresses the ennui of the seasoned scenester who watches the new groups reshuffling the old poses, while “Movement” is a feedback-laced diatribe about modern music: “it’s like a culture, without the effort, of all the culture/it’s like a movement, without the bother, of all of the meaning.” As for Murphy’s singing, he’s not got a big voice, but its dry, irritable texture suits the songs’s themes of exhaustion and exasperation. He also does a cute David-Byrne-doing-Al-Green falsetto on “Disco Infiltrator”  and resurrects the choral serenity of Brian Eno’s early solo albums on the closing “Great Release”. 

Spotting the sources is bonus fun (for those whose brains are wired like that, anyway). But the glory of LCD Soundsystem is the way the music sounds like an entity not a collage, its manifold and disparate influences melding to form a seductive--if clearly deeply conflicted--self.  

DFA / LCD Sound System

Groove magazine, 2005

For the last three years, DFA has been on a mission to make New York City live up to its own legend--"to be what it should be," as  the label's co-founder James Murphy puts it.  DFA's spiritual ancestors are early Eighties Manhattan labels like ZE, 99 and Sleeping Bag, pioneers of sounds like "punk-funk" and "mutant disco" that mixed dance culture's groove power with absurdist wit, dark humor and rock'n'roll aggression. The DFA sound flashes back to times and places when NYC's party-hard hedonism seemed to have both an edge and a point--Mudd Club, Hurrah's, Danceteria, Paradise Garage--but it rarely feels like a mere exercise in retro-pastiche.

The label's initial batch of vinyl-only singles in 2002--most famously "House of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture and "Losing My Edge" by LCD Soundsystem--resurrected the idea of dance music spiked with punk attitude. Before long everybody was clamoring for a dose of DFA cool. Murphy, 34, and his English-born partner Tim Goldsworthy, 32, were touted as Superproducers, indieland's equivalent to the Neptunes. "Yeah I was the punk-funk Pharrell Williams," laughs Murphy. "Which makes me Chad, I guess" adds Goldsworthy.

Janet Jackson phoned DFA and suggested collaborating, saying she wanted to do something "raw and funky" like "Losing My Edge." Amazingly, DFA sorta kinda forgot to follow up the call. Duran Duran were also interested in getting DFA's magic touch. Most surreally, Goldsworthy and Murphy spent an afternoon in the studio with Britney Spears. "That was weird," says Goldsworthy. "Won't do that again. No offence to her--she's lovely. Got a foul mouth, though!"  The brief session came to nothing, through lack of common musical ground. "When we work with people, we hang out, listen to records, share stuff," says Murphy. "But with Britney we soon discovered we had absolutely no way of communicating. She didn't know anything that we knew. I was excited when the idea was first broached, because I thought maybe there's something Britney wants to do, and it's fucking burning a hole in her, and we can find out what it is. And the collaboration could be embarrassing, a failure, but that's fine. But I think she's someone that's very divorced from what she wants to do, there's been a set of performance requirements on her for such a long time, such that how would she even know what she wanted to do? And we never had time to found out anyway, because it was like, 'she's available for four hours on Wednesday, write a song'. There's no way you can kid yourself you can make something real in those circumstances."

After these lost encounters with "the big time", DFA consciously backed away from the opportunities being thrust their way. "You stop returning phone calls, people get bored of you real quickly!" laughs Murphy. Instead, they concentrated on building up their own operation. The stance is bearing fruit now, with a freshly-inked global distribution deal between DFA and EMI. The first release under this new arrangement was the recent and highly impressive three-CD collection of DFA works so far, Compilation #2. It’s now followed by the brilliant debut album from LCD Soundsystem, which is James Murphy's own group.

Murphy and Goldsworthy originally met in inauspicious circumstances, as hired help for Irish deejay/producer/soundtrack composer David Holmes, who was making his Bow Down To The Exit Sign album in Manhattan.  Murphy did the engineering, Goldsworthy did the programming. The location was Murphy's West Village of Manhattan recording studio (now DFA's basement sound-lab). It didn't take long for the two technicians to suspect they were making most of the creative decisions. "Tim and I were forced to create a dialogue about how to make sounds, because there was just this vague cloud of ideas coming from Holmes," says Murphy, gesturing to the back of the studio, where Holmes sat during the recording process. "Tim and I found we could talk about the most subtle sonic things. Say, with Suicide, we could talk about the space between the two different organ sounds, or the lag between the organ playing and the drum machine beat, the way the two instruments don't lock together. Or we could talk about how earnest Alan Vega's Elvis-like vocal performance is, and how could we get that same quality out of the bass--a feeling that's earnest and embarrassing but saved by being actually totally for real."

Taking breaks from the recording grind, Goldsworthy and Murphy bonded further during Saturday night missions of full-on clubbing. Which is when Murphy, hitherto a typical indie-rock guy, had his dance music E-piphany. "Yeah, it's an unheard of story, isn't it?" he laughs. "A person who only listens to rock goes off, does a mountain of Ecstasy, and gets converted to dance music".

The same thing had happened to Goldsworthy over a decade earlier, as an indiepop fan who got swept up in the UK's Ecstasy-fueled acid house revolution circa 1988. "I went from wearing an anorak and National Health spectacles into shaving my head and dancing in a field for eight hours!" In the Nineties, Goldsworthy, like a lot of people, followed a vibe shift towards more chilled-out drugs (heavy weed) and moody, downtempo sounds, picking up especially on the music coming out of the early Nineties Bristol scene (very near where he grew up in the West of England). With his schoolfriend James Lavelle, Goldsworthy co-founded the trip hop label Mo Wax, whose whole aesthetic owed a huge amount to Massive Attack's epochal 1991 album Blue Lines. Goldsworthy and Lavelle also made atmospheric and increasingly over-ambitious music as the pivotal core of UNKLE, a sort of post-trip hop supergroup that called upon diverse array of collaborators (ranging from DJ Shadow to Radiohead's Thom Yorke) on albums like Psyence Fiction. It's this background in "soundtrack for a non-existent movie" music that led to Goldsworthy becoming the programming foil for David Holmes. Which ultimately led to him coming to Manhattan and meeting Murphy.

Goldsworthy had been through the whole dance culture experience and, like a lot of people, grown sick and tired of it. Murphy, a die-hard indie-rock/punk-rock guy, had always "loathed dance music. I thought it was all disco or C& C Music Factory. I didn't know anything about it and didn't want to know anything about it. I'd really come up through the Pixies, the Fall, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and all the Chicago noise punk stuff like Big Black." And in truth, when the two of them went out clubbing in New York while working on the Holmes record, there wasn't much going on in dance culture to counter either Goldsworthy's disillusion or Murphy's prejudice. The Manhattan scene was moribund. Goldsworthy had come to New York, a city that loomed large in his imagination because of hip hop and house, with high expectations and was very disappointed. "I was shocked, it was so bad. You couldn't dance anywhere," he says, referring to Mayor Bloomberg's crackdown on bars that had DJs spinning but didn't have the expensive "cabaret  license" that nightclubs need to get to make it permissible for their patrons to wiggle their butts in time to the music. "It was fucking awful."

Beyond the specific malaise of Manhattan clubland, dance music at the close of the Nineties was going through a not very compelling phase. It was neither pushing fearlessly forward into the future with huge leaps of innovation like it had done for most of the Nineties, nor did it have that edge-of-anarchy madness that characterized the rave scene in its early days. The superclubs were slick and soul-less. And technique-obsessed and genre-purist DJs had squeezed out an awful lot of vibe. By the start of the new millennium, the new generation of hipster youth in New York and London had little interest in club culture, which seemed safe, passe and altogether lacking in cutting-edge glamour. These young cool kids were looking to guitar bands again, groups with stage moves and charismatic hair, from the Strokes to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Murphy and Goldsworthy decided to rescue dance music from "McDepth--that McDonald's version of 'deep', where there's nothing there", Murphy explains. The duo cite everything from glitchy laptop musicians  to Tortoise-style post-rock to post-Blue Lines Massive Attack as examples of bogus profundity, chin-stroking pretentiousness, and terminal boredom. Revealingly, Murphy's MDMA revelation didn't occur listening to whatever passed for an Ecstasy anthem in those days (Rolando's "Jaguar," say). No, the DJ dropped The Beatles'  "Tomorrow Never Knows"--one of his all-time favorite tunes--at exactly the point "when the drug was peaking" in his nervous system. And that gave Murphy the idea of  "throwing parties and playing better music--like "Loose" by the Stooges--than what dance culture was offering at that time". Taking the name DFA--short for Death From Above, and originally the tag under which Murphy did infamously loud sound mixing for rock bands--they started throwing irregular parties in New York, based around the notion of bridging the considerable gap between Donna Summer and The Stooges. Soon, tired of endlessly playing their staple fare like Can and Liquid Liquid, the duo decided to make their own "dance-punk" tracks to spin.

"House Of Jealous Lovers" was their first stab. Dance distributors picked up the single purely for the house remix by Morgan Geist from cognoscenti-approved outfit Metro Area. "We'd heard his track 'Atmosphreak' and thought it was amazing," recalls Murphy. "One of the Rapture's friends, Dan, was room mates with Morgan, and so we asked if he'd do a remix and he very kindly did one really cheap. It was only because of Morgan's remix that anyone took it--the dance distributors would often identify it in their orders as being by Morgan Geist." Ironically, and fatefully, it was DFA's original discopunk version that eventually took off.

"House of Jealous Lovers" arrived with perfect timing to catch the breaking wave of dancefloor taste shift towards edgy angularity--not just the rediscovery of Eighties groups like ESG and A Certain Ratio, but the emergence of neo-postpunk bands like !!!, Liars, Erase Errata, and Radio Four (whom DFA also produced). But while The Rapture's slashing guitar and slightly-constipated, white-boys-getting-down funk bass flash you back to 1979 and UK agit-funk outfits like Gang of Four and Delta 5, Murphy & Goldsworthy's production supplied the kind of pumping, monolithic regularity that made the track fully contemporary. "There were indie bands already coming through doing that kind of rickety, Delta 5-style punk-funk, but we wanted to make records that house DJs would actually play," says Murphy. "We had a big talk with The Rapture about that Mr Oizo track 'Flat Beat', the bassline in that tune. In 2000, when we were making 'House of Jealous Lovers', 'Flat Beat' was just about the only dance track around that was memorable. It was a tune you could remember, it fucked killed on the dancefloor, and it had incredible low end. So our attitude was, 'Jealous Lovers' has to compete in that context. So we filtered the bass a lot, did a couple of layers of hi-hats and reversed them, took the drummer's playing and chopped it up." The drummer himself came up with the cowbell, which eventually became a kind of DFA trademark. "House of Jealous Lovers" became a huge success on all kinds of different dancefloors. Some commentators regard it as the best single of the decade so far. It's certainly one of the most significant.

DFA's signature sound mixes Goldsworthy's computer wizardry and Murphy's background of engineering and playing in rock bands (DFA's remixes typically feature his drumming, bass, and sometimes guitar). Two different kinds of knowledge mesh perfectly: Murphy's expertise at getting great drum sounds and capturing live "feel", Goldsworthy's digital editing skills and vast sample-hound's knowledge of recorded music acquired during his Mo Wax days. Both guys look their respective parts. Slender, softspoken, and diffidently English in a way that often, he says, gets him mistaken for gay, Goldsworthy seems like someone at home with delicate, intricate work--a century ago, you might have assumed from his intent, bespectacled gaze and fastidious manner that he was an engraver or watch-maker. Wearing a Taos ski resort T-shirt and brown corduroy pants, the slightly pudgy and much more boisterous Murphy looks like your archetypal American indie-rock studio rat.

After a low-key spell in late 2003/early 2004--a steady flow of fine but not exactly throat-grabbing releases, from The Juan Maclean, Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom, and Black Dice--DFA came back strong in the last few months of 2004 with two of their most exciting singles yet.  Pixeltan's  "Get Up/Say What"  is classic DFA discopunk, simultaneously raw and slick, while "Sunplus"  by J.O.Y.--a Japanese outfit helmed by K.U.D.O, Goldsworthy's Tim 's former partner in UNKLE, and featuring guest vocals from Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms--beautifully updates the thorny, fractured postpunk funk of LiLiPUT and The Slits. Like most DFA releases, these tracks came out as vinyl 12 inches. But don't fret if you've got no turntable--you can also find them on Compilation #2. Attractively packaged with the label’s trademark minimal design, the box set pulls together everything that wasn't on their first, not wholly satisfactory compilation, throws in a terrific bonus mix CD executed by Tim Goldsworthy and Tim Sweeney, and altogether showcases a formidable body of work.  Two highlights are Liquid Liquid's "Bellhead," a brand-new DFA recording of an old song by one of their Eighties postpunk heroes, formerly on the legendary 99 Records label, and the 15 minute disco-delic journey-into-sound that is "Casual Friday" by Black Leotard Front (an alter ego for Gonzalez and Russom).

And now there’s the second release under the global distribution deal with EMI, the debut album from LCD Soundsystem, which people are already talking about as a contender for best album of 2005. In the studio, LCD is basically a James Murphy solo project with occasional help from friends who drop by, and some spiritual guidance from Goldsworthy. Live, though, LCD swells into a proper band, and a surprisingly powerful one, its sheer rock-funk force bringing to mind at various points Happy Mondays, the Lo-Fidelity Allstars, and The Stooges gone disco. 

Released not long after “House Of Jealous Lovers”, LCD’s  debut single “Losing My Edge” was the first indication that DFA weren’t just a pair of capable remixers, but that there was in fact a whole sensibility, aesthetic, and ethos behind the label, as well as a groovy retro-nuevo sound.  Sung by Murphy, the song is the plaint of a cool hunter type--a musician, or DJ, or record store clerk, or possibly all three--who’s agonizingly aware that he’s slipping, as younger kids outdo his esoteric knowledge with even more obscure reference points. “I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978,” the character whines. “To the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties”.  The aging hipster’s claims of priority and having been first-on-the-block get more and more absurd: “I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City/I was working on the organ sounds with much patience…  I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids/I played it at CBGB's… I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan/I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes/I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.”  

As well as being a hilarious auto-critique of hipsterism, “Losing My Edge” obliquely captured something of the pathos of the modern era. All this massive ever-accumulating knowledge about music history, the huge array of arcane influences and sources available thanks to the reissue industry and peer-to-peer filesharing, all the advantages we have today in terms of technology and how to get good sounds, have resulted in a kind of a kind of crisis of “well made” music, where producers are scholars of production, know how to get a great period feel, yet it seems harder and harder to make music that actually matters, in the way that the music that inspired them mattered in its own day. “Record collection rock” is my term for this syndrome, although the malaise is just as prevalent in dance culture (look at the perennial return of the 303 acid bass, each time sounding more exhausted and unsurprising). 

“Losing My Edge” was very funny, but also poignant. Murphy agrees. “It’s incredibly sad. It took people a while to pick up on that. At first they were like, ‘ha! You got ‘em’, like it was just a satire on hipsters. What’s truly sad, though, is that the initial inspiration for it was from my deejaying in the early days of DFA, playing postpunk and an eclectic mix of dance and rock. And suddenly everybody started playing that kind of mixture, and I thought ‘fuck, now it’s a genre and I’m fucked, I’m not going to get hired’. My response was, “I was doing this first,” and then I realized that was pathetic, that I was this 31 year old hipster douchebag. So at the end of “Losing My Edge,” that’s why there’s the long list of bands-- Pere Ubu, Todd Terry, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, Heldon, Gentle Giant,  the Human League, Roy Harper, Sun Ra, on and on--‘cos in the end that’s what my attitude reduced to, just running around trying to yell the names of cool bands before anybody else!”. He says that a big part of DFA’s attitude is that “we definitely try to shoot holes in our own cool as fast as we can, because being cool is one of the worst things for music.” He cites DFA’s disco-flavored remix of Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” as an example, its softness representing a deliberate swerve from the obvious punk-funk sound that DFA were known for.

“Beat Connection”, the even more impressive flipside to “Losing,” was also a meta-music statement, with Murphy accusing everyone on the dancefloor of colluding in lameness. “Everybody here needs a shove/Everybody here is afraid of fun/It’s the saddest night out in the USA/Nobody’s coming undone.” He explains that this was inspired by his and Goldsworthy’s experience of the “really uptight” New York club scene at the tail-end of the Nineties.  When Murphy compares his lyrical approach to The Stooges--“really simple, repetitive, quite stupid”--he hits it on the nail. “Beat Connection” is dance culture’s counterpart to The Stooges 1969 classic “No Fun.”  Which was probably the very first punk song--indeed the Sex Pistols did a brilliant cover version of it. 

When people talk about LCD Soundsystem and DFA, though, the word that comes up isn’t punk rock so much as postpunk--Public Image Ltd (the band John Lydon formed after the Pistols broke up), Gang of Four, Liquid Liquid, etc. Murphy originally got into this era of music when he was working as sound engineer and live sound mixer for Six Finger Satellite, an abrasive mid-Nineties band who were precocious--indeed premature--in referencing the postpunk period well before it became hip again circa 2001. In a 1995 interview with me, Six Finger Satellite were already namedropping late Seventies outfits like Chrome and This Heat. They also recorded an all-synth and heavily Devo-influenced mini-album, Machine Cuisine, as a sideline from their more guitar-oriented, Big Black-like albums. “Going on tour with Six Finger Satellite was one of those super fertile times in my life in terms of finding out about music,” recalls Murphy. “They were like ‘do you know about Deutsche Amerikanishce Freundschaft? Do you know about Suicide?’, and they dumped all this knowledge on me while we were driving around the country from gig to gig. This was a few years before I met Tim, which was itself another very fertile and immersive period in terms of new music.”  The Six Finger Satellite connection endures. DFA act The Juan Maclean is actually Six Finger guitarist John Maclean, making Kraftwerk-like electronica. 

“Losing My Edge” b/w  “Beat Connection” was followed by two more excellent LCD singles, “Give It Up” b/w “Tired” and “Yeah” (which came in a “Crass version” and a “Pretentious Version” and managed to make the 303 acid-bass sound quite exciting, against all the odds). These six early single tracks are collected on the bonus disc that comes with the debut LCD Soundsystem album. Running through a lot of the CD--particularly songs like “Movement” and “On Repeat”-- is that same meta-musical rage you heard in “Losing” and “Beat”: a poisoned blend of a desire for music to be revolutionary and dangerous, along with a defeatist, crippled-by-irony awareness that the age of musical revolution may be long past. “Movement,” the single, fuses the sentiments of “Losing My Edge” and “Beat Connection”, with Murphy surveying the music scene and pointing the finger--“it’s like a culture, without the effort, of all the culture/it’s like a movement, without the bother, of all of the meaning”--and then confessing to being “tapped”, meaning exhausted, sapped of energy and inspiration. Although the sentiment could apply just as equally to dance culture, Murphy says the song is specifically a reaction to all the talk of guitar rock making a comeback, “all the inanity that gets bandied about as rock journalism. It’s a complete rip of fashion journalism--‘the high waisted pant is BACK’.  Like that's supposed to mean something.  I mean, I hope you don't go around hearing ‘abstract expressionism is BACK!  and HOTTER than EVER!’ in art mags.”

“On Repeat” is yet another LCD song about the ennui that comes when you’re been into music for a long time: the awareness of  the cycles repeating, the eternal return of the same personae and poses, archetypes and attitudes, reshuffled with slight variations. “That attitude is where I’m coming from all of the time,” says Murphy. “The lyric referring to ‘the new stylish creep’--that’s me! The song is  about hating what you are, and that giving you strength to hate everything else.  It's weird.  I love music so much that I want to drown it forever.  Destroy everything.”

You can hear these conflicted emotions in Murphy’s singing voice. It has a weird tetchy texture that evokes a mixture of exasperation and fatigue, sounds at once spirited and dispirited. Murphy says that’s an accurate reflection of how he feels when he’s recording vocals. “It murders me.  I hate hearing my own stupid voice in the headphones, with all the singerly bits and false poses.  I sometimes have to sing things over and over until I hate the song, until there's no posy vocal bits in there that make me cringe.  That song, ‘On Repeat,’ in particular was hell to do. But in the end I like it.  Or at least I feel like I can stand behind it”. In terms of that frayed, worn-out quality to LCD vocals, Murphy says “I usually compress the shit out of the vocal with a VCA compressor, which is really brutal.  And I try to mix them so that the frequencies are like "Mother of Pearl" by Roxy Music or "Poptones" by PiL”. 

Yet for all the lyrical and vocal notes of disillusionment and frustration running through LCD Soundsystem, the music itself is full of exuberance and playfulness, a delight in the sheer pleasures and possibilities of sound. “Too Much Love,” which seems to be a song about drug burn-out and excessive nocturnal socializing, features an awesome grating synth-whine that makes me think of a serotonin-depleted brain whimpering on the Tuesday after a wild weekend.  Another standout track, “Disco Infiltrator” nods to Kraftwerk with its imitation of the eerie synth-riff from 1980’s “Home Computer.” It’s not a sample but a recreation, says Murphy. “It just an ascending chromatic scale, really.  It's not rocket science!” The track also features some sweet semi-falsetto singing from Murphy that sounds like David Byrne circa Talking Heads’ Remain In Light. “It's just my shitty soul voice,” laughs Murphy. “Al Green has a beautiful soul, so that's what you hear coming through in his voice.  My soul is absolute rubbish, so that's what comes out!”

The closing “Great Release” seems like a homage to Brian Eno’s song-based albums like Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Another Green World. “Actually, it’s Here Comes the Warm Jets-era Eno,” laughs Murphy. “It’s not a homage, though--I hate that word. No, I just like the type of energy that some Eno/Bowie stuff got, and some of the space of Lou Reed stuff, like ’Satellite of Love’. Some journalist got kind of stroppy with me about that song, and all I could think was, ‘is there seriously some problem with there being too many songs that use sonic spaces similar to early Eno solo work?  I mean, is this really something we need to talk about before it gets out of control?!?’”. I WISH I had that problem.  Or is the problem just me--that I'm not being original enough?  Because if it is, then let's just dump rock in the fucking ocean and call it a day, because I'm doing the best I can for the moment!”

Best of all is “Thrills,” in which Murphy comes off like Iggy Pop singing over a track that fuses The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” with Suicide’s “Dance,” over a fat bassline not a million miles from Timo Maas. Actually, Murphy says, the inspiration for the bass-and-percussion groove is Missy Elliott's “Get Yr Freak On”. “I made the original version of ‘Thrills’ right when that came out.  I loved that era of mainstream hip hop, it was a free-for-all.  And just the bass of it.”

Of course, all these comparisons and reference points only underscore the point I earlier made in reference to “Losing My Edge”: the poignancy of living in a “late” era of culture, the insurmountable-seeming challenge of competing with the accumulated brilliance of the past and creating any kind of sensation of new-ness.  “Yeah, that is kind of tattooed on my stomach,” says Murphy, referring to this pained awareness of belatedness. He acknowledges that “great influences do not a great record make”.  And yet despite all the odds, the LCD album is a great record.

When I mention the American literary critic Harold Bloom’s concept of “anxiety of influence”--which argues that “strong” artists suffer from an acute sense of anguish that everything has been done before, and that makes them struggle against their predecessors in a desperate Oedipal attempt to achieve originality--Murphy flips out. “It's hilarious that you say this--I mention Bloom's anxiety theory pretty regularly in interviews!  This is the shit I've been screaming about for years.  Learning and progress has always been based on learning from the past.  Real originality never comes from trying to defeat the past right out of the gate.  It's a spark of an individual idea caused by the love/hate relationship between a "listener" and the "sound".  I love music, and it inspired me at first to copy it, then to be ashamed of copying it, then to make music in "modes" (genres) while trying to  pretend they were original, then finally making music with a purpose--which for me was dance music.  It made people dance. It was no longer just music to make you look cool and feel like you were part of something you admire. 

“I don't feel like I'm in any danger of making ‘retro’ music, but at the same time, there are things about the ways various people who've come before me did things that I prefer greatly to the way ‘modern’ things are done.  I use a computer.  I edit and do all sorts of modern shit, but there are things I consciously do that were done in songs I love from before me.” 

As much as love, though, it’s hate that inspires LCD Soundsystem in equal measure. “I hate the way bands stand on stage, the gear they use, the crew they hire to tune their tedious guitars,  the love they have for their special ‘guitar amp, the belief in their fragile, phoney little singer who's a fucking sham.  They are not and will never be Iggy Pop.  Neither will I, or my band, but we know it, and we're trying our fucking best to be the LCD Soundsystem.  Complete with its laundry list of influences, failures and idiocies. At least you go onstage knowing that, good or bad, no one is like you.”

* * * * *

Many labels never survive the initial hype storm of being hip. Murphy recalls a peculiar, uncomfortable phase when "we kept seeing magazines with profiles of DFA, but we weren't really releasing anything at the time." Now, though, he's thankful that "we're not ascendant anymore. At this point we're kind of cruising along. And it's nice. It doesn't feel like it's out of our control anymore."

And what about New York, the city whose mythos is so central to DFA? Is it living up to its own reputation at the moment? "It's a great city, but people get lazy here," says Murphy. "So we and a few other people we think of as allies, we go into phases of trying to punch the city into being interesting, Then we go home for a couple of months and hang out with our wives and cook. And then it's like, 'okay, time to go out punching again'. And it's getting to be about that time again. For a while, we were like 'oh fuck them, let them live in their filth of terrible parties, shitty DJs, just doing the same thing'. See I can't go to these parties where people play records that are sent to them by promoters 'cos they're genre djs, part of a genre. I've always loathed that. And then I found myself in that situation again," Murphy sighs, referring to the way DFA gets lumped together with Black Strobe and Trevor Jackson of Playgroup/Output, the way genre-crossing becomes its own kind of genre. "That's not what I signed up for, you know?  I didn't leave indie rock to end up back in indie rock!"

House of Zealous Rockers: DFA

by 

Simon Reynolds

Village Voice October 26, 2004

When was the last time we had a great New York indie record label? Think about it. Not just a company that happens to be based here, but one with a roster of local artists, one whose whole vibe ‘n’ vision is bound up with the mythos of New York City. You’d probably have to go back to the early ’80s, the era of punk-funk and mutant-disco imprints like ZE, 99, and Sleeping Bag. Today’s only real contender is DFA. For the last three years, DFA has been on a mission to make this city live up to its own legend—”to be what it should be,” as DFA co-founder James Murphy puts it. The DFA sound flashes back to places and times when NYC’s party-hard hedonism seemed to have both an edge and a point—Mudd Club, Paradise Garage—but never feels like an exercise in retro pastiche.

The label’s initial batch of vinyl-only singles in 2002—most famously “House of Jealous Lovers” by the Rapture—resurrected the idea of dance music spiked with punk attitude. Before long, everybody was clamoring for a dose of DFA cool. Murphy and his English-born partner, Tim Goldsworthy, were touted as superproducers, indieland’s equivalent to the Neptunes. Janet Jackson phoned them and suggested collaborating (amazingly, DFA kinda sorta forgot to follow up the call.) Most surreally, they spent an afternoon in the studio with Britney Spears. “That was weird,” says Goldsworthy. “Won’t do that again. No offense to her—she’s lovely. Got a foul mouth, though!” The brief session came to nothing, through lack of common musical ground. “When we work with people, we hang out, listen to records, share stuff,” says Murphy. “But with Britney we had absolutely no way of communicating. She didn’t know anything that we knew.”

After this lost encounter with “the big time,” DFA consciously backed away from the opportunities being thrust its way. “You stop returning phone calls, people get bored of you real quick!” laughs Murphy. Instead they concentrated on building up their own operation. The stance is bearing fruit in the last months of 2004, with a freshly inked global-minus-America distribution deal with EMI and an impressive three-CD collection of DFA works so far, Compilation #2, out this week. Early next year the second release under this new arrangement will be the debut album from Murphy’s own group LCD Soundsystem.

Murphy and Goldsworthy originally met in inauspicious circumstances, as hired help for DJ-producer David Holmes, who was making one of his “soundtrack for a nonexistent movie”-type albums in Manhattan. Murphy did the engineering, Goldsworthy did the programming. The location was Murphy’s West 13th Street recording studio (now DFA’s sound lab). It didn’t take long for the two technicians to suspect they were making most of the creative decisions. “Tim and I were forced to create a dialogue about how to make sounds, because there was just this vague cloud of ideas coming from Holmes,” says Murphy, gesturing to the back of the studio.

Taking breaks from the recording grind, the two sound boys bonded further during Saturday-night missions of full-on clubbing. Which is when Murphy, hitherto a typical indie-rock discophobe, had his dance music E-piphany. “Yeah, it’s an unheard of story, isn’t it?” he laughs. “A person who only listens to rock goes off, does a mountain of E, and gets converted to dance music.” Revealingly, though, it was hearing the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” at exactly the point “when the drug was peaking” that gave Murphy the idea of “throwing parties and playing better music—like ‘Loose’ by the Stooges—than what dance culture was offering at that time.”

At the close of the ’90s, technique-obsessed and genre-purist DJs were squeezing all the vibe out of club culture, in the process driving the next generation of hipster kids back to rock bands with stage moves and charismatic hair. Murphy and Goldsworthy decided to rescue dance music from “McDepth—that McDonald’s version of ‘deep,’ where there’s nothing there,” Murphy explains, citing everything from glitchy laptop musicians to Tortoise-style post-rock as culpable. Taking the name DFA—short for Death From Above, and originally the tag under which Murphy did infamously loud sound mixing for bands like Six Finger Satellite—they started throwing irregular parties based around the notion of bridging the considerable gap between Donna Summer and the Stooges. Soon, tired of endlessly playing their staple fare like Can and Liquid Liquid, the duo decided to make their own “dance-punk” tracks to spin.

“House of Jealous Lovers” was their first real stab. Dance distributors picked up the single purely for the house remix by Morgan Geist (from cognoscenti-approved outfit Metro Area). But it was DFA’s original disco-punk version that eventually took off, timed perfectly for the dancefloor taste shift toward edgy angularity (not just the rediscovery of ’80s groups like ESG and A Certain Ratio, but the emergence of neo-post-punk bands like !!! and Radio 4). But while the Rapture’s slashing guitar and slightly constipated, white-boys-getting-down funk bass flash you back to Gang of Four and Delta 5, Murphy and Goldsworthy’s production supplied a pumping, monolithic regularity that made the track fully contemporary. “There were indie bands already coming through doing that kind of rickety punk-funk, but we wanted to make records that house DJs would actually play,” says Murphy. “So we filtered the bass a lot, did a couple of layers of hi-hats and reversed them, took the drummer’s playing and chopped it up.”

DFA’s signature sound mixes Goldsworthy’s computer wizardry with Murphy’s background of engineering and playing in rock bands (DFA’s remixes typically feature his drumming, bass, and sometimes guitar). Two different kinds of knowledge mesh perfectly: Murphy’s expertise at getting great drum sounds and capturing live “feel,” Goldsworthy’s digital editing skills and vast sample-hound knowledge of recorded music (acquired during his trip-hop days as co-founder of Mo Wax and member of that label’s supergroup UNKLE). Both guys look their respective parts. Slender, soft-spoken, and diffidently English in a way that often, he says, gets him mistaken for gay, Goldsworthy seems like someone at home with delicate, intricate work—a century ago, you might have assumed from his intent, bespectacled gaze and fastidious manner that he was an engraver or watchmaker. Wearing a Taos ski resort T-shirt and brown cords, the slightly pudgy and much more boisterous Murphy looks like your archetypal Amerindie studio rat.

After a low-key spell—a steady flow of fine but not exactly throat-grabbing releases, from the Juan Maclean, Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom, and Black Dice—DFA has come back strong this fall with two of its most exciting singles yet. Pixeltan’s “Get Up/Say What” is classic DFA disco-punk, simultaneously raw and slick, while “Sunplus” by J.O.Y.—a Japanese outfit helmed by K.U.D.O, Goldsworthy’s former partner in UNKLE, and featuring guest vocals from Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms—beautifully updates the thorny, fractured funk of LiLiPUT and the Slits. Like most DFA releases, these tracks came out as vinyl 12-inches. But don’t fret if you’ve got no turntable—you can also find them on Compilation #2. The box set pulls together everything that wasn’t on the first, not wholly satisfactory anthology, throws in a bonus mix CD, and altogether showcases a formidable body of work. One previously unavailable highlight is Liquid Liquid’s “Bellhead,” a brand-new recording of an old song by one of DFA’s ’80s post-punk heroes.

Many labels never survive the initial hype storm of being hip. Murphy recalls a peculiar, uncomfortable phase when “we kept seeing magazines with profiles of DFA, but we weren’t really releasing anything at the time.” Now, though, he’s thankful that “we’re not ascendant anymore. At this point we’re kind of cruising along. And it’s nice. It doesn’t feel like it’s out of our control anymore.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Strangely I've never been able to get into the later LCD albums, which people from the generation just below mine swear by. "All My Friends" and all that.  Perhaps because the disparate influences are more successfully emulsified? So that it sounds like fully achieved atemporality rather than a collage on the edge of congealing?

This all feels so far back in time, long long ago, even more long ago than the original postpunk era ....  twas strange to learn recently that my youngest, unborn at the time of writing these pieces, is a fan of LCD Soundsystem and actually saw them live not so long ago.,,,,