RIP Andy Gill - the NME writer interviewed, in 2003, about Sheffield, postpunk, and being confused with that chap in the Gang of Four

I was really saddened to hear about the recent death of Andy Gill, who wrote superbly about postpunk, electronic music, and weirdo sounds of all types for NME during the late Seventies and Eighties, and later on became resident popular music critic at The Independent.  It was for Q, though, that he came to New York in 1993 to interview Donald Fagen, whom as it happened I was covering for The Observer. We met at the album playback for Kamakiriad and had a long and very pleasant conversation. Sadly we never did meet again, but in 2003 I interviewed Andy by telephone for Rip It Up and Start Again, about his time as the Sheffield correspondent for the New Musical Express. Below is a tidied-up transcript of our conversation, with Andy providing a richly detailed lowdown on Sheffield subculture, covering the early days of Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, Vice Versa / ABC, as well as a number of lesser-knowns and curios from the after-punk era (including I'm So Hollow, Artery, The Extras, 2.3, Molodoy). I also asked him about his experiences working at NME -  heady, boozy, conflictual - during its last golden age. 

Are you Sheffield born and bred?

“I was born in Sheffield [in 1953], but spent my teens – this is late Sixties, early Seventies – in Nottingham. And then went to Sheffield University, starting in 1973.  Although it was mainly engineers and had a good metallurgy department, it had a substantial arts side to it too. And it was a fairly leftwing place. I studied philosophy. I quickly got drawn into the student newspaper  Darts. I edited that during my second year. I did my finals in 1976.

“That year I applied in response to the famous ‘hip young gunslingers’ advert that the New Musical Express ran, when they were looking for a new writer [the one that Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons came first equal for the staff writer job, so they gave jobs to both of them,  and Paul Morley was runner-up].  During much of this time I worked part-time at a branch of the Virgin record shop in Sheffield - a funky little store at the bottom of this street The Moor.  That was pretty cool – the shop had this row of old airline seats and people would listen to albums on “cans, man!” – headphones. People would sit and listen for ages. We’d enjoy putting records on in the store. The shop had loads of deletions and cut-outs, so it was a good grounding for listening and learning about music.

“A thing to note about Sheffield then is that it was a bit of equivalent to San Francisco. It’s always had this leftist bohemia thing, in terms of attitudes. When Ornette Coleman played the UK, he’d play London, and he’d play Sheffield – because he had a constituency there, and people were prepared to go to the trouble of putting him on there.”

What were the crucial nodes of Sheffield bohemia?

“There was Rare & Racy, this store in the university district, which was full of second hand books and second hand records. Antiquarian books. It’s still there, and still a fantastic shop. The guys that run it were a bunch of old jazzbos - very bohemian. Unlike most bookstores where there’d be this hush, like in church, in Rare & Racy  there’d be this cacophonous racket of free jazz, things like Sun Ra. Or John Cage. The Rare & Racy guys only liked avantgarde jazz, contemporary European avant-garde, and old blues. So, you’d hear Skip James or Charlie Patton wheezing away at you.

“And then another key node, a venue for early electronic stuff was Meatwhistle – a sort of youth club and community centre, a place behind the city hall. Human League, Adi Newton [Clock DVA] all played there. A lot of people came out of that Meatwhistle mulch.

“Then there was Cabaret Voltaire, who had their own thing going. Before the Cabs had a record out, they used to come into Virgin.  I had hair down to my waist in those days. They came up to the counter and asked 'Have you got any records by Cabaret Voltaire?'. I’d heard of the name, and what I’d heard about them sounded really intriguing to me. So, I said ‘As far as I know they haven’t got anything out yet, but I’d really be interested in hearing them, cos it’s my kind of thing.’ I remember them being quite shocked that this guy who looked like a Ted Nugent fan was heavily into that kind of that stuff. Ever since then we’ve been mates.

“Of the two big constituencies in Sheffield as far as music goes in those days, one was metal / hard rock. Every metal band would come to play the Sheffield City Hall. When ordering up albums for the shop, 200 or 250 was a good order for an album - as an initial order that meant the band was a big seller. The only groups that did that were Sabs, Quo or Zep. 




"The other huge thing was glam. Not the Sweet or Gary Glitter, but Roxy Music and Bowie. They were a huge influence in Sheffield. It was this working-class thing of dressing up - but not just dressing up, being prepared to be outrageous and being into this weird music.”

So, Sheffield youth were into the Eno side of Roxy as much as they were into the Ferry side?

“Definitely. It was the experimental side of Roxy and glam that was interesting to most people. There was this club, the Crazy Daisy – that was the place that had a big glam night. People would go and dress up for it. 



Roxette (1977) from NWfilmarchive on Vimeo.

Mal and Rich and Chris [Cabaret Voltaire -  Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk, Chris Watson] and their gang were heavily into the sonics of Roxy. Although Mal was heavily into clothes too.  He had two rooms in his flat, and one room was where he lived and the other was his wardrobe – and he had an ironing board in the middle of it. It was just completely full of clothes. Mal was the most stylish person I’d ever met; he always had a consummate sense of style.

The Cabs - Mallinder in the middle - pic by Pete Hill

“The early Cabs gigs were trying to get a reaction – it was a racket, just squealing noise. And there’d be films behind them of god knows what: biological warfare experiments, people in chemical warfare suits. They’d collect old Super-8 footage of things like that.

"Around 1975 or 1976, we became friends. They had been going since ‘73 or ’74. So, it was a bit after that I got to meet them. They had this studio in this old industrial building. The whole building was called Western Works – and they recorded in it and called the studio Western Works.”

What were they like as people, Cabaret Voltaire?

“Richard’s always been a bit stroppy –in that very Yorkshire way. He can be hellishly stubborn. That’s a typically Yorkshire thing:  ‘if you say don’t do this, I’ll do it’.  He’s got that thing in his voice.

"In Sheffield it wasn’t like the London Musicians Collective where everyone’s got wire-rim glasses and that sort of avantgarde middle class attitude. In Sheffield, it was working class Dada. They were heavily into Dada and liked to get a reaction. Wake people up. Richard, then, mainly played guitar and clarinet. Mal did rudimentary bass and vocals, treated beyond legibility.

“Chris Watson is now quite famous. He joined Tyne Tees as a sound engineer, and since then became one of the top sound engineers in British TV. He does most of the David Attenborough things, going around the world taping the sound of weird animals. And then solo he does albums of strange ambiences of strange places. Chris was more straightforward than the other two, at first glance. It was like a René Magritte thing, where you look like you work in a bank but you do these weird art works. When you see Salvador Dali, from his appearance you know what to expect from his paintings. Whereas looking normal is like protective coloration. Chris looked more normal than Mal or Richard – and in many ways, he was more normal. But he was very interested in sonic weirdness.”

Who else was around in that moment just before and just after punk?

“There was the fanzine Gunrubber, by one Ronny Clocks – a/k/a Paul Bower. He later went into local government in London. And became a big figure in New Labour. Paul had always been very political. Gunrubber was important. 



"See, punk didn’t hit the same way in Sheffield as it did elsewhere. Punk in most other places in the UK inspired people to pick up a guitar and do the three-chord rock thing, in emulation of the Clash or the Pistols. But in Sheffield it didn’t happen that way, there were hardly any punk rock bands like that in Sheffield. Most bands wanted to make weird sounds. Early synths were prized. Or just boxes of tricks that people had made."

So, there were no Sheffield equivalent to provincial punk bands like Bristol’s The Cortinas, then?

“Well, there was 2.3, which was Paul Bower’s band. They had a single on Fast Product. But even they weren’t very punky. Paul was singer/guitarist in 2.3, but he was a scene maker as much as anything.

“Another fanzine was Steve’s Paper. That was Stephen Singleton, who formed Vice Versa – and which then turned into ABC. Steve’s zine was more gossipy and concerned with scene-making. But he was doing something at least.

“Another important node in the Sheffield scene was this club Now Society aka Now Soc. That was within the university. These guys behind Now Soc felt that what the entertainments committee were putting on was fucking rubbish – groups like Mud, or Osibisa. So, they thought ‘there’s all these local bands, we should get them in here’. They set up in one of the student bars in the university, funded through the student union. Human League did their debut performance at Now Soc, which I reviewed for NME. I always remember that gig because people had never seen a haircut like that before – Phil Oakey had the asymmetrical haircut with the floppy fringe that reached down to his chin on one side only. Phil had that look from day one. The League were doing these comical kabuki moves in a self-deprecating way. People were up for something new. Also, Kraftwerk were big in Sheffield, people there loved them.

“Another important club was The Limit. Def Leppard played there just before they broke. The Human League also. They bought these Perspex screens, on HP [hire purchase], to shield them from beer and gob thrown on them by the ‘what the fook’s this?’ people in the audience. That was to protect the synths from shorting out with beer getting in the works, which they couldn’t afford to happen.”

You did a special electronic feature for the NME, right?  A five-page pull-out on "Synthesised Sound", January 5^th 1980 - the first issue of the new decade!

“Yeah. It seemed to me that there was basic split between those who used synths to make weird sounds – people like Eno, or Allen Ravenstine in Pere Ubu, or the Cabs – and then those who used the keyboards to make pianistic and organ-like sounds, which would be all the prog people like Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson. But at that point I didn’t really know about the psychedelic precursors who were doing more interesting stuffwith synths, like Lothar and the Hand People, Silver Apples, Fifty Foot Hose. But I had been discovering weird electronic stuff since being a teenager in Nottingham. We’d go to listen to obscure electronic albums on Nonesuch by people like Morton Subotnick, in the record booths on a Saturday afternoon right in the middle of this department store in Nottingham.”  

Why do you think there is this electronic connection with Sheffield in particular, and the industrial North in general? There’s an attraction to the synthetic, and also a feeling of affinity with groups like Kraftwerk, who are from the similarly industrial Dusseldorf, or with American groups like Devo and Pere Ubu from industrial Ohio.

“It’s one of those things, musique concrete is a very industrial sound. In Sheffield you had these big steel forges, and you’d drive past and hear the sound of hammers, these really big KLANGS. That might have been influential on the Cabs – they recorded stuff that sounded like that.”

Was Sheffield starting to go into decline in the Seventies?

“In the Seventies, it still had a strong industrial base. It’s always been known as the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. There was a deliberate decision by Thatcher to kill the city – because it was so anti-Conservative. As soon as she got into power in 1979, every program that would have helped Sheffield was denied to the city. And the city just died. I went to live in London in 1980 and as I went back to Sheffield year after year to visit, you could see it was just dying. In the Nineties it got a bit of gentrification. But it was tragic what happened to Sheffield.

“In the Seventies, though, it did still have this industrial base. People from outside of it thought of it as this grim wasteland - huge steel rolling mills the size of several football pitches, all this industrial grime. But to the people who worked in them, it was their bread and butter.

“People were still employed. And the dole culture was quite strong even then. If you were on the dole, you weren’t ashamed of being on the dole. The dole was there to enable you to have time to work on your music. So it wasn’t that everybody wanted jobs, everybody wanted desperately to avoid having to work.

“But going back to Sheffield having this image of being an industrial wasteland…. Actually, Sheffield is the most beautiful city in the UK. There was an act passed way back in the last century concerning the development of Sheffield that stipulated that there had to be substantial areas of greenery. Five minutes’ drive and you’re up in the Peak District, and if you look down on the city from the moors, you can see there’s huge parks dotting the city. If you go past Sheffield, on the M1, you see the bad areas - the old industrial areas. But over on the west side of Sheffield where the university was and where everybody I knew lived, it was beautiful. All these beautiful old stone houses. And you’re in the countryside virtually. Sheffield was called the Rome of Britain because it was built on seven hills, just like Rome was built on seven hills.

Did you find the journalistic clichés that you’d get in the early pieces on Cabaret Voltaire and so forth – Sheffield as “grey” and “grim”– annoying, then?

“They did and they do annoy, a bit. Because Sheffield is a beautiful place. Certainly compared to fucking Manchester, which really is a grim and bleak place. For sure, there were areas of Sheffield that were horrible – as there are in every town.”

Sheffield was also famously left-wing. Labour always controlled the city council.

“It was hopeless for any other party to try to get power there.  The Lib Dems have managed to share power now, thanks to what Blunkett did to the city when he was head of the council, that whole farrago with the World Student Games, which they fought tooth and nail to get, thinking it would be a big revenue earner, but it bankrupted the city. So that led to a big swing against Labour. But back in the old days, people were proud of having the cheapest buses in the UK - 5p a ride, you could get anywhere in the city.  You could get around easily on public transport, which is just as well as being built on seven hills, it was hard for cyclists. Some of the hills are pretty steep.

“In Sheffield, you could travel really easily and cheaply. You could drink cheaply – beer was cheaper than down south. People tended to walk around a lot. There weren’t that many people with cars. It was mainly a pedestrian culture. If you were in a band, you would hire vans to take the kit to the venue.”

And in Sheffield, the kind of Labour was definitely Old Labour and to the left of the spectrum. In favor of nationalization of the major industries. There were some unreconstructed communists on the council, right?

“Oh yeah, a lot of Trots. A very left-wing city and always had been. Nowadays it’s not, but nowhere is. But in those days… There’s always been an undercurrent of a Communist Anarchist Trotskyite thing.”

Yet Sheffield never really produced a militantly political postpunk group like The Pop Group or Gang of Four… You didn’t get that kind of agit-prop band.

“The groups weren’t that left wing, but the general populace was very left wing. Far more than any other British city probably – maybe there’s places in Wales or Scotland could challenge it.  The bands in Sheffield then weren’t political, they were more anarchist. It’s that Yorkshire stubbornness – ‘no you’re not going to organize me into this thing.’ That instinctive anarchism was a big spur for a lot of the musical undercurrents in Sheffield during postpunk.

“And I may have had an effect on that. Because you were more likely to get your band reviewed in NME if you played that kind of music. As the paper’s Sheffield stringer, I favored certain sounds. And occasionally groups threatened me because they were so annoyed I wasn’t covering them. I may have contributed to that Sheffield postpunk image in that sense.”

There was a period when the music papers would discover and focus attention on a Northern city as a new hotbed of postpunk action – first it was Manchester, and then Leeds, and then Sheffield, which the NME jestingly described as "This week's Leeds" - because it had become a syndrome by that point.  Then after that Liverpool, and then they moved on to Scotland. But what were the differences, and the relationships, between Sheffield and Leeds and Manchester.

“In Sheffield, we always considered Leeds a right-wing city. That’s despite Gang of Four and the Mekons coming from there. Obviously, there was a left-wing undercurrent in Leeds, connected to the university and polytechnic. But in Leeds, you had to watch out for the National Front. There was no NF in Sheffield – not at all. Whereas Leeds was a very strong centre for the National Front.

“As for Manchester, it just seemed fucking grim. I went there with the Cabs and this other group Graph, when they played the Factory in Hulme. One of them, after doing the soundcheck, went out to get some cigarettes – and got mugged.

“That would never happen in Sheffield.  Sheffield 10 is the cool area – that’s the university district. I lived in Broomhill, which was John Betjeman’s favorite suburb in all Britain. But nobody got mugged, even if you went down the red-light district, in Havelock Square.  It was still a safe place to go.”

Along with the local Sheffield stuff, in NME you also used to write about groups like Devo and Pere Ubu. Do you feel there was some kind of deep spiritual connection between Sheffield and those industrial Ohio cities Cleveland and Akron?

“I sometimes wondered about that. When The Modern Dance came out, I thought ‘this is the greatest album I’ve ever heard’. It’s still my favorite of all time. It’s perfect, it has everything for my taste buds -- the synths, the squealing noise, the attack, the moody ruminations, and the bottle-smashing musique concrete elements. It has a drive and vision that few other punk records have.

“Devo were the equivalent in their day of Zappa in his day – Zappa in his prime. That early Zappa, Mothers of Invention stuff was brilliant. Satirizing hippy culture even as it was being created, with We’re Only in It for the Money. Very farsighted. Devo were doing the same thing for the New Wave. Freedom of Choice is one of the great albums.

We know about The Human League and its offshoot Heaven 17, about Cabaret Voltaire, about Vice Versa becoming ABC, about Clock DVA… Who were some of the other notable after-punk outfits scrabbling around at that time in Sheffield?

“I’m So Hollow had one of the first Wasp synths, with the touch sensitive keyboard. They were coming from the Wire end of punk, which was big in Sheffield. Not the thrash aesthetic, but very angular and considered. Later on, I’m So Hollow would have been considered Goth, probably.

“Artery were an interesting band. They used to wear aprons onstage. But they changed style so often it was hard to get a fix on them. A curate’s egg - good in bits.

“There was also this group called Molodoy. They had a poster that said ‘Right, right bratties - Molodoy’.  That was Nadsat, the teenage slang from A Clockwork Orange. Molodoy dressed up like Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange. Their music was like Wire – very angular and stern. There was tension but no release, it was a very tightly repressed sound. Quite interesting – but they never amounted to much.

Molodoy at the Limit Club, 1978

(pic by Garry Warburton)

“The Comsat Angels had so much potential, but they were dogged by bad luck, bad choices, bad decisions.  Musically they had lots of interesting ideas and they should really have been like a U2 or an Echo and the Bunnymen. They could have been a more interesting version of that kind of postpunk stadium rock. 

The Comsats were all set to tour America, supporting U2. But one of them fell ill. Robert Palmer was a big Comsats fan. Steve Fellows wrote all the Comsats songs, did the singing and guitars - and Robert Palmer invited him to work with him in the Bahamas. Steve used the money to pay off the Comsats’s debts.

Later Steve discovered and managed Gomez – they brought in a tape this record store in Broomhill, in Sheffield, where Steve was working part time."

The Northern cities might have had different vibes, musically, but they all shared a common antipathy to London - a mixture of resentment of the centralized dominance of the capital, and contempt for Southern effeteness.

“2.3 had a song that was anti-London [“I Don’t Care About London”].  They did a parody of the Clash’s ‘London’s Burning”, and it went “’London’s burning’ they all shout/but I wouldn’t even piss on it to put the fire out”. That was pretty indicative of the Sheffield attitude to the nancies down South!”

But then you moved down South in 1980…

“I felt I should get down to London and impose myself on the NME. Stop being reticent. I’d been  desperately trying to get them to accept articles on Tuxedomoon and Chrome, groups I liked from San Francisco. It was a bit of a struggle. I got a job on the staff.”

How did you find it – London, and NME?

“I felt lonely. It was so much bigger than anywhere else. I got on with the NME office people. The job was a bit of a doddle, the editing. Cos I’d edited the fortnightly student newspaper at Sheffield, I’d dealt with libel writs and all that – that was terrifying, receiving a libel writ. So, working at NME was quite easy. But in Sheffield, it being much smaller, you’d have people dropping in on their way home. But people in London live ten miles away. So, you tended to do your socializing immediately after work. It was easy to slip into that booze culture. There was a coterie of us at NME who’d go drinking for long periods at lunch times – Ian Penman, Monty Smith, Danny Baker, me. Got very drunk at lunch time and then wrote funny shit in the afternoon. That was the best part of the NME.”

Writing for the music papers in those days – especially NME but Sounds and Melody Maker too – was much more powerful than being a music journalist later on. Bands were influenced by writers… certain writers became cult figures, with mystique and intrigue wafting around them… Did you get that kind of attention?

“Sometimes. But I don’t think I ever had my photo appear in the NME. I thought that was a bad idea – because someone’s going come up to at a gig complaining about something you wrote and you might get glassed. I wanted to be anonymous.

Andy's faves of 1981, in the NME Xmas issue that year

“The other thing is that people always confused me with the other Andy Gill, the guy in Gang of Four. And he gets it the other way round, people think he’s reviewing records for The Independent. Even his dad thinks that! On tour, in America, apparently someone once came up to him and asked “Are you the Andy Gill who writes for the NME?”. Andy said “no”. And this guy goes, “oh…” – and just walked away! “

That whole late Seventies, early Eighties period – it must have been an unbelievably exciting time to be on the frontlines writing about it in real-time. It was incredibly exciting just to read about it from a distance. Punk turning into postpunk turning into New Pop…

“We used to have editorial meetings at NME - they were ghastly affairs, arguments about genres and which things should be covered and which things should be ignored.  I would be thinking ‘we should just cover all of this’.  I could never understand the factionalism, and the absolutist nature of the factionalism.”

So, you weren’t involved in a faction at NME, then?

“Not really. To an extent, there was a cluster that was me, Ian, Chris Bohn, Paul Morley. But Morley was more a gadfly and had more of a pop sensibility. It was Paul who once said that Stephen Mallinder was the sexiest man in British pop. Which was ironic because at that time Morley looked just like Mallinder!”

Talking about pop sensibility, there was this huge shift from grim and bleak postpunk to bright and bouncy ‘new pop’. And Vice Versa switched to become ABC.

“Vice Versa were an electronic band manqué - and it was only when Martin Fry joined that they became this glossy pop thing. And only when Trevor Horn got his mitts on them that they became this viable pop thing. I remember thinking: ‘Blimey, ABC and Human League in the Top 10 - it would never have happened in my day’.  I would not have bigged them up. I liked what the Human League did on Dare, but I did think it was a dilute Kraftwerk.

Vice Versa live at Futurama festival , Leeds, 1980

“The day we left Sheffield to move down to London, we did a moonlight flit to avoid paying the last lot of rent. And I remember Ian Burden – then in this group Graph -  coming round to the house. We had both been in an improvising group called the Musical Janines, with Stephen Fellows and Mick Glaisher and Kevin Bacon from the Comsats, just making a racket. 






"Anyway, it was November or October 1980, I was about to leave Sheffield and Ian comes around and says “Have you heard, the Human League have split up?” Martyn Ware and Ian Craig-Marsh had left Phil Oakey and Adrian Wright in the lurch on the eve of this big European tour. And Ian says, “Phil has asked me to join the League.” Ian could play keyboards as well as bass, you see. Ian said, ‘I’ll have to learn all their repertoire, but that’ll only take about an afternoon, cos it’s all one-finger tunes.’ But he said ‘I’m not sure whether to do it or not’. And I was like, ‘for Christ’s sake, say ‘yes’. At the very least you’ll get to see Europe, and you might make a bit of money out of it, and it’s playing in a proper band’.  

“So, Ian joined the Human League – and of course, he co-wrote ‘The Sound of the Crowd’ and ‘Love Action’. Ian wrote the riffs; Phil wrote the words.  Later on, Steve Fellows was living around Ian’s big house, so he was there when the post came one day. Ian opens this envelope and there’s a royalty cheque for the European earnings off just ‘Love Action’. And it’s a quarter of a million quid. And Ian was like, ‘oh, more money….’ and he just left it on the table! Didn’t bank it for weeks, because he’d just got so many of these checks. It’s a bit like the Joe Cocker stories.  Sheffield’s most famous singer, but he had no head for money – and he had that typical working-class self-deprecating thing. His dad supposedly found a load of checks in a drawer, dating back to the early seventies. And his mum found a cheque for hundreds of thousands of dollars in his jeans that she’d washed. Likewise, Ian, I think, was a bit embarrassed by his success.”

So was Ian Burden the musical genius of the second incarnation of the Human League?

“It was him and Jo Callis, who’d been in the Rezillos. Jo and Ian were the ones who came up with the music. Phil was the lyrics and a little bit of the music – and then the presentation, and the overall vision. I have a lot of respect for Phil - he’s stayed true to his ideals. And always he stayed in Sheffield. He found it a bit embarrassing, being famous and recognized. He didn’t feel hip enough for London. Found it a bit hard to mingle with the music industry."

What about ABC? Did you care for them?

“Well, I came up with that phrase ‘the Lexicon of Love’. That was the headline I gave this live review Penman did of ABC. Ian and I still argue over who came up with it, actually. It was one of their first gigs, more like a PA, because they couldn’t play. ABC was really a Trevor Horn fantasy constructed in the studio.

“Did I care for ABC? Well, like one ‘cares’ for an extremely sweet candy. Stephen Singleton, back when he was doing Steve’s Paper, the fanzine – he was always going about ‘I’ve found some great shirts in a second hand store’. Or ‘I’ve found some nice gloves.’ It was a very fashion-mag, glam-oriented approach – into the visual aesthetic of punk, rather than the music. So, it didn’t surprise me that much, ABC, as an extension of that.”

“Talking of glam becoming punk, the great lost Sheffield group, who were quite important, was The Extras. I managed them for a short while. The singer John Lake was a sort of actor-poet singer – so the songs were a bit like someone busking ‘characters’ over tracks that the others had laid down. They were too late for glam, too early for the New Romantic - and out of step with punk. It was a highly design-conscious type of music - all the elements of glam were there, with a little bit of punk edge musically. The lyrics were very literary and poetic, plugged into that Burroughs, cut-up thing, but also that Bukowski thing. The keyboard player Robin Markin looked like Steve Harley; singer John looked like Bryan Ferry; the bassist Robin Allen, known at the time as Robin Banks, looked like Dylan, a mop of curly hair. And then they had this sax player Andy Quick, thin as a rake, who looked the spitting image of Rowland S. Howard from the Birthday Party. Bizarrely Andy departed for the antipodes at virtually the same time as Rowland S. Howard came over to England.  Andy was quite a funny character -  lovely, but he could flip over and become borderline dangerous. He nutted a window once somewhere and got all this glass in his forehead. Just having a sax in the group made it a Roxy Music, Andy Mackay thing.

“The Extras were very big in Sheffield, but the timing was just off. Two years earlier, or two years later, they could have made it. But they were the ones where everybody in Sheffield expected ‘Oh, they’re going to be famous soon’. They moved down to London, got a manager there, but it all fell apart.”

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Over at Pantheon, a rapidly growing archive of Andy Gill's writing. Which can also be found in copious amounts at Rock's Back Pages.

Here's a tribute to Andy at The Independent, where he worked for many years.




Andy Gill can be seen and heard talking in this doc Made in Sheffield

ORANGE JUICE

The Glasgow School

Domino

Uncut, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Summer 1980: the sombre pall of postpunk hangs over the nation.  Overpowered by the dark visions of Metal Box and Unknown Pleasures, the new bands coming through all devoutly follow the Gospel According to John or the Gospel According to Ian (preached, on Closer, from beyond the grave). But, wait, heresy’s brewing north of Hadrian’s Wall. A bunch of Scottish bands, foremost among them Orange Juice, are bringing the sunshine. Affiliated to Alan Horne’s ludicrously ambitious Postcard label, the Glasgow group herald the demise of postpunk, proposing a new life-affirming mindset in which “pop” isn’t a dirty word and it’s cool to sing love songs. 

The closest Joy Division ever got to the latter was the harrowing “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” while Lydon was still sneering “this is not a love song” as late as 1983 (despite being a happily married man!).  Orange Juice’s debut single “Falling and Laughing” was both a love song and a meta-pop manifesto in defence of romance. Crushed by his latest crush, the humiliated and heartbroken Edwyn Collins concludes “what can I do but learn to laugh at myself?” “Love Sick,” the B-side of  OJ’s second single “Blue Boy,” could almost be a riposte to Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax”. It describes the same symptoms (“my head is pounding/my mind is confused”) as Go4 (“feel like a beetle on its back… thoughts like piss down the drain”). But unlike the agonized Jon King, Collins’ lump-in-throat croon and his band’s spangled jangle make maladie d’amour seem like a delicious delirium.

Just about the only thing Orange Juice shared with PiL and Go4 was a passion for the dance music of their day. “Falling” is an endearingly shaky take on disco. Drummer Steven Daly does his level best to execute the requisite bustling hi-hat and cymbal patterns, David McClymont makes a fair stab at a funk bassline, and Collins and James Kirk supply Nile Rodgers-style double-time rhythm guitar. But the end result is closer to Swell Maps sloppy than Chic superslick, while Collins doesn’t sound so much like he’s singing in the bath as singing through a mouthful of bathwater.

Disco flirtations aside, OJ’s sound mostly came direct from The Velvet Underground, especially the warm, golden guitars of Loaded songs like “Rock’n’Roll”. But in a manoevure that pretty much invented “indie,” OJ took that sound and divorced it from New York cool. They replaced the VU’s bohemian worldliness with an early-Byrds-like  innocence. “You must think me very naïve” goes the first line of “Falling and Laughing”, while “Simply Thrilled Honey” vows “worldiness must keep apart from me”.  As much as they worshipped Lou Reed and his Gretsch guitar, there was no room for heroin or methedrine in OJ’s world; they barely even touched alcohol. Sounds’ resident Postcard champion Dave McCullough dubbed OJ, Josef K, and Aztec Camera “New Puritans”. When OJ gleefully chanted “no more rock’n’roll for you” on “Poor Old Soul (Part Two)”, they meant it: it was high time to jettison all that decadent sex ‘n’ drugs ’n’ r & r nonsense.  In this respect, Orange Juice were heirs to the cleancut straightness of Jonathan Richman and  Talking Heads. 

After the jejeune shambles of “Falling”, OJ’s second single “Blue Boy” was disconcertingly robust-sounding: a boisterous gallop that adds a touch of Dylan and Neil Young to the Live 1969 Velvets, with discreet swells of keyboard and a verging-on-psychedelic guitar solo. The American sound of “Blue Boy” inaugurated a whole tradition of Scottish outfits, from Lloyd Cole & The Commotions to Teenage Fanclub, who looked admiringly across the Atlantic (their gaze, ironically, often falling on Anglophiles like Big Star).  After this almost manly rocker, “Simply Thrilled Honey” is gorgeously fey. Which suits the lyric’s scenario: Collins as frail waif fending off unwanted advances from a female predator. (Four years later Morrissey would replicate the scenario--“she’s too rough and I’m too delicate”--in “Pretty Girls Make Graves”). Wondrously eccentric-in-structure, “Simply Thrilled” climbs a hill at the end just to rush down it in a breathless tumble.  “Poor Old Soul,” the fourth single, reverts to the discopunk of “Falling and Laughing,” all flustered rhythm guitar and a walking bassline, but it’s far better produced. This was Orange Juice’s most concerted lunge for a mainstream hit, but while it topped the independent chart effortlessly, “Poor” stopped short at #80 in the real chart.

The group’s sound was still too ramshackle for daytime radio, while Postcard lacked the muscle to get the hits Horne craved. So OJ signed to Polydor. The rest of The Glasgow School consists of all 12 tracks from Ostrich Churchyard, their first attempt at recording an album, plus a few bonus obscurities. Ostrich bears the same relation to You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever (the debut LP Polydor actually released) that Hatful Of Hollow has to The Smiths, i.e. these are the underproduced but zestier prototypes of the songs in question.  There’s a scintillating freshness to the versions of “In A Nutshell” and “Dying Day.” But I  prefer the You Can’t Hide take of “Consolation Prize,” the most poignant tune in OJ’s entire songbook. The Ostrich version features an incongruous Glitterband-like “HEY!” chant from the group during the first chorus, while the song’s home stretch of soaring glory doesn’t achieve quite the same giddy angle of ascent as it does on You Can’t Hide. 

In the song, Collins croons to yet another object of unrequited adoration: “I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn’s/I wore it hoping to impress/So frightfully camp, it made you laugh/Tomorrow I’ll buy myself a dress”. Probably more than anything else by Orange Juice, “Consolation Prize” is the blueprint for the C86 shambling band movement. “I’ll never be man enough for you,” sings Collins at the end, but the tone is triumphant not lamenting. Minor cutie-pop band One Thousand Violins took their name from the song’s first line, and a thousand more mid-Eighties indie groups modeled themselves on Collins & Co’s androgyny. Perhaps, on reflection, that’s not much of a legacy. But this music is its own testament. I honestly don’t understand why Alan Horne would weep after playing each hot-from-the-pressing-plant OJ single back to back with “Pale Blue Eyes” and finding it lacking. OJ might actually be that almost-unknown thing: the derivative band who are better than the thing they’re indebted to. They’re certainly more loveable than the Velvets.

Get well soon Edwyn.

NEW POP

Spin, 2006

By Simon Reynolds

You’ve known these videos for as long as you can remember, the tunes and the haircuts are as familiar as your mom’s face or the back of your hand.  Back in the day this stuff got called “New Music” --a flood of telegenic UK bands whose arrival in this country coincided with the birth of MTV. Which was no coincidence--image-conscious and glam-literate, the Brits’ native flair for posing and preening suited the new medium. London had a fledgling video industry, pioneered by theatrical rockers like Bowie, Queen, and Boomtown Rats, way before America did. For just a couple of years in the early Eighties, the new British pop groups exploited the gap between MTV’s launch and the US rock industry waking up to video’s potential. As the Limey haircuts over-ran TV, radio and the Billboard Top Ten,  commentators dubbed it “the Second British Invasion.”

These style-conscious pop groups--Dexys Midnight Runners, ABC, Adam Ant, Soft Cell—are still regarded as vapid one-hit-wonders, enjoyable as a period-evoking nostalgic frisson, but void of substance. Yet believe it or not, nearly all of them were sparked into existence by hearing the Sex Pistols in 1977, and they emerged from the same postpunk scene that produced such currently mega-fashionable reference points as Gang of Four and Wire. Culture Club’s Jon Moss apprenticed in the second-division punk combo London, while Boy George was briefly a protégé of Pistols svengali Malcolm McLaren. Duran Duran’s original vision was to fuse The Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” and Chic’s “Le Freak”, and earlier in their career they played the punk venues of the UK Midlands alongside local do-it-yourself legend Swell Maps.

One reason the MTV Brits excelled at video was that most of them went to art school, where they absorbed the late Seventies conceptualist sensibility and radical politics. But by 1981, many of them had come to believe that the postpunk culture of independent labels and experimental noise had became a ghetto. So they adopted a subvert-from-within strategy, embracing sugar hooks and production gloss, dance grooves and futuristic synths.  Wanting to score hits no longer meant you were selling out: it indicated seriousness about reaching the masses with your ideas. The movement was christened “New Pop” in the UK, but by the time the music reached America, the manifestos and masterplans disappeared in the dazzle of pop stardom and preposterous hair. Here’s your chance to find out about the backstories of self-reinvention and oversized ambition lurking behind the “disposable fluff” of the Second British Invasion.

 The Star

Adam Ant

The Hit

“Goody Two Shoes”

The Hook

“You don't drink, don't smoke--what do you do?/Subtle innuendos follow/’Must be something inside’”

The Video

What-the-butler-saw-through-the-keyhole shenanigans in a hotel

The Back Story

Adam Ant--real name, Stuart Goddard--was an original punk rocker. Indeed the Sex Pistols started their performing career opening for Ant’s first band, Bazooka Joe. Fronting Adam and the Antz, the singer’s glammy look and risqué lyrics (bondage ditties like “Whip in My Valise” and “Beat My Guest”) attracted a cult following, many of whom would go on to form Goth bands. Impatient for full-blown stardom, Adam hired his hero, Malcolm McLaren, to give him an extreme make-over. McLaren promptly stole Adam’s band to form Bow Wow Wow (see below) but not before the singer got his money’s worth from McLaren, swapping his pervy image for a swashbucklingly heroic wardrobe inspired by pirates and native American warriors. Adam also came up a whole new sound, using Apache war-chants, African tribal drums, and twangy guitar. With a Navajo-style  white stripe across his exquisitely chiseled nose, Adam stomped and whooped his way to megastardom, becoming a teenybop idol and even performing for Her Majesty. His pro-sex, anti-drink’n’drugs stance led critics to label him as mere squeaky-clean showbiz, prompting the answer song “Goody Two Shoes”.

The Other (UK) Hits

“Dog Eat Dog”, “Ant Music”, “Kings of the Wild Frontier”, “Stand and Deliver,” “Prince Charming”, “Ant Rap”

And now?

The singer has battled mental illness in recent years. He was briefly committed following a 2002 incident in a London nightclub (he brandished a starter pistol after being mocked by some of the clientele) and again in 2003, when he removed his pants in a cafe. 

The Star

ABC

The Hit

“The Look of Love”

The Hook

”If you judge a book by the cover/Then you’d judge the look by the lover/I hope you’ll soon recover/Me I go from one extreme to another”

The Video

Mary Poppins-meets-Sgt Pepper’s Edwardian fantasia set in English park, with ABC performing on a bandstand.

The Backstory

ABC started as Sheffield electronic experimentalists Vice Versa. Fanzine writer Martin Fry went to profile them and got on so well the interview turned into a job interview, with Vice Versa inviting him to join the group. When synthpop blew up, they changed both their sound and name, pinning their pop dreams on a concept that fused disco sashay and hyper-literate lyrics, written and sung by Fry. Rebelling against the postpunk gloom of bands like Joy Division and The Cure, ABC issued fizzy “New Pop” manifestos about positivism and striving for your dreams, starting with the single “Tears Are Not Enough”. The great pop producer Trevor Horn whipped up a glittering, spectacular sound to go with their gold lame tuxedos, resulting in the string-swept  “The Look of Love” and the massive-selling LP The Lexicon of Love. Then they went and burst the romantic bubble with Beauty Stab, trading gloss for a guitar-heavy rock sound and politically-conscious lyrics about unemployment.

The Other (UK) Hits

“Poison Arrow”, “All of My Heart”

And Now?

Active on the UK’s  Eighties nostalgia circuit.

The Star

Dexys Midnight Runners

The Hit

“Come On Eileen”

The Hook

“Eileen, in that dress/My thoughts, I confess/Verge on dirty”

The Video

Raggle-taggle roustabouts in denim overalls and gypsy neckerchiefs dance through the streets, their leader flirting with a bonny Irish lass.

The Backstory

Don’t be fooled by the overalls and bare hairy chest: Dexys singer/leader Kevin Rowland is one of the UK’s great pop mavericks, combining the serial self-reinvention of David Bowie with the working-class-hero chip-on-both-shoulders rage of Johnny Rotten. Like the latter, Rowland’s background is Irish Catholic and he originally wanted to be a priest. Instead he fronted Birmingham, England punk band The Killjoys and recorded the single “Johnny Won’t Get To Heaven”. Rowland formed a new band with the intention of starting his own youth movement, “the young soul rebels”. Taking their name from Dexedrine, a brand of amphetamine popular with Sixties mods, Dexys Midnight Runners modeled their sound on the punchy horns and uptempo beats of Stax and Atlantic. They adopted a boxing-inspired look of hoods and training boots that paralleled the band’s regime of exercising together to boost their collective feeling of missionary zeal. Hits followed and converts flocked to witness Dexys electrifying Projected Passion Revue tour. But when journalists questioned the singer’s “new soul vision”, a paranoid Rowland boycotted the media and communicated direct to Dexys fans with communiqués and manifestos in the music papers paid for at the band’s own expense. After a mutiny from the band, Rowland reformulated Dexys Mk 2 around a fiddle-laced Celtic Soul sound. “Come On Eileen” was a #1 hit in the UK, America, and much of the world. But being embraced by housewives, grandmas and little kids played havoc with Rowland’s sense of his own seriousness, and  Dexys followed up with 1985’s deliberate career-suicide album, Don’t Stand Me Down.

The Other (UK) Hits

“Dance Stance,” “Geno”, “There There My Dear”, “Jackie Wilson Said”

And now?

In the late Nineties, Rowland reactivated his career with a startling new image, dressing in women’s clothing (perhaps his “dirty” thoughts about Eileen’s dress didn’t involve taking it off, but putting it on?) but the solo album flopped. Dexys recently reformed for a reunion show. 

The Star

Scritti Politti

The Hit

“Perfect Way”

The Hook

“I got a perfect way to make the girls go crazy”

The Video

Gauzy, black-and-white images of pretty boy Green and pretty girl models.

The Backstory

A folk music fan and member of the Young Communist League, Green Gartside saw the Sex Pistols in 1977 and immediately forgot about playing jigs on his acoustic guitar. Scritti Politti, the group he formed at art school with two friends, moved into a communal squatted house in London and swelled into a 20-strong collective, the three musicians out-numbered by non-musical friends who contributed by thrashing out the crucial ideological issues of the era. The theory-commune thrived initially, becoming a slightly smelly hotbed of activity and generating three brilliant EPs of fractured do-it-yourself art-pop, a style Gartside dubbed “messthetics”. But the all-night think-tank sessions and amphetamine diet wore the group out, climaxing with Green’s collapse after a gig supporting Gang of Four. The singer recuperated for 9 months in a cottage in rural Wales and returned with a “new pop” vision of infiltrating the mainstream with luscious melody and deconstructing “the love song” from the inside out. Steeped in funk, soul, and soft lover’s reggae, Scritti tunes like the gorgeous “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” (later covered by Madness) earned critical raves, but stalled outside the Top 40. Possibly that was because of the lyrics’ allusions to Nietzche, Wittegenstein and other philosophers (Scritti even did a song called “Jacques Derrida”), or simply that the group’s  indie label, Rough Trade, lacked the clout to crack the charts. Green eventually decided to shed his old comrades and signed to a major label for the album Cupid & Psyche 85, which spawned a series of crisp, taut, ultra-glossy UK hits and a single US  smash, “Perfect Way”. Miles Davis dug it enough to cover “Perfect Way”, but most Americans, hearing it on the radio and unaware of Green’s Commie past and intellectual leanings, thought he was just another British pretty boy peddling falsetto faux-soul.

The Other (UK) Hits

“Wood Beez”, “Absolute”, “The Word Girl”

And now?

Green Gartside recently played his first gig in 25 years under the alias Double G and the Treacherous Three, and will release his first album since 2000’s Anomie and Bonhomie later this year.

The Star

The Human League

The Hit

“Don’t You Want Me Baby”

The Hook

“I was working in a waitress in a cocktail bar/When I met you”

The Video

Video-within-a-video: the band on set making their own promo, watching the rushes, etc

The Backstory

Sheffield, 1977: two synth nerds (Ian Craig Marsh, Martyn Ware) and a glam rock obsessed science fiction fan with a lopsided haircut (Phil Oakey) progressed from 97  minute long electronic soundscapes to catchy ditties about silkworms and Buddha. Along the way they dropped their original name (The Future), recruited a fourth, non-musical member (art student Adrian Wright) whose job was to project wacky images behind the band onstage, picked up an endorsement from David Bowie, and signed to Virgin. But their science-geek songs like “The Black Hit of Space” (about a record so bland it sucks up about the entire Top 40), failed to propel the League into the actual UK charts. The band split in half, with Oakey and Wright keeping the name and the other two forming Heaven 17 (of  “Temptation” and “Let Me Go” early MTV fame). Staring oblivion in the face, Oakey discovered two Sheffield girls, Susan Sulley and Joanne Catherall, dancing at a nightclub and recruited them as backing singers. Further salvation came with the arrival of genius producer Martin Rushent, whose grasp of state-of-the-art technology turned the League into a remorseless hit-making machine. Worldwide #1 “Don’t You Want Me” touched hearts on both sides of the Atlatnic thanks to the “girl next door” charm of Sulley’s ever-so-slightly offkey vocals and the witty, poignant lyrics, which rewrote the story of Oakey’s discovery of the girls and project into a future where he’s been abandoned by his ungrateful protégés. In fact Oakey and the two women are still together as sole remaining members of the League 25 years later!

The Other (UK) Hits

“Sound of the Crowd”, “Love Action”, “Mirror Man,” “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”, “The Lebanon”

And now?

Performing on the UK’s 80s nostalgia circuit; Oakey also deejays synthpop.

The Star

The Thompson Twins

The Hit

“Hold Me Now”

The Hook

“Hold me now/Warm my heart/Stay with me/Let loving start”

The Video

Uncharacteristically simple, non-cartoony effort with the trio performing the song on a vividly colored soundstage.

The Backstory

Before they became maestros of contagious hooks and clever-clever videos, The Thompson Twins were postpunk radicals. They formed in Sheffield in 1977, then moved to London, where they lived in squats and recruited Alannah Currie (the one with shaved eyebrows and an explosion of albino-blond curls). She’d been squawking her saxophone in an all-girl punky-reggae group, The Unfuckables, who engaged in anti-sexist street protests like throwing paintbombs at offensive billboards. Percussionist Joe Leeway (the black one, also with shaved eyebrows) arrived, swelling the Twins into a seven-piece collective of earnest politicos who liked to shatter the performer/spectactor barrier by inviting the audience to play percussion. But as their role models Scritti Politti shifted direction, The Thompson Twins dropped postpunk’s dour dissent for new pop irony. Where once singer Tom Bailey (the cute frontman, eyebrows intact) railed onstage against the sexist murals at one rock venue, now he talked about being proud to make disposable music. Success on America’s New Wave dancefloors with “In the Name of Love” swiftly escalated into MTV dominion with “Hold Me Now”, “We Are Detective,”, et al. Once PC to a fault, Thompson Twins became a mega-grossing music corporation (the album Into the Gap sold five million worldwide) and hammered the final nail into the coffin of their left-wing idealism with a cover version of The Beatles’ “Revolution”. After appearing at Live Aid in Philadelphia, though, their career began a long slide.

The Other (UK) Hits

“Love On Your Side,” “You Take Me Up”, “Doctor! Doctor!”, ''Sister Of Mercy''

And now?

Currie and Bailey moved to New Zealand, where they made ambient music as Babble. Currie also started a glass-casting business and the charity MADGE ("Mothers Against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment"). Now divorced, they’ve both moved back to the UK. Bailey still makes music as International Observer.  Leeway teaches in LA.

The Star

Bow Wow Wow

The Hit

“I Want Candy”

The Hook

“One day soon I’ll make you mine/Then we’ll have candy all the time”

The Video

Nymphet with Mohawk and tiny tattered dress gambols amid surf and sand.

The Backstory

After McLaren stole the Antz from Adam, he needed a new lead singer, and found Annabella Lwin, a 14 year old Anglo-Burmese cutie, working in a London drycleaners. McLaren wanted Bow Wow Wow to be the next Sex Pistols and hitched a cartload of subversive concepts--underage teen-sex, home taping (then the record industry’s boogieman) and unemployment-as-jolly-good-fun--to their captivating blend of African rhythms and dashing guitar licks. “C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!” didn’t create “God Save The Queen” shockwaves, though, and McLaren’s increasingly exploitative ploys (the kiddy-porn eroticism of songs like “Sexy Eiffel Tower,”  an attempt to launch a “junior Playboy” around the band, and an album cover featuring a nude Lwin) all backfired. After a conceptual makeover with the back-to-nature album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah! City All Over, Go Ape Crazy, Bow Wow Wow finally broke through in the UK with “Go Wild In the Country”.  But by the time “I Want Candy” (a remake of The Strangeloves 1965 hit ) was romping up the Billboard charts McLaren had lost interest in the band, instead becoming a pop star in his own right with the bizarre hillybilly hip hop of “Buffalo Gals”.

The Other (UK) Hits

“C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!,” “Go Wild in the Country”

And now?

Lwin pursues a solo career, writes songs for movies and commercials, does charity performances, and explores Buddhist spirituality. She and bassist Leigh Gorman (now a producer in LA) reformed BWW for a late 90s tour and continue to perform live. Guitarist Matthew Ashman died from diabetes in 1995; drummer Dave Barbarossa plays in Chicane.