Happy Mondays

HAPPY MONDAYS, The Rock Garden, London
Melody Maker, May 2nd 1987

by Simon Reynolds

Happy Mondays is where the repetition repetition repetition of post-Velvets jangle-drone meets the repetition repetition repetition of Seventies funk. Imagine a cross between The Blue Orchids and Hamilton Bohannon, The Fall and The Fatback Band, James and JB. The wah-wah on ‘Freaky Dancin'‘ cues memories of both The Stooges' ‘Ann’ and Isaac Hayes' ‘Shaft’ simultaneously. I'd like them to take this hybrid further still, bring in a clavinet and some John Cale viola...

What Happy Mondays do (quite unintentionally, I'm sure) is take the steamy stupor of the dancefloor and, through some cryogenic process of alchemy, create an unearthly frost-funk; a sound that seems newborn and yet ancient as a fossil. With its granite basslines and guitars that twinke like stalactites and icicles, it's a sound that's streaming with glistening rivulets of the stuff we rock critics call ‘magic’, when we're at a loss for words.

Shaun Ryder is like a goblin in the midst of this enchanted ice palace, unsavoury, snarling like a hobo – you can practically see the flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth.



However, as a good reporter, I feel duty-bound to tell you that this was not, in fact, a great gig. Happy Mondays lumbered when they should have shimmered. The burnished precision of Cale's production was traded in for a coarse and sloppy tumult. The band seemed to apply themselves to the task in hand with an offhand listlessness. The percussionist's spazz dancing was a perfect representation of their stiff untogetherness.

It was not groovy. It was not dreamy. Happy Mondays came across as shabby and awkward, when they should have come across as grave and intense apostles of the cryptic beauty that has somehow come into their possession. Buy the record, and keep your fingers crossed for next time.





HAPPY MONDAYS
Bummed
Melody Maker, November 1988

by Simon Reynolds








HAPPY MONDAYS, Wembley Arena, London
Melody Maker, April 21st 1990

by Simon Reynolds


A gig at Wembley Arena is generally a hollow demonstration that a band has reached a certain statistical stature. But everything about tonight has been set up to proclaim, loudly, that this is an Event, a crucial benchmark indicating that Happy Mondays are a bona fide "phenomenon", in the ascendant. The tickets and ads enthuse that "the rave is on"; the Arena's stagefront seats have been removed, leaving a giant mong-pit swarming with the herds of expectant ravers and fashion casualties; dry ice pumps out of vents and lazers spell out the bands logo; stars of the lustrous calibre of Boy George, Sonic Boom, Bobby Gillespie and Jona Lewie are to be spotted. And a grizzled, paunchy roadie who looks like Peter Hook's elder brother keeps coming on and brandishing a cardboard cut-out Number One figure at us meaningfully. Presumably this is meant to suggest that if we all went out and bought three copies of "Step On" it might top the charts. Quite why this would be such a triumph, in aday and age when being Number One in the Hit Parade means less than ever (the present occupants are a German rap group) is not made clear.

Finally, after much heralding from Gary Clail and the On U Sound System, and a fanfare of fireworks, Happy Mondays shamble on. Shaun Ryder greets the crowd with the cryptic query "where's me pickled herrings?". It's in this kind of lapse into bathos that Happy Mondays' "significance" has come to reside. They've come to be esteemed merely for unprepossessing details: for Shaun's refusal to trim his untamed nose hairs and bum fluff, for Bez's glazed vacancy. Similarly, the Mondays' gatecrashing of the Top Of The Pops party has been celebrated in
terms suspiciously reminiscent to the approbation meted out to The Wedding Present and The Pogues. The Mondays are reprobates soiling pristine pop with their warts-and-all anti-charisma, making a mess on the carpet and vandalising the fittings.



I say: Happy Mondays the indisputably magnificent underground band, make for a piss-poor pop group. No sex appeal, no style, no melodies, bar the one by the South African, and the chunk of "Ticket To Ride" in the middle of "Lazy-Itis". At the same time, the crystalline proto-funk of Squirrel And G-Man and Bummed has declined into a right dog's dinner of a quasi-pop sound, a garbled and gurned confusion of pop tinsel, Acid house production and rock grunge, with Ryder's scabby gibberish bobbing about queasily amidships.

I saw Happy Mondays' live once before, in '87, when Melody Maker was practically alone in heralding them. They were crap. Nothing has changed, except that they have more technology and more volume at their disposal. The Mondays still can't funk to save their lives, but what they can do is set up a lobotomised groove somewhere between a scuffed and shabby House and the deadbeat stomp of The Fall: a rhythm simple enough for white people to shuffle about to. And shuffle they do, sluggishly and earnestly, willing this to be the Event it's cracked up to be.

What's the Mondays have lost is readily apparent. An early song like "Tart Tart" is still an irrestible surge of glacial trance-rock, somewhere between The Velvet Underground and The Fatback Band. But the new tracks are, at best,an endearing shambles, at worst, a bloody, boring mess. "Hallelujah" remains a real sow's ear of a song. On "He's Gonna Step On You Again", the Mondays guitarist can't manage the moderately sublime, fuzz-boogie riff of the original, so emits a feeble, doodled gesture at same, that's completely lost in the turmoil. For "Lazy-Itis", a silver-haired and bewildered Karl Denver is wheeled on, to duet inaudibly with Ryder. Through it all, Bez who looks like Hugh Laurie after three years in a concentration camp) continues the endless, moronic traipse that is his dance, his feet retracing the same listless steps as though he's crushing grapes.



Somewhere along the line, a distinction has to be made between the radically mindblowing, and the merely mindless. That's what the Mondays have degenerated into: a massive levelling down of consciousness, a bovine pleasure, pop music to masticate, like chewing gum or cud. Only the closing "Wrote For Luck" lives up to the hype: the tumultuous avalanche of cultural garbage that is the Mondays' sound suddenly escalates to 'white light white heat', and what we have is the "Sister Ray" of Acieeed. By the end, it's reached a transcendent plateau of sheer de-evolution, with Bez and the saucily attired backing singer rolling about like protozoan creatures in the primordial soup. But then it all fizzles out like a damp squib, with the Mondays snubbing the audience's calls for a
second encore, and punters exiting disgruntled.



So wherein lies the Happy Mondays' "significance"? They are significant,
but largely because they've been willed into a phenomenon, pushed from the hip by the Hip. There are other factors, of course: the perennial con of Manchester mystique, plus various sociological vectors. The Mondays have been proclaimed as the first, truly working class band to emerge since punk: real kids in possession of the truth that's "only known by guttersnipes". But it's closer to the truth to call them lumpen-proletarian pop. This was Marx's term for the underclass who've
lapsed from dignified labour into a lifestyle of shifty shiftlessness, petty crime, conniving, and other opportunistic means of survival. Not for nothing did Marx regard the lumpen-proletariat as a counter-revolutionary class, a sewer spawning illiberalism and sometimes support for tinpot dictators. Indeed, a crucial element of the Thatcher programme is the systematic debasement of the proletariat (bound together by solidarity and the discipline of labour) into a lumpen proletariat (indigent and faithless, except to kith'n'kin and mates).

Where Mark E. Smith's lyrics are oblique observations of Northern underclass grotesquerie, Shaun Ryder's drivel is more like the Id of the lumpen-proletariat speaking its bloody mind aloud: discredited knowledges, warped notions, bigotries and balderdash. This is fine up to a point, a sign of the times, a new thing in pop (the revenge of the plebeian upon pop's aristocratic pretensions). But when I listen to Happy Mondays now, I don't think otherworldly like I once did, I think: eating at the Golden Egg, acid casuals, terrace anthems, dog-fights and hunting rats with air rifles, Hofmeister, betting shops, people eating with their mouths open. Pickled herrings. Reality, for sure, nose hairs and all. But who needs it?





HAPPY MONDAYS
New Statesman, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

In 1990, Happy Mondays were everybody's favourite anti- heroes. The year began with the Mancunian group's first hit, the "Rave On" EP, still lingering in the charts like a stubborn gatecrasher. By mid-Summer, they'd cracked the Top Ten with "Step On You", a revamp of an obscure, early Seventies boogie hit, and packed out Wembley Arena. They end the year with a solidly successful LP Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches. But Happy Mondays have a media profile that's quite out of proportion to this merely respectable commercial showing. Partly that's because their debauched exploits have turned them into the music press' mascot, reassuring proof that rock still has the capacity to scandalise. And partly it's because Happy Mondays are considered, correctly, to be a "phenomenon" - the first group to emerge from the ranks of this country's working class "rave culture".

Happy Mondays and their ilk are Thatcher's illegitimate children. Thatcherism's assault on the defences of the old working class (the unions, Welfare safety nets, etc) was intended to inculcate the middle class values of providence, iniative, deferral of gratification in favour of the long term dividend. But a significant number of working class youth responded to the challenge of "enterprise culture" in a hand-to-mouth way: not by becoming opportunity-conscious but by resorting to all manner of opportunistic means of survival (drug dealing, bootlegging, organising illegal warehouse parties and raves). Not a black economy so much as a blag economy, where success depends on having a eye for the main chance and being a fast talker.

This lumpen milieu has its own nefarious take on the "work hard, play hard" ethos. Its skills are reactive (the sharp quip, the quick killing) and its pleasures short-term and intense (the buzz, the crack). Rave culture's combination of trance dance and hallucinogenics superficially resembled Sixties counter culture. But there was no "politics of ecstasy" here; getting brainblasted and "going mental" was the goal, not opening the doors of perception. It's a culture of consolation, an analgesic/amnesiac respite from the alertness of workaday survivalism. "Skin up and mong out" was the rallying cry.

The story of how Happy Mondays became the figureheads for this scene involves a fair amount of chance and contingency. Until mid-1988, they were a critically-lauded but obscure gang of Mancunian reprobates whose music was a bizarre fusion of rock and funk, somewhere between The Velvet Underground and Funkadelic. Their two albums Squirrel And G-Man... and Bummed were completely at odds with both the pop mainstream and the indie rock state-of- art. But during 1988 and 1989, the Mondays began to pick up a substantial following of Ecstasy-guzzling "love thugs", as much for the fact that the Mondays were big time E-dealers as for their dishevelled dance sound. By mid-1989, Happy Mondays were being pinpointed by the press as prime architects of the "Madchester" scene. And when the "Rave On" EP cracked the charts at Christmas, they were welcomed as a kind of Aciiied Pogues; gutternsipes upsetting the decorum of Top Of The Pops and vandalising the fittings. The Happy Mondays trailblazed the current resurgence of laddish rock bands (e.g. soccer-obsessed, "scally" rockers The Farm, or Flowered Up, London's "answer" to the Mondays) and the reintroduction of the concept of "street credibility" to rock critical parlance.



If the "brains" behind the Mondays is singer Shaun Ryder, in many ways the focal point and font of the group's anti-charisma is a character called Bez. Strictly speaking, his contribution to the group is negligible: he dances onstage, shakes his maraccas desultorily and out-of-time, regularly gets into trouble with the police. But for the Mondays hooligan following, he's clearly their representative: proof that anyone of them could be up there if they'd lucked out, enjoying all the unearned drugs and ardent birds. Bez is their role model, the ultimate chancer. Anthony Wilson - TV presenter, owner of Manchester's Hacienda club, and founder of Factory, the group's record label - claims that Happy Mondays are the "new Sex Pistols". Doubtless Ryder is Rotten, Bez is Vicious, and as for Wilson - he's Malcolm McLaren, doing his best to kickstart a "folk devil/moral panic" furore in the media. At the beginning of the year, Wilson was to be found in The Face opining that he wouldn't be bothered in the slightest if one of the Mondays died as a result of pharmaceutical excess: notoriety never hurt record sales, after all. And throughout the year he's always been on hand to offer credulous journalists his own potted version of the last four years of UK pop history.

According to Wilson, white working class youth discovered Ecstasy and Chicago house music in Ibiza, the Meditteranean holiday spot. E loosened up British bodily uptightness and taught white people how to dance for the first time*. Eventually groups like Happy Mondays and Stone Roses started to emerge from the hitherto DJ-based scene, rock groups who had incorporated a house feel into their sound. And the next development (and here Wilson's distorted history turns to wishful thinking) must surely be the exporting back to America by British groups of a dance sound originally invented by Black Americans (the obvious parallel being the way The Stones and Beatles sold R&B back to white America). At a music industry seminar in New York this summer, Wilson lambasted representatives of the American record business for failing to notice the "revolutionary" music on their own doorstep, in a talk entitled "Wake Up America, You're Dead".

But despite the crude shock tactics and cynical hype of Wilson, despite the vortex of voyeurism and vicarious fascination spun around them by music press and fans alike, Happy Mondays have somehow managed to avoid being simplified and classified. They are simply too wayward, unruly and incorrigible to "represent" an ideology, stance or even a constituency. No one really has a grip on what Happy Mondays are "about". Shaun Ryder's lyrics are like the Id of the lumpen-proletariat speaking its bloody mind aloud, an E-addled stream of semi-consciousness. And the group's sound is a lumpy slurry of motley influences and plagiarised pop memories, a regurgitation of all the junk culture that's been shoved down their throats. Unfathomable, instinctively post-modern, committed to nothing but the pursuit of pleasure, Happy Mondays were what pop was all about in 1990. But with the waning of the Thatcher era, could it be that the Mondays' "pills 'n' thrills and bellyaches" worldview is already beginning to look a little dated?

MADCHESTER VERSUS DREAMPOP: Happy Mondays versus Ride

Village Voice, November 1990

There's a theory that the perception of time is class-related. That's why the counsel of insurance companies and the propaganda of anti-smoking lobbies have greatest impact on the middle classes, connecting with their (self) managerial view of life, their training in forward planning and deferral of gratification. Part of ex-Prime Minister Thatcher's project was to inculcate the British masses in the middle class discipline of providence, the virtues of belt-tightening and holding out for for the longterm dividend.  Her method was brutal: systematic immiseration of the working class, through the removal of welfare safety nets, in order to encourage "iniative" and discourage lazy-ass "parasitism".    

But a significant portion of the British working class has responded to the challenge of "enterprise culture" while remaining within the here-and-now timeframe.  The last decade has seen the explosive rise of a 'black economy'.  Proletarian youth in the deprived parts of the country (the inner cities, much of the North) have resorted to all manner of opportunistic means of survival: bootlegging, credit card fraud, petty theft, organising illegal warehouse parties and raves, drug dealing.  It's from this lumpen-prole milieu that Happy Mondays have emerged.  Their skills are reactive (the sharp quip, the quick killing) and their pleasures short-term and intense (a quest for "the buzz" or "the crack"). The title of their latest album "Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches" (Elektra) sums up Happy Mondays' lifestyle/worldview. If this new psychedelia is a "holiday from life", it's modelled on the boorishly orgiastic antics of British youth in Ibiza and other Mediterranean tourist spots.  No "politics of ecstasy", no opening of the doors of perception, here; rather a search for "good vibes", a blurring of vision and slackening of tension, a weekend respite from the alertness of workaday survivalism. Skin up and veg out.    

Happy Mondays' sound is a dishevelled slurry of motley influences and dog-eared memories-- unconsciously post-modern pop. Wholesale chunks of Seventies pop detritus like Labelle’s "Lady Marmalade" and Cockney Rebel’s "Come Up And See Me, Make Me Smile" bob about in a bizarre melange of Seventies funk and boogie slide guitar, with the whole thing whipped into 1990 dancefloor shape by DJ-turned-producer Paul Oakenfold. Singer Shaun Ryder rants a gutternsnipe version of cut-up: phrases that lodged in his head while stoned in front of the TV, the drivel of acid-casualty acquaintances. Happy Mondays' music never seems to bear any sign of premeditation; it's always here-and-now, what occurred to them or came their way just then.    

If Happy Mondays represent the dominant sensibility in UK alternative music, then My Bloody Valentine and their myriad offspring (Ride, Boo Radleys, Lush, Chapterhouse, Slowdive, Pale Saints, etc) represent the opposing tendency. These bands--known variously as “shoegazers”, “dreampop” and “the scene that celebrates itself”--are also obsessed with the here-and-now, the loss of self in the singular moment of rapture. But they're worlds apart from the bleary, slackadaisical euphoria of Happy Mondays. In a way, these groups represent the middle class response to the quandaries of Thatcher's Britain.  Thatcherism's attack on the welfare state has grievously damaged Britain's "dole culture" (the breeding ground of indie bands). At the same time, Thatcherite culture has turned pop into a reflection of straight aspirations, a normative agent. The utopian dreams of youth culture have been excluded from the centre stage, outflanked and outmoded. And politically, dreams of transformation have shifted from the public to the private sector: personal transfiguration rather than collective progress.  Transcendence can only be momentary, tragically confined to the here-and-now.     

 We're back to time-consciousness and its relation to class. These middle class drop outs' special agony is that they can look far enough into the future to see that it has no place for their hopes. At the same time, their rock historical awareness is (over)developed enough for them to feel reproached by the grander aspirations of previous rock eras. So a generation has sacrificed itself to the desolate task of carrying a torch for the impossible dreams of the past. For this vicarious generation, with its unrealised lives and unavoidable sense of lateness, rock's wanderlust has become internalised, turned to daydream.  The beatnik idea of "travelling but never arriving" has become the self-defeating belief that "it's better to be lost than found".     

Sounds familiar? Husker Du invented all this. Dinosaur Jr gave it an extra spin. Then My Bloody Valentine took that dazed and confused sound, made it even more chaotically ethereal, and added Anglo androgyny and frailty. Ride are the apotheosis of the genre: not because they're its best exponents (that's still MBV), but because they're generic to the point of transparency. Their third EP actually featured songs with titles like "Dreams Burn Down", and "Here And Now", while their debut LP on Sire is called Nowhere. It's an ambivalent buzzword.  “Nowhere" can signify a plight: lost on the road to nowhere, stranded with no way home.  But "nowhere" is also the site of bliss, to be reached by the paradox of "going nowhere fast" ("Drive Blind"), or rising above mundane limits into the amnesiac haze of white noise.     

Although Ride's music is more classically "psychedelic" than Happy Mondays, it seems likely that this is because Ride have derived their version of psychedelic experience from other records rather than from drug excess. This is psychedelia as existensial posture: disorientation as losing the bearings that would enable you to make your way through the world/make your mark on the world. Or, as one British writer put it, being "lost in the bewilderness".  

Happy Mondays fantasise about the high life and so hijack the look of winners (flash Italian fashion). Ride dream not of social climbing but of rising above it ALL, and so wear the monochrome uniform of the exile on Main Street.  Happy Mondays' music may not be triumphalist like Bon Jovi's blue collar anthems, or MC Hammer's buppyspeak positivism.  But it oozes the chancer's confidence in his own cunning, his ability to talk his way out of trouble and into opportunity.  Like most indie/college rock, Ride are defeatist. This involves more than simply feeling that they belong to a defeated generation. Their very idea of bliss is bound up with surrender: the dream of being ravished by some total experience (absolute Love, mystic communion) that offers redemption. Compare that with the reprobate Happy Mondays "on the make, on the prowl" worldview, where pleasure's there for the taking.

HAPPY MONDAYS / JANE'S ADDICTION, Madison Square Garden, New York
Melody Maker, May 11th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

It must have seemed an inspired notion to pair these unabashed champions of drug culture, but inside sources tell me that it's turned out to be a marriage made in hell. Happy Mondays stroll casually onstage half an hour late (a misdemeanour for which Jane's Addiction's manager exacts hefty financial revenge), Ryder exhaling huge clouds of wacky tobaccy, Bez loping back and forth across the stage like a Gumby, his face contorted by a stark staring grimace of brain-blitzed glee. I expected a culture clash, bemused and derisive silence from the arena horde, but, happily, droves of college radio Manc wannabees have turned up. Having studiously learnt their raver moves from seeing the Mondays videos on MTV's "alternative" show 120 Minutes, these kids bob and lurch in feigned E-blasted gormlessness, but rather touchingly get it ever so slightly wrong.

The Mondays' sound is a slick shambles, an immaculate hotch-potch that sounds remarkably close to the records, suggesting – knock me down with a feather – a substantial reliance on tapes. But who cares, when they sound this good? "Loose Fit" is a magnificent mirage, its golden riff shimmering forebodingly over sultry, low riding rhythms. A new song is in the same Seventies vein; synths that spume and froth as obscenely as World Of Twist's Moog ejaculations, bubbling swamp-funk pulsations, boogie guitar. It's like the primordial soup from which terrestrial life emerged. Then, like William Hurt in Altered States, the Mondays regress still further, beyond the protozoan to the sub-atomic "white light" state of pre-consciousness, with 'Wrote For Luck': a raga-house mantra for a state of mindlessness, like 'Sister Ray' crossed with 'I Feel Love'. The band exit one by one, as the beat slows down in sync with a strobe, and isolated pockets of jeers and boos are drowned out by a thoroughly merited ovation.



Jane's Addiction are another twist to the rock/dance collusion, but their thing is fission/fusion rather than the Mondays' pilfered pick 'n' mix, hacking freneticism rather than groovy brain-death. The sheer funk of Jane's Addiction's sound is startling. Perry Farrell jerks and spasms like he's the human fuse wire in Patti Smith's equation "art + electricity = rock 'n' roll". His helium-high peal of petulance careens across Navarro's cascades like a surfer riding the Mother Of All Waves. One side of Jane's Addiction is all about back-to-nature primitivism (the rhythm section is as tumultuously tribal as Bow Wow Wow, my absolute favourite group of 1981), but they have an equally powerful drive to revolt against nature, weird out. Where Happy Mondays are degenerate, Janes Addiction are decadent – a sublime fusion of excess and elegance, not a wallow in stupefaction. Although Farrell gives us the pagan blessing "good sex", and declares that "God is in your scrotum," most of the songs aren't about carnality but transcendence; the refusal of limits and the aspiration to god-head (the grandeur-lust of 'Wish I Was Ocean Size'). This self-aggrandisement/self-annihilation complex is the thread that connects rock shamanism with Farrell's other great releases, heroin and surfing.

Ironically, Farrell looks set to spurn the real power that's now his for the grasping. The fervour of the 14,000-strong coalition of subcultures here tonight underlines the impression that Jane's Addiction have become the focus for the disparate disaffected. The group's upcoming Lollapalooza tour of the USA, a kind of mobile rock festival, looks set to resurrect the idea of counter culture. Farrell could actually turn the twenty something generation's "those were the days" defeatism into "these are the days" pride. But apparently he's already decided to end Jane's Addiction. If he does, it'll be an act of sheer willfulness comparable with Big Black's premature hari-kiri, except that so much more is at stake. I hope he changes his mind, but I'll admire the heroic perversity if he does pull the plug.



HAPPY MONDAYS
Yes, Please
Melody Maker, September 1992

by Simon Reynolds

God, doesn't Madchester seem an aeon ago? When Ian Brown comes back, is he still going to be doing all those baggy body-moves? And right now, here's Happy Mondays, two years after the heyday, and provoking similar curiosity and concern about the Moment having passed. I've no particularly axe to grind: I loved the Mondays' first two magical LP's, detested their brief stint as pop stars, was won over again by the brooding shimmer of "Loose Fit". Basically, I'd be glad if Yes, Please was a great album.

It's actually pretty good**, but it has this strange air of irrelevance to what's goin' on. The UK is ruled by the two hardcores: American(ophile) slacker grunge, and the techno/hip hop mutant known as 'ardkore. Compared with these two scenes, Yes, Please lacks urgency, menace and above all, resonance. The Mondays, when they mattered, derived their rhythm and resonance from rave culture. By defacing and disfiguring rave music, they provided the scene with Faces and Figureheads; they rockified house with their rough guitars and ruffian anti-charisma. But since 1990, the Mondays have disconnected from the ever-evolving dancefloor. Obviously, they aspire to be a Great Band with their own self-sufficient aesthetic impervious to trends. But do they have enough stuff to sustain them?

Well, Happy Mondays were never gonna be the new Beatles (no great melodies). The Stones analogy was closer (black rhythm, orgiastic drug abuse, bad boy allure), but the Mondays' hedonism has never had a spiritual dimension like the Stones. They don't have it in them to write Nineties equivalents to "Gimme Shelter"; good as it was, "Loose Fit" was no "Let It Loose". The Mondays share rave culture's boorish celebration and excessive lust for kicks, but their music doesn't deal with the comedown and complications of the crash-and-burn lifestyle.

Like Pills N' Thrills, the title Yes, Please captures perfectly their gimme-gimme-gimme, "more E, Vicar?" attitude. The conditions surrounding the making of Yes, Please were bacchanalian; Shaun Ryder developed a serious crack problem, spending days in Barbados drug dens where hyped-up locals played reggae at an insane 78 rpm. If only some of that mania and derangement could made it into the Mondays music. Instead, Yes, Please has the Caribbean stamped all over it. At best, we're talking about the oceanic funk of late, late Can or John Martyn's One World; at worst, a typically tropical soundtrack to the Mondays' expensive vacation. The album's sun-baked mellow-yellow vibe is a culmination of the Mondays fantasy of life as an endless holiday, an eternal Ibiza. But most people have to come back to grim workaday reality, which is what gives the weekender lifestyle its special intensity and poignancy. Happy Mondays can now live the life of Riley in perpetuity, which makes it a bit meaningless. And that's where The Stones comparison really connects, as in the late Stones and the dull sterility of being no-work-and-all-playboys.

Happy Mondays are still a ways from that, but Yes, Please is really more of the same only better-produced (and at half-a-million quid, so it should be). The emphasis is on groove, hardly surpising since producers Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz (ex-Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club) were, in their day, one of the best rhythm sections in the white world. The album kicks off well with "Stinkin' Thinkin'", all bubbling bass, spindly rhythm guitar and squelch-amatic keyboards, with Ryder cast as the irresistible rogue; "kiss me for making you wait/kiss me for screwing everything in sight/kiss me for never getting it right". "Monkey In The Family" is pretty fab too: reggaematic techno-funk that packs a fair old wallop, spangly, bubblegum sitar-rock and tingling tablas filling up the Sly & Robbie chasms between the beat. The doubtless drug problem inspired lyric is one of the few times Ryder acknowledges the costs of excessive hedonism.



Thereafter, Side One degenerates into bumptious jubilation. "Sunshine & Love" is brisk, amiable, tuneful, and turns me off like only happy-go-lucky music can. I'd venture that no great art has come out of pure affirmation or unproblematic joy, unless it's joy so convulsive it's close to madness (which is where Happy Mondays lose out to the manic rush of 'ardkore). "Dustman" has boogie guitar, simmering, summery percussion, and that's about the size of it. "Angel" is almost ominous, a tensile throwback to the early Eighties (ESG meets "Walking On Sunshine"), with another addiction and/or rehab blues lyric: "when did the pain start?/When did the symptoms begin?" (slurred so it sounds like "The Simpsons begin").

Side Two resumes the sunny side upful vibe, with the sweltering, horn-powered, vaguely Latinate "Cut 'Em Loose Bruce". The near-instrumental "Theme From Netto" is, on a purely musical level, the best track on the album: sublime flecked rhythm guitar, succulent bass, brimming keyboards - gorgeous, the Barbados Tourist Board should employ it in their ad campaigns. "Love Child" is good fun too, a Seventies disco up-and-down-the-scale bassline, a raunchy riff, and a dub-spacious production -the first time Weymouth & Frantz really let rip on the console. It's striking that for all their huge intake of psycho-active substances, the Mondays music rarely sounds druggy, never simulates or induces disorientation, delirium, or a hyper-real kinetic feeling, rather sounds a bit stoned, to say the most. Thereafter, Yes, Please tails off with "Total Ringo" and "Cowboy Dave": apart from Ryder's drivel, these could be Island Records jet-set funk-rock a la Steve Winwood or Robert Palmer. Yuk-ola.

So. Yes, Please is baggy growing up a bit, but not really evolving. It's hard to fault, it's as good as Happy Mondays get, but perhaps not good enough to matter. To recoup a half a million quid outlay a record has to be laden with potential hit singles or to strike some kind of chord with a sizeable faction of the populace. Yes, Please, unless I'm very much mistaken, will fail on either count. In the end, Happy Mondays are too self-absorbed and un-driven to create anything that really resonates. They're having fun, living it up, but whereas in 1989/90 that was the whole point (they represented a lumpen underclass of chancers, were Thatcher's illegitimate children, etc), in 1992 - who cares?


* possibly the most egregious myth peddled by Wilson, Factory (Steve Morris: "it takes Ecstasy to make a white man dance") and many others involved in Madchester (Mani: "Whitey could dance, with a pill in 'im"). What's most amazing is that many of the Mancs peddling this myth that no white people danced before MDMA/house were either aware of or actually involved in.... NORTHERN SOUL, ferchrissakes. But what about the Southern jazz-funk scene with its rave-like all dayers and soul weekends, what about the warehouse funk culture of Eighties London and the many flavours of metropolitan club cutlure? What about 2-Tone, whose ska-sploitation movie was called Dance Crazy? What about postpunk's ideas of "dangerous disco"? What about the original Sixties mods, the R&B obsessed precursors to the Northern soulies? What about trad jazz, which was all about reviving the pre-WW2 function of jazz as a dance music, music to get drunk and go wild to, and a scene where the word "raver" even had some currency? True, house/E brought in a different kind of dancing, more fluid, ecstatic and tranced out; with different kind of body-moves and a tribal-vibal synergy that was new (if prefigured in gay club culture and the original 70s disco). But what they're really talking about, if anything at all, is that a bunch of indie-dance types who'd never been into dancing (at least to dance music) got turned on to it.

* * I was way too kind to this bland-beyond-belief album, wasn't I?

WORLD OF TWIST, interview
Melody Maker, November 2nd, 1991

by Simon Reynolds



"When I went to see Hawkwind as a 14 year old kid," recalls Gordon King. World Of Twist's guitarist, "I was awestruck. I thought 'where the fuck do they live, what kind of people are they?!' I was fascinated. Seeing Nik Turner walking around with someone's head on a axe, behaving like a twat, or Bob Calvert narrating some of his drivel - I just thought it was a really heavy trip. 10 years later, you listen and you have a really good laugh."

That's as good an evocation of the confused drives behind 'kitschadelia' as you'll get. Kitschadelia is what happens when an aspiration to the monumentalism of pre-punk, is checked by post-punk irony. Seen through the primal gaze of the quintessential pop kid, The Sweet's plastic insurrection, Gary Glitter's barbarian bubblegum, Marc Bolan shrouded in Top Of The Pop's cheapo purple haze effects, were truly apocalyptic, genuinely alien. In retrospect, you have to laugh at the crass sensationalism, the naff, over-stated effects; at the time, your eyes were blown.

World Of Twist aren't alone in hankering for the lost innocence of what Nik Cohn called SUPERPOP. There's St Etienne, with their dreams of gold lame, limousines, and a Phil Spectoresque empire of puppet-proteges. There's Teenage Fanclub, whose Bandwagonesque is virtually a concept album about Seventies glam'n'metal. In the States, Urge Overkill's ironic-yet-awesome anthems like "The Kids Are Insane"
resurrect the stadium rock of their adolescence. Partly, bands are playing with the idea of superstardom, as a way of coming to terms with the insignificance of being a rock band in 1991. Partly, it's a genuine envy of the days when rock was titanic, hysteria-inducing, before punk demystified the process, enabled/obliged us to see through the spectacle.

"The finest age you go can through with pop is when you're thirteen," avers drummer Nick Sanderson. "It's all totally fresh, you're so obsessed."

"You can be so snobby about everything," adds Gordon. "You can be at school and everyone's into Gary Glitter and Slade - which I did like, I admit - but I'd sneer and say 'I like progressive'. I had long hair, an Afghan coat and a gas mask bag. I was three years ahead of my contemporaries, and hated by everyone. I didn't have a girlfriend til I was 18! You forget that that still goes on - there's probably some 13 year old kid with the modern equivalent of a gas mask bag with World Of Twist's logo on it, and he's sneering at the kids who like Carter".

Like Gordon, Nick was obsessed with Genesis, Bowie, Roxy Music, Peter Hammill of Van Der Graaf Generator. "If I'd known then, aged 13, that one day I'd be doing an interview with Melody Maker, the progressive paper, I'd have cried tears of absolute joy. It was my first music paper."

Gordon: "It's got the best name as well. Born in a different era. But I've got to pick you up on one thing, Simon - Melody Maker seems to have dropped the folk rock coverage. Why is that? There was some lovely, lovely bands on that scene. What happened to Gryphon?"

From their unlikely beginning as prog rock fiends, Nick and Gordon moved on to Northern Soul - all nighters, spending forty quid on rare singles. Then came punk. "When punk happened, I had to hide half my albums when people came round," remembers Gordon. "All the prog stuff."

Nick: "You had to rewrite history. It was very Stalinist. Me, I had to put all my albums at the back of the collection, make out I didn't listen to music."

Gordon: "During punk, the band that finally drove my dad into a fit of rage was XTC on So It Goes - the most innocuous of the lot. All his pent-up fury went on them".

Perhaps the most long-lasting effect of punk was irony; after the Pistols, you could never quite return to the life- and-death seriousness of imagining rock as a world-changing force. In some ways, the spirit of punk lives largest and most visible in Vic Reeves, who's as much a part of the kitschadelic sensibility as any of the bands. As it happens, Gordon's turn of phrase (lots of arch expressions like "super", "hopping mad", "slap-up nosh") is tres Vic.

Post-punk irony is both curse and blessing. Pre-punk, rock stars took themselves seriously to the point of madness.

"We recorded the album at Real World, Peter Gabriel's studio," says Gordon. "And he's a classic case of a man who's lost touch with reality. The title of the studio's so ironic. He was a childhood idol of me and Nick, and we were dead keen to meet him. But he was really shy. Worse thing is, he makes such strenous efforts to stay in contact with the real world. It's almost touching. Like he kept making cups of tea for everybody in the whole room. It's little gestures like that, where he's trying to say 'I am normal'. Yes all went mad, too."

Punk's more immediate effect, though, was to discredit the idea of spectacle, of the performer as superhuman or otherworldly. Apart from a few shamanic, glam-influenced figures like Siouxsie and Adam Ant, the main thrust of punk was demystificatory, icon-oclastic. The first group to break ranks and reinstate the idea of spectacle was The Human League - a big influence on WoT.

"The best gig I've ever seen was Human League at the Lyceum, just before the girls joined. It was just so strange. I used to go all the big, progressive shows - Hawkwind, Genesis, all the dinosaur groups - so I wasn't aware of the irony involved in the League. I just thought, after four years of sweaty pogoing and ordinary blokes onstage, that this was the kind of SHOW I'd secretly always wanted."

In fact, Human League were the first kitschadelic group, the first to go back to yesterday's idea of the future. They even covered Glitter's "Rock'N'Roll". WoT hate "politically motivated pop", bemoan the recent overdose of drab realism, lament the fact that TOTP is a barren zone, devoid of aliens and freaks. Acid house, great as it was/is, has only contributed to the new facelessness. Like the League back in '79, World Of Twist stand almost alone against the resurgence of "ordinary geezer-ism" (Carter, drongo bands, knob-twiddling rave technicians). WoT want to bring back awe, fascination, a gulf between audience and band.

"We're trying to do something a bit larger than what everyone else does. But it's not like we're really arrogant. It's just that, from when I used to go and see bands as a kid, the ones I remember are the really massive groups."

Quality Street, World Of Twist's debut album, sounds larger than life. At the risk of labouring the Human League analogy, I'd say it's a Dare for the Nineties.

"It's the only pop album available, isn't it?" says Nick.

World Of Twist dwell on a most peculiar planet of sound. The album ranges from monumental moog-mantras like "Sons Of The Stage", "The Lights" and "On The Scene", to glutinously saccharine love devotionals like "Jellybaby" and "Speed Wine". The stand-out track, "The Spring", cuts between mock- orchestral lavishness and seriously cosmic trance-rock, while cryptic lyrics conjure an Ecstasy-addled vision of pop utopia. Bubblegum sitar, corny horn flourishes, Northern soul beats, Dave Gilmour/Loop guitar curlicues, mucoid spurts of synth, aciiied frenzy - it ought to be a mess, but the absurdly motley inputs come together like a dream.

"We're all fired up by such different things, we're too old for that unity thing," says Nick. They're an absurdly motley crew. Visual technician and Catweazle-lookalike Adge's ideal night, says Gordon, would be a rave; "my ideal night would be a Northern Soul all-nighter." Nick's would be a weeekend in pre-glasnost East Germany. He used to be morbidly obessed with the late, unlamented DDR - with the dimly lit drabness, the all-pervading misery, the surly restaurant service. "Everybody wore crap versions of Western clothes, Finnish jeans - they all looked like Mark E. Smith. I went so many times, they wouldn't let me in anymore."

And then there's crooner Tony Ogden, who (according to Gordon) listened to things like MC5 "way back when they weren't cool like they are now", but who is now more enamoured of mid-Sixties pop cabaret like The Honeycombs. "They had very peculiar sound for the time, the vocals were recorded on ten tracks, sped up and slowed down". A jittery, cagey fellow, Tony's contributions to the interview are coded and evasive. Asked where the obsession with sweets (Quality Street, "Sweets", "Jellybaby") comes from, he replies "it's a purely accidental, confectionery connection." Nick adds "'cos, personally, I'm more of a savouries man."

A lot of songs about are the exhiliration of pop, the thrill of neon-blitzed Saturday Nite, being "on the scene". Does World Of Twist music come out of your life or out of a love of pop?

Tony: "We're a celebration of pop, no doubt about it. We're a celebration of everything - except life! It's a celebration of celebration as well. There's so much celebrating going on, you wouldn't credit it. Serious!"

What's your ambition for World Of Twist, your dream state of total achievement?

"We want to make both the best and the worst record of our time."




WORLD OF TWIST
Astoria, London
Melody Maker, April 6th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

World Of Twist are fascinated by yesteryear's quaint ideas of the futuristic: Tomorrow People typography, obsolete synthesisers and man-made fabrics, astro-lamps, fiber optic ornaments and other long-lost fads - all the drek
that Victor Lewis-Smith's Buygones used to rake up. This kind of penchant usually leads to negligible whimsy of the Half Man Half Biscuit ilk. But World Of Twist have somehow evaded the belittling gaze normally associated with camp'n'kitsch, the odious trait of looking down on pop culture's preposterous excesses from a position of superiority. World Of Twist's music is of a different order of magnitude: it seems to look down on you.

Their songs are monumentally absurd, ziggurats of tinsel and tack. World Of
Twist are sublime (original meaning: an experience so vast and unmanageable it inspires speechless, humbled awe) and ridiculous.

Let the bubblegum apocalypse unfurl... A bedlam of flanged bass, phased cymbals, dry ice and stroboscope mayhem, then it's straight into the single, "Sons Of The Stage".
Those obscenely fartacious moogs spurt like spume from a whale's blowhole, then percolate in sensurround like a man-made sargasso sea. Tentacles of dralon, rayon and orlon enfold your limbs; the chorus "the floor's an ocean/And this
wave is breaking/Your head is gone and your body's shaking/There's nothing you can do and there is no solution/Gotta get down to the noise and confusion" is
Dionysian doggerel to ignite teenybop bacchanalia. The closing pseudo-orchestral coda is like a symphony for perspex instruments.

The folk responsible for this kitsch-adelic fantasia are a motley bunch: singer Tony Ogden looks like a malnourished Bryan Ferry, a cut-price fetishist in that hideously
inorganic, black gloss shirt; wizened techno-wizzard Adge really does seem to come from some 1971 timewarp; guitarist Gordon King looks and plays like a fugitive from Loop; blowsy Julia Vesuvius is a bird and no mistake. But this is fine:
they have the blemished and decidedly mortal look that pop groups had before the video age. And World Of Twist are not rock'n'roll, not soul, not even "dance" (although they partake of elements from all the above), but pop in the
purest and most bygone sense of the word. Their domain should
really be the discotheque, if such places still existed, rather than the nightclub or the rock venue. World Of Twist's "roots" are those phases when pop has been most rootless and inauthentic (glam, Northern Soul, Hawkwind), when subcultural
styles have been co-opted and travestied by bubblegum mimicry. It's so right that they should cover "She's A Rainbow", from that period when The Stones shamelessly jilted authentic R&B to hitch a ride on flower power's coat tails. And their version of MC5's "Kick Out The Jams" reveals the counter culture anthem to be pretty much on the same level as The Sweet's "Teenage Rampage": a gloriously vacant blast of
insurrectionary hot air.

"The Storm" is a neon kaleidoscope, a planetarium fallen into the hands of acid freaks. One mesmering miasmic mantra (possibly entitled "On The Scene") makes me momentarily imagine them as The Velcro Underground. "Life And Death" has
the most epic, life-and-death bassline since "Keep Feeling Fascination" (the Human League are a righteous reference point for WoT); future schlock-waves of glutinous moog engulf us in plastic bliss. The kitsch-quake cometh, and it'll blow your
eyes.




WORLD OF TWIST
"Sons of the Stage"
singles review column, Melody Maker, March 23rd 1991

by Simon Reynolds

Camp is all about a belittling delight in the quaint artificiality and over-stylisation of bygone pop culture; an aesthetic response wherein affection is mingled with contempt. Camp in pop has meant--Pet Shop Boys, Transvision Vamp, all that sorry school of shite.

But now here come World Twist, with an astonishing single that reconciles these opposites and offers the dizzying possibility of a “camp sublime”.

“Sons of the Stage” is a bugger to describe, which is always a good sign. Imagine a sound somewhere between Can and Vic Reeves, oceanic rock and a lava lamp. It’s camp and it’s cosmic. Kitsch-adelia is the best term I can find to evoke the flatulent fanfares of symphonic Moog, the spirograph curlicues of acid rock guitar, the monstrous, stomping beat. Yet underneath the arched eyebrows and laconic Northern irony, World of Twist are obviously fired up by an ardour for the imposing idiocy of pop, its vacant menace and preposterous splendour, as manifested by bubblegum barbarians like Glitter, the Sweet, David Essex. The lyrics set up a fantastical scenario of communal freak-out, joining the dots that run from acid rock through Northern Soul to Hawkwind and “Teenage Rampage” right up to rave culture. After this camp bacchanalia, the final coda--a fake orchestral fantasia of phased guitars and babbling Moogs--is a plastic apocalypse worthy of Prince, at once tacky and sacramental.

Awesome.

RADIO ON
1979, UK; BFI DVD, 2008.
director's cut (boom boom), Sight and Sound, June 2008.

by Simon Reynolds

In the interview accompanying this new edition of Radio On, director/writer Chris Petit uses the word "autistic" on three separate occasions to describe the mood he was aiming for. Embarking on his debut screenplay while still Time Out's film editor, Petit wasn't concerned with plot or character, dialogue or drama; his real interest was "buildings and weather". Watching Radio On almost thirty years after it was made, you do get the sense that more creative energy was invested in location scouting than psychology and motivation. The minimal narrative--a man, Robert B. (David Beames) drives from London to Bristol to investigate his brother's mysterious death--is a mere ploy to set the movie in motion and introduce the principal character: the urban landscape of late Seventies Britain.



Somewhere between Martin Parr's Boring Postcards and Anton Corbijn's Control, the movie has, as Petit notes, a documentary value first if not foremost. These clapped-out vistas of service stations, fly-overs, industrial estates, and business hotels rarely made it into UK cinema of the period. Radio On is not picturesque, then, but it is superlatively filmic, thanks to Martin Schafer's B/W cinematography, so high-contrast that glossy darkness frequently swallows up almost the entire screen, while during night scenes electric lighting burns through the murk with magnesium ferocity.

Radio On was an Anglo-Germanic production, jointly funded by the BFI and Wim Wenders' Road Movies company. Interviewing the German director for Time Out, Petit had plucked up the courage to say, "actually, I've got this script". Amazingly, his hero not only part-funded Radio On, he loaned Petit his cinematographer Schafer plus his wife, Lisa Kreuzer, as female lead. Even more remarkably, Petit ended up in the chair despite being a first-time director.

The influence of Wenders' road trilogy is a strong presence in Radio On, but equally important is another crucial mid-Seventies trilogy: J.G. Ballard's Crash/High-Rise/Concrete Island. The latter, a short novel about a modern-day castaway trapped on scrubland beneath the Westway flyover after being injured in a car crash, leaps to mind during the long aerial shot of Robert driving out of London, the camera lingering lovingly on the gash-ugly industrial wasteland that surrounds the fly-over. Another literary reference point is Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age, a novel often aligned with punk as a document of the climate of malaise and bunkered-down anomie in mid-Seventies Britain. Filmed in the month of January, Radio On exudes a coldness both physical and emotional. One song on the marvelously apt and evocative soundtrack sings plaintively about being "free from the frozen years at last".

Petit uses pop songs to externalize the feelings that his taciturn and blocked characters can't or won't express. That's not especially radical in itself, but music is deployed in an unconventional way that hovers ambiguously midway between diagetic and non-diagetic. A tune, ostensibly played on the in-car stereo, might abruptly dip down in volume but continue to play without fading away; Devo's stilted subversion of "Satisfaction' is made even more disjointed and alienated by being chopped into shards with sizeable chunks of silence in between. In the interview, Petit says he consciously reversed cinema's vision-over-sound hierarchy, aiming to make "sound with pictures". Hardly surprising that dance culture's terminology features in the title radio on (remix) , the 1998 mini-movie included with this DVD that "stalks the past" by revisiting the movie's original locations--places like Silbury Hill and Heston Services--to see how they've changed, while also subjecting the original film to computer-editing processes of deceleration, freezing, and zoom.

You could almost imagine the original Radio On as a series of unofficial promo videos made by a director responding to the mind's eye triggering potency of the era's vanguard pop: the experimental end of glam, German electronic, New Wave. Bowie's "Heroes" and "Always Crashing in the Same Car" are brilliantly deployed, as are Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" and "Ohm Sweet Ohm". But oddly, British postpunk--seemingly, the obvious Ballardian musical analogue--is absent. Joy Division's "Transmission" and "Shadowplay' would have been a perfect fit. Still, postpunk does appear to have determined Robert's look: he wears Ian Curtis's Eastern Bloc overcoat and physically looks like the 5th member of Wire.



Radio On's title itself comes from The Modern Lovers' proto-punk anthem "Roadrunner", a hymn to the American dream of perpetual mobility. Jonathan Richman sings "I'm in love with the modern world", but Radio On's vision of modernity is unlovely and loveless. Robert's motto could be "only disconnect". A New Wave hit single used repeatedly on the soundtrack spells this out: Lene Lovich's "Lucky Number", where the singer goes from aloof autonomy ("my lucky number's one" ) to discovering that "two" (coupledom) is better by far. But Robert keep on looking out for number one.

There's a series of brittle interactions with aggrieved-seeming English women, from Robert's live-in girlfriend (always seen shivering and swaddled in layers of clothes or a duvet) who moves out without him even noticing, to the dead brother's lover (a bony, raven-haired girl with a striking resemblance to postpunk ice queen Siouxsie Sioux). Even doing his job as an all-night deejay at a biscuit factory, Robert lacks empathy. Reading out a female worker's request for "Help Me Make It Through the Night," he says "here's something better" and plays Ian Dury's "Sweet Gene Vincent" instead. His (im)passive aggressive demeanour eventually triggers female violence: in a pub he keeps getting in the way of a snooker game, provoking one of the women players to kick over the stool he's sat on.

Radio On's permafrost thaws slightly only a couple of times. Intimacy of a sort develops between Robert and Ingrid, a German woman (Lisa Kreuzer) searching for her five year old daughter. The movie's first smiles are cracked and Robert tags along on Ingrid's quest for a while. The other moment involves male bonding kindled through music. At a derelict petrol station in Chippenham, Robert meets a rockabilly-obsessed singer (a cameo from the then not-very-famous Sting) and the two men duet on another love-by-numbers song, "Three Steps to Heaven" (originally by Eddie Cochran, who died in a car crash on the nearby A4--how J.G.B. is that?) But these are ships-that-pass encounters. Ingrid ruefully notes, "last night I hoped we would sleep together… but we won't". About to drive off from the petrol station, Robert cheerily says "see you around Eddie", only for Sting's character to snap "no you won't" with unexpected bitterness.



In Radio On, the automobile is an ambiguous symbol, representing less autonomy than autism, promising not the freedom of the open road but the emptiness of a life unmoored from emotional ties. The road movie, as Petit knew from the off, wouldn't translate to the UK's spaghetti junctions and landscape-scarring bypasses, but that was the point. Just compare the word "motorway"--as dourly, phlegmatically British as "mustn't grumble"-- with "highway" and "freeway": it simply doesn't set off the same utopian resonances of transcendence and liberation. Robert's vaguely American-looking 1950s beaut of an automobile is out of place, a relic. Along with Wenders road movies, Petit admired Monte Hellmann's Two-Lane Blacktop. His equivalent to the latter's nihilistic closing image--the celluloid catching fire in the projector as the race drivers hurtle to nowhere--could easily have been when Robert steers his car to the edge of the precipice above a grim quarry. (Unconsciously or not, an echo of the denouement of another anti- road movie, Spielberg's Duel). But suicide would be cheap resolution and catharsis of the kind Petit determinedly avoids and the movie doesn't end there, not quite.



Radio On shies away from a political reading. Petit was adamantly opposed to social realism, studies of the fine gradations of the class system, and other hallmarks of 1970s British cinema (he singles out Abigail's Party as his antithesis). Nonetheless, political reality leaks into Robert's bubbleworld, forming an ambient backdrop of dislocation and tension. The radio drip-drips endless bad news from the IRA and Baadher-Meinhof to a West country porn ring that (it turns out) might have some connection to his brother's death, along with heavy snow that paralyses much of the country and the perennial bathos of no-score draws on the football results. There's a 'Free Astrid Poll' slogan spraypainted on a London wall and a tiny hint that Ingrid originally left her daughter with her estranged husband when she got involved in some kind of radical wildness. Society is falling apart but Robert is all uncomprehending detachment: as he tells an unbalanced hitchhiker, a squaddy gone AWOL from his Northern Ireland tour of duty, "I never understood what the problems were".

When Robert strolls past an industrial park en route to his car, a sign on a warehouse wall advertises Shock Absorbers. Cars have them, but they can also be them, insulating their occupants from the Real and the Social. "Here in my car/I feel safest of all," sang Asbergers sufferer Gary Numan in 1979's "Cars". "I can lock all my doors/It's the only way to live." Is there a glimmer of hope at Radio On's end when Robert abandons privatized transportation (as favored by car ownership fan Margaret Thatcher) for the shabby, inefficient, but resolutely collective British Rail? Perhaps that's to read too much into this resolutely oblique, brilliantly opaque movie.