drum and bass circa 1999

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Planet V

Ultra

LTJ BUKEM featuring  MC CONRAD and DRS

Progression Sessons

Good Looking

Spin, 1999?

by Simon Reynolds

        For  half-a-decade there, jungle was the fastest moving music on the planet--and I'm not just talking about the ever-accelerating breakbeats. Sucking in a dizzying succession of influences (hip hop, dancehall,  jazz,  industrial), the scene ran through a half-dozen distinct stylistic phases. But two years ago, jungle's mutational onrush  stalled.  Producers progressively banished the elements that had given the music "vibe" (hip hop, reggae) leaving behind a techno-influenced, dark-but-clinical sound motored by the trudging two-step beat.

    

     Planet V is probably the best compilation the scene could muster right about now; it's a superb survey of  a sonic stasis quo. Adam F's "Brand New Funk" and Ed Rush and Optical's "Funktion (Remix)" indicate two  facets of drum and bass's current, desperate

reinvocation of "funk". The On The Corner-ish "Funktion" trailblazed the more frantic polyrhythms that are now thankfully superceding two-step [2013 note: not meaning the UK garage 2step but the jacknife-at-the-waist plodfunk that took over D'n'B from 1997 onwards, aka neurofunk], while Adam F's tune should really be titled "Kitschy Retro Funk"--its blacksploitation  brass stabs  make me think of  Jackie Brown in silhouette brandishing a gun. Long associated with V Recordings, the Reprazent posse are well, er, reprazented, with solid efforts from DJ Die, Scorpio, DJ Suv and Krust,  plus album highlights from Roni Size like "Strictly Social"--a peculiar mesh of Cantonese gongs,  brittle Sonic Youth guitarchords and  Glitterbeat stomp. Such incongruous combinations are one of the few avenues of  aesthetic rejuvenation still open for drum abd bass.

    

        Stuck in his pleasant rut of  wispy  synth-washes and simulated sax'n' strings sounds,  LTJ Bukem ought to be a sad figure. Instead, he's achieved a strange dignity, simply by sticking to his aesthetic guns instead of going "dark" when it was fashionable. Bukem's latest mix-CD, featuring tracks by his Looking Good roster of acolytes/clones and languid MC-ing from Conrad, will keep his fans  happy until the arrival of the  maestro's long-awaited solo debut. One of the ironies of  ambient drum and bass--supposedly meant for home listening-- is that it  sounds much better over a huge club sound system, where the extra volume realizes the music's oceanic aspirations. These days  I'd rather hear this softcore jazzy jungle played out than the hard stuff:  Looking Good's clip-clopping breaks have more of   jungle's bygone frisky exuberance than two-step's dirgefunk, and its heart-murmur basslines impact your ribcage without harshing your ear.  Influenced more by house's smooth, seamless mixing than jungle's chop 'n' slash, Bukem's forte is weaving a sensurround wall of soothing goo. Which is why all Looking Good artists sound samey--they're designed as compatible components for the Bukem mix-scape. Not radical music by any means, then, but  Bukem-style aquafunk remains a valid segment of what junglists  call the "full circumference".

Further reading: my December 1997 piece on Neurofunk for the Wire

                                                                                   

IAN DURY - OBITUARY

published as 'The Life and Rhymes of Ian Dury 1942 — 2000'

Uncut, June 2000

by Simon Reynolds

At the peak of his late '70s success, Ian Dury was one of this country’s most beloved entertainers. He kept busy in his post-stardom years — movie acting, working for UNICEF, squeezing out albums intermittently. But despite a recent resurgence of affection and interest, Dury never quite recovered his place in the public eye.

Bands like Madness and Blur picked up a few tips from his character sketch-style of songwriting, closer to "three-minute scripts" (as he put it) than pop ditties. But Dury was ultimately too much of an inspired one-off to become an inspirational "genre," a la your Lou Reeds or Bowies with their legions of mostly mediocre imitators. No, they broke the proverbial mold when they made Ian Dury.

His charismatic soul-clash of salt-of-the-earth Cockney ("Mockney", Dury confessed, since he’d actually grown up in Essex) and arty weirdo came from his parents — the unsuccessful and shortlived marriage of bus driver/chauffeur Dad (beautifully immortalized in Dury’s poignant 'My Old Man') and posh, bohemian mother. The polio he contracted in 1949 at age seven left Dury with a withered left leg and a personality that mixed adversity-hardened toughness with the classic comedian’s craving for acceptance. (The perfect blend of menace and cuddly charm for a post-punk pop star, in other words).

Like so many in the Britrock pantheon, Dury was a product of '60s art schools. Attracted as much by the long-haired boho lifestyle and opportunities to draw nude models as by art-as-vocation, he studied at Walthamstow Art School, where he was taught by Peter Blake, the Pop Art painter responsible for the cover of Sgt Pepper. Dury then made it into the Royal College Of Art (something he rated as the greatest achievement of his life), but eventually decided he was never going to be as great as his painter heroes, and focused his attention on rock’n’roll, figuring that the competition (especially lyrically) wasn’t as hot.

His first band, Kilburn And the High Roads, was a theatrical outfit that achieved some popularity on the nascent pub rock circuit in the early Seventies (John Lydon was often in the audience and reputedly learned some things from Dury when it came to baleful stage presentation) but only released on a posthumous and little-bought LP. Towards the end of the band’s life, pianist Chas Jankel joined. Cleancut Jankel and Dury (then looking like a glam bovver boy, with sepulchral eyeliner, Doc Martens, skinhead crop, and straight leg rolled-up jeans) formed a classic chalk-and-cheese songwriting partnership — Chas’ melodic flair and neat-freak talent for arrangement strangely yet perfectly complementing Ian’s scabrous yarns and lyrical Method acting. Hooking up with Loving Awareness, a band of seriously seasoned musicians (bassist Norman Watt-Roy had been on the road since he was 13) who were swiftly and thankfully renamed the Blockheads, Dury finally found the fluent funk and vivid instrumental colours he’d never got from the High Roads.

The result was New Boots And Panties!!!, recorded on a £4,000 loan with Jankel as "musical director", then sold to Stiff Records. An incongruous mix of funk, rockabilly and music-hall influences like Wee Willie Harris, plus Dury’s coarse vernacular poetics, New Boots became a word-of-mouth hit, finding its place in every suburban new-waver’s hi-fi cabinet, and ultimately selling a million copies worldwide. Balancing the punk shock appeal of rude words (the infamous "arseholes bastards fucking cunts and pricks" swearfest that kickstarts 'Plaistow Patricia') with satirical wit, shit-hot musicianship and indelible tunes, New Boots was the perfect crossover record for its time, without ever seeming compromised or calculated.

Although punk provided the climate for Dury’s success (without it, he’d probably have remained an Alex Harvey-like cult), in many ways he did not fit at all. At 37, Dury was more than twice the age of punk’s archetypal 17-year-old kid on the street. The Blockheads were also borderline musos, slick funkateers who’d probably have been an Average White Band without Dury’s prickly persona.
More enamoured of the Meters than the New York Dolls, Dury regarded himself as a non-musician who "knows a lot about rhythm — I work my lyrics with rhythm". He even half-seriously claimed that 'Reasons To Be Cheerful (Pt 3)' was "the first rapping record", having been released three months before 'Rapper’s Delight'. Do It Yourself, the long awaited sequel to New Boots, was glossy, full-on disco — "because if you can’t dance to it, there’s a lot of other things you can’t do to it", Dury told Radio One with a nudge-nudge leer in his voice. Ironically, the best songs on the album were about not getting laid — the are-we-just-friends-or-something-more tentativeness of 'Inbetweenies', the desperate chat-up merchant of 'Do Not Ask Me', the marital warfare scenario of 'Sink My Boats', and, above all, the discotheque hellzone of 'Dance Of The Screamers', with its lost lonely losers and socially unskilled inadequates searching hopelessly for love, and Dury’s chorus howls of hoarse, wordless agony sparring with Davey Payne’s blasts of freedom sax.

The other big difference between Dury and punk was that for all his lyrics’ occasional grotesquerie and his own life’s pain, his vision was ultimately heartwarming and humane, a celebration of life, love, and "the jolly-up". Following the Blockheads’ Number One smash, 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick', with its risque double-entendres and panoramic shimmerfunk, Dury’s chirpy Cockney chappy side came to the fore. Now superstars, Dury and The Blockheads did a 100-date tour of the UK that climaxed with a week at the Hammersmith Odeon, and scored another huge hit in late 1980 with 'Reasons To Be Cheerful'.

Dury, by his own later admission, lost it, spiralling off into self-loathing confusion while simultaneously vigorously enjoying the fruits of stardom. His first marriage was one casualty; his partnership with Jankel another. Apparently finding Dury’s potent personality "threatening" and "oppressive" to his own sense of self, Jankel quit to do a solo album.

Dury and The Blockheads recruited ex-Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson and pulled together the self-produced and scrawny-sounding Laughter, ("A miserable record", as Ian admitted later. "I called it Laughter to cheer myself up"), which went down with the public like a cup of cold sick. Dury collaborated again with Jankel for 1981’s Lord Upminster, recorded in Nassau with Sly’n’Robbie. Negatively inspired by the UN’s Year of the Disabled, the single, 'Spasticus Autisticus' (a "war cry" and an "anti-charity song," said Ian), got banned by the Beeb. Its commercial failure effectively ended Dury’s pop stardom.

Over the next 19 years, there were other albums: 1984’s 4000 Weeks Holiday, 1989’s Apples (which became a musical). Dury wrote the theme song for The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, acted in films like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover and The Crow: Part Two, globetrotted in support of polio immunisation for UNICEF, did a bit of TV hosting, married sculptor Sophy Tilson and had two sons. He did not seem overly bothered about extricating himself from the "Where Are They Now?" file. But partly in response to his struggles with cancer and partly triggered by his status as Britpop reference point, a surge of public fondness dragged him out of semi-retirement, resulting in gigging with a reformed Blockheads and last year’s well-received Mr Love Pants. On March 27 he died aged 57, finally succumbing after a five-year long battle with cancer.

Like Jarvis Cocker, an artist with whom he has some things in common, and unlike virtually everybody else, Dury managed to pull off two precarious marriages — rock’n’roll and Englishness; rock’n’roll and comedy. Personally, Ian and the Blockheads turned my 16-year-old self onto punk and funk; it was New Boots that led me both to Never Mind The Bollocks and to Off The Wall. Until I heard 'Wake Up And Make Love With Me', I’d no idea pop music could be so casually adult. Until I heard 'If I Was With A Woman', I never knew that lyrics could have things going on between the lines, that the message of a song could really be the total opposite of what its persona (the spiteful, scared-shitless misogynist) was apparently saying.

Along with Billy MacKenzie, Dury is one of the few pop heroes I really regret never having met; as with MacKenzie, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if he’d only been able to maintain the chemistry between himself and his most fruitful collaborator (Jankel/Rankine), then immediately realise the stupidity of such speculations, when he’d given us so much already. As Dury quipped not long before his death, when you make a great record, you should have the right to milk it for the rest of your life. Ian Dury made at least two.

All the best, mate, from your fan.

SIX FINGER SATELLITE

Severe Exposure

Sub Pop

Melody Maker, 1995 

by Simon Reynolds

            'Humanity' and 'honesty' are two of the most overrated things in rock.  So hats off to Sub Pop for bringing us Six Finger Satellite, a band whose coldblooded conceptualism and contrivance makes them exiles in their own land.  Heartless and arty where their compatriots are heartfelt and artless, SFS are the best Sub Pop band since you-know-who.

     With their Kraftwerk-style uniforms (whitecoated lab technicians circa last year's fab mini-LP "Machine Cuisine") and strict-time robo-rhythms, SFS are rock reptiles in the tradition of Devo or Tubeway Army. This time round there's less of  "Cuisine"'s dirty electronica, and instead a slight return to the guitar-centric sound of the debut LP. SFS exhiliratingly join the dots between various forgotten moments in post-punk. And so  "Bad Comrade" begins as a grim processional through the bleak urban wastes of 'Red Mecca' era Cabaret Voltaire, then explodes into the caustic agit-funk paroxysms of Gang of  Four; "Parlour Games" and "Simian Fever" recall the art-metal clangour of Chrome and  Bowie's "Lodger"; "White Queen to Black Knight"  virtually rewrites  "Annalisa" from PiL's underrated debut. As for "Cock Fight": forget Nine Inch Nails et al, this is the real industrial rock, a swarf-spitting, steelworks scree.

            Thematically, we're talking grotesquerie-a-gogo, the kind of perverse, puerile  preoccupations that characterised Throbbing Gristle, Big Black and Devo. "Rabies (Baby's Got The)"  gives the game away in the title, while "Where Humans Go" appears to be a 'Soylent Green'-style sci-fi fantasy of people being rendered down into meat for cannibal consumption, with machinic beats and effluent-like synth-slime conjuring the abattoir's grisly ambience. The ultimate destination of this particular rock strain of  impulse-to-outrage and morbid fascination with abjection is always the Final Solution, and so the last track "Board The Bus" revives the scenario of "Machine Cuisine"'s  "The Magic Bus"  (with its cyborg gauleiter grunts of "work equals freedom" and "fire at will, commandant").

            Dodgy flirtations with the Teutonic/technocratic aside, Six Finger's rigour and frigidity are strangely refreshing at a time when so much US rock is basically 70s singer-songwriter angst with a fuzz-box.  Expose yourself to their severity.        

SIX FINGER SATELLITE
Melody Maker,  1995
 
by Simon Reynolds

                It was actually a mistake that first got me intrigued by Six Finger

Satellite. At the end of the 1993 Sub Pop compilation "Curtis W.  Pitts", there's

a devastating diatribe against Sebadoh that basically accuses them of pimping

their own neurosis; as Six Finger are the last act credited on the sleeve, I

assumed they'd authored it.  Turns out it's actually a self-critique that Barlow

& Co cobbled together to play over the PA prior to Sebadoh hitting the stage. An

error, then, but a strangely appropriate one, since Six Finger---with their

almost English flair for concept, image, packaging and manifesto, their creed of

discipline and unitary vision--are nothing if not anti-slacker.

    "This is a time of slacker rock," says singer John MacLean with a pained

grimace. "Regular guys stepping onstage in T-shirt and jeans, complaining about

their personal problems.  And we're definitely a reaction against that, rock as psychotherapy session. A lot of these bands seem amazed that they're

confused by life."

     Six Finger have no truck with the spiritual weaklings of  lo-fi, which is basically punk degenerated into an ersatz folk music (Sebadoh = James Taylor with a fuzzbox). Six Finger descend from an altogether less meek-and-mild strand of punk, that runs from the Stooges' raw power through the Pistols' virulent nihilism to Big Black's ear-scalding severity.

    Where this vision of punk (brutalism, will-to-power, appetite for destruction) inevitably seems to end up is Germany.  And so The Stooges' Ron Asheton performed in SS regalia, while as a solo artist Iggy had "visions of swastikas" reeling in his head; Johnny Rotten sang about the Berlin Wall and Belsen; Big Black covered Kraftwerk's misogynist ditty "The Model".  Punk-prophet and Kraftwerk-fan Lester Bangs pointed out that Germany had invented speed (amphetamine and the autobahn) and argued that rock's future lay with the German bands' man-machine interface and motorik rhythms.  It's on this aesthetic freeway connecting Detroit and Berlin, where guitar-blitzkrieg meets synth-precision, that you'll find Six Finger Satellite.

     On the cover of their first Sub Pop single, 'The Declaration of

Techno-Colonialism', the band wore space suits and Gary Numan make-up; inside,

there's a manifesto about the need for "a pact between man and machinery".

    "We had all this was stuff about showing up at the studio on time, being physically fit, because you have to earn the machines' respect," says John. "We keep to a strict regimen of getting up at 9 0'clock, meeting at the coffee shop, doing some callisthenic exercises before repairing to the studio, then winding up at the disco at night."

    In between the guitar-centric debut "The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird"

and the Gang of Four/Tubeway Army amalgam of their new album "Severe Exposure",

Six Finger made a full-on foray into electronica with last year's fab

mini-LP "Machine Cuisine".  Here, they made extravagant use of the slimy

inorganic textures generated by their vast collection of outmoded analogue synths. Like

the boffins of UK art-tekno, Six Finger prefer quaint '70s instruments to

modern digital technology, partly because of the extreme, unsubtle artificiality

of the sounds they generate, and partly because the old synths are played in a

strenuous, hands-on way that feels more rock'n'roll. Onstage, singer J. Ryan

wields his portable synth like an axe, strapped around his neck.

   "Modern computer music like techno is the perfect example of the machines

playing the people," frowns John, when I question their strange lo-fi approach to

futurism.  "Analog has this warmth that's closer to human.  When it's heated up

to optimum operational temperature, analogue gear has the same temperature as the

human body."

     Like Elastica, Six Finger play rock purged of hippy indulgence ("when I

heard about Jerry Garcia's death, I felt a great weight lifted off my shoulders,"

quips bassist James Apt) and severed from its pre-1976 blues roots.  Their

compulsive but unswinging, strict-time rhythms lie somewhere between New Wave's

raunch-free twitch'n'jerk and disco's metronomic pulse.  Drummer Rick Pelletier

even incorporates a disco-style crashing hi-hat into his playing.

    Six Finger are veritable scholars of post-punk. Earlier, during the

soundcheck for their gig at CBGB's, James namechecks This Heat's "Deceit" and

ATV's "Vibing Up The Senile Man", the Stranglers, Suicide and PiL.  Later, during

the interview, the band cite Gary Numan, Devo, DAF, Kraftwerk, plus San Francisco

post-punk/art-metal bands MX-80 and Chrome, whose "acidic but potent"

guitar-clangour is a big influence on John's playing.  They hint that their

future output may bear the imprint of Eno & Bowie's Berlin-based trilogy

"Low"/"Heroes"/ "Lodger".  As for contemporary kindred spirits, they give the big-up to Hydrogen Terrorists, from their own locale of Providence, Rhode Island; James describes them approvingly as "the soundtrack to a seal clubbing".

    "We're interesting in anything that involves two opposing forces,"

elucidates James, when quizzed about their 'beauty is cruelty' aesthetic and

Devo-esque interest in the superhuman/subhuman interface. "Whether it's in

personal relations or the structure of the Nazi empire. A study of the oppressor

and the oppressed."

    So which do you sympathise with?

   "That depends. Whoever has the guts to carry something through. People who

don't recant on their ideal.  Perverted genius, scary figures from history like

Rasputin the Mad Monk."

     In their groovy press pack, each member of Six Finger lists their favorite

dictators (Ngo Dinh Diem, Idi Amin, Genghis Khan and Steve Albini).  For some

reason, there seems to be an innate tendency for rebel rock to drift toward a

fascination with fascism.  Perhaps it's not so odd when you consider that the

Nazis were Romantics, Nietzche buffs and neo-pagans (all tendencies shared by

arty rock'n'rollers).  And so Iggy talked of being a fuehrer without followers,

the ubermensch that Nietzche could only write about; Bowie spent much of his

coked-out mid-70s flirting with Nazism and Aleister Crowley.  Following in this

well-trod path, Six Finger attempted to rival the Pistols' "Belsen Was A Gas" for

sheer tastelessness with "The Magic Bus" on "Machine Cuisine", in which a

vocoderised J.  Ryan plays the role of a sort of robot commandant ushering

passengers on board their way to the Final Solution.  And on the new LP, "Board The

Bus" revisits this most dubious of scenarios. So what gives?

   "I guess I've just read a lot of war books and had my share of Third Reich

fantasies, so I'm acting them out", J.  says sheepishly.

    "It's only because they were such a remarkable organisation," continues

James. "It has nothing to do with the acts themselves, just the way they were

structured.  It's how most people wish they could live their lives: hyper-regimented. Get up, slaughter 50 thousand people, then have lunch.  They were striving for a kind of efficiency that's beyond the attainable. We've come close, on this tour."

     "At one of our shows, we used to have a Six Finger black arm-band, and a

local newspaper accused us of being Nazis," adds John. "But I've always thought

of the whole performance aspect of rock as being related to fascism, the cult of

personality."

    James: "The confusion our generation feels is from not being able to live up

to the highly edited lifestyles we see on TV. And so being able to go see a

really focused, committed performance, means something.  We try to present a

unified front so people can fixate on the band."

     John: "There's a whole fascist side to it where it's not background music,

it's a love/hate thing.  People come up and say 'that show was offensive to me'.

They could have just left the club but the fact that they stayed and watched all

the way through, hating it, is cool.  To me that's like someone saying they really liked it."

    We appear to have reached another of those stagnant lulls in rock

history when barbarism seems better than banality, when the frisson of the

monstrous seems preferable to ennui.   "If you can bring out a violent response in someone, that's good," says James. "People are so dissassociated from their own being these days, they need to be jolted.".   

"Severe Exposure" is out now on Sub Pop.

 

Silver Apples

SILVER APPLES 

Silver Apples 
Melody Maker, 1995? 1994?

by Simon Reynolds

   Pipping Kraftwerk to the post, paving the way for Suicide, Silver Apples were the first rock band to use synthesisers as their art's core, as opposed to mere ornamentation.  They were a duo, percussionist/vocalist Danny Taylor and a chap called Simeon who identified so strongly with his self-cobbled instrument (a bunch of audio-oscillators with 86 manual controls) that he called it The Simeon. He also sang and strummed the banjo a bit.  After two decades of being legendary but little heard, the band's two virtually unfindable LP's, 1968's 'Silver Apples' and 1969's 'Contact' have been compacted onto a single silver disc.      

Hooray for that, and about fucking time.  For this is astounding stuff, a manic, mantric, mesmerising head-rush that's the missing link between the acid-rock of 13th Floor Elevators and the aciiiied tekno of RichieHawtin/FUSE/Plastikman. When Taylor and Simeon start yowling about "oscillations, oscillations, electronic evocations...spinning magnetic fluctuations" in their highly-strung quaver, they're clearly singing from the same acid-scorched mind-zone as Roky Erikson, i.e. the 'white light' stage of sub-atomic consciousness that's the ultimate level of the LSD experience.  But musically, these late Sixties tracks contain in germ form the oscillator-riffs, pulse-sequences and frequency-arpeggios that make up the lexicon of techno today.    

The sense of prophecy is uncanny. "Velvet Cave" could be '92-style 'ardkore, layering Joey Beltram sine-wave synth over fitful fatback funk.  "Program" even features 'sampling', in the form of bursts of radio broadcast--adverts, classical fanfares, shortwave Italian, and so on. Hell, with the banjo-driven "Ruby" and "Confusion" they even got to the hillybilly/techno hybrid 25 years ahead of The Grid!    Only the occasional dippy song-title ("Sea Green Serenades", "Lovefingers", "Whirly-Bird") and the Grace Slick-like balefulness of the vocals on the wonderfully accusatory "A Pox On You",  hint that these guys are hippies. How they ever managed to get so far ahead of their own time, we'll probably never know, but this record is no historical curio--it's mindblowing in an eerily contemporary way.                                              

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.