YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS
Liner notes by Simon Reynolds
Postpunk and “perfection” rarely went together. This was an
era of experimental over-reach, of bands catalysed by the punk do-it-yourself
principle attempting to expand the music by embracing genres (funk, reggae,
jazz) that in their original context relied on virtuosity and slickness.
Artistic ambition and anyone-can-do-it amateurism make for uneasy bedfellows,
and many of the key groups of the period made records that were closer to
sketches towards an ideal of a new music than the fully-realised deal. Even
some of the accredited classics that defined the era—Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, Gang of Four’s Entertainment—have the odd moment or
several that are substandard, botched, or simply misconceived. And really,
that’s okay, because perfection wasn’t the point of postpunk. What was?
Throwing out ideas, setting challenges for band and audience alike, keeping the
collective conversation moving. That’s why groups like Cabaret Voltaire, the
Pop Group, Scritti Politti, Throbbing Gristle, were heroic figures, true
catalysts.
What this does mean, though, is that there are really just a
handful of long-form recordings from the entire 1978-84 period that are
immaculate from conception to construction. The Slits’ Cut, Slates by the Fall,
Pere Ubu’s first two albums… and Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth. The Cardiff
trio’s one-and-only album contains not a wasted note, barely a blemish. The
individual songs have something of the “rightness” of things found in
nature—leaves, snowflakes, pebbles, sea-shells—that are at once miraculous yet
commonplace, marvelous and unassuming. Together the tunes add up to a perfectly
sequenced whole, a cohesive experience. Colossal
Youth became the independent scene equivalent of a blockbuster smash on its
release in early 1980, and clearly the punters were partly responding to the
sheer quality and aesthetic integrity of the record, which arrived without
fanfare, seemingly from nowhere. But they were also spellbound by the
originality and unusual-ness of the sound—there was nothing else like Young
Marble Giants around at the time—and by its quiet radicalism. Colossal Youth was followed by a couple
of EPs, and then the group split up, to everyone’s surprise and dismay.
Frustrating as this disintegration was for fans, it had the beneficial
side-effect of ensuring that the group left a small, perfectly-formed body of
work—compact enough to fit on a compact disc.
* * *
The story of Young Marble Giants starts with two brothers,
Stuart and Philip Moxham. They grew up in Cardiff,
but were half-English, their father's side of the family hailing
from Gloucestershire farming stock. And there are actually four Moxham
brothers. The eldest, Richard, was an adventurous spirit and returned from
travels in the Far East with a fantastic
record collection and a great stereo. Stuart, the principal songwriter and
driving force in Young Marble Giants, fondly recalls his adolescent initiation,
via Richard’s “top-of-the range headphones”, into the pleasures of immersive
listening. At this point--the early Seventies--the sounds he lost himself in
consisted of progressive rock and folky singer-songwriters such as Neil Young,
Ralph McTell, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell.
Stuart had some of his older brother’s restlessness and
signed on for a see-the-world stint in the Royal Navy. Returning to Cardiff, he took up
music-making at the relatively late-starter age of twenty and was soon playing
guitar in a band called True Wheel (the name came from the title of the Brian
Eno song on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), the very same ditty
whose lyrics supplied A Certain Ratio with their name). In another fit of
restlessness, Stuart jumped on his motorbike and drove to Norwich, where he lived for a period, working
on a farm. When he came back to Cardiff,
True Wheel had recruited his brother Philip as bassist, and a teenage girl
called Alison Statton had joined as a backing singer. Stuart shifted roles to
become the band’s frontman; Philip and Alison, meanwhile, started dating.
True Wheel was a covers band and Stuart, looking for a
vehicle for his songwriting, decided to start his own band. He invited Philip
to join. Philip agreed--but only on condition that Alison was involved. Stuart
wasn’t keen on this idea at all: he had envisaged singing his own songs. But he
really wanted to work with his brother, on account of their “telepathic”
musical bond. “We were very close, and when it came to playing, we had a
phenomenal communication… we could jam and change key at exactly the same time,
stop at the same time.” So Stuart agreed to Alison being the vocalist, but with
“a tiny seed of resentment” lodged in his heart right from the start.
Formed
in November 1978, Young Marble Giants found their name in a book about
classical sculpture. Later they would put the text in question on the back
sleeve of the Final Day EP: "...Young
marble giants greeted the sailor as he entered the home stretch to Athens. Two basic
intuitions of Greek art -- tensed vitality and geometric structuring -- are as
yet disunited; the sculptor partly carves, partly maps an abstract concept of
human form onto the rectangular block." Something of this quality of
geometric starkness and clarity of form infused the group’s sound, very much a
consciously chosen and conceptualized-in-advance style, as opposed to something
evolved haphazardly. Hating what Stuart described in one interview as “this
business of Phil Spectorism, this whole idea of masses of strings and layers of
sound,” the brothers rejected its modern equivalent, the punk rock “wall of
noise” built from thickly layered guitars and fuzzed-out distortion. Instead,
like an old fashioned pocket watch with its casing open to reveal the moving
parts, the Young Marble Giants sound would be pared and bare, its meshwork of
cogs and spindles exposed in all its intricate distinctness. As Philip would
later express it, "You write the gaps as much as you write the
music."
Crucial
to the band’s crisp and dry sound was Stuart’s Rickenbacker, “a very trebly
guitar” which he played using “an extremely hard plectrum, called a shark fin,
with a serrated edge.” Throughout the YMG songbook, Stuart eschews lead-guitar
flourishes and soloistic playing in favour of
a signature style of scurrying rhythm guitar, its characteristic choppy
quality reliant upon on a technique called “muting”, where “you’re basically
resting the hand that you strum with on the strings.” The result was a feel
that was dynamic and propulsive yet curiously suppressed, subdued, even
furtive. Philip played his bass high, such that it was frequently mistaken by
listeners for another guitar; indeed, with Stuart’s playing so intensely
rhythmic and stripped-down, the bassline was often the melodic thread in YMG
songs. The brothers’ instruments wound around each other like fibres twining
into yarn. “We became immensely tight,” says Stuart. He attributes their
supernatural synchrony not just to fraternal closeness but to their use of
machine rhythm. Instead of a human drummer, YMG twitched to the precision pulse
of a very basic drum machine. “We were playing to what was effectively an
electronic metronome”, akin to the click-track used by sessions musicians in
recording studios.
Stuart
compares the interplay between himself and Philip to “knitting”--a strikingly
un-rock’n’roll and non-macho metaphor that speaks volumes about the low-key
radicalism of YMG music. Alison Statton’s voice meshed perfectly with this
androgynous sound. Seventeen years old when the band started, a trainee dental
nurse at the
University Hospital of Wales, Statton sang with a plaintive simplicity and cool
pallor of tone that bypassed all the mannered drama of the singerly arts.
Statton arrived at this unadorned naturalism without much conscious stylization.
“I admire a
trained voice or 'real singer', someone who can belt it out and you never doubt
they can hit any note they want to, but I have always loved the exposure
of a naked human voice and all its frailties and the individual-ness that comes
with that exposure, that honesty,” she muses. “It adds a tension yet it also
makes me feel more connected to the person singing.” Alison’s intriguingly
motley music taste does help to explain her avoidance of straight-ahead rock
raunch and soul-blues emoting: “Hymns, disco, the Residents, nursery rhymes,”
is the list of favored listening she gave in one 1980 interview, while another
journalist noted the presence of Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Tom Waits and Ultravox
in her record collection. “I did like the raw energy of punk
rock at live gigs,” Alison says now, “but I was more inspired by less urgent,
quieter music--less 'masculine' sounds if you like. I can remember being
mesmerised by the church organ in the Scottish Presbyterian church on a Sunday
and can still hear the detail of a dropped hymn book echoing or a stifled cough
when it stopped and silence fell once again. Then there's the music one’s
parents listen to, in my case Orkney fiddle and accordion music, swing bands
and crooners with the likes of the original 'My Way'. It all somehow settles
itself into your musical psyche whether you want it to or not! It's always been
the points of sound in silence that get my attention most of all--the
ticking of the clock and crackle of the fire in Mr. Morgan's parlour, the
rain on a window pane or an owl at night. Those are the sounds that have an
exquisite intensity for me.”
There
was a shadowy “fourth member” of Young Marble Giants, a non-musician who
nonetheless played a vital technical role. The Moxham brothers’ cousin Pete
Joyce was a telephone engineer by trade and a dab hand at cobbling together
electronic gizmos; he was also a fan of avant-garde rock bands like Pere Ubu
and Can. Joyce built YMG’s drum machine from a diagram in Practical Wireless, and he also made them a ring modulator. “It had
two inputs and one output, so you’d put two things in and it would blend them
together,” recalls Stuart. “You could put the drum machine and the electric
organ in and you would be able to play
the drum machine. It was like an early sampler in a way, the pitch of it would
go up and down.” The ring modulator and other gizmos (including the non-kiddy
version of the Stylophone, a very rudimentary synthesizer) embellished the
basic YMG sound with wisps of electronic sound and subliminal drone-tones.
“We
had a very limited palette–electric guitar, electric organ, drum machine and
ring modulator… Oh, and voice, of course,” says Stuart. On first hearing, this
was the most striking aspect of Young Marble Giants: the sheer emaciation of the
sound, the miniaturization of detail. Rather than blaring in your face or
grabbing the lapels of your attention, this was music that drew you into its
withdrawn and chilly stillness, rapt you with its moods of stealth and
solitude. Not exactly rock’n’roll, then, and as such primed to chime with the
ideals of 1979, a year in which the postpunk vanguard of PiL and Cabaret
Voltaire were loudly insisting on the utter obsolescence of rock and looking
for music’s future in the studio-based innovations of disco and dub.
PiL
and the Cabs were just two of countless bands who loudly lambasted The Clash
and (bizarrely) Chuck Berry as representing the definition of arriéré-garde,
everything that modernist music should be renouncing and leaving for dead. YMG
also went in for this kind of rhetoric a little bit. In one interview, Stuart
recalled an early gig they played in Cardiff--an
industrial town oriented around heavy rock bands and twelve-bar blues--during
which an audience member shouted out “play rock and roll!” “So I kind of went
into this Chuck Berry riff, and then stopped and said ‘look, anyone can do
that. They're doing it all over town. But we want to do this. If you want that, go somewhere else’.” Yet weirdly there was a subliminal rock’n’roll element in
YMG music. Stuart loved both the twangy
instrumental rock of Duane Eddy and the crisp rhythm-and-blues playing of Steve
Cropper from Booker T and the MGs; on certain YMG tunes, like “Include Me Out”,
there’s a dashing rock’n’roll feel redolent of Eddie Cochran or Bo Diddley,
while “Brand-New-Life” sounds a bit like The Police’s “Message in A Bottle”.
“In a lot of ways, I was a frustrated rocker. A lot of those riffs would sound
great on loud, distorted guitars in a conventional band. There’s something a
bit repressed about Young Marble Giants music.” Yet the restraint, the
leashing, of that impulse to rock-out, is crucial to YMG’s sound. This was
rock’n’roll Anglicised, the urge to cut loose checked by a native reserve and
inhibition. In another sense, it’s the authentic sonic depiction of mental
unrest and emotional disquiet; the way the music moves suggests someone
physically immobile but internally agitated. “Music for Evenings”, for
instance, simmers with damped-down rage, jitters with imploded violence.
Cardiff being such a
rock town, YMG struggled to have any impact, playing a handful of local gigs
(as few as four, by some reckonings) and selling cassettes of early tape-reel
recordings via the local Virgin record store, where Stuart worked. What New
Wave/postpunk scene there was clustered around the coffee bar Grassroots, a
social advice center run by Cardiff City Council. The place had a practice room
for bands and hosted the occasional performance. YMG’s debut at Grassroots
wasn’t especially auspicious: legend has it they played to an audience of
exactly one. Generally, crowds tended to be perplexed by the sight of a band
without a drummer. YMG didn’t even have a drum machine onstage, just a Casio
cassette machine playing a “tatty old mono cassette,” recalls Stuart. “Phil
would play the bass and at the end of the track he’d turn off the tape recorder
with his knee. And it worked fine.”
YMG
did become friendly, though, with the prime movers of the Grassroots scene,
Reptile Ranch, a group who were far more plugged into the postpunk scene across
the UK.
Specifically, they aligned themselves with the
do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself sector pioneered by the Desperate Bicycles
and Scritti Politti. A key aspect to postpunk’s ethos of democratizing
music-making was the idea of resisting the centralization of the music industry
in London.
Hence the late Seventies upsurge of independent labels and musicians
collectives in the provinces. One manifestation of this defiant regionalism was
a spate of city-based compilations aiming to showcase local talent, albums like
Hicks From the Sticks, Bouquet of Steel,
Avon Calling, Norwich, A Fine City,
Street To Street: A Liverpool Album,
and many more.
In
the spirit of the time, Reptile Ranch assembled a Cardiff compilation titled Is The War Over? and released it via
their label Z Block. The initial spur to action came when the band saw a South Bank Show documentary about Rough
Trade. As well as a shop and label, Rough Trade was also a distribution
company. Working in tandem with similar companies across the country, Rough
Trade had been the driving force behind the establishment of a nationwide
independent distribution network. As historian Dave Cavanagh noted in his book My Magpie Eyes Have Seen the Prize, “in
the context of post-punk Britain”
Rough Trade’s efforts ““were as beneficial and as provident as if they had been
building the first roads.” Lacking effective distribution, independent labels
outside London
had hitherto relied on mail-order and the hospitality of whatever record stores
they could physically reach. But the system developed by Rough Trade and the
other members of the Cartel (as the alliance of regional distributors came to
be known) meant that all kinds of remote and far-flung musical eccentrics could
reach a national audience. Or even an international one, as Rough Trade’s
tentacles began to extend overseas and form alliances with similar companies in
America
and Europe.
YMG contributed two tracks to Is The War Over?, “Ode to Booker T" and "Searching for
Mr. Right," recorded in a rough-and-ready studio upstairs at Grassroots.
When Reptile Ranch went up to London to talk to Rough Trade about getting
distribution for the compilation, Geoff Travis--the label’s co-founder and
A&R visionary--immediately noticed there was something special about the
YMG songs, despite their demo-like
recording quality. “Reptile Ranch went up to London
to peddle our wares and came back with the glad tidings,” recalls Alison. “I
was gobsmacked!” Suddenly, says Stuart, “we were in London and Geoff Travis was asking, ‘what do
you want to do next?’. Rather than the obvious first step of recording a debut
single, Stuart wanted to gamble on the bigger impact of coming out of nowhere
with a full album. Eventually he swayed his band-mates to the risky notion and
Rough Trade dispatched the group to Foel
Studios, a converted farmhouse in the rolling hills around Llanfair
Caereinion in mid-Wales. Foel’s owner Dave Anderson was a veteran of
longhair kosmic rockers Amon Duul II and Hawkwind and had already engineered
the debut album by another Rough Trade act, Essential Logic. YMG recorded Colossal Youth in just five days,
spending a mere twenty minutes per track each when it came to mixing the album.
“When we were finished doing all the mixes, we turned all the lights out
and listened to it really loud. It was all I could do to stop crying,"
Stuart recalled in a 1981 interview. At the end, Anderson asked if he could be credited as
producer, as opposed to just engineer, and YMG, with some reluctance, assented.
In hindsight, Stuart Moxham thinks the credit was thoroughly deserved,
capturing their sound in all its delicacy and nakedness being no small
achievement.
Listening to Colossal
Youth, the word “naked” seems quite apt, as it often feels like you’re
eavesdropping on someone’s private thoughts: you don’t catch all the
references, the meaning is often cloudy, but the aura of intimacy and
inwardness is unmistakable. “It’s that cliché, artists as people who can’t
communicate in normal ways,” says Stuart. “They don’t go to the pub, they sit
in a room and agonize. For me, writing the songs was a cathartic exercise. When
I came to do sleevenotes for the first re-release some years ago, that was the
first time I’d seen all the lyrics in one place. I hadn’t even thought about
them for 15 years and suddenly I was looking at myself at the age of 25. There
was all this wisdom in the lyrics I hadn’t seen. Almost like I was wiser than I
could’ve dreamt and was writing advice to myself–and not being able to take it,
of course.” The songs on Colossal Youth,
he explained in a 1980 interview, “are all based on things that happened to me
with my girlfriend. That's the most important thing that's happened to me in
years, meeting this particular girl and what we've been through. We broke
up and now we're back together again. It's been a really stormy
relationship."
Not that this was really confessional songwriting in the
blatantly open-souled, “dear diary” sense. “N.I.T.A.” veers from anguished
clarity (“it’s nice to hear you’re having a good time/but it still hurts 'cos
you used to be mine/This doesn't mean that I possessed you/You're haunting me
because I let you”) to dream-logic opacity (“shape up your body "Let's be
a tree"”) before signposting its own coded obliqueness with the cryptic
line “Nature intended the abstract for you and me”. The abstraction got
heightened by the distancing effect of Stuart’s words being ventriloquised
through Alison. “It’s really weird … when I sing it, it tends to be emotional because
the lyrics are mine,” Stuart noted in one interview. “Alison on the other
hand is really laid back and unemotional sounding. It's a strange
paradox, a disinterested voice singing about something emotional."
Not all of Stuart’s songs were torn from his troubled love
life. Others were more existential musings or simply involved the joys of
mucking about with language. “It was that Devo/Bowie cut-up arty approach to
lyric-writing really. Something like ‘Choci Loni, it was almost like Edward
Lear. The words are obscure and deeply personal. That whole language in that
song is my family’s baby talk –which even we don’t talk about. But nobody would
ever suss that!”
Although Stuart was the main creative force, Philip and
Alison together wrote one of Colossal
Youth’s stand-out songs, “Eating Noddemix”. Alison’s lyric is a kind of
split-screen movie, juxtaposing a girl going through her daily routines
(munching the Swiss cereal bar of the title, adjusting her make-up) with
horrific accidents (a collapsed apartment building, a train crash) that are
going on simultaneously. “Just one of those moments when you realise we're all preoccupied with the
mindlessness of the everyday routine, not realising how precious every
moment of this existence is,” muses Alison today. “Meanwhile, elsewhere,
people are meeting an abrupt end to it all. Death comes without warning.” The song ends with a slightly comical
voice-over, Alison impersonating an “official”-sounding, hard-bitten voice--a
police officer or ambulance worker perhaps, or maybe a news reporter--who
switches from talking about the tragedy to their TV-viewing plans for that
evening without missing a beat. “I hate that voiceover bit at the end but
basically it's looking at how people who face these realities on a daily basis
adopt a matter of fact, hardened distance to it all. We can't stay in that
vital space for long without anaesthetising ourselves in some way.”
Certain songs glisten with a particular intensity, but Colossal Youth really takes effect as a
whole. It’s an album of great songs, but also, in a way, an ambient record.
Stuart mentions the headphone listening that was such an important part of his
youth--“That’s the ultimate way of getting inside the music and cutting off the
world: you’re not available, you’re inside the headphones, dedicated to
listening”--adding that in his opinion “all truly great music has two elements:
atmosphere, and detail. So it works on the micro and the macro.” Abundantly
endowed with both, Colossal Youth is
almost the postpunk counterpart to Dark
Side of the Moon. Although maybe the
Brian Eno of Another Green World and
the second, slower and more tranquil half of Before and After Science is more apt: all those songs about
castaways and daydreamers, washed-up and
washed-out characters who’ve hemorrhaged all their will power. “I remember
saying in one interview that what I wanted the album to do was to sound like a
radio that’s between stations, and you’re listening to it under the bed-clothes
at 4-AM, and you’re getting these
fantastic short wave sounds and snatches of modulated sounds,” recalls
Stuart. Colossal Youth seems “real” in the sense that it evokes, through
its textures as much as the songs, those large portions of our lives that are
interstitial and event-less: the nullity of waiting or killing time; the long
stretches of lethargy and languor, low-level anxiety or pensive reverie.
When Colossal Youth
arrived in record stores in February 1980, it looked as striking as it sounded.
The cover was a black-and-white portrait of the group taken by Patrick Graham,
with the trio’s heads catching the light so that one half of each face glowed
palely while the other side disappeared into inky blackness. The image had a
sort of timeless classicism faintly redolent of an early Beatles album cover,
but also made the YMG look statuesque, their impassive expressions perfectly
indicative of the subdued aura of the music. Colossal Youth was instantly successful, as if people had been
waiting for exactly this sound: music by introverts, for introverts. In the
independent scene context, the album was a best-seller, peaking at #3 in the
indie charts and shifting some 27 thousand copies in the immediate year of its
release. Because Rough Trade operated its famously non-exploitative 50/50
deals, which split profits (after costs had been made back) evenly between
label and band, YMG actually saw some dough. “Enough to wish I hadn't
frittered it away,” laughs Alison. “I seem to remember a phase of eating out
all the time! But I lived in a squat at the time and certainly wasn't going on
expensive holidays and investing in offshore banking. Let's just say it
earned a meagre living.” Stuart did better than the others, having
written the bulk of the songs and also getting a publishing deal off the back
of Colossal Youth.
Doing
their first round of music paper interviews, Young Marble Giants left many
journalists enchanted. Typically they presented the group as
small-town naifs, often fixating on Alison’s fresh-faced aura, her plimsoles
and print dresses and ankle socks. . Dave McCullough from
Sounds, a big YMG supporter, described Alison as “wide-eyed and
straight out of a Girl's Own story, as the heroine, of course. You get
the impression she's going to fall over any minute in the big-city smog, and
that she's been brought up on fresh cow's milk and healthy Girl Guide rambles
through the Welsh valleys. She looks frighteningly innocent.” Yet Alison
was a smoker in those days, and
Cardiff,
an industrial city, was hardly a remote haven from the hurly-burly of
modernity.
That said, Young Marble Giants did stick out somewhat in the
Rough Trade milieu, where they were warmly welcomed but never quite fitted with
the bohemian/radical vibe that surrounded the label, which hostile outsiders
tended to describe with derogatory terms like “brown rice” or “hippie”. “It was quite a different
world,” says Alison, adding that that although “we met some incredibly kind
people there, in another sense it was a bit overwhelming for me. I
felt naive and lacked confidence.”
In 1979-80, Rough Trade was at its zenith of power and influence, with a
roster that included many of the leading post-punk bands of the day: Swell
Maps, Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti, The Fall, The Raincoats, The Pop
Group, Essential Logic, This Heat, Red Crayola, Kleenex, and Pere Ubu. The
Raincoats--an all-female feminist band based in Westbourne Grove, a short walk
from Rough Trade’s headquarters just off Portobello Road--virtually adopted the
wide-eyed provincials. “They took us under their wing like
feisty aunties or something,” recalls Stuart. “On one level they were kind of
frighteningly feminist and that was new to us. They didn’t shave their legs,
for instance. On another level, they were very kind to us”. Young Marble Giants
played their debut London
gig with the Raincoats in Deptford, bringing Stuart’s dog Nixon to the venue.
They also became close to This Heat, a ferociously intense trio of
proggers-turned-postpunkers who resembled the Soft Machine stripped of English
whimsy and jacked-up on Cold War paranoia. But more important than anyone else
was Geoff Travis, who became something of a father figure to Stuart, especially
after he moved up to London.
“Geoff actually said ’I‘ll always have faith in anything you do,’ which is such
a fantastic thing to say.” Alison recalls Travis as “a very quiet and gentle guy
with a knack for picking out potential other people missed. I remember him
playing me a Smiths demo he'd just got hold of when I was at the Rough Trade
offices and to be honest I couldn't jump up and down with excitement on my
brief listening, but Geoff was very animated about it.”
The gambit/gamble of releasing their debut album first,
rather than a single had paid off: Young Marble Giants had made a major
statement and blown everybody away just as Stuart had hoped. Now, reversing the
normal sequence of things, YMG recorded their debut single, “Final Day”.
Actually, it was a four-track EP, but the title track eclipsed the other tunes
so utterly it tends to be remembered as a single. On its June 1980 release, it
became a night-time Radio One hit, played heavily on John Peel’s show at first
and then getting picked up by the early evening DJs.
“Final
Day” captures the feeling of 1980, a year of mounting dread that nuclear
Armageddon was nigh. The Cold War, which had briefly thawed in the
mid-Seventies with détente and the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, had abruptly plunged back below freezing
point, the election of saber-rattling conservative leaders like Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the West being matched by a renewed hard line
from the Soviet Politburo. The geopolitical backdrop to this terrible
re-polarisation was turmoil in the Middle East:
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
(to prop up a socialist government threatened by fundamentalist rebels), the
Iranian Revolution and the seizing of US hostages by Ayatollah Khomeini’s
government. In response to the escalating tension between the superpowers, the
Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament, dormant since its early Sixties heyday,
reactivated. In 1980 CND organised massive anti-nuclear rallies in the UK to protest
the deployment of American Trident missiles in the UK--a move, its critics argued,
that would turn Britain
into a client state cum launching pad for America and Target #1 for Soviet
warheads in any full-blown nuclear exchange.
“Final Day” wasn’t the only pop song to register the mood of
apprehension. UB40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming” and Kate Bush’s “Breathing”
actually made the charts, while on the postpunk underground YMG’s buddies This
Heat recorded Deceit, virtually a
concept album about the balance of terror and the quiescent complicity of
ordinary people in the insanity of mutual assured destruction. But “Final Day”
was the most effectively chilling evocation, from the subliminal keyboard drone
running through the whole track (“I put a matchstick in one the keys to get
that tone,” chuckles Stuart”) to Alison’s forlorn fatalism as she intones the
lines “As the light goes out on the final day/For the people who never had a
say,” to the sheer startling brevity of the statement (the song lasts just one
minute and 39 seconds). “It was the easiest song to write, it just came out
perfectly formed, and it took as long to write as it does to listen to,” says
Stuart, explaining that the lines “when the rich die last/Like the rabbits” is
a fusion of “an Ian Fleming short story about how rich people will die last
because that’s the privilege of wealth, and the fact that apparently in a
nuclear war rabbits will survive longest, along with beetles.”
* * *
Having arrived with a double debut more auspicious and
immaculate than even Joy Division’s (who emerged from the coarse chrysalis of Warsaw) Young Marble
Giants seemed poised for greatness. The only problem was translating what they
did to the stage: music so un-rock was
hardly likely to rock a crowd. The band became (in)famous for its lack of
onstage presence, the static presentation owing to stage nerves as much as the
nature of their music. “We used to smoke a hell of a lot, that was it,” says
Stuart. “I used to line up my cigarettes on the electric organ at sound-check
and virtually chain smoke our way through the set.” Alison recalls Stuart being
“the most
animated out of all of us, the one with the best rapport with the audience--but
even that was limited.” But this was all
part of what she calls the music’s “human factor”. “We were all exposed and
stripped back to the bare bones both in an audio and visual sense. I'm sure
sometimes people held their breath from start to finish at a concert. You could
sometimes hear a pin drop between songs.”
None of this went down well with your average punk audience, so it’s
hardly any wonder that the group sometimes fantasized in interviews about
finding alternative venues more genial to their music. They told Sounds they’d prefer to “play
chamber- music places… places where people can just sit down, relax and listen,” like churches with their
reverberant acoustics or even “rural places”.
Despite these problems with live performance, Young Marble
Giants embarked on a tour of North America
late in 1980, although it could be more truthfully be called an East Coast/West
Coast tour, the group understandably shying away from
venturing into the rock’n’roll heartland. In Los Angeles, they played
a gig at a Czechoslovakian community center. There was a batch of shows in the
Bay Area, San Francisco being the
bohemian capital of the West Coast and America’s #2 postpunk city after New
York(Rough Trade even had a branch of its record store in Frisco at that
point). “We stayed in a converted fire station loft owned by two artists, with a cool
veggie restaurant/bar downstairs called The Right Spot,” recalls Alison. There
was a show at the Berkeley Keystone, an outdoor concert with the Flaming Groovies
(a real chalk and cheese pairing, that one), and a show in Palo Alto, 35 miles
to the South of San Francisco, at a club run by Hells Angels. After playing a
gig in Vancouver,
they switched to the Eastern seaboard, playing several shows in New York and New Jersey: two nights
at Hurrah’s, a New Wave club that was a haven both for visiting Anglo bands and
for NYC Anglophiles, plus a gig in Hoboken,
NJ, a short ride on the Path
train from Manhattan.
“New York I
found more depressing than San
Francisco, but then I was ill at the time,” says
Alison. Severe tensions had also
developed within the band during the American traipse: between Stuart and
Alison, between Stuart and his brother, and, fatally, between Alison and Philip,
who actually split up midway through the tour.
The
amorous discord didn’t result in Young Marble Giants’ equivalent to Rumours, however. The next release was
low-key: Testcard, a six track EP of
“instrumentals in praise and celebration of mid-morning television music”. In those days, there were extended periods
during the day when British TV ceased programming and instead broadcast just
the Testcard--an intricately coloured and geometrically patterned diagram
designed so that TV repair men could adjust the definition and color. This static
image was accompanied by a peculiar sort of lite-jazzy Muzak whose crisp
definition and detailed arrangements lent itself to similar fine-tuning of the
TV’s sound reproduction. Stuart had absorbed this music as a child hanging out chez his grandmother, who kept the TV on
constantly as a sort of hearth-warming ambient presence. Outlining the concept
of the EP (the work of the Moxham brothers, Alison being sidelined still by
illness) to NME, Stuart argued that
“any kind of ambient music just isn't listened to seriously but it has a lot of
merits. We've been influenced by testcard music, by nursery rhymes, by popular
classical music--all that light, fringe stuff. The sound of those great big
cinema organs, fairground music… I don't listen to it as much as, say, Radio
One but I enjoy it a lot more."
A
couple of months before the EP’s release, though, and just as they were being
anointed one of 1980’s best new groups in the NME’s reader poll, in January 1981 Young Marble Giants announced
they were splitting up. While Alison and Philip’s break-up was clearly
problematic, the main problem was Stuart’s feeling that, since he was writing
80 percent of the material and handling the band’s business affairs, he should
be the group’s frontman. The attention paid to Alison as the singer aggravated
him, and burst out in an NME
interview when the subject of her having being voted one of 1980’s best female
singers came up: “But Alison’s not a singer! She’s someone who sings. Alison
sings as if she was at the bus-stop or something. A real singer sings with more
control”. The comment inadvertently pinpointed precisely what was special and
even innovative about her vocals: a naturalistic style of under-singing later
picked up by Barney Sumner in New Order, among many others over the years. In a
late 1980 interview conducted during the American tour, Stuart had confessed,
“it is frustrating not to sing the things. I'm not writing songs 'cos I want to
be a musician, I'm writing them 'cos that's the only way I've got to express
myself." Finally, the “seed of resentment” that had lodged in his heart at
the very formation of the group blossomed, and Stuart announced that he was
starting a sideline group, The Gist, in which he would be the singer.
Although officially presented as a sideline to Young Marble
Giants, the announcement precipitated the break-up. Especially as it had been
preceded by various attempts by Stuart to kick Alison out of the band. From the
start, admits Stuart, he “didn’t really want to have Alison in the band, I
wanted Phil but I took Alison on as well because it was a fait accompli. I
thought nothing’s going to happen anyway, but when it did happen it did matter.
I wasn’t mature enough to deal with it. I made Alison suffer and I’m really
sorry for it.” It was a messy moment
made worse by the split-up between Philip and Alison and Stuart’s final
break-up with Wendy Smith, and the obvious solution was to scatter. So ended
the short and bittersweet existence of Young Marble Giants, just two years,
evenly divided between obscurity and fame.
With hindsight, “it was the best thing for all of us,” Alison concludes
philosophically. “The good thing is I'm really fond of Stuart now but that
might not have occurred had we not had that space and distance to grow up in.” The brothers too reconciled reasonably
swiftly, with Philip helping out on some of the Gist recordings. Inevitably,
there’s a temptation to wonder what might have happened if they’d resolved
their differences and reformed after a brief furlough. What if Stuart
could have relaxed his creative control enough to allow more space for the
budding songwriting talent evidenced by Alison and Philip’s “Eating Noddemix”
and Philip/Stuart co-authored pearls like “Choci Loni”? Could they have
translated YMG’s magic into pop music, or something close enough, and endured
as a Cocteau Twins-level group, or even achieved the mainstream success of
Everything But the Girl, contemporaries of theirs? Je ne
regrette rien, says Alison. “We might have all gone doolally!” It’s also hard to
imagine something as fragile as YMG’s music surviving the grind and graft
required to really make it in the music business.
As Rough Trade’s top-selling band after Stiff Little
Fingers, the ex-Giants were encouraged by Geoff Travis to pursue any musical
impulses they had. In 1982, Stuart released a flurry of records as The Gist,
including three singles and an album, Embrace
the Herd; after this, his musical activity became more sporadic, spurts of
solo work alternating with periods working as an animator and a driving
instructor. Philip Moxham briefly joined
Pere Ubu singer David Thomas’ solo sideline outfit the Pedestrians and also
played with Everything But the Girl. Alison formed Weekend with Spike from
Reptile Ranch and another Cardiffian, Simon Booth, who had been a key member of
the Camden
squatland collective/think-tank that surrounded Scritti Politti. On singles
like "The View From Her Room" and on the album La Variete, Weekend embraced an idea of “jazz” then circulating
through the post-postpunk hipsterland: melodic and Latin-tinged, as opposed to
fiery and freeform, as purveyed by the likes of Carmel, the Style Council (in
their Café Bleu, left-Bank Parisian beatnik mode), and Everything But the Girl,
who covered Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” in the style of Astrid Gilberto and
got played on Radio 2 for their pains. When Weekend split up, Booth formed the
jazzier Working Week and Alison embarked upon a musical partnership with Ian
Devine (formerly the accomplice of confrontational postpunk chanteuse Linder
Sterling in the band Ludus). Later Alison would join up with Spike again to
record a couple of albums. Nowadays she she’s a chiropractor. “As far as music goes,
there are a couple of 'quiet' projects in the pipeline and quite a lot of interest
in YMG stuff. But with work and two children there's no sense of urgency. Que sera.”
And the legacy of Young Marble Giants? The sound is close to
inimitable, but over the decades there have been audible echoes, whether
conscious borrowings or simply a group discovering for themselves the same
principles. In the late Eighties, drumless outfit Hugo Largo played their
tranquil, glinting songs to New York
audiences sitting on the floor. In the Nineties, you could detect the YMG
imprint in some of the more melodious post-rock groups like Pram and Insides,
as well as the idyllictronic toy-music of Mouse on Mars and Mum. And then
there’s the fact that Kurt Cobain was a massive YMG fan and had planned for
Nirvana to cover Colossal Youth’s
“Credit in the Straight World”, perhaps seeing this oblique opt-out anthem as
the perfect protest rock for a passive-aggressive, narcoleptic generation. As
it happened, he never got around to doing it, but his widow Courtney Love
recorded a version on Hole’s grunge-goes-glossy blockbuster Live Through This.
Mostly, though, the legacy is the music itself, that slender
and virtually flawless body of work that has proved impervious to the eroding
attrition of time. Although the members carried on making music fitfully after going
their separate ways, the name Young Marble Giants itself retains a kind of
immaculateness—there’s no after-trail of legend-disgracing lesser material,
precious little in the way of demos, basement tapes, out-takes, and the like.
For once, the Collected Works = the Best of. You hold it in your hands, or hear
it in your ears, as you read these words.
