Kanye, "the Black Bowie"

So it is revealed that KW originally wanted to give his 2018 album Ye the title  Hitler.  Which inevitably brings to mind David Bowie's "I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I'd be an excellent dictator" comment from 1976.  Apparently in a 2015 business meeting Kanye also described Hitler as a "marketing genius", which mirrors Bowie's impressed comments about Goebbel's skills in the advertising / propaganda realm and Hitler's as master showman who "staged a country". 

Here below is a review of Pablo where I do the West / Bowie comparison.

But first, crikey, look here's a piece from 2011 on Kanye comparing himself to Hitler! Apparently at the Big Chill Festival, he said this to the audience: "I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I’m ... insane, like I’m Hitler. One day the light will shine through, and one day people will understand everything I ever did." The LA Times journo consults a psychologist and psychiatrist, who posit plausibly that "For Kanye West to compare himself to Hitler in that way, it suggests a certain level of narcissism. To empathize with someone responsible for the deaths of millions of people, it can indicate a lack of sensitivity to how other people are going to feel about your comments. And, again, it can be a sign of narcissism.’ and ‘Kanye West’s referencing of Hitler is about narcissism and identifying with people in positions of power." 

Not that you need professionals to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder - you just have to listen to the records. 

KANYE WEST

The Life of Pablo

The Wire, April 2016

by Simon Reynolds

A journalist recently asked me whether I agreed with his thesis that the Rock Star is a dying breed – literally dying off, with high-profile 2016 extinctions like Bowie and Lemmy. My thought was that if you understand rock narrowly as electric-guitar music, then yes, resources are depleting rapidly; it’s a minority-interest sound now, incapable of supporting mythic-scale personalities. 

But think of “rock star” in a less tethered-to-genre way and it’s surely obvious that the archetype is alive and kicking elsewhere. Above all, rap is where you’ll find that public theatre of ego-drama, unbridled excess, and artistic over-reach, the car-crash personalities and epic sagas of anti-heroism.  If Future is our era’s Iggy – vocal tone of pained ecstasy, lust-for-life turned toxic - then Kanye West amply fills the Bowie role. There’s the same torturously conflicted relationship with fame, the same restless chasing of the cutting edge balanced by a compulsion to command the centre stage of pop culture.  

Like Bowie, West is a mediatician as much as a musician.  So while the audio content of his seventh album intersects with the soundworlds of TriAngle or LuckyMe, it doesn’t make sense to approach The Life of Pablo in the way that 98% of the releases covered in this magazine get treated – as a primarily audio experience. Pablo resists being disentangled from the vortex of discourse - gossip, leaks, forensic analysis, public melt-downs - that imbricates its every texture and lyric.  Tempting as it is to hack exasperatedly away at the thicket of context and subtext – from the month-long cavalcade of “spaz in the news Kanye” (to quote a lyric from the album) to the way that virtually every sound and line seems hyperlinked – in order to get through to the Work itself, the truth is that the surrounding swirl is the Work, or at least an outer but un-detachable layer to it.

The fact that there’s no solid-form incarnation of Pablo, that the album can only be heard as a stream from the hi-fidelity streaming service Tidal, practically incites you to listen connectively, with other windows open on your browser: checking reviews, consulting rap-nerd annotation sites, monitoring Twitter and Facebook reactions. This is Pablo’s, and Kanye’s, proper domain: the hubbub of the internet.

Pablo is an Event, then. But it’s also an assemblage of moments, aesthetic decisions, accumulated over three years of studio work (with a few elements dating even further back, to the 2010 sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: the album before the previous album).  How could a coherent vibe possibly emerge from such a piecemeal process? The simple answer is that it hasn’t.  It’s not just that this album as a  (not-)whole feels loosely collated and arbitrarily sequenced. Many individual tracks seem like they could easily dis-assemble into constituent parts – there’s a segmental feel to the way that guest raps, vocal cameos, samples, intros and codas slot into their provisionally allotted place. You sense a governing logic of additive and subtractive unrest that has yet to subside. West tweaked tracks up to the last minute and indeed beyond the last minute. It’s conceivable that there will never be a definitive shape to The Life of Pablo.

The album’s mode of construction invites deconstruction: breakdowns of the credits, inventories of samples, a fever of instant-response exegesis.   This is how we tend to envisage creativity operating these days: as recreativity, the marshalling of influences,  allusions, evocations, self-reflexive references. Kanye is an exemplar of the modern ideal of the curator as creator. He rose to fame through deft use of samples, often amounting simply to re-presenting the music of others with his lyrics over the top and a turbo-boosted beat underneath. That technique felt inspired and glorious on the Chaka Khan-lifting “Through the Wire”, his debut solo smash in 2004; it felt empty and crass with the Curtis Mayfield-molesting “Touch the Sky” and Daft Punk-depleting “Stronger.”  Pablo is littered with startling sample-choices, but who even knows if Kanye, a man over-extended on multiple fronts, actually found them all? Perhaps he’s now obliged to delegate tasks like this to his diffuse squad of producers, what’s been described as the Kanye Think Tank.

Just as Pablo dismantles the conventional understanding of the Album as a finished work, authorship becomes moot here as well.  “Famous” is typical, crediting no less than sixteen writers (although some of these are the composers of the samples) and eight producers. It’s a drastically racheted-up version of the way Bowie made records, except that each of his albums drew on a finite team of players and a single producer or co-producer. Here, each individual song deploys a different line-up.

As you’d expect, then, Pablo is bitty. It’s an album of good bits and shit bits, all jumbled together. Nearly every song contains at least one great sound or rhythm idea. In “Famous,” it’s a sequence of what sounds like electro-Bollywood, but is actually Eighties dancehall queen Sister Nancy. In “Feedback”, it’s a gnarly loop distantly related to an Iranian disco song by Googoosh. In “FML”, it’s Section 25’s “Hit” drastically reprocessed into a psychedelic dirge of fluorescent bass and gargoyle vox.  Other delights come from guest collaborators or producers, like the too-brief interlude of Laurie Anderson-like cyborg chorale from composer Caroline Shaw in “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2,” or the lachrymose texture-swirls and echo-misted beat of “Real Friends,” built by Frank Jukes and Boi-1da.     

But every good bit is marred by its proximity to a shit bit, and nine times out of ten, the latter involves a gross sentiment or a mewling, sloppy delivery emitted from the brain and mouth of West himself.  Perhaps the most grating adjacency of beauty and beastly is “30 Hours”, where the blurry-souled mumble of Arthur Russell from World of Echo is accompanied by the self-regard and spite of a Kanye punch-drunk in the media echo-chamber.  After a swipe at an ex’s supposedly fading looks and a  jab about a blow job being better than having no job, the song degenerates into barely written drivel barely synched to the beat – the seeming off-the-cuff realism underlined by the interruption of a cellphone call and Kanye’s mumbled “I’m just doing an album track right now.”  

Pablo grips your attention through an attraction-repulsion effect: the attraction largely pertaining to the sonics, the repulsion manifesting almost entirely in the lyrics. Despite the album’s disparate provenance and huge cast list, Kanye’s personality is overpoweringly present, oozing from every pore of the record. If there’s a thematic, it’s spiritual unrest and a longing for wholeness. Fractured and insatiable, Kanye confesses “I just wanna feel liberated” - freed from his own self, from the chains of appetite and vanity.   At his core is a hungry hole that can be filled not by trophies and transient thrills but by God’s love alone.

Kanye has touted Pablo as a gospel album (its original working title was So Help Me God) and as a musical form gospel pops up several times, mostly early on. Featuring a squeaky-voiced 4-year old preacher and swells of choir, opener “Ultralight Beam” pleads for serenity and sanctuary. “‘Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1,” the next track, uses samples from a 1976 gospel record by Pastor T.L. Barret and Youth for Christ from West’s hometown Chicago. “Low Lights” takes a long passage of female testifying about the Lord’s inspirational power from “So Alive”, a track by house producer Kings of Tomorrow. Not for the first time, I was struck by the childish conception of the Almighty that seems to figure in hip hop: no trace of the Old Testament God of Thou Shalt Not, or the New Testament God who warns that the rich will have a tough time getting into heaven. This is a forgiving and indulgent deity, who offers ego-reinforcement and motivational uplift, unsurprisingly close to the all-American God who figures in prosperity theology a/k/a the gospel of wealth. 

Entreaties to the Sky Daddy have featured in Kanye’s work from the start. “Jesus Walks”, on the debut The College Dropout, introduced his “at war with myself” shtick: torn in twain ‘tween venality and virtue, lowly libido and higher purpose. Except it didn’t seem like shtick then; it felt strikingly original. West continued to present himself as a divided soul – most movingly on Late Registration’s exquisite “Addicted” – and opened up the terrain occupied by the likes of Kendrick Lamar with songs like “Bitch, Don’t’ Kill My Vibe” (where Lamar identifies as a sinner while admitting “I’m probably gonna sin again”). A secular version of this woozy confusion came from Drake,who became a  superstar by reveling in the fruits of fame and fortune while simultaneously complaining about the hollow-inside tristesse that followed.

These self-medicating and self-loathing (never enough to change or stop, of course) MCs constitute a late phase of rap I think of as its decadence. Where hip hop once thrilled with the barbarian rapacity of its hunger for success, now the genre – all conquering, sated – succumbs to a sickly malaise of self-doubt and overshared “sensitivity”. An inner void has become virtually a status symbol, like being player-hated once was: the true mark of having triumphed now is to feel like the treasure is worthless.

Kanye pioneered this brand of anhedonic numbness, complaining about feeling unreal when he sees himself on TV in the “Pinocchio Story,” the mawkish finale to his emo-rap album 808s & Heartbreak.  As the listener ventures deeper into Pablo, the gospel concept dissolves both musically and thematically: the sonics are suggestive by turns of IDM, trap, and “21^st Century hipster”, and lyrically any striving for higher ground gives way to the profane fare of paranoia and self-pity.  “Famous” is supposedly Kanye  “breaking-up” with Fame, (a temptress personified here by Rihanna) but he still manages to squeeze in some instantly-infamous jibes at Taylor Swift along with a legion of haters “mad they still nameless.” “Feedback” confesses “I’ve been out of my mind a long time” only to brandish that fact as support to his claim to be a modern Picasso: “name one genius that ain’t crazy.” “Real Friends” recycles laments first aired on 808s about the impossibility of leading a normal life: back then it involved a relative’s wedding and having to leave before they cut the cake, here it’s about always being in a hurry and not knowing how old his friends’s children are. The only new element is the dissing of a cousin who stole West’s laptop.

That crime and the “dirty motherfucker” responsible crop up a second time on “No More Parties in LA”, one of Pablo’s most cohesive and enjoyably groovy tracks: a Dilla-like throwback to underground rap’s hyno-loop aesthetic, with Madlib producing and guest verses from Kendrick Lamar. One sample source is “Suzy Thundertussy”, Junie Morrison’s funk track about a super groupie.  The original song starts with the line “Los Angeles is a lonely sort of place”, but in “No More Parties”, the first two words - Morrison’s oozily enunciated “Los Angeles”  - is turned into a recurrent refrain that sounds like “lost in lust” or, even more mystically, “lost in lost”. Like Lamar’s own “Swimming Pools”, the song sounds dissolute, the parties blurring into each other in a memory-haze of Hollywood Hills decadence. More than anything, “No More Parties” reminds me of “Hotel California” and Don Henley solo songs like “The Last Worthless Evening”: rock stars having their coke and critiquing it.  

Since at least 808s & Heartbreak being a Kanye West fan has resembled a dysfunctional relationship where one partner keeps pushing the other away, constantly testing their limits. Where Drake exists “somewhere between psychotic and iconic,” the discomfort zone for Kanye is somewhere between mess and messianic, desperation and despotism. An asshole who knows he’s an asshole and tells you he’s an asshole - “a 38-year-old 8-year-old with rich nigga problems” is how he self-diagnoses on “No More Parties” - is still an asshole. Even if he keeps managing to find ever more audaciously upfront and often laugh-out-loud ways -- on this album, “I Love Kanye” -  of telling you that.  

Equal parts scattershot genius and splattershit grotesquerie, Life of Pablo is a reminder of rap’s enduring paradox:  here’s an entertainment form based on personalities that in real life you would avoid like the plague - monologists, braggarts, slimeball lechers, pullers of rank.  You wouldn’t want to be with these people; you wouldn’t want to be these people. To circle back to the start, that then raises the question:  why do we need rock stars? (The “we” is rhetorical: I know many, perhaps most readers of this magazine either never felt such a need or have long out-grown it). At one point, there was interest and even illumination to gleaned from watching their megalo-melodrama from afar. Their misadventures and vision-quests made exhibitionist art out of the paradoxes and impasses of “living without limits” (as West phrases it on the most haunting song here, “FML” - an acronym for Fuck My Life).  Stars showed how ascending to that scale of freedom could become its own trap.  But we’ve seen this story acted out too many times. Fame-as-pathology, fame-as-catastrophe – it’s a script now.

Pablo’s final song “Fade” pivots around some classic house music samples -- Hardrive’s “Deep Inside,” Mr Fingers’s “Mystery of Love”- along with two different versions of “(I Know) I’m Losing You”  by Rare Earth and Undisputed Truth.  Guest Ty Dolla $ign voices what sounds like Kanye’s personal plaint about needing attention to feel alive: “When no one ain’t around... Ain’t nobody watchin’... I just fade away”. When Barbara Tucker’s wondrous vocal lick from the Hardrive track – “deep deep down inside” – enters, it sounds blurrily processed, probably indecipherably so for listeners unfamiliar with the original garage anthem. I hear it as “deep deep down I’m stuck”. That’s Kanye West and that’s pop culture in 2016. 

junkshop glam, or, the hardrock continuum

 Various Artists

All The Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And A Flavour Of Bubblegum) From The 70’s

Pitchfork, January 29 1019

The title of this glam rock box set is a cute twist on “All the Young Dudes,” the song Bowie  gifted to Mott the Hoople and that became their biggest hit. People, then and since, took it as an anthem for rock’s third generation – the kids who were babies when rock’n’roll first arrived,  missed out most of the Sixties too, but come the Seventies craved a sound of their own. The Bowie / Mott / Roxy side of glam – literate and musically sophisticated - is not really what this collection is really about, though. “Droog” is the true clue – a near-future slang term for a teenage thug from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of the Anthony Burgess novel. Scandalous on its 1971 release, the film was blamed for a spate of copycat ultraviolence and chimed with existing UK anxieties about feral youth and rising crime: soccer hooliganism, skinhead “bovver boys” in steel-capped Doc Martens brutalizing hippies and immigrants, subcultural tribes warring on the streets.

All the Young Droogs largely celebrates the music that sublimated and safely vented the disorderly impulses of working class kids in the not-so-Great Britain of the early Seventies. It’s packed with the  coarse ‘n’ rowdy rock whose shout-along choruses and stomp-along drums unleashed uproar down the discotheque as records and shook concert halls from foundations to rafters when bands played live.  Compiler Phil King’s focus, though, is not the huge-selling glitter bands like Slade or The Sweet, but the nearly-made-its and the never-stood-a-chancers: “Junkshop glam,” as collectors and dealers call this stuff, a term that exudes the musty aroma of digging through cardboard boxes of dirt-cheap singles.

Nowadays, some of those 7-inches sell for hundreds of pounds. Junkshop glam has followed the same trajectory as earlier cult sounds like Sixties garage, Seventies punk, and DIY -  from utterly dejected and almost value-less in the immediate aftermath of its release, to the basis of a vinyl antiques market. Indeed the interest in the  second and third divisions of glitter started when collectors of those earlier styles had exhausted those seams,  then realised that glam - beneath the vocal hysteria and campy affectations – was raw basic rock. Another supply of short sharp shocks and punchy thrills opened up in the nick of time.   

Glam as punk-before-punk is an argument convincingly made on the first disc of Droogs. titled “Rock’s Off”. Ray Owen Moon’s “Hey Sweety” launches things with a stinging attack and pummeling power just a notch behind The Stooges, although the oddly phrased title-chorus diminishes the menace slightly.   Most Droogs inclusions are fairly frivolous affairs lyrically -  anthems of lust, celebrations of rocking out - but Third World War anticipate punk themes with the proletarian plaint and Strummer-like sandpaper vocals of “Working Class Man.” Hustler forge a link between The Faces and Cockney Rejects with “Get Outta My Way”, which is like Magic’s “Rude” recast as pub boogie:  the hilarious lament of  a longhair hassled by his girl’s disapproving Dad.  In Supernaut’s “I Like It Both Ways”, the bisexual protagonist’s own dad think he’s “INSANE!!”: during the middle-eight he’s confused by stereophonic propositions from a girl in the left speaker and a boy in the right.  Other highlights include the chrome-glistening grind of James Hogg’s “Lovely Lady Rock” and the grating lurch of Ning’s  “Machine,” akin to being run over by a bulldozer driven by a caveman.

Things stay stompy and simplistic on the second disc “Tubthumpers & Hellraisers,” but with a slight shift towards pop.  On Harpo’s “My Teenage Queen,”  a lithe, corkscrewing melody contrasts with a hammer-pounding relentless beat, which is interrupted by an unexpected outbreak of hand-percussion like a belly-dancer abruptly jumping onstage to join the band.  Frenzy’s “Poser” sneers sweetly and Simon Turner’s “Sex Appeal” is a delicious bounce of bubblegum. Compared with the ferocious first disc, though, this radio-friendly fare often feels flimsier, stirring those doubts familiar with similar archival salvage enterprises: is this really lost treasure? Or is it deservedly obscure?

Shrewdly, on the final disc “Elegance and Decadence,” King  switches gears and zooms in on what some  call “high glam”: the Bowie-besotted, Ferry-infatuated side of the genre, which appealed to older teenagers and middle class students with its thoughtful lyrics, its witty cultural references and arty name-drops, and the exquisite styling of the clothes and record packaging. The backings favored by performers like John Howard, Paul St John, and Alastair Riddell are svelte and lissome, shunning the beefy power-chords and leaden kick drums of the more thumping and  lumpen glitter, in favor of strummed acoustic guitar and swaying rhythms. The vocal presence on these songs is likewise willowy and androgynous: sometimes an unearthly soar above the mundane,  other times highly-strung and histrionic.

The most fetching specimens here in this post-Hunky Dory mode are Steve Elgin’s “Don’t Leave Your Lover Lying Around (Dear),” with its saucy asides about how “trade is looking good,” and Brian Wells’s archly enunciated “Paper Party.” Bowie-esque themes of fame and fantasy abound, with titles like “Spaceship Lover”, “Ultrastar”, and “Star Machine” (the latter by actual Bowie offcut Woody Woodmansey’s U Boat). “Criminal World” by the debonair Metro – who described their style as “English rock music, but influenced by a hundred years of European culture… Baudelaire and Kurt Weill” -  would  be later covered by Bowie himself on 1983’s Let’s Dance, a well-deserved compliment. Even more genteel-sounding is “New York City Pretty,” which could be an out-take from Rocky Horror, so closely does Clive Kennedy mirror Tim Curry’s phrasing.

Like other retro-actively invented genres such as  freakbeat, part of the appeal of junkshop glam is its generic-ness: the closeness with which artists conform to the rules of rock at that precise moment.  In many cases, these performers were arrant opportunists: a year or two earlier, they’d been prog or bluesy-rock artists. Some would adapt yet again and adopt New Wave mannerisms - replacing fluting aristocratic tones for gruff working class accents, swapping escapism and decadence for lyrics about unemployment and urban deprivation. Indeed Droogs contains an example of glam juvenilia from a future prime mover of punk: “Showbiz Kid” by Sleaze, the early band of TV Smith of The Adverts.

Although this kind of aesthetic flexibility seems suspect and unprincipled, it usefully reveals a couple of things about rock. First, it points to a sameness persisting underneath all the style changes. From today’s remote vantage point, the differences – once so significant and divisive - between Sixties beat groups, bluesy boogie, heavy metal, glam, pub rock, and punk start to fade and a continuum of hard rock emerges.  The dominant sound on Droogs is situated somewhere between The Pretty Things, Ten Years After, The Groundhogs, on one side, and the Count Bishops, Sham 69, Motorhead, on the other. I’ve picked British names but you could just as easily throw Steppenwolf, Grand Funk and Black Flag in there, or for that matter, AC/DC.

The other thing that Droogs shows is that originality is both uncommon and over-rated. Herd mentality, which is to say the willingness of the horde of proficient but not necessarily creative performers to be influenced by the rare innovators in their midst, is what actually changes the sound of the radio. It’s the arrival of the copyists that definitively establishes a new set of musical characteristics, performance gestures, and lyrical fixtures, as the defining sound of an era.  Send in the clones, then, because sometimes you can’t get enough of a good thing.

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

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

Are you Sheffield born and bred?

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

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

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

What were the crucial nodes of Sheffield bohemia?

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

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

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

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




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

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

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



Roxette (1977) from NWfilmarchive on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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

What were they like as people, Cabaret Voltaire?

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was Sheffield starting to go into decline in the Seventies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molodoy at the Limit Club, 1978

(pic by Garry Warburton)

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

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

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

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

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

But then you moved down South in 1980…

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

How did you find it – London, and NME?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vice Versa live at Futurama festival , Leeds, 1980

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






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

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

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

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

What about ABC? Did you care for them?

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

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

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

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

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

  The first thing I read by Andy - and cut out and kept - I had never heard of Faust or even Krautrock, so the idea that it was a revolution that had been betrayed was a double intrigue

 

NME, April 11, 1981

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




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