postpunk compilation

sleevenotes to the V2 compilation Rip It Up and Start Again (Postpunk 1978-1984), 2006

by Simon Reynolds

We’re deep into the post-punk resurgence now, but there’s no sign yet of a slow down: the endless procession of new bands that have drawn inspiration from that era keeps on colliding with veteran bands that have reformed, a flood of reissues jostles with compilations and anthologies. The net effect of this sustained explosion of curiosity and fascination with the period, though, is a tendency to take postpunk as a known quantity, a defined and circumscribed bundle of attributes: "angular", "stark", "jagged", "angsty," and so forth.

One of my main goals when writing Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 was to show the real sprawling diversity of postpunk--less a genre than a space of possibility that opened up in the late Seventies. The same ambition applies to this compilation. As you'll hear, not everything released back then was dread-soaked or twitchy with nervous tension, skeletally minimal or herky-jerky in feel. Postpunk's open-ended ideals and imperatives (avoid the obvious, jettison anything that smacked of traditional rock 'n' roll, cultivate idiosyncrasy) generated ethereal dreaminess, eccentric whimsy, and senseless acts of exquisitely odd beauty, just as much as they encouraged fractured punk-funk or structureless noise.

This compilation has its fair share of high-energy freneticism: Devo's "Praying Hands" filters the rampant rowdiness of Sixties shindigs and frat-parties through the group's characteristic grotesque humor (it's an attempt to imagine a born-again Christian dance craze, a la the Twist or the Mashed Potato), while the crisp, kinetic rockabilly of The Fall's "Fiery Jack" hits your membranes like the sharp sting of cheap sulphate. But you'll also hear more of a different kind of postpunk that tends to get overlooked: insidiously atmospheric, teeming with jeweled subtleties, a music of ghosts and glints.

Young Marble Giants' "Choci Loni" is a prime example of this stealthy and secretive side of postpunk, a spidery near-silence of crisply flecked guitar and warm Horlicks bass wrapping itself like a shawl around Alison Statton's self-contained vocal. Like their Rough Trade labelmates The Raincoats on their exquisitely intricate chime-box ”Only Loved At Night", "Choci Loni"
draws you into its hush and casts a shivery spell that lingers long after the song ends. Likewise, Fatal Microbes' "Violence Grows" avoids the apocalyptic bombast its title suggests in favour of slow-drone gorgeousness, thereby achieving a far more disquieting effect. Singer Honey Bane’s blankly amoral lyric about muggings in shadowy pedestrian subways is so vivid you can practically see the orange sodium light, smell the piss in the underpass. Violence of a different sort is the subject of "Grass", a darkly witty allegory about authoritarianism originally written by the late, great Ivor Cutler but covered here by Robert Wyatt, a pre-punk innovator who thrived in a postpunk world of anything-goes. Backed by the shimmering tablas and shehnai of East London Bangladeshi outfit Dishari Shilpee Gosth, Wyatt plays the role of guru imparting wisdom to an acolyte, the power relation underlined by lines like “while we talk I'll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me / I have something important to say."

Another early 70s figure who came into his own after punk was John Cooper Clarke, a Dylan-obsessed Mancunian bard who incanted his poetry over backing by the Invisible Girls, a group headed by Joy Division producer Martin Hannett. "Beasley Street" is something like a "Desolation Row" for Thatcher’s Britain, The Invisible Girls' dream-drifty tufts of texture making an incongruously idyllic backdrop for Clarke's lyrical phantasmagoria of deprivation, delapidation, and moral dry rot. An equally grim vision of  proletarian life 'n' leisure is painted on The Specials "Friday Night Saturday Morning"  (a hard-to-find track that lurked on the flipside of  the group's 1981 number one single "Ghost Town"), the bleakness deliciously offset by the jaunty-sad Wurlitzer rocksteady of Jerry Dammers' arrangement and the sardonic fatalism of Terry Hall's words and delivery.

Another song about staying up all night: Thomas Leer's "Tight as a Drum," from his classic EP 4 Movements. Having started out making DIY electronic lo-fi in1978 with the self-released "Private Plane" and then recording an album of ominous ambient noise for Industrial Records, Leer had shifted by 1981 to a jazz 'n' soul inflected synthpop of uncommon warmth and swing. (This stemmed partly from the fact that Leer played the beats live on an electronic drum pad kit, rather than programming them on a drum machine). A tingling, tremulous mist of synthetic sighs and shivers, "Tight as a Drum" captures the frayed euphoria of a young man who's made it through 'til
dawn's early light.

The Human League's "Dancevision" also evokes a peculiarly indeterminate alloy of joy and sorrow. Recorded in 1977, just before Phil Oakey joined the band, its haiku-succinct minimalism shimmers like the future-ghost of Detroit techno. The track's creators, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware reappear with the great "lost" Heaven 17 single "I'm Your Money" (the follow-up to “We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thang”, it never appeared on the classic Penthouse and Pavement album). “Money”’s hard-headed economic worldview contrasts with the defiant mysticism of The Blue Orchids’ "Dumb Magician," a song that rejects worldly ambition (climbing “the money mountain,” scheming to get your “foot in the door”) in favor of otherworldly transcendence and a glory beyond words. “The only way out is UP!" cries singer Martin Bramah, his previous life as guitarist in the original incarnation of The Fall looping us back to the opening track, "Fiery Jack.”

From spiky to spacey, from jagged frenzy to ambient calm, postpunk encompassed a vast spectrum of sound and mood, texture and tempo. I hope this compilation gives you a glimpse of this music’s amazing reach and richness, and a taste for exploring further.

tracklist

1 –The Fall Fiery Jack 4:44
2 –Devo Praying Hands 2:48
3 –Pulsallama The Devil Lives In My Husband's Body 3:25
4 –Cabaret Voltaire Sluggin' For Jesus Part 1 4:55
5 –Josef K Sense Of Guilt 3:03
6 –Scritti Politti P.A.s 5:57
7 –The Slits Spend, Spend, Spend 3:14
8 –Fatal Microbes Violence Grows 3:10
9 –Robert Wyatt Grass 2:36
10 –Siouxsie & The Banshees Slowdive 4:18
11 –The Raincoats Only Loved At Night 3:30
12 –Young Marble Giants Choci Loni 2:34
13 –The Human League Dancevision 2:19
14 –Thomas Leer Tight As A Drum 4:36
15 –Associates* White Car In Germany 4:53
16 –The B52s* Give Me Back My Man 3:58
17 –John Cooper Clarke Beasley Street 6:49
18 –The Specials Friday Night, Saturday Morning 3:33
19 –Heaven 17 I'm Your Money 5:06
20 –The Blue Orchids* Dumb Magician 2:53

                                                                                    

Seize the Time: Gang of Four and the eternal returns of retro rock (2005)

Seize the Time: Gang of Four and the eternal returns of retro rock

director's cut, Slate, October 5 2005

By Simon Reynolds

In an early Ian McEwan story, a novelist struggles with the follow-up to an acclaimed best-seller. There’s a psychologically grotesque twist to the tale, when her lover discovers that the manuscript she’s been toiling over is actually a painstakingly typed-out, word-for-word repeat of the debut. This isn’t precisely what postpunk legend Gang of Four have done on Return The Gift, the first release by the group’s original line-up since 1981, but it’s not far off. Instead of recording an album of new material like most reformed bands do, they’ve  rerecorded fourteen Gang of Four classics cherry-picked from albums such as Entertainment!, Solid Gold, and Songs of the Free.

It’s hard to think of a precedent in rock history for Return-- essentially, a band recording its own tribute album. The decision has bemused many Gang of Four fans, who wonder why they didn’t just put out a compilation of the definitive versions. Some see Return as proof that the group’s reformation was purely opportunistic, an attempt to reap the rewards of postpunk’s ultra-hip status these past couple of years, which has involved a swarm of new bands-- from the Rapture and Radio Four to Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand--drawing heavily from the Gang’s innovatively jagged and minimalist punk-funk. Surely, the argument goes, if the group really felt it had a relevant contribution to make beyond being a nostalgia act (their upcoming tour of America, their second this year, is sponsored by VH1), it would write an album of new material.

But there’s other ways of looking at Return the Gift. When I saw Gang of Four perform earlier this year in New York, I was struck by how contemporary the lyrics felt, with their dissections of consumerism, militarism, the psychology of right-wing backlash, and so forth, and how depressing that was as an indice of our society’s advance since the late Seventies.  Take “Natural’s Not In It,” a critique of the leisure and entertainment industry’s “coercion of the senses,” a mass-media and advertising barrage of hedonic imagery that causes singer Jon King to protest “this heaven gives me migraine.”  The song is even more blisteringly applicable to today’s porno-fied popular culture than it was when the Gang first recorded it in 1979.

The title Return the Gift itself--derived from one of the Entertainment! songs Gang of Four didn’t remake-also hints that the whole project might be an oblique commentary on retro culture’s “eternal returns”. That kind of meta-rock gesture was always Gang of Four’s signature.  When the band formed in 1977, King and guitarist Andy Gill were enrolled at Leeds’ University’s Fine Art department, then a hotbed of conceptualism and Leftist critiques of institutionalized art.  Absorbing this sensibility and bolstering it with extracurricular immersion in Marxist theorists like Gramsci, Gang of Four approached every aspect of their “intervention” in pop culture--songwriting, album packaging, interviews, internal band relations--in a spirit of demystification.  “Damaged Goods” and “Contract,” for instance, cold-bloodedly analyzed sex and marriage using the language of the market. Most famously, “Love Like Anthrax” was built around an expose-the-device structure redolent of Brecht and Godard (Gill and King helped run Leeds University’s film society). On one side of the stereo mix, King wails the blues of a heartbroken lover; from the other speaker issues Gill’s speaking voice, critiquing the privileging of the love song in popular culture and even questioning the supposed universality of the emotion.

Return The Gift “exposes the device” by placing in plain, unavoidable sight the redundancy and reconsumption involved in rock’s nostalgia market. When fans buy new albums by reformed favorites of their youth, at heart they’re hoping for a magical erasure of time itself. They’re not really interested in what the band might have to say now, or where the band members’ separate musical journeys have taken them in subsequent decades; they want the band to create “new” songs in their vintage style.  Such consumer bad faith is precisely the kind of phenomenon that the old Gang of Four enjoyed skewering. Could it be that Return is saying: you want a Gang of Four resurrection? Here you are, then, exactly what you secretly deep-down crave: the old songs, again.  Militant agit-funk becomes showbiz.

Yet the motivation for Gang of Four rerecording their songs also has a mundanely pragmatic aspect that’s equally consistent with their demystificatory approach.  “Covering" their own songs is a canny way of honoring and reactivating the legacy while ensuring that any benefits accrue to the creators of said legacy.  A straightforward repackaging of the old recordings, a compilation or box set, would only serve to enrich EMI, their original record company in the UK. And that’s something Gang of Four didn’t want to happen.  “We have never made any money at all from record sales with EMI and still have unrecouped advances,” declares King in an email interview. “So we didn’t want them to benefit as they did nothing to support us.” As for their original American record company, Warners, King claims that they deleted Entertainment!--easily one of the fifty most powerful and influential rock albums of all time--in 1993 and only re-released it in 2005 in response to Gang of Four’s having become such a monstrously fashionable reference point for new bands. Rerecording the songs--something which contracts typically allow artists to do after 20 years--put Gang of Four in a strong bargaining position in terms of negotiating a new deal with superior royalty rates. “It will mean that whatever we make will go to us,” says King of their arrangement with V2, a one-off licensing of the recording masters rather than a long term recording contract. “It is our way of reasserting ownership of our own material. “

This hard-headed approach seem “un-rock’n’roll”, but it’s perfectly in accord with Gang of Four’s commitment to stripping away the mystique from everything. The famous cover of Entertainment! depicts a Native American shaking hands with a cowboy. “The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend,” runs the caption. “The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him”.  If demystification involves the refusal to be fooled, such a sober, unsentimental mindset lends itself to business, where seeing all the angles is paramount.  Despite their Maoism-referencing moniker Gang of Four were never card-carrying Communists (although early on they did operate as a collective, paying their roadies the same wage as the musicians). But it’s precisely their Marxian worldview, with its structural understanding of exploitation and the power play of economic interests, that’s made the Gang vigilant and astute in their dealings with the record industry.

As it happens, like those Soviet commissars reborn as industrial  barons in the Nineties, most of Gang of Four “crossed over into enterprise” (as their postpunk fellow-traveler John Lydon once sang it) after the group disintegrated and have thrived in the business world.  Bassist Dave Allen’s long resume includes stints at Emusic.com, Intel’s Consumer Digital Audio Services Operation, and the Overland Entertainment Division, and currently he’s involved in a web-design/music consultancy company called Pampelmoose (whose clients include… Gang of Four).  Drummer Hugo Burnham plunged into the corporate heart of the music industry, working for EMI Music Publishing, Warner Bros, and Island, before starting his own management company, Huge & Jolly. Until recently King was the CEO of World Television, a webcasting/corporate TV/news production/event management company. On the face of it, it’s disconcerting that King, who once sang savagely mordant songs like “Capital (It Fails Us Now)”, should have become a sharp operator in the realm of shareholders meetings and venture financing (at one point the first part of his email address was “investorrelations”!). Then again, what were they supposed to do, during the Nineties, this bunch of smart, university-educated guys? Likewise, with Return, why shouldn’t Gang of Four exploit their own legend and literally capitalize on their moment in the retro sun?

The cycle of pop history has turned, putting Gang of Four in a position to get payback not just for the trademark infringements of today’s Go4-recyclers but earlier bands with heavy debts (the most successful being Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were such fans they hired Gill to produce their 1984 debut album). “Comrades, let us seize the time” is the tongue-in-cheek chorus of “Capital,” and Gang of Four have done exactly that. But what does it feel like to listen to the new version of “Capital”, and the rest of Return? The re-renditions are oddly faithful, with only subtle deviations from the blueprints. The fundamental structures of songs like “At Home He Feels Like A Tourist” and “Why Theory?” have been left intact (drastic remaking/remodeling is restricted to the bonus CD of remixes by other groups, some of which buck the played-out nature of the “remix tribute album” by being  surprisingly good). The main difference between Return and its sources relates to recording ambience, reflecting both advances in studio engineering techniques and the accumulated know-how of the band over the decades (Gill, a successful record producer, handled the production duties). The rerecordings of the Entertainment! songs especially sound glossier and have a modern “big drum sound”. Then again, the stark, emaciated production of Entertainment!, a result of its being recorded “dry” (engineer lingo for no reverb), was part of the record’s aesthetic statement. Reverb creates the illusion of a band playing together in the same acoustic space.  More live-sounding, the Return versions are stronger in a certain sense but are more conventional and naturalistic. And they lack, of course, the aura of historicity itself.

For this diehard fan, Return is a curious listening experience, with something of the eerieness of that Ian McEwan story about the blocked writer. You can’t help wondering what it must have felt like for the band members, laboring away at remaking songs they’d laid down definitively long ago. On the new version of “Anthrax”, Gill adds some self-reflexive lines about Return, describing it as an “an exercise in archaeology.” an attempt to find out where their heads were at in those heady postpunk days. Quizzed about the project both King and Allen refer to the original recordings as “Dead Sea Scrolls” they could refer to when memory failed. Aged seven I wanted to be an archaeologist because I thought it was all about stumbling on Mayan temples in the jungle, then lost interest when I went to a dig and saw how tedious sifting for pottery shards actually was. Return isn’t dreary (it could hardly be, given that the songs are among the most dynamic and structurally inventive rock songs of the last 30 years) but it never quite ignites because of the contradictions that brought the record into existence. These new versions seem to exist neither in 1979 nor 2005 but a peculiar limbo of non-time, the anachronic space of “retro” itself.

Return ends with “We Live As We Dream, Alone.” When Gang of Four first recorded it for 1982’s Songs of the Free, the track was a bleak evocation of the privatization of public life in the era of Reagan and Thatcher (who once famously declared “there is no such thing as society”). The ideal of the collective is at the heart of socialism, but it’s is also a big part of being in a rock band: all-for-one and one-for-all camaraderie, unity allied to a sense of purpose and destiny, the shared dream of making it and making history. The original “We Live As We Dream, Alone” can be heard now as a glimpse ahead to the break-up of the gang and the dispersal of its members into solo careerism. Resurrected as the final track of their comeback, the song seems pointedly to pose the question of whether the reunited Gang will stick around to see if they do have anything new to say, musically or lyrically, or whether they’ll simply go their own ways again.

9/11

a piece written for the Wire in late 2001 about the potential cultural / musical implications of the World Trade Center attacks

In the aftermath of  9/11/2001, commentators in every field of art and entertainment joined the culture-wide consensus-chorus that "nothing will ever be the same again". Many argued that a new spirit of civic commitment and self-sacrifice would inevitably spill over to culture, with artists becoming more engaged and tackling more profound themes, and the public craving deeper, more demanding work. There were hasty announcements of  "the end of  irony", predictions that a new seriousness would wipe away the vapid, trivial pop culture of the last decade or so. 

The precedent that everyone seems to be reaching back for is WW2 and the reconstruction that followed: the moral (and morale) uplift created by a stark Good Versus Evil struggle, and the sheer energy and can-do spirit generated by the mobilisation of entire populations and economies, led to hopes of rebuilding a better world. But the "WTC-as-Pearl-Harbor/Bush & Blair as Roosevelt & Churchill" parallel doesn't really hold; at best, this is a choice between lesser evils. For most of us non-combatants, the "war against terror" will be passive and ultimately enervating, as we watch the professionals rain death (and food parcels) down on remote populations, while the home front will entail the emergence of an Israel-style security state, with constant and debilitating sense of being both under siege and under surveillance.  It's hard to imagine either a massive project of social renewal like the Welfare State, or a great era of artistic creativity, coming out of this.

It's not at all clear how the repercussions of 9/11/2001 will play out in pop culture, let alone its semi-popular and marginal adjuncts. With a few exceptions (hip hop, most notably), music had seemed like it was ever more compartmentalized and sealed-off from "the real world", developing according to its own self-reflexive trajectory.  But maybe History will impact pop music and  recreate the conditions that prevailed in the postpunk era. When I was a youth, bands rarely mentioned music in interviews, political issues were so much more urgent; it was a context in which a song like UB40's "The Earth Dies Screaming" getting on Top of the Pops seemed like a crucial intervention. The recent spate of rock bands like Radiohead and U2 speaking out against globalisation, Third World debt, etc. already suggested a return to activism, altruism, and earnestness. Actually, having chafed against the irony culture for a long while, I already feel a slight pang for that cosy, harmless decadence. Indeed, it seems likely that a certain sort of acerbic, bitter irony is going to be an essential weapon in these days of bizarre reversals--like the way Bush, the President dedicated to narrowing the gap between church and state, has suddenly been recast as global defender of  secular liberalism against theocratic absolutism.

Where the WTC horror might  have at least a temporary dampening effect is on musics based on  the aesthetics of devastation: extreme noise terror, aural bombardments, apocalyptic soundscapes, traumaturgy, ambient fear. From DJ Scud's "Total Destruction" and Techno Animal's Brotherhood of the Bomb to the death metal covered by Terrorizer magazine, it all starts to seem, if not questionable then at least.... superfluous, surpassed by reality. Why was it supposed to be a good thing to do in the first place?

The alibi, I guess, is that it's not about vicarious delight in wanton destruction (as with small boys who love blowing stuff up,  Hollywood disaster movies), but  about waking people from cultural slumber, confronting them with the worst that can happen.  In times of numbness, ersatz emergency gets those atrophied adrenal glands pumping. But when everyday life is sufficiently raw-nerved, thank you very much -  who wants to experience simulated armageddon as entertainment? Stuff that soothes,  or helps the tears flow, seems more suitable -- Harold Budd, Sandy Denny. 

Of course, terrible things have been going on for, like, ever -- massacres, massive bombings,

cumulative collateral death tolls that are way bigger. But as they say, it makes a difference when it's close-to-home.  That's literal in my case: I live about one and a half miles from the site, and even now,  a month later, the air is sometimes fouled by the wind-born vapors from what is essentially a gigantic slow-burning crematorium. 9/11 has fatally interfered with  my appetite for "destruction" (meaning cultural/sonic images thereof).  Even something like Tricky's "Aftermath," one of my favorite pieces of music ever,  might be a tough listen in the future, the  lines about going "looking for people" having a new resonance -   just as sharing my 2 year old's delight as he points at a glistening airplane in the wonderfully blue skies over Manhattan will now always be accompanied by a shudder. 

Some of the more daring commentators have broached the whole question of  the carnographic sublime, writing honestly about the appalling splendor of  blazing fusilages piercing the sundazzled glass, the sheer spectacle of the  towers crumbling. Even dotty old Stockhausen, who got in such trouble for his dumb remark about the WTC attack as "the greatest work of art in history," was clumsily reaching towards something worth addressing: the extent to which apocalypse, carnage and cataclysm are embedded in the "libidinal economy" of the avant-garde. From Hendrix's aural pyromania to Einsturzende Neubauten's end times scenarios, from underground hip hop producer El-P titling his solo album Fantastic Damage to kid606 ally Electric Company using a picture of a collapsing building on the front of his latest release for Tigerbeat 6, imagery of waste and warfare seem to offer figures for absolute desire, excess, too-muchness; it's the 20th Century sublime, man-made (where the 18th Century's sublime was rampaging Nature)  but inhumane and anti-humanist.  Underground dance  music of all kinds is full of this kind of imagery, from drum'n'bass to gabber. For some years now dancehall reggae has been dominated by fire imagery, whether it's gangsta gunfire or the Rasta vision of Babylon being destroyed by the cleansing flames of Jah's righteous wrath (the fantasy is essentially the smiting of infidels, something that appeals in postcolonial vassal state Jamaica for precisely the same anti-globalisation, anti-Amerika reasons it does to Islamic jihadists).

The events of the last few weeks have made me question my own pleasure in this kind of imagery. I've also had pause to consider the way a rhetoric of crusades and a messianic, rallying mode of address has tripped off my critical tongue at various points over the years-- something that is paralleled by the way underground musics like drum'n'bass envisions themselves in paramilitary terms, as guerrillas, renegades, armies of underground resistance,  even terrorists. Then again, as silly as it seems when the real thing flares up all around, maybe "culture" is the safest, most harmless place for this kind of soldier talk. Music and the discourse around it can sublimate desires for mission, insurgency, single-minded purpose, our will to believe and our craving for the absolute.