Rip It Up and Start Again (48 page)

From being an electropop band that made “No standard rock ’n’ roll instrumentation” their manifesto, the Human League mutated into a pop group that just happened to use synths. Representing an ideal of quality pop with universal appeal, Abba was the group’s new reference point. For
NME
’s Paul Morley, Human League represented a new middle of the road (M.O.R.) that was simultaneously postpunk and post-Abba.
Dare
could only have been made by a group who knew about Roxy, Iggy, and Kraftwerk, but their music had become inviting and accessible enough to win over the great unhip masses—moms and dads, teenyboppers, children, even grandma. The avant-M.O.R. tag made sense because
Dare
’s worldview and sentiments were positive, wholesome, and in some ways just a notch away from small-
c
conservative. “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” saw Oakey rattling off a list of life-enhancing things over electronicized Glitterbeat: “Everybody needs love and adventure/Everybody needs cash to spend…Everybody needs two or three friends.” “I Am the Law” turned the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” inside out. It was a sympathetic song about authority and the police, inspired by Oakey’s encounter with an injured bouncer back when he was working as a hospital porter. In interviews, Oakey rejected bohemian values (he was pro-marriage, antidrugs), and exalted a new spirit of professionalism and commitment to entertainment, saying “This new pride that I’m always talking about in pop music,
that
was destroyed by punk, the garage band ideal.”

“Don’t You Want Me” was Human League’s most sonically conventional single yet, from its perky groove to its trim verse/chorus structure. It also further underlined the importance of Catherall and Sulley to the group. The Human League’s biggest song ever was the one that gave the greatest prominence to the girls’ unassuming vocals. A duet between Oakey and Sulley, it deliciously rewrites the story of how “the girls” were discovered and projects five years into the future. Oakey sings as the Svengali who plucks a girl from obscurity (“You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar”) and turns her into “someone new,” only to be abandoned by his protégé lover now that she has the world at her feet. Defiant, if ever so slightly off pitch, Sulley (although in reality, it was Catherall who had become Oakey’s girlfriend) sings as the provincial dreamer who always knew deep down that she was destined for better things and is now determined to make her own path in life.

The “Don’t You Want Me” video added further layers of artifice. A Brechtian conundrum, it depicted the band making a promo, cutting between scenes from the video within a video and action off the set or in the editing suite, such as the band watching their own rushes. “I don’t know where that idea came from originally, whether it was Phil’s or the director Steve Barron’s,” says Bob Last. “But from the band’s point of view, a great deal of the appeal was that it was a film, shot on thirty-five millimeter, something that was extremely unusual in those very early days of the video industry. And that was a straightforwardly aspirational thing, the idea of doing a video with high production values. If you look at the promo, there’s a big film camera very prominent in it. And from a marketing standpoint it was very smart, because here were these girls in the band who really were just these ‘regular girls,’ now appearing in a
movie
.” A worldwide smash—Britain’s Christmas number one for 1981, it topped the charts in America the following summer—“Don’t You Want Me” propelled
Dare
to global sales of over five million. The Human League
were
Abba for all intents and purposes.

With the Human League leading the way, the peak of synthpop occurred during the winter of 1981–82. Close behind the Human League in the warm-blooded electropop stakes was Soft Cell, who scored a U.K. number one hit and crashed into the U.S. Top 10 with their torrid cover of the Northern soul classic “Tainted Love,” which was swiftly followed by the U.K. hits “Bedsitter” and “Say Hello Wave Goodbye.” Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a highly melodic if increasingly pretentious synth duo from Liverpool, scored three U.K. Top 5 hits in a row (two of them, bizarrely, about Joan of Arc). The U.K. Top 10 was also haunted by Japan’s electronic torch song “Ghosts,” Ultravox’s interminable “Vienna,” and a couple of deceptively lightweight ditties by Depeche Mode.

By the spring of 1982, electronic pop was so dominant in Britain that the Musicians Union made an attempt to limit the use of synthesizers. “They seriously proposed the idea of rationing synthesizers, restricting them to certain recommended studios where they could be used to duplicate string parts,” says Ian Craig Marsh. “Which sounds ludicrous, almost Stalinesque. But they wanted to protect the jobs of orchestras.”

Synthpop was treated with equal suspicion in certain quarters of the rock scene. “It’s not experimenting at all, it’s just using synthesizers to play pretty ordinary songs a lot of the time,” jeered Pete De Freitas of Liverpool postpunkers Echo and the Bunnymen. “A lot of these kids just don’t have talent,” added bassist Les Pattinson. “Any farmyard horse can kick a synth.” Perhaps he meant to say “any clotheshorse,” given that, as per the Undertones’ “My Perfect Cousin,” synthesizers were associated with effete poseurs. Conversely, it was precisely the instrument’s symbolic coding as effeminate and unrock that appealed both to synth users and synthpop fans. Compared to the phallic guitar, the synth was for gender benders: Oakey with his lipstick, eyeliner, and asymmetric hair hanging long and girly down one side of his face; Soft Cell’s Marc Almond in his pervy black leather; skirt-wearing Martin Gore from Depeche Mode; Eurythmics’ singer Annie Lennox and her crop-haired, androgynous-dominatrix image.

In America, attitudes toward synths were even more polarized. For many heavy-metal fans, keyboards were innately queer, their presence immediately signifying the ruination of “real” metal. For other Americans, being into “English haircut bands” and “art fag” music served as an empowering act of cultural treason. If you grew up feeling different in an American high school during the eighties, surrounded by Mötley Crüe fans, with the only homegrown underground being hardcore punk’s alterna-jock muscularity, then the sole alternative was to look toward England and to become a fan of groups such as Depeche Mode. Since David Bowie’s emergence, if not earlier, there was a real sense in which “English” connoted “gay” in the American rock imagination. This explains not just Anglophobia but Anglophilia, too. For those alienated by the overbearing masculinity of mainstream American rock, England beckons as an imaginary haven, a utopia of androgyny. In the early eighties, gay or sexually ambiguous boys, plus a good number of girls, were attracted to British electropop, not least because the bands were generally full of pretty boys wearing makeup.

Japan could have been the ultimate Anglo art fag nightmare as far as heartland rockers were concerned. Yet far from living in some paradise for dandy aesthetes and members of the third gender, Japan were rebelling against the mundane realities of urban Britain, which could be just as hostile to the art minded and androgynous as those of any blue-collar town in America. The son of a rat catcher, singer David Sylvian grew up in dreary Catford on the edge of southeast London. “It was disguise, a mask to hide behind,” Sylvian said of his white-makeup face and platinum-blond wedge-cut hair. “The music was a mask as well. It says nothing about how I was, other than I was hiding, trying desperately to be anything but myself. Just because I thought that was the only way I could survive.” Even the name Sylvian was masquerade, inspired by Syl Sylvain of the cross-dressing New York Dolls. The singer’s real surname, Batt, couldn’t have been less exotic or more pathetically English. His brother Steve, who played drums in Japan, called himself Steve Jansen, after Dolls singer David Johansen.

Japan arrived on the U.K. music scene just in time for punk, which transformed everything to their disadvantage. The music press ridiculed them as behind-the-curve glamsters and mocked Sylvian’s croon as second-rate Bryan Ferry. Gradually, Japan developed an arresting and distinctive post-Roxy sound built around exotic synth textures and Mick Karn’s languid fretless bass. Japan’s records sounded as exquisite as Sylvian and his bandmates looked. In performance, the singer mesmerized listeners with his excessive poise and composure, a statuesque quality that carried through to his ultrastylized vocals and the immaculately made-up blank white facade of his face. Simon Frith could have been talking about Sylvian when he wrote about Bowie’s “art of posing.” He “wasn’t sexy like most pop idols. His voice and body were aesthetic not sensual objects; he expressed semi-detached bedroom fantasies, boys’ arty dreams…an individual grace that showed up everyone else as clods.”

As expressed most thoroughly in the music and life of Bryan Ferry, the art rock dream is achieving an aristocratic existence, dedicated to beauty: collecting and cherishing antiques and objets d’art, visiting exotic places, feasting your eyes. There’s a hierarchic impulse underlying art rock’s obsession with distinction and perfection, and this often takes on an unnerving right-wing flavor. Following in Bowie’s dandy footsteps, Japan exhibited a fascination for the former Axis powers—in songs like “Suburban Berlin,” “Nightporter” (inspired by the Dirk Bogarde as Nazi-in-hiding movie), and the name Japan itself—and for other well-ordered societies. They wrote a song called “Communist China” and another called “Rhodesia,” surely the only pop tune ever written about this postcolonial white-power pariah of the civilized world!

Too refined for the crass self-mythologization of New Romanticism, Japan nonetheless benefited as pop culture began to shift in a neoglam direction. Almost overnight, they became incredibly hip. Critical praise began to accumulate around the “Art of Parties” single, turning into an avalanche for
Tin Drum,
a loose concept album about Mao’s China. “Ghosts,” an electronic ballad eerily shaded with flittering synths but devoid of a beat or bassline, went Top 10, setting up a compelling
Top of the Pops
appearance, with the still, pale Sylvian drawing the world into his hush.

“Too fragile to fuck” is how Paul Morley described Sylvian. Soft Cell’s Marc Almond was fragile, too, but in a different way: wonderfully uncool and hyperemotional. His vocal pitch wavered, the intonation was often excessive, but Almond’s all too human passion burst through. Like the League, Soft Cell had no truck with the we-are-robots shtick of first-wave electropop. Their songs nestled in the gap between glitzy dreams and squalid English realities. “I like to mix personal experiences with film images and then exaggerate them,” Almond declared.

Almond was studying art at Leeds Polytechnic when he met fellow student David Ball, initially enlisting him to provide the soundtrack for Almond’s cabaret-like art performances. Although Ball played Soft Cell’s synths, it was Almond who was the real scholar of electronic music. The duo’s music emerged from the collision of Almond’s electronic taste and Ball’s background as a fan of Northern soul and orchestrated sixties pop such as Burt Bacharach. Almond deejayed synthetic dance pop at the Leeds Warehouse nightclub, the epicenter of the Leeds branch of the Futurist/New Romantic scene. He particularly loved Suicide, especially the neon-twinkling textures of the duo’s second album, which was more lushly textured and synthetic than their classic lo-fi debut. Soft Cell essentially transposed Suicide’s glamorous and dirty New York vibe to provincial England. “Bedsitter,” the group’s second huge U.K. hit, documented Almond’s lifestyle, alternating between his cramped flat in Leeds’s red-light district and the hollow glitz of the New Romantic fantasy as enacted weekly at the Warehouse club. He told
Sounds,
“I used to wonder about these really glamorous people: what do they look like doing the dishes?” For their debut album,
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret,
Soft Cell voyaged to New York to soak up the scuzz, recording songs such as “Seedy Films” and “Sex Dwarf” in a studio near Times Square. If that first album played up the sleaze to an almost cartoonish degree, the 1983 follow-up,
The Art of Falling Apart,
deepened Almond’s obsession with beautiful losers into a harrowed empathy for the broken and discarded of this world.

Innocuous and innocent, Depeche Mode initially seemed like the antithesis of Soft Cell. Originally a guitar group made up of punk fans, they’d bought synths, built up a songbook of winsome and dinky-sounding electropop ditties, and shunned major-label offers in favor of a 50/50 profit-splitting deal with Mute Records. Their jaunty singles “New Life” and “Just Can’t Get Enough” raced up the charts and won them a teenybop following. Gradually, over the course of eighteen months or so, the music made by the pretty boys from the suburban town of Basildon started to sound more haunting. Martin Gore, the main songwriter, took to wearing a leather skirt and displayed a keen interest in all things transgressive. Depeche Mode also developed a burgeoning political consciousness that was unusual in the realm of synthpop.

The first sign of this newly committed Depeche came with the 1983 single “Everything Counts,” which combined hard electro beats, wisps of bleak melody, and clumsy if heartfelt anti-Thatcher sentiments: “The grabbing hands grab all they can…It’s a competitive world.” It was their biggest hit to date. The accompanying album,
Construction Time Again,
featured a hammer, symbolic of workers’ power, on its cover. Over the next year, Depeche Mode almost methodically worked their way through the big issues. “Love in Itself” was a Gang of Four–style critique of romantic love as distraction/consolation for life in an unjust world: “There was a time when all of my mind was love/Now I find that most of the time/Love’s not enough, in itself.” “People Are People,” another big hit in both the U.K. and America, dealt with racism, homophobia, and every other kind of bigotry and intolerance. Genuinely pained perplexity seared through the painful doggerel of “People are people so why should it be/You and I should get along so awfully?” “Blasphemous Rumours” lugubriously accused God of having “a sick sense of humor.” The pervy pop smash “Master and Servant” came adorned with metal-bashing noises (very chic thanks to the German outfit Einstürzende Neubauten). Gore had been exposed to Neubauten’s “steel symphonies” and power-tool performances during a sojourn in Berlin, where he’d explored the city’s seedy demimonde of S&M and bondage clubs—an inspiration for “Master and Servant.” But the song also contained a political resonance, in the sly line “forget all about equality.”