Rip It Up and Start Again (55 page)

By the time Marsh wrote his nativist counterblast in 1984, a grassroots American intifada had been swelling for some time in the form of bands such as the Blasters, Violent Femmes, Blood on the Saddle, the Gun Club, and Lone Justice, who’d mostly come up through punk but by the early eighties had rediscovered various forms of American roots music such as country, blues, rockabilly, folk, and zydeco. Renegade rock historian Joe Carducci—no Anglophile himself—captured this inadvertently humorous backlash against “the limey fag-wave” well. Suddenly, he writes, it was “flag wavers vs fag-wavers…. Expunks and ex–new wavers were showing up in new bands trying to look like your average whiskey guzzlin’, range ridin’ shitkicker.” The mainstream version of the New Americana soon followed: John Cougar Mellencamp, ex–Creedence Clearwater Revival singer John Fogerty, and above all Bruce Springsteen with his stupendously successful
Born in the U.S.A.

At the time, this rapid resurgence of trad rock felt surprising, and for New Pop believers, disheartening. In hindsight, it appears inevitable. As Simon Frith argued, “The strength of the rock and roll tradition lay in its fantasy of the streets [in the case of the New Americana, you could substitute the great outdoors, the frontier, the wilderness]…. The new pop music was, by contrast, mall music, shiny but confined. It is not surprising that the counter-sounds got louder and louder, that new myths developed of roots and region, history, authenticity. There is a limit to how long people can look as though they’re having fun.” That’s a little unfair to the millions who loved New Pop and weren’t
pretending
to have fun (not all of them teenage girls, either). But pop culture works through a kind of oscillating internal pendulum, swinging back and forth between extremes. Some kind of return to rock values (if not necessarily to guitar music) was bound to happen. In the long run, it was hip-hop that gradually took on the role formerly occupied by rock as the locus of those concerns about roots and authenticity, those fantasies of rebellion and street knowledge—a role it has yet to relinquish.

In 1984, the British Invaders were pretty much in retreat. A few hung in there—Duran Duran, Wham!, Billy Idol—but overall it was a year in which American artists seized back
Billboard
. MTV didn’t die with the New Music, though. On the contrary, it thrived like never before, because the new chart-ruling American stars—Cyndi Lauper, Prince, ZZ Top, Springsteen, and, by the end of ’84, Madonna—had all grasped the power of video and adapted well to the new MTV reality. Musically, many American artists either learned or benefited from the climate created by New Pop. The rock-funk fusions of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and most everything by Prince were American (and far more musically adept) versions of the disco-punk dreams of Brit New Popsters. As well as forging a signature video style that wittily compensated for the group’s lack of sex appeal, ZZ Top made their boogie more dance floor friendly by adding a metronomic, sequencer-driven pulse. Van Halen scored their biggest hit with “Jump,” driven by a synth riff rather than by Eddie Van Halen’s guitar. Even that touchstone figure for the New Americana roots backlash, Bruce Springsteen, developed a new keyboard-dominated sound on singles such as “Dancing in the Dark.” On the flip sides of the singles off
Born in the U.S.A.,
you could even find disco remixes from the likes of Arthur Baker, the electro pioneer who’d worked with New Order.

As American rockers grabbed hold of videos and synths, Devo—original homegrown pioneers of synthrock and video pop—found it harder to get on MTV. “Their playlist was suddenly based solely on what was already a radio hit, it had nothing to do with how good or innovative the video was,” says Casale. The crunch came with the single “That’s Good.” Neither the tune nor the promo was Devo’s finest hour. It was one of three same-looking and sounding video singles from their late 1982
Oh, No! It’s Devo
album, all shot on the same unattractively carpeted soundstage, in more or less the same outfits, with the same camera angles. The only things that vary are the animations on the blue-screen backdrop.

It was one of the animated sequences in “That’s Good”—a french fry “fucking” a doughnut, juxtaposed with images of a half-naked, sweaty, and eventually dissatisfied porno babe—that brought Devo’s deteriorating relationship with MTV to its breaking point. The programming director told the group, “You can have the french fry, or you can have the doughnut, but you can’t have both.” Devo protested at first, then capitulated and re-edited the video. “By the time we got it back to them, they were looking at our ‘adds’ [the number of radio station playlists adding the single] and saying ‘you’re not getting enough,’” says Casale. “That’s Good” never made the MTV playlist. Ultimately, says Mark Mothersbaugh, MTV “became the Home Shopping Network for record companies. And instead of showing the bands with innovative videos, they pushed the bands with the expensive, bloated videos.”

JUST ABOUT THE FIRST POSTPUNK
figure to start talking about pop as the way forward, Green Gartside was also just about the last of the New Pop fops to become a bona fide pop star. In an odd little coda to the Second British Invasion, Scritti Politti finally reached the
Billboard
Top 20 long after most of Green’s Limey contemporaries, such as ABC and Heaven 17, had been driven from American airwaves.

After firing his former squatland comrades and abandoning the independent-label scene, Green signed to Virgin and teamed up with two Manhattan-based musicians, keyboardist/programmer David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher (formerly of Material). Inspired by New York’s synthfunk and electro, Green and his dream team set about forging precision-tooled dance pop. All bright, chittering sequencer riffs and ultracrisp Linn beats, the new Scritti sound was
pointilliste,
a mosaic of hypersyncopations and microrhythmic intricacies. “We used to talk about it being like a Swiss watch,” Green recalled.

“Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin),” the first single from this third incarnation of Scritti, was released in early 1984 and became the U.K. Top 10 hit Green had craved for so long. “Wood Beez” and its even more stunning follow-up “Absolute” were still haunted by the old Scritti’s melodic strangeness, still audible relatives of “PAs” and “Skank Bloc Bologna.” But the sound of the records was slick, tough, and absolutely contemporary. Green had also finally worked out a way of writing lyrics that could pass for a normal love song. On closer inspection, though, they turned out to be pretzels of contradiction, with an
aporia
(the poststructuralist term for voids in the fabric of meaning) lurking in the center of every twist of language, sweet nothings that could wreck your heart.

“A Little Knowledge,” for instance, was a love song about the impossibility of love, with the rapturously distraught Green concluding, “Now I know to love you is not to know you.” “Wood Beez” reprised the “Faithless” idea of losing belief but gaining soul, with Green crooning, “Each time I go to bed/I pray like Aretha Franklin.” For the secular Green, “soul” signified the sweet ache of an emptiness that was paradoxically also a fullness. In interviews Green described his pop songs as “hymns for agnostics, for the disillusioned like myself.” They were also tributes to the quasi-religious power of pop music, paeans that put into practice what they preached.

Scritti’s biggest U.K. single, the number six smash “The Word Girl,” was luscious lover’s rock that took a leaf out of Jacques Lacan’s book (literally, insofar as a page fragment from the French psychoanalyst’s
Ecrits
was reproduced on the twelve-inch single’s cover). The chorus, “How your flesh and blood became the word,” was both a question and an expression of wonder. Green, as always, was fascinated by the process in which an ordinary woman with flaws became idealized into a figment of the male romantic imagination (“a name for what you lose when it was never yours”), a de-realized fetish.

In the United States, the smash single was “Perfect Way,” which peaked at number eleven. Manager Bob Last fondly recalls the excitement of that moment in 1985 when Scritti finally “achieved this high-gloss sound that could penetrate mainstream American radio.” Indeed, the Scritti sound was so advanced it actually influenced the next wave of mideighties black pop, records such as Janet Jackson’s
Control
.

The accompanying album
Cupid & Psyche 85
finally fulfilled Green’s grandiose talk of the past several years. Not only was it immensely successful, but it was true pop deconstruction to bring a smile to Jacques Derrida’s lips. The new Scritti sound (all those dazzling surfaces) paralleled the way Green’s oddly depthless lyrics worked (the lover’s discourse as a lexical maze, a chain of foolishness along which desire traverses endlessly, hopelessly looking to heal the primal wound of lack at the heart of being). Inspired by Michael Jackson, Green had developed an eerie falsetto that sounded freakishly ethereal, beyond gender. It suited
Cupid
’s hall-of-mirrors sound, all perfect reflective surfaces for Green’s narcissism. It’s no coincidence that the inner sleeve to
Cupid
shows the immaculately groomed Green and his two cohorts in a deluxe men’s bathroom, staring into a mirror. Gamson and Maher are looking at Green’s reflection, but the singer only has admiring eyes for himself.

“When I met Derrida, he told me what I was doing was part of the same project of undoing and unsettling that he’s engaged in,” Green boasted in a 1988 interview, referring to a dinner with the philosopher arranged by French radio. Yet it’s doubtful that the subtle subversions woven into Scritti’s superslick sound were picked up on by most listeners. This was especially true of the American audience, which wasn’t familiar with the backstory of the band’s tortuous journey toward pop and, seeing the video for “Perfect Way,” most likely took Green to be just another fey, fair-haired pretty boy from England. On U.S. radio, surrounded by what Green called “the bright, brittle, endless barrage” of mideighties pop funk, it was hard to distinguish “Perfect Way” from any of the other cosmetically perfected, ultracommercial records of that era. Outside the context of indieland’s frugal means, the expensiveness of the sound didn’t carry any real resonance. Green angrily dismissed “any attempts to tie it to Thatcherism” as “nonsense,” but it was hard to see how
Cupid
could be read in any other terms than straightforward upward mobility, especially when you factored in things such as the beautiful models used in “The Word Girl” video or the fact that Green himself did a modeling assignment for
Vogue
. Buying in or selling out, was there
really
a difference in the end?

THE GENEALOGY OF THE WORD
“Gothic” encompasses medieval churches, Gothic literature and art, with their themes of death and the uncanny, and the original Goths, those Germanic barbarians who swarmed over the dying Roman Empire. When applied to postpunk, however, “Gothic” initially described a certain doomy atmosphere in music. In 1979, Martin Hannett described Joy Division as “dancing music with Gothic overtones.” Quite rapidly, though, “Gothic” became a term of abuse applied to bands such as Bauhaus that had emerged in the wake of Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. It remained an insult until the latter months of 1982, when the word was reclaimed as a tribal rallying cry. Darkness suddenly looked like an alluring alternative to New Pop’s squeaky-clean, overground brightness.

And yet Goth and New Pop actually had something in common. Both had roots in glam. ABC and the Human League loved Roxy and Bowie, but so did Goth groups such as Bauhaus and Sex Gang Children. New Pop and Goth both represented a return to glamour and stardom and a backlash against postpunk’s antimystique. Whether it was the Human League’s celebration of romance or Goth’s patchouli-scented romanticism, 1982 saw the return of that old (black) magic.

The vortex of the early Goth scene was the Batcave, a Soho nightclub that started in July 1982 as an “absolutely no funk” alternative to the New Romantic and imported black dance fare offered at other London clubs. Founded by the campy group Specimen, the Batcave favored a leather-and-lace decor and thirties monster movie references. As the club took off, it went on tour to the provinces, inspired imitators, and franchised Batcave nights in cities all over the U.K., as well as a one-off night at Danceteria in New York.

Goth came to prominence in the winter of 1982–83, just at the point when New Pop was getting fat and bland. Virtually unknown outside the U.K. live circuit, Southern Death Cult abruptly materialized on
NME
’s front cover in October ’82. Early in the new year, another
NME
cover story proclaimed the arrival of “Positive Punk.” Loosely tied to two rising Goth groups, Brigandage and Blood and Roses, the piece essentially celebrated the victory of imagination and individuality against a vaguely conjured mediocrity. The article’s epigram, stolen from
The Rocky Horror Show
’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter, was “Don’t dream it, be it.”

By 1983, bands such as Danse Society, the March Violets, Flesh for Lulu, and scores more swarmed across the independent charts. Soon almost every independent label had a Goth band on its roster. Goth’s tentacles stretched from the Los Angeles “death rock” scene centered around Christian Death and 45 Grave to Iceland’s Kukl (the name translated as “sorcery”), who sang about the country’s pagan mythology and whose lineup included Björk.

As with other successful subcultures, Goth style created plenty of scope for individual expression while simultaneously marshaling a potent tribal identity. Its palette of sonic and sartorial hallmarks meant you could recognize a Goth group within seconds of seeing and hearing them. Standard musical fixtures included scything guitar patterns, high-pitched post–Joy Division basslines that usurped the melodic role, beats that were either hypnotically dirgelike or “tribal” in some ethnically indeterminate Burundi-meets-Apache way, and vocals that were either near operatic and Teutonic or deep, droning alloys of Jim Morrison and Ian Curtis. The Goth image entailed some combination of deathly pallor, teased or ratted black hair, ruffled Regency shirts, stovepipe hats, leather garments, and spiked dog collars, accessorized with religious, magical, or macabre silver jewelry. The clothing color scheme was funereal, the sense of glamour literally sepulchral.

Connecting everything was the romance of
old things
. The original Gothic movement in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century literature had been antimodernist. It represented the return of the re-pressed: all the medieval superstitions and primordial longings allegedly banished by the Industrial Revolution, all those shadowy regions of the soul supposedly illuminated by the Enlightenment. The new Goth was likewise based on the idea that the most profound emotions you’ll ever feel are the same ones felt by people thousands of years ago, the fundamental, eternal experiences of love, death, despair, awe, and dread.

Goth’s interest in the timeless could be seen as precisely that, a refusal of the timely, an apolitical flight from the urgent topical issues of the day. In its early days, Goth was shaped in reaction to the two other strands that came directly out of U.K. punk, Oi! and anarcho-punk, both of which addressed exploitation and injustice. The Oi! or “real punk” contingent (bands such as the Exploited and Cockney Rejects) defined punk as rabble-rousing protest grounded in working-class experience. The anarcho-punk movement, focused around the band Crass and their label of the same name, was more ideological, spewing out vinyl tracts denouncing the unholy trinity of state, church, and military while extolling pacifism and self-government.

Up to a point, the proto-Goths enjoyed the energy at Oi! and anarcho-punk gigs. But ultimately, says Goth historian Mick Mercer, “A lot of the people who became Goths wanted the excitement of punk but not the mundane element.” Redefining punk rebellion as deviance from norms, these proto-Goths proposed an escape from the crushing commonplaceness of everyday English life, into ritual and ceremony, magic and mystery. They latched on to any groups they could find “who offered something a bit more intelligent and twisted, Romantic and tortured,” says Mercer, groups such as the Birthday Party and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The intersection point between Goth and New Pop was Adam Ant. The original Antz were proto-Goth. Their songs tweaked taboos and unveiled kinky desires, and the “sex music for antpeople” concept was overtly tribal. Goth put a high premium on physical beauty, be it natural or aided by self-adornment and makeup, and Adam was the first in a long line of hunky Goth singers that included Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy and Southern Death Cult’s Ian Astbury. The other Goth hallmark Adam possessed was the charismatic aura of the cult leader, mingling various aspects of warrior chieftain, shaman, and savior.

But when Adam, impatient to become a big star, “sold out” and went pop, his original fan base defected. The ambitious Adam declared that “cult” was just a euphemism for “failure,” but the Goth groups, in contrast, cultivated cultishness, understanding that their audience wanted bands they could cling to as private property. “Bauhaus picked up a lot of disaffected Antz fans,” says Mercer. Bauhaus’ debut,
In a Flat Field,
came out on November 5, 1980, the day before
Kings of the Wild Frontier
. Antz fans who didn’t care for Adam’s new storybook imagery of pirates and Indians turned instead to Bauhaus’ hammy glam theater of blasphemy and idolatry.

Curiously, it was Malcolm McLaren, the person who’d given Adam the image makeover, who best understood this impulse. Predicting the return of rock’s underground spirit as a backlash against New Pop, McLaren celebrated the die-hard loyalty of metal fans. “Led Zeppelin never appeared on television or radio, yet they sold more records at that time than any other group!” he told
Sounds
in December 1982. “They
made sure
their music was outside the area of manufactured pop product.”

Banshees’ singer Siouxsie Sioux crystallized the emerging Goth movement’s spirit when she declared her desire to be “a thorn in the side of mediocrity.” In the very beginning, though, the Banshees were exemplary postpunk vanguardists, spouting the rock-is-dead rhetoric of the time. Bassist Steve Severin saw rock as “flaccid and perverted,” and in interviews cited influences—Velvets, Roxy, Can, Beefheart—similar to those of their postpunk contemporaries. The Banshees’ sound took shape through a process of reduction and rejection. “It was a case of us knowing what we
didn’t
want, throwing out every cliché,” says Severin. “Never having a guitar solo, never ending a song with a loud drum smash.”

Siouxsie wanted a guitar sound like “a cross between the Velvet Underground and the shower scene in
Psycho,
” says Severin. Early on, the Banshees were often lumped in with Wire, kindred spirits in angularity and emaciated minimalism. Both groups were big fans of flange—a glassy, brittle guitar sound created by a device that doubles the musical signal and then puts the “shadow” guitar slightly out of phase with the main signal. The Banshees used its cold swirl to draw a sharp line separating what they were doing from seventies rock. Heard on their 1978 debut,
The Scream,
the result was stark and serrated, a mortification of rock, a new cruel geometry achieved
within
and
against
the orthodox guitar/bass/drums format.

Siouxsie’s ice queen voice was equally forbidding, piercing the listener’s flesh like a lance, and it suited the songs. Jagged and jarring, the Banshees’ tunes could be catchy (“Hong Kong Garden,” their debut single, reached number seven in the U.K.), but they didn’t
feel
melodic. The lyrics, alternately penned by Severin and Siouxsie, espoused a brutally unsentimental view of the world (“Love in a void/It’s so numb/Avoid in love/It’s so dumb”) relieved only by macabre humor. “Carcass,” for instance, concerned a butcher’s assistant who falls in love with a lump of meat and amputates his own limbs on the meat grinder to more closely resemble his beloved.

Siouxsie defined punk not in political terms but as “disrupting yourself, questioning yourself,” which generally translated as a morbid preoccupation with the dark side of human nature, obsession, unreason, and extreme mental states. Severin’s “Jigsaw Feeling” imagined what it felt like to be autistic, while Siouxsie’s “Suburban Relapse” is a darkly witty sketch of a housewife having a breakdown: “Whilst finishing a chore/I asked myself ‘What for?’” Siouxsie observed, “You look at these homes and realize how many of the women are out of their minds within these pruned rose gardens. There’s something about the containment of emotion within suburbia.”

Severin and Siouxsie knew suburbia intimately. They grew up in neighboring towns on the southernmost fringe of London. But the pair actually met on the other side of the city, at a Roxy Music concert at Wembley Arena in 1974. Glam fans, they had no truck with punk’s do-it-yourself egalitarianism. “Anyone
can’t
do it,” quips Severin. The Banshees believed in maintaining an enigmatic distance from the audience, both offstage (“That whole concept of the Clash letting their fans stay in their hotel rooms,” chuckles Severin, “I mean, no, we’d let them stay out in the rain!”) and in performance. “There’s something magical about a stage,” muses Severin. “You think of all your favorite people, such as the Doors, and you can’t imagine them being the blokes next door. The stage is their church. That’s what appealed about the intelligent side of glam, the fact that there was some kind of theater going on, a drama was being presented.”

This side of the Banshees emerged on 1979’s
Join Hands
with “Icon” and the protracted “cover version” of “The Lord’s Prayer,” songs that set the template for Goth as a modern pagan cult tapping into atavistic pre-Christian urges. “With ‘Icon’ we were trying to create music that you could get lost in, an intensity of sound that was hypnotic, ritualistic,” says Severin. The song is loosely inspired by the story of a Polish priest who set fire to himself, but sounds more like a hymn to Siouxsie, an “icon in the fire” of Goth desire.

After an early personnel upheaval—the defection of drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay—the Banshees recruited the more conventionally skilled John McGeoch (formerly the guitarist in Magazine) and drummer Budgie for
Kaleidoscope
. As the title suggests,
Kaleidoscope
shifted from the monochrome severity of the first two albums to a more vivid palette of textures. The Banshees even sounded pretty on U.K. hit singles “Christine” and “Happy House.” But 1981’s
Juju
was the Banshees’ most perfect statement, every song a chip off the same lustrous jet-black block. The album blueprinted an absurdly large proportion of Goth’s musical and lyrical themes. With “Sin in My Heart,” “Voodoo Dolly,” “Halloween,” “Spellbound,” and “Night Shift,” the Banshees explored ideas of magic and the supernatural for the first time.

In 1982 the Banshees recorded two songs that were virtual Goth manifestos. On “Fireworks,” Siouxsie chants, “We are fireworks,” an exultant image of self-beautification as a glam gesture flashing against the murk of mundanity. “Painted Bird,” from
A Kiss in the Dreamhouse,
paid homage to the Banshees’ audience, inciting them to “Confound that dowdy flock with a sharp-honed nerve/Because we’re painted birds by our own design.” Its inspiration was Jerzy Kozinski’s novel of the same title, the protagonist of which collects birds. “When he was feeling really aggressive or frustrated,” Siouxsie explained, “he’d paint this bird with different colors, and then throw it to its flock. And it would recognize its flock, but because it was a different color, they would attack it.”

From its bejeweled, Klimt-inspired cover imagery to its exquisite textures, 1982’s
Dreamhouse
marked the Banshees’ plunge into fin de siècle decadence. Musically, the influences were English psychedelia: the Beatles, Syd Barrett, Traffic, and the Gothic-bucolic Donovan of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Season of the Witch.” “
Dreamhouse
really started with the words for ‘Cascade,’” says Severin. The imagery of “liquid falling” seemed to demand the melting of Siouxsie the ice queen and the unveiling of a hitherto suppressed side to the Banshees: deliquescent, sensuous, and on “Melt!” (their first-ever ballad) languidly erotic. Circa
The Scream,
the Banshees’ music was “sexy” like J. G. Ballard’s
Crash
. But now, inspired partly by Severin’s reading of Ballard’s latest book,
The Unlimited Dream Company
—“where the imagery is very lush, sensual, exotic,” he says—the Banshees were making the perfect seduction soundtrack.