Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (50 page)

Michael Stipe, R.E.M.:

Entertainment!
shredded everything that came before it. The Gang of Four know how to swing. I stole a lot from them, [from the liner notes to Songs of the Free]

While Gang of Four were not the first band to confront problematic social issues with intelligence rather than anger, they did it better than any punks before them. And they backed up their uncompromising words with actions: the group’s commercial potential was permanently damaged when, after refusing to excise the word “rubbers” from a song, their debut performance on the British television show Top of the Pops was canceled.

Following another two full years of touring, both with Rock against Racism and on their own, Gang of Four returned in 1981 with a long-awaited follow-up entitled
Solid Gold
. They employed an R&B producer to smooth out the sound, and
Solid Gold
is more polished and mature than
Entertainment!
, certainly a worthy successor. Where Andy Gill’s guitars seem to have eased slightly from their trebly assault, Dave Allen’s bass takes on a heavy dub sound and becomes more disorienting than ever on songs like
Paralysed
.

Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney:

I just love them rhythmically, how they put their songs together with interesting time changes. I love the way Andy Gill’s guitar sounds. I’d say for [Sieater-Kinney’s album] Dig Me Out, I was listening to
Entertainment!
more than any other record. It just has an energy that’s inspiring.

A difficult record to make,
Solid Gold
proved to be the one that ripped the group apart. Feeling a “sense of completion” and wanting to explore dub further, Allen quit, and by the end of 1981, Sara Lee had taken over on bass. While Lee proved every bit as capable of handling the substantial low-end throbs that drove Gang of Four, the group never again captured the intensity of the original lineup.

King Coffey, Butthole Surfers:

The first two albums were really influential to me personally as a drummer, because they had a real tribal sense, it wasn’t “kick-snare-kick-snare,” they were laying into the toms. It was a very different style of drumming.

With 1982’s
Songs of the Free
, the group proved they had some life – if little muscle – left in them. Shifting into a looser funk that incorporated slick background vocals and electro dance elements, the band nearly produced a hit song with the catchy and hilarious
I Love a Man in Uniform
. With the cold existentialism of
We Live as We Dream, Alone
, though, it was clear the angst and social alienation were not gone entirely.

By the time the group released 1983’s
Ward
, however, they truly seemed to have gone soft. Reduced to a trio (drummer Burnham was fired to make way for a drum machine) and backed with lightweight string arrangements, the record sounds like a lame stab at the pop charts. Even with glossy production, the Marxist funk rockers were way out of step with current trends, and following a farewell show that included an encore with original members Burnham and Allen, Gang of Four disbanded in 1984.

After leaving Gang of Four, Dave Allen formed the band Shriekback and later the groups King Swamp and Low Pop Suicide (he also composed music with Jon King for the film The Karate Kid). Allen also founded World Domination Records, which he continues to run today. Both Lee and Burnham did for-hire work, with the B-52’s and Bryan Ferry respectively, while Gill produced the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ debut album (and more recently, Jesus Lizard). Burnham eventually retired as a musician, though he continues in the business today as a successful record executive.

Following the 1990 release of the Gang of Four’s career overview, A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, new interest in the group led Andy Gill and Jon King to re-form the group with session musicians. Two releases – 1991’s
Mall
and ‘95’s
Shrinkwrapped
– are mildly interesting, though largely irrelevant to the career and subsequent impact of the original group.

DISCOGRAPHY

Damaged Goods
EP
(Fast Product, 1978)
; a debut single never released domestically.

Entertainment!
(Warner Bros., 1979; Infinite Zero, 1995)
; the classic debut that finds the group at its tightest and most agitating; the reissue includes the 1980 EP
Gang of Four
[a.k.a.
Yellow
).

Solid Gold
(Warner Bros., 1981; Infinite Zero, 1995)
; a very good recording of the band in transition between the debut’s raw power and the later electro-funk; the reissue includes the 1981 EP
Another Day, Another Dollar
.

Songs of the Free
(Warner Bros. 1982; Infinite Zero, 1996)
; a generally successful move toward pop styles, including the classic
I Love a Man In Uniform
.

Hard
(Warner Bros., 1983)
; a slickly produced drum machine record that ended the band on a low note.

At the Palace
(Phonogram, 1984)
; a live album recorded in Hollywood during the band’s final tour.

The Peel Sessions
(Strange Fruit / Dutch East India Trading, 1990)
; a record collecting the group’s appearances on the John Peel’s U.K. radio show.

A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
(Warner Bros., 1990)
; an excellent collection that spans the pre-reunited band’s career and is appropriately heavy on early material.

Mall
(Polydor, 1991)
; though not without its merits, this reunion record is generally flat.

Shrinkwrapped
(Castle, 1995)
; largely irrelevant.

SWELL MAPS

Scott Kannberg, Pavement:

Swell Maps was a big influence on our early records, one of those bands that we heard and were like, “Oh, we can do this.” They had these songs they fucked up somehow to make sound really dirty and low frequency, but they had these great songs underneath all this mess. And that’s what we tried to do on the first couple singles. I actually met Nikki Sudden recently in London. He heard we were big fans and came to our show.

For most of its existence, Swell Maps was little more than two suburban teenage brothers and their neighborhood friends, copping mysterious pseudonyms and low profiles to hide their mundane reality, and messing around at home with tape recorders and instruments they couldn’t play. What they created might have amounted to nothing special, except for how extraordinarily “nothing special” it all was. Their dingy racket helped inspire many subsequent suburban teens – most notably Pavement (whose early sound and career mirrors that of Swell Maps) – to make use of whatever skills and tools they had on hand to express themselves musically. Using punk as a method more than as a style, Swell Maps were among the primary architects of an aesthetic that would later be dubbed “low-fi.”

Adrian Nicholas Godley and his little brother Paul began making music from their home in the town of Solihull (near Birmingham) around 1972, when they were 15 and 12 years old, respectively. At the time, the two – who would rename themselves Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks – were inspired by popular glam rockers like T. Rex, American garage rock like the
Stooges
, and somewhat later by German groovers
Can
. When they expanded the group during the punk explosion of 1976, Nikki became singer and guitarist and Epic drummer; Nikki’s schoolmate Steve Bird (who became Jowe Head) joined on bass, neighbor Richard Earl (Biggies Books) came aboard on guitar, and buddies David Barrington (Phones Sportsmen) and John “Golden” Cockrill helped out with “occasional vocals and cacophony.”

Inspired by pioneer do-it-yourself punk band Desperate Bicycles (whose slogan was “it’s easy, it’s cheap, go and do it”), Swell Maps decided to make and independently release (on Rather Records) a single in late 1977. At 1 minute 27 seconds,
Read about Seymour
was a shriveled pop gem; an obscure, tossed-off classic. A year and a half later these unambitious part-time punks got around to recording again and released their debut album,
A Trip to Marineville
. The record combined straight punk sounds with krautrock, acid rock, and industrial elements to make one great sloppy, off-key and off-kilter, collection of sculpted noise and song. Tracks were haphazardly recorded, often created on the spot, and featured whoever happened to be around that day.

Lou Barlow, Sebadoh / Folk Implosion:

I heard Swell Maps when I was pretty young. It was cool to hear those records back then because it sort of strengthened my convictions, like “Wow, you can do this.” Even if only one person in the world goes and buys your record that you recorded on your own tape machine, at least someone did. I mean, how did I find the Swell Maps? That was really inspirational to know that someone will listen to it.

“Listening to our early records I can hear us fumbling around for a style,” Epic Soundtracks said. We weren’t a punk band; we just thought we were us, really. Because the people in the band were all into different music, it came out as a lot of things thrown together and mixed up. It confused a lot of people.” The sleeve perfectly completed the record’s disorientingly random quality, reading: “Try it at 16 rpm, 33 rpm, 45 rpm and 78 rpm! It is probably funniest at 33!! And most musical at 16!”

Tim Gone, Stereolab:

Read about Seymour
is a minute and a half long and it’s just pure independence personified. Done in a low-fi studio, it sounds amazing. Everything I like in rock dynamics. Real excitement. When I first bought
A Trip to Marineville
I must have played it a hundred timed or more, just to listen to every single second of it.

While
Marineville
received good reviews and did well on the indie charts, the band was difficult to maintain. By 1980, Epic had begun attending college in Portsmouth and Nikki had moved to London, Jowe was living in Manchester and Richard was in Bath. Still, Swell Maps continued when they could, releasing their best-known single,
Let’s Build a Car
, as well as a second album,
Swell Maps in “Jane from Occupied Europe
.
”
Both noisier and at times more tuneful, Jane showed real growth in studio editing techniques and greater instrumental range with added keyboard and saxophone.

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

The first Swell Maps 45 I bought (for no reason ‘cept what th’ fuck) was
Let’s Build a Car
which still to this day gives me a soul scorched buzz ‘n’ rush. As soon as that Nikki Sudden guitar comes slicing slabbing and all out fuzzifying off that crackling vinyl groove you know you’re gonna rock. It’s the best of both whirls: fist-in-the-heart guitar burnin’ rock and ahead-of-its-time songsmith awareness. So fuck, it was amazing. The Swell Maps had a lot to do with my upbringing, [from liner notes to
Collision Time Revisited
]

The band did a short tour of Europe, but the members soon realized they didn’t get along well enough to stay together. As Epic aptly summed up in the notes to the
Collision Time Revisited
compilation: “Formed March ‘72 – Made first record Sept. ‘77 – Self-destructed March ‘80. We grew up together but we grew apart. Anyway it was fun.”

Jowe made a few solo albums before joining celebrated English indie band Television Personalities. Richard Earl put together a solo record on his own label before quitting music. Nikki and Epic formed the Jacobites (later Nikki Sudden and the Jacobites), which had some success during the ‘80s. Sudden, who evolved into a New Romantic strummer of dark love ballads, made records solo and with Dave Kusworth. Epic became the drummer for Crime and the City Solution (which featured Simon Bonney), These Immortal Souls (with Roland Howard of the
Birthday Party
), and, briefly,
Red Crayola
. With the encouragement of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo (with whom he’d worked), Epic became a solo artist in the ‘90s and released a series of surprisingly gentle and beautiful piano ballad records. Guests on his albums included members of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Late in 1997 (a month after being interviewed for this book), Epic died of heart failure at home in London.

DISCOGRAPHY

A Trip to Marineville
(Rather / Rough Trade, 1979; Mute, 1991)
; the debut record that made an art out of sloppily compiled, all-over-the-place, punk-inspired pop.

In “Jane from Occupied Europe”
(Rather / Rough Trade, 1980; Mute, 1991)
; the second and last studio album, which showed the band still developing as it was breaking up.

Whatever Happens Next...
(Rather / Rough Trade, 1981; Mute, 1991)
; a collection of outtakes and demos from their short career.

Train out of It
(Antar, 1987; Mute, 1991)
; compilation featuring 26 singles and outtakes.

Collision Time Revisited
(Mute, 1989)
; a 27-song remastered version of the 1981
Collision Time
compilation of singles, favorites, and rarities.