”Honour thy error as a hidden intention”
-Brian Eno
One way Post-Punk did stand in opposition to Prog was its suspicion of musicianship. Krautrock had often, and Anti-Prog occasionally, seen spontaneity as an escape route from the regular. But this active suspicion was new. Musicianship was at times seen as a necessary evil, but more often just an evil.
Strategies and devices abounded to dispel its polluting professionalism. If Keith Levine went wrong while playing, he’d immediately lose interest in the piece and switch to exploring the ‘mistake’. For PiL’s ’Flowers of Romance’ album he gathered as many weird and exotic instruments as he could lay hands on, simply because no-one in the band had a clue how to play them – “turning total ineptitude into an artistic advantage”. In time this would degenerate into Indie cutesiness. But the notion back then wasn’t that sloppy playing had some quirky charm, it was that getting yourself lost took you off the standard map. Mistakes were deprogramming.
Pere Ubu’s gameplan was to “put unique people together. Unique people will play uniquely whether or not they know how to play.” Some bands followed the Magic Band model, where a central non-musical guru/ dictator held sway over some musical help. Mark E Smith edged out all the original Fall members and just replaced them with the roadies. “Musicians are the lowest form of life” he commented, and later boasted he could take anybody and “mould them” into the shapes he needed. Gang of Four used to pay their roadies double what they gave themselves, for providing the actual labour.
Factory’s producer Martin Hannett seems to have seen musicians the way Hitchcock saw actors, as “cattle”. His un-Punk insistence on recording each instrument separately may have been merely a schoolteacherish trick to isolate each player in turn, in order to pick on them the better.
Even within the necessary evil of musicality, levelling forces could be brought to bear. Many bands operated as collectives, with gigs as “open rehearsals” and scant soloing. Vic Goddard described Subway Sect live as “just practising in front of a load of people.” This literal lack of ‘leads’ led to the undermining of the traditional mixing-desk dominance of guitar and vocals. Sometimes instruments played at an equal level, at others it was even reversed and bass and drums were pushed to the fore. (Instruments were often swapped around between songs anyway.) Scritti Politti took it a stage further, extending band membership and stage space to anyone who happened to be staying in their overcrowded squat – even though this normally outnumbered the actual musicians.
Sixties and Seventies musicians had built up cults around themselves, of the ‘Clapton is God’ variety. Post-Punks tried to dispel such things. Dave Allen insisted, “Gang of Four doesn’t believe in the individual.” Asked to release a press photo of themselves, the Mekons instead dressed up a puppet and wrote across it ‘No Personalities Emerge’.
Simultaneously, the process of creating and recording music was blown up so as to be de-mystified. “People exert control through mystification,” explained Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis. Both Scritti Politti and Desperate Bicycles decorated their sleeves with information about recording, even down to the phone numbers of pressing plants.
Electronic music was another angle. The Human League, “definitely on a mission to destroy rock’n’roll”, explicitly included in their ‘mission statement’ the stricture “no standard instrumentation”. Though a handy way of sabotaging rock gestures such as guitar heroics, synths’ appeal mostly came out of the popular notion that they generated push-button music, so easy as to be somehow cheating – making music was no longer skilled labour. This built on the pioneering work of electronic composers like Luc Ferrari, who’d said “my intention was to pave the way for the amateur, much as people take snapshots during vacations.”
Another Rockist notion that needed knocking down was the emphasis on energy and vitality, as if they were inherent qualities to be tapped into. Typically, Punk had merely upped the ante on this. In his Rotten days, Lydon had perpetually screamed at his audience “get off your arse!” as if the notion had by itself some form of moral conviction. Reynolds’ book opens, appropriately, with the Pistols’ last gig, the self-defined “lazy bastard” unable to get up off the floor, intoning the lyrics to Iggy’s ’I’m Bored’ while sounding… well, bored.
Much of his future career was based here. Amusingly, Reynolds reads great significance into the long PiL track ’Fodderstompf’, while openly conceding (as the band intoned on the track) that they “were only trying to finish the album with the minimum amount of effort.” A later number was named after Phenagen sleeping pills. Lydon happily boasted of his idleness, providing a week’s diary to pop Bible ‘Smash Hits’, with entries like “the only day I left the house. I went to the off-license. That’s all I did.” Similarly, for Magazine’s first ’Top of the Pops’ appearance, Howard Devoto painted his face white and refused to move.
Reynolds rightly raises the Brechtian influence on Post-Punk. My bid for pseuds corner would be that the lethargic anti-star persona was a Brechtian assault on the role of the performer as an entertainer; the person whose ‘job’ is to act as foreman of the crowd, an ambassador for the entertainment industry. Lydon’s lethargy may have been as much an act as his earlier Rotten rantings of course, but that’s part of the point. By deliberately doing what the rock star isn’t supposed to do, he was drawing attention to the artifice of what the rock star does.
However, not only performances but the music itself revelled in such lethargy. For example Bowie’s Berlin-era vocals are often insouciant and lustreless, like placeholder vocals that just got left in. He later admitted it came from not having much to say at the time, in fact the single ‘Sound and Vision’ is precisely about not having much to say. Musically, unlike a ‘classic’ rock album like ’Sergeant Pepper’ which shines with the impression that months of work went into polishing it, ’Low’ sounds like it was thrown together quickly and casually. With PiL this is exactly the way their albums were made, improvised first takes often reaching vinyl. You couldn’t even call it last-minute because such lethargic methods meant that release dates had to constantly be put back.
In fact this is the way most Post-Punk recordings sounded, like off-the-cuff remarks to be uttered and then discarded. Krautrock bands like Faust had wanted their albums to look and sound like bootlegs, bulletins of work in progress, rather than finished and polished products to be prized and revered. Post-Punk, as so often, fitted right into this slipstream; most bands not recording more than one or two takes. Many tracks sound like they’re laid down as a substitute, the next-best thing to not laying down that track. (Yes I’m saying this was – at least in part –deliberate and yes it is a good thing!)
Having outed Rock as part of the entertainment industry, Post-Punk went on to taint it with all the evils of the dominant culture. On albums such as ’Third Reich ‘n’ Roll’, the Residents made it not the sound not of rebellion but of control. Vic Godard claimed it was for “releasing people’s tension so they can go back to work the following morning”, whereas music could be “a really good secondary education system... teaching [people] to educate themselves.”
Lydon used the cover of the first PiL album to reverse the Pistol’s rebel pose. On a record store shelf largely full of poor imitations of ’Bollocks’, all straining to look ‘real’ and ’from the street’, PiL looked like product - the cover parodying and imitating mainstream magazines such as ’Time’ and ’Vogue’ while the members appeared neatly dressed and coiffured. The band’s name was a similar provocation; ‘look like a corporation, act like a collective’ made for a neat reversal of Rock’s spurious claims to radicalism whilst creating more profit for multinationals. Throbbing Gristle similarly likened themselves not to the Doors or the Stones but to Tescos or ‘Government Agencies’, insisting “it’s a campaign, it has nothing to do with art.”
In fact this was probably taken furthest with Industrial, and by Throbbing Gristle in particular. Their (in the loosest sense of the term) singer Genesis P. Orridge would use tracks like ’Discipline’ (“let’s get some discipline in here!”) to identify himself not with history’s rebels but the worst kind of leader or power-monger – Charlie Manson or Jim Jones. Befitting Post-Punk’s straight-faced status, he delighted in maintaining a disquieting ambiguity about where he stood on all this.
For others the problem to be overcome was not just Punk as a genre or Rock as a style – the problem was music. If Punk had wanted to destroy the music industry, in it’s purest form Post-Punk sought to demolish music itself. Music was thought of as cultural blinkers, a barrier to the ability to hear sound which needed throwing open. Despite the popular perception of Neubauten as perennial metal-bashers, often they did make music from instruments – merely from breaking instruments, sawing and smashing them up with a fury bordering on the iconoclastic. Their goal was “to go beyond tonality, beyond even notes, and reach the point where everything and nothing could be perceived as music.” Similarly, Modernist composer Edgar Varese had already claimed music was defunct, and needed replacing by “organised sound”.
Perhaps there was no real stopping-point. A holy grail to Post-Punk was music that had a direct physical effect upon the listener, akin to the tribal notion of music as drug. There’s urban myths about both Throbbing Gristle and PiL emitting sub-lows which caused their audience to shit themselves; amusing, but unlikely to be true. But TG’s successor Psychic TV did experiment with infrasound-music, to create a similar (if less extreme) effect. The appeal lay in giving music a direct practical usage, neither a token of commodity fetishism nor a mere messenger-boy in the service of delivering ‘radical’ lyrics.
However… though Post-Punk had ridiculed Punk’s easy assumption that music had an innate ability to be a radicalising social force, that it was inherently unassimilatable, it never actually abandoned the notion that this was possible. Rock music had become decadent, cancerous - at the same time as it insisted on its youthful virility. The cancerous cells needed cutting out, with ruthless excisions. But however severe the surgery you perform the operation in the hope the patient will survive.
Music (or if you prefer, ‘organised sound’) was still regarded as an incubator for not just alternative ideas but alternative practice. Music was intended as a kind of dub remix of reality, stripping out every common-sense assumption. “We started challenging everything” recalls the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, “right down to the core of personal relationships, the things between the audience and the band”.
Participants recall today how much the process changed themselves. Not always for the better. Una Baines today regards the Fall’s determination to “break down every barrier – musical, personal, mental” as the source of her two nervous breakdowns. (G2, 5/1/06)
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