INTERVENTIONS IN ANY MEDIA

(The latest instalment of 'Intensify The Contradictions', a deep dive into Post-Punk which starts here.)

“(We) use every tool, every energy and any media we can get our collective hands on.” 
- John Sinclair, The White Panthers Party

“We want to use a complete environmental thing where all the senses are moved and used. We want people to get stoned on the show, not on acid and things.”
- Nik Turner (from Carol Clerk’s ‘The Saga of Hawkwind’)

For the generation which came straight after Punk, Post-Punks often seemed peculiarly pally with the Hippies. There’s two main reasons for this. First, they were similar eras. As Reynolds puts it “the post-Punk era certainly rivals the Sixties in… the way that the music seemed inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of the times.” After a Seventies thaw, the Eighties witnessed what’s come to be called the Second Cold War, a return to the threat of nuclear Armageddon and (more conceptually) the sense of a world inherently predicated on opposition and conflict. Green described Scritti Politti as “index-linked to a large social upheaval.”

Reynolds adds “there was a similar mood-blend of anticipation and anxiety, a mania for all things new and futuristic coupled with fear of what the future had in store.” Upon this coin of utopianism/ dystopianism things did spin.

And these parallels were obvious at the time. The growing conservatism marked by the elections of Thatcher and Reagan led to the concept of the SixSixSixties – the notion that the permissive society ushered in by that era had turned society rotten, and all it's times a changing now needed changing back. (Largely by tearing up the social contract. Which had been made in the mid-Forties, but hey-ho.) It had been one thing for rebel Punks to jeer at hippies back in ’76, too mellow to throw bricks. By the Eighties that meant siding with the most establishment figures.

With this Sixties underground influence came a refreshed emphasis on multi-media performance. (Plus a reaction against Punk’s fetishisation of the primacy of the live event.) The ‘happenings’ had their main root in the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests, while the Velvet Underground had their Exploding Plastic Inevitable show. Susan Sontag busily theorised about the Gesamtkunstwerk, where all works of art would come together into one. Music was already being ‘matched’ by album cover design, while bands ‘performed’ rather than just played – their look, actions and general attitude as important as the music. (If not more so.) If all media were converging, the new medium of rock music seemed a handy unification point. (Like the Twenties the Sixties are now looked back on as quaint and innocent, full of classic cars and cuddly mop-tops. But they saw themselves as cutting edge, pushing forward, arriving at the future ahead of schedule.)

But multimedia performances were also a means to get back, to the basis of art - in drum-thumping, wall-painting tribal ritual, before all the various disciplines had veered off and got separated. And the charm lay in this combination. Multimedia simultaneously offered a way forward, embracing technology and innovation, and a way back, reconnecting to the primitive.

Post-Punk inherited this attitude, with Fast Product coining the slogan “interventions in any media.” A young P. Orridge, before Throbbing Gristle or even COUM Transmissions, had joined Transmedia Explorations – a kind of British Pranksters who arranged happenings at arch-hippy hangout the UFO Club. As the Human League’s Martyn Ware put it, “the whole atmosphere around the record was as important as the music – it all came together as a piece of art.” Gerald Casale of Devo commented “the theatrics and the ideas and the staging were as important as the music.” Test Department favoured derelict spaces over ‘proper’ music venues.

In fact it not only took things further, it took things beyond where they could actually then go. A downside of being ahead of your time is that you want to start travelling on modes of transportation that haven’t actually been invented yet. Tuxedomoon and the Residents were like the Babbage engines of multimedia installation art, existing before the technology to enable such a concept so stuck with having to pretend to be bands. (Or more accurately for the Residents, they were provocateurs keen to disseminate a bunch of dubious-sounding urban myths and the easiest way to do that was to make out they were in a band.) Like the early electronic bands, most of their equipment was built or hodge-podged together themselves. And, before video, there was no medium to show the fruit of their wares outside of the live concert.

But there was an important difference between the generations. As is well known the Grateful Dead had begun as the house band for the Prankster’s Acid Test events, but soon became a headline band in their own right. And that was a telling shift. All media need to converge. But Rock music, young and vibrant, was inevitably going to push its way to the front. Unifying everything else around the music added to the sense of modernity, of being “in touch with the kids”. Post-Punk reversed this polarity, seeing multi-media as a chance to minimise the role of music in their operations.

For example, the Human League wanted to carry out a support slot for the Talking Heads as an “automated cabaret” or “cinema you can dance to”, which they themselves would watch from the audience. “It was going to be this big multimedia show”, explained Martyn Ware, almost “Exploding Plastic Inevitable level.” Too much for the Heads it was called off, and adverts amended to read “the Human League will not now be appearing.” (As if that clarified anything.) This reversal rests on a general generational shift and something central to Post-Punk, which we’ll come to…

CULTIVATE THE MISTAKE (GETTING IT WRONG ON PURPOSE)

(..being the fourth part of 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk, which starts here.)

”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)

Stay tuned for more...

FROM PROG TO ANTI-PROG (IN THE WAKE OF KING CRIMSON)

(Being the third part of 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk, which starts here.)

”There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake.” 
- Robert Fripp

"I still can’t see why people listen instead of doing it themselves.” 
- Soft Machine,’Thank You Pierre Lunaire’

If Post-Punk was ready to plunder from Dub, it would borrow from many other places too. In fact, Dub’s reductive yet polyglot instincts positively encouraged this! So it stole from everywhere, from Seventies American Punk, from Funk and Disco, from contemporary electro-acoustic composers, from minimalists, from free improvisers and drone merchants and from a then-emerging ‘world’ music. (African tribal drummers was a particular favourite.) But their second biggest musical influence was closer to home.

Punk’s Year Zero rhetoric, highly effective as a sound-bite, was soon being regurgitated as gospel by gormless music journos. To the point where many simply took it as read that early Seventies music just divided into brainless Disco and bodiless Prog.

Yet this standard model omitted much. There was a music for which you could use the catch-all term ‘anti-Prog’. It wasn’t bombastic, technocratic and obsessed with proficiency, or with stuffing itself with quotations from Classical music. Instead it was left-field, askew and omniverously creative, more idiosyncratic than ostentatious. So eclectic was it that it was hard to see it as a distinct music scene, leaving it hidden in plain sight. Yet as we shall see it had something of a regular cast, everyone within at least one degree of separation from everyone else.

King Crimson had been one of Prog’s founders. Yet, contrary to the core, once others rose in their wake they turned again. Their line-up rejigged, with only guitarist Robert Fripp remaining from the originating group, they went on to make a trilogy quite different in sound - ‘Lark’s Tongues in Aspic’ (1973), ‘Starless and Bible Black’ and ’Red’ (both 1974). Fripp was soon calling prog a “prison”, a King-turned-republican whose stance effectively pre-echoed Lydon by leaving the scene he’d done so much to spawn.

As a sign of changed priorities, on the track ’Trio’, drummer Bill Bruford figured there was nothing for him to add - so didn’t. For which he was credited for “admirable restraint”, not a phrase oft-heard in Prog circles. Musically, these albums influenced Metal’s frontiers more than Post-Punk. But their effect, at least for here, lay in their no longer sounding Prog. The seemingly automatic link between progressive music and Prog music was broken. And then…

Fripp went on to play on another slightly later trilogy, Eno’s first solo albums - ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’, ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’ (both ’74) and ‘Another Green World’ the next year. Despite that ‘solo’ tag they became a nexus point for this nameless scene, as well as Fripp bringing in members of Roxy Music, Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, plus Robert Wyatt and John Cale. (Plus Phil Collins. Nothing is ever perfect.)

In almost linear opposition to Prog’s cult of the virtuoso, Eno himself was keen to establish his status as a non-musician, proudly downplaying his own musical role on the sleeves. He was a classic case of the person whose Art School background precisely qualified him for a career in music. He’d played in the Portsmouth Symphonia, an orchestra anyone could join provided they had no proficiency in their chosen instrument. (They guested on one track.)

Sessions went ahead quite spontaneously, with Eno really only arranging encounters, which he’d afterwards treat to the point they’d became unrecognisable to the players. And often the results, on a track like ’Third Uncle’ sounds like Post-Punk arriving four years early. The albums became influential enough in Post-Punk circles for A Certain Ratio to take their name from a lyric.

Similarly another member of Eno’s musical pool, Robert Wyatt, had started out in Soft Machine. Who were in many way the missing link from the Sixties Underground to Prog. (Perhaps more so than Pink Floyd.) But his solo albums ‘Rock Bottom’ (1974) and 'Ruth is Stranger Than Richard’ (1975) were clear-cut anti-prog, perhaps above all through their playful attitude, somehow free-form and singalong simultaneously.

Against Prog’s fancifully airbrushed covers, these came with naive-art paintings by Wyatt’s wife Alfreda. The songs, often seemingly written from a child perspective, with Ivor Cutler bobbing up at unexpected moments, can feel like the soundtrack to a very, very strange children’s TV show. Eno inevitably appeared on the second, playing “direct inject anti-jazz ray gun.”

Meanwhile, across the water, the German music scene notoriously dubbed Krautrock by us gauche Brits was equally influential. It may be best summed up by this quote from Faust’s Jean-Herve Peron: ”We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock 'n' roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics. We had the urge of saying something completely different.” (For some speculation on how such a scene could arise there and then, this time taking David Stubbs as my spirit guide, see here.) Crucially for Post-Punk, it’s way of making music new was stripping it back down to its roots.

Bands like Can and Faust took to touring Britain frequently, finding the reception better than back home. Seeds were being sewn. Bowie’s influential Berlin trilogy (of course featuring Fripp and Eno) further cemented Anglo-German relations in alternative music circles. Robert Lloyd once said the break-up of the Prefects came from half the band wanting to be the Sex Pistols, and the other half Faust. And that was doubtless true of many a Punk band, save the Pistols themselves where part of the band wanted to be Can. (John Lydon’s original post-Pistols plan, prior to forming PIL, had been to become their singer.)

Yet the twist was all this was really over by the time Punk had arrived. King Crimson disbanded in ’74, Roxy in ’76. (In their case they later reunited, but as quite a different outfit who fall outside the scope of this tale.) Robert Wyatt’s last original-run album came in 1975, the same year Eno turned to ambient. So Post-Punk had the best of both worlds; pioneers to pick up from, yet at the same time a clear stage to straddle.

And yet by turn Post-Punk came to back-influence both anti-Prog and Krautrock, until the dividing lines often seemed dissolved. From 1979 Recommended Records started to re-release Faust, feeding but also reflecting a developing interest. In 1981 a recently reformed King Crimson released ’Discipline’, which sounded little like either their Prog or anti-Prog incarnations, but quite a lot like Post-Punk. Wyatt returned to release a series of singles from the late Seventies on, where the long free-form numbers became stripped-down songs, virtually miniatures, not just minimal but seemingly casually thrown-up. (Later collected on ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’, 1972.) He was no longer on Prog’s haven Virgin but the epicentre of indie - Rough Trade. And if Lydon never sang with Can, Jah Wobble got to record with ex-members, as Eno did with Cluster.

Up next! Mistakes...

TAKE IT AWAY! (DUB AS DECONSTRUCTION)

(Part 2 of 'Intensify The Contradictions', a deep dive into Post-Punk. First part here.)

“Dub is minimalist by definition: Reggae music deconstructed then rebuilt in deep echo and reverb… to emphasise the hypnotic power of its repeating, resounding bass and drum.”
- Chris M. Slawecki  

“My own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”
- Samuel Beckett

“The nature of dub was the holes.”
- Mark Stewart of The Pop Group ('The Wire', No. 293)

In short, by ’78 Punk’s leathers had started to feel like a straight-jacket, a form of fundamentalism taking rock back to its foot-stomping origins. This felt like a cop-out, a retreat to the already-trod.

But at the same time much of the suspect Seventies music had been additional, hyphenated… Progressive Rock, Jazz Rock, Rock Operas, concertos for group and orchestra etc… as if Rock was mere meat and potatoes needing extra, more exotic ingredients poured over in order to titivate it. With enemies to the fore and aft, which way to go?

The guide out of this impasse was Dub. Keith Levene latter commented “those Jamaican dub plates fascinated me, because they had nothing to do with accepted structures and formats at that time. Nothing to do with the blues or rock music. Those dubs sounded so strange, like music from another planet…. it takes a real discipline to actually subtract from the spaces rather than add all the time.”

And the last sentence is key. Magically, dub was subtractive without being restrictive. It was quite literally the art of taking things out, stripping elements from a track and occasionally throwing them back in, just to see how it sounded. Or maybe throwing in something from a completely different track, them mangling them all with studio trickery or making up your own elements.

So to Post-Punk ears, Punk’s failure had been to not strip things back far enough, getting to guitar/bass/drums then stopping arbitrarily like a British workman hitting break-time. Confronted by the famous ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ slogan – “here’s a chord, here’s another, now form your own band!” – Throbbing Gristle’s Peter Christopherson complained “but why do you need that many?”

Some took this reductionist approach literally. Plentiful are the songs covered in this book which really did only use one chord. Still others, Throbbing Gristle among them, got by with less. (Not a joke! Not hyperbole! Not an imaginary story!)

But the real point was to apply the Dub sensibility philosophically. As Reynolds says of PiL (perhaps the defining Post-Punk band), they “assimilated… the dub aesthetic of subtraction without ever resorting to obviously dubby production effects like reverb and echo.” Despite Wobble’s rumbling bass, a less than clued-up listener might even have missed the influence entirely.

British Punk had always loved reggae in any form. Before their own records had been released, it was usually Reggae that got played over the PA before the bands came on. But it had been a hopeless unrequited white-boy love, forever behind the beat. Most Punk attempts to play reggae had been both literal and excruciating, for example the Clash’s cod-awful cover of ‘Police and Thieves’ (which Lee Perry detested). This borrowing of a Reggae sensibility was new.

Striving to escape Punk’s genre trap, Post-Punk had no unified sound but a diversity of styles and approaches. Yet underneath these there was a common underlying philosophy of deconstruction, which came through dub reductivism. While the Slits couldn’t have sounded more Dubby if they tried (and doubtless they did), the clipped austerity of Wire and Gang of Four or the gothic howl of the Banshees couldn’t have sounded less Dubby. Yet both bands had started with a quite conscious process of removal and reduction.

“It was a case of us knowing what we didn’t want, throwing out every cliché”, commented Banshee Steve Severin. “Never having a guitar solo, never ending a sound with a loud drum smash.” Wire’s (quite literal) list of ins and outs was assisted by a lucky accident. When the original guitarist was waylaid by a broken leg, the rest found that the same songs simply sounded better without him. “All the fat, all the meander suddenly disappeared,” noted Bruce Gilbert. Colin Newman commented “the idea was not to do Punk [but something] more reduced... How do you get to the next stage? You take elements away.”

Skipping his parts inevitably shortened songs, even from Punk’s two minutes fifty nine. Almost all of their first album comes in under the two-minute mark; too quick, as the paleo-Punks discovered, for pogoing. (So, in a move which would become typical, they took to hurling cans.)

Gang of Four’s Andy Gill commented how they’d replace guitar solos with “anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole.” What you took out had just as much a presence as what you left in. More generally, Factory’s producer Martin Hannett, in many ways the Phil Spector of Post-Punk, was a big Dub fan who strove to create a sense of space in music – “deserted public places, empty office blocks.”

The other main input Post-Punk transfused from Dub was a playful attitude. Dub always prized the spliff in hand above the masterplan. “Play was very important,” commented Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. Or as it was put by Captain Beefheart (another Post-Punk touchstone), “I play music. Too many work it.” This sense of play cross-fed with a general (if largely undefined) left-libertarian attitude, with its emphasis on the liberation of desire and disdain for the hairshirt militancy of (the numerous) Trot factions. The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart cited “the French ultra-left, the Situationist International, Artaud and the dissident surrealists, the Dutch Provos, 60s and 70s fringe groups.”

This led to a massive emphasis on spontaneity as the mother of invention, on seizing the moment, on doing something once and moving on. It led to very little emphasis on making sure experiments actually came off, or on creating a back catalogue of lasting worth. In short, you weren’t likely to worry about the risk of failure if you weren’t engaged by the prospect of ‘success’ either.

This may seem odd to some, for Post-Punk now has a reputation for dourness. And it’s true the phrases ‘Joy Division’ and ‘barrel of laughs’ may not immediately feel like natural bedfellows. But ‘playful’ shouldn’t be taken to mean simply ‘entertaining’ or ‘good time’. Watch any child and you’ll soon realise what a serious business play is. Gang of Four sarcastically titled their main album ’Entertainment’, while Fast Product label coined the slogan ‘difficult fun’ – perfectly encapsulating the distinction.

Moreover if, as already said, Post-Punk’s provocation was in part just one great big practical joke, it was one which relied for effect on being delivered deadpan – on leaving the audience edgily unsure of how to take things. My research isn’t exhaustive, but I’m not sure that a single participant ever broke into a smile between 1978 and 1982. Not in public, at any rate.

Further instalments to follow... 

INTENSIFY THE CONTRADICTIONS

(A TREATISE ON POST-PUNK BADLY DISGUISED AS A REVIEW OF SIMON REYNOLD’S ‘RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN: POST-PUNK 1978-1984’)

INTRODUCTION

As the sub-head might suggest, this rant isn’t so much a review of Simon Reynolds’ book as my own parallel spin on events - sailing merrily along on it’s own subjectivity without feeling the need for support or substantiation. While Reynolds delves into specifics, tracking the development of bands and scenes, this is more of a thematic and philosophical overview.

And despite Reynold’s Anglo-Americanism, I intend to concentrate on the UK scene I know best… though I break my own rule as soon as I feel like it. I also won’t bother sourcing quotes much. Unless otherwise attributed assume they come from either Reynolds’ book or his website. Histories of Post-Punk shouldn’t be tidy anyway, should they?

But if you really can’t face it all, here’s a digest version:

Part One: A bunch of scruffy squat-dwelling malcontents find a way to combine their twin hobbies – not liking music, and liking winding people up. (Bluffer's Note: Another term for this is ’Brechtian Alienation Device’.)

Part Two: After a few years of dwelling in dank squats, they discover they like making money more than they like not liking music. 

…and in the unlikely event you’ve never heard any Post-Punk, a playlist I put together lies here.

PART ONE: MINIMUM ROCK ‘N’ ROLL (POST-PUNK ANTI-MUSIC)

“It was like life or death. I’ve never ever come across that intensity, where every gig was the last you were gonna do… or the first you’d ever done.”
- Paul Hanley of The Fall, (G2, 19/01/04)

“We’ve just been waiting for it to fall,
We oppose all rock and roll.”
Subway Sect, ‘Rock & Roll, Even’

1. SONGS TO PROTEST ABOUT

“To me the Pistols were the last rock ’n’ roll band. They weren’t the beginning of anything.” 
- Keith Levine of Public Image Limited

“It was very much our intention to be antagonistic... confronted with audiences full of Sid Vicious lookalikes and skinheads, and thinking ‘Right, you cunts, we’re gonna play a really slow, boring song for ten minutes and really piss you off.’... Just about everyone hated it. We had some terrible reactions, but we used to thrive on it.” 
- Robert Lloyd of The Prefects

I was first drawn to this book by the Orange Juice-quoting title, which seemed to distill the whole Post-Punk spirit down into six pithy words. But if six is still too many for you, let’s lop a full third off and instead quote Mark Perry – “Let’s fuck the rules.” …but more of that anon.

Unlike America or most other countries, in Britain Punk’s underground years were short-lived and it was pretty soon splashing attention-getting expletives on the cover of the tabloids. Which gave it the image of an explosion, big, brash and quickly over.

Now fools will tell you the original moment was the thing, like history’s made of bright but brief big bangs, after which nothing’s left but the clearing up and the cashing in. Yet this is the excuse of the also-ran, blaming his failings on an accident of fate which meant he got there too late to participate. As Reynolds puts it “this book is for – and about – the people who were not there at the right time and place… but who nevertheless refused to believe it was all over and done with before they’d had a chance to join in.” Think about your physics. What really happened after the Big Bang? Everything happened after the Big Bang.

In a similar fashion, hip hop kids wax nostalgic for a “back in the day” they never saw. Now Grandmaster Flash was great, but Public Enemy and Wu Tang Clan were greater. Neither King Tubby nor Lee Perry were there at the dawning days of Reggae, but they never let it hold them back overmuch. Human developments don’t spring fully formed out of the brows of pioneers and innovators. They’re cumulative. As Newton put it, you see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. And in an explosion lots of stuff that initially hangs out together is soon flying out in different directions at accelerating speeds.

Post-Punk, rather than meaning “what happened after Punk” as the name might literally imply, was actually but one of a bewildering array of such flying tangents. (There was New Wave, Anarcho-Punk, Street Punk, Positive Punk and almost certainly others.) But the plain fact is that out of all those tangents it’s the one which traveled furthest.

After the initial explosion, many felt Punk had happily settled down into a ‘new sound’. The next musical fashion had successfully replaced the last, we knew where we were again. But others saw Punk’s apparent success as its failure, it had reinvigorated a music business it had set out to destroy. After the Sixties, major labels had coined slogans like ‘The Man can’t bust our music’ and ‘the revolutionaries are on CBS’, now they were doing the same.

Anarcho-Punk saw the solution to this as doubling down, making music that was more rough-edged and abrasive, more politically charged, but above all more sweary. Crass’ head honcho Penny Rimbaud was wont to straightfacedly claim things like “rock and roll is revolution, it ain’t no entertainment”. The Clash’s problem had been to have too many tunes and not enough swear words. This time we’d be so spiky the system would never be able to digest us.

(Disclaimer: Crass themselves may have been a more complex case. They quite consciously emulated Dada, frequently used song form to taunt their own audience and would only perform under a single 40 watt household bulb – a Brechtian alienation device if ever there was. But with few exceptions their proliferation of disciples dumped the more interesting aspects of their teachings in favour of dogma. More of me ranting about the ranters here.) 

Whereas Post-Punk diagnosed a wider malaise - Punk’s failure was indicative of Rock’s failure. It had trued to revitalise a corpse, and so had only prolonged its lurching zombie existence. Rock’s tired moves and stale gestures may have had some limited success once, when Elvis first went on the TV. Now everyone had long since learnt to expect them. Yet what had long since been subsumed by the entertainment industry was still maintaining the fiction it was the music of outlaws. What had once felt like enabling devices had become a set of stultifying cliches, to be cast off. (And its remarkable how much more true all this than when it was first said, with a rock press that’s principally nostalgic and where bands and tribute bands can be barely separable.)

Rock fans forever fixate on terms like ‘real’ or ‘authentic’, by which they seem to mean something like ‘unmediated’. Rock music supposedly allows for direct expression from the band to the listener, without constraint or diversion through social channels. In the words of the song, direct from my heart to you. And of course this is absurd, expression is mediated by definition. Why pretend otherwise? Why not make music which expressly points this out? Lapses and concessions which Punk had papered over were now to be played up, to (as Reynolds phrases it) “intensify the contradictions”.

So the attitude to rock music became that false friends are the worst enemies. In John Lydon’s now-famous rant: "It's dead. It's a disease. It's a plague. It's been going on for too long. It's history. It's vile. It's not achieving anything, it's just regression. They play rock 'n' roll at airports… It's too limited. It is too much like a structure, a church.” Josef K wouldn’t even talk to their audience during their gigs, as that perpetuated a bogus camaraderie. Instead they used pre-recorded announcements. ’Rockist’ was soon the slur of choice.

If Rock was supposedly about spontaneity and gut instinct, Post-Punk exulted in cerebralism. Richard Hell had written “I hate Rock’n’Roll, I’d rather read a book”, but as a joke, a provocation. The Post-Punks walked the walk, with Talking Heads managing to freak out notorious rockers the Ramones by their habit of reading books on the road. The Human League’s first single had the line “we’re much cleverer than you”, while the Fall opened gigs with the similar taunt “the difference between you and us is that we have brains.” “Stupid” became an almost generic insult from the Psychedelic Furs.

David Byrne, Howard Devoto and all of Devo deliberately cultivated an awkward ‘geek chic’ image, at jerky odds with Rockist notions of ‘coolness’. With references to New Wave Science Fiction, radical political theory and cultural studies, Post-Punk virtually came with a reading list.

And Post-Punk not only rebelled against this fresh conformity, but saw in it the opportunity to piss off a whole new audience – all their former friends. In an off-the-cuff yet era-defining comment, Steve Albini said he saw no challenge in winding up squares - all the fun came from offending hipsters. Before Cabaret Voltaire had played a gig or even come to think of themselves as a band they’d drive round Sheffield, broadcasting their sonic offerings out of the back of a van. “Just to wind people up, really” Richard Kirk commented, “that’s what we started out trying to do.” Julian Cope’s early band A Shallow Madness “didn’t make music at all but just got on other people’s nerves”. Pere Ubu’s David Thomas noted the through-line, observing “we were fundamentally perverse”.

And this contrarianism shouldn’t be seen as ancillary to anything else. The desire to give the customer not what they wanted was front and centre. No less than three Post-Punk tracks work as metaphors for their own reception by likening career suicide to actual death missions, This Heat's 'Not Waving but Drowning', Pere Ubu's 'Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo' and Alternative TV's 'The Good Missionaries'. (“And he died a good death/ But the people were still disappointed/ And disjointed”.)

But none of this had a catchy name until …And The Native Hipsters released their second album, titled ’Songs To Protest About’. Which wasn’t until 2006, and it’s entirely possible they delayed so long just to be annoying.

Yet this driving need to get up people’s noses had been an essential part of Punk from the beginning. In this way the apparently innocuous term ‘Post-Punk’ is a misnomer. A fairer world would see Post-Punk as the continuation of pure Punk spirit, and let every other spoke and blind alley lumber itself with a hyphen. (Here I pretty much lump all the other tribes and tangents together under the label paleo-Punks.)

Hence the two characters who launch this book were two such hastily accelerating particles, who had once seemed key Punk players. Johnny Rotten’s sneer had launched a thousand copycats, but by 1978 he’d grown sick of it, ditched the Pistols, changed his name back to Lydon and formed a brand new band – Public Image Limited. “Be a Punk!” he later taunted. “Join the army!” Trumping him, Howard Devoto upped and left the Buzzcocks on the eve of their fame, within six months of their first gig. “I’m living in this movie”, he penned, “but it doesn’t move me.” And with that he was off.

A perfect microcosm of the way Post-Punk wanted to be heard was Sounds’ review of Nurse With Wound’s debut. Instead of the normal stars system, it was awarded five question marks – the perplexed reviewer aware it was extremely something, yet clueless as to what. Let’s look at those question marks in turn…