“(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…
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