FUTURES NEVER LAST

(...beginning Part Two of 'Intensify the Contradictions', moving on from Post-Punk itself to its influence on New Pop. First part starts here.)

“The movement was successful in it’s details and a failure in its essentials... Our aim was not to establish a glorious place for ourselves in the annals of art and literature but to change the world. This was our essential purpose and we completely failed.
- Luis Bunel on Surrealism

“We act out all the stereotypes, try to use them as decoys,
As we become shining examples of the system we set out to destroy” 

- Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, ‘Famous And Dandy (Like Amos and Andy)’ 

1. GREY TO GOLD (NEW POP REDISCOVERS THE MAINSTREAM)

“I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless; the poison is in the sugar” 
Stanislaw Lec

“...and he likes ABC!”
The Fall, ‘CREEP’ 

Just like the Eighties, Reynolds’ book is split in two. And just like the Eighties, the first half makes a whole lot more sense than the second. Though he calls this second section ‘New Pop and New Rock’, he nails his colours to the mast early on. Almost all his examples of New Pop are celebratory, almost all those of New Rock negative. In a (website-only) footnote over inclusion, we’re told the Psychedelic Furs are struck out because they ‘went Rock’. Which they undoubtedly did, but if that retrospectively devalues their earlier albums you can’t help but wondering what would be the result if they’d ‘gone Pop’.

Reynolds’ celebration of New Pop is largely taken from a 1980 ’NME’ article by Paul Morley, which coined the term. Once a Post-Punk champion Morley now came to dismiss it as dour and self-marginalising, in need of transmuting into something bright and enticing - grey must be gold. He talks of heading “towards an overground brightness… no longer is there an acceptance of the cobwebbed corner.” These two sets of antonyms - grey into colour, margins against centre - will recur again and again. And Reynolds becomes captivated by the process through which “pop culture works through a kind of oscillating internal pendulum, swinging back and forth between extremes”.

In this way he literally throws a curveball into his narrative. The first half is linear, concerned with progression and advancement, forging a new art for a new world. Songs themselves are forever being whittled down and sharpened, pointed in about every sense of the word. The second half is cyclic, with music forever seesawing from one point to its opposite and back again. This alone seems pretty uninteresting.

However he adds a twist - portraying New Pop as simultaneously the antithesis and the apotheosis of Post-Punk. He carefully constructs a causal narrative where Post-Punk was the incubator of some wild radical ideas, which New Pop then smuggled into the mainstream under that lick of gold paint. He writes how “they all coated their music in a patina of commercial gloss” in “a strategy of entryism (aka ‘the sugared pill’).”

Handily summarising this second half in the second paragraph of his back cover blurb, Reynolds writes: “The [Post-Punk] spirit of ‘constant change’ continued and mutated with the New Pop of the early Eighties… all of whom originally came out of Punk, but who playfully embraced glamour and video in order to propel their bright ideas into the heart of the mainstream.”

All of whom? Not every New Pop act had started out as Post-Punk, swapping the grey mac for the gold lame jacket. Considerable space is devoted to, for example, ABC. For who that isn’t true at all. Though there are counter-cases, among them the Human League, Scritti Politti and Orange Juice.

But this risks collapsing important differences. For Orange Juice, New Pop was merely a hop, skip and a jump away. But for Scritti Politti rejecting Punk autonomy for chart-friendliness involved a screeching changing of gears. Ironically, this sharp right turn is precisely what makes it a tale to tell. As this seems to be the nub of the book, let’s focus on that.

Reynolds portrays New Pop a way for Post-Punk to escape its anti-Rockist dilemmas. Truth to tell, Post-Punk had always had an ambiguous relationship to Pop. When Lydon had intoned “the cassette played… poptones!” he couldn’t have sounded more scathing. But, for example, the Pop Group were so called partly to provoke and mislead straight rock fans, but also out of a genuine love of pop music. The band had met through being ‘funkateers’ who only later discovered such a thing as Punk. (Stewart later commented “we really thought we were funky, but we couldn’t play very well and we played out of time, so people thought we were avant-garde.”) Pop was also seen as a way to incorporate black music into Punk’s white-boy palette, adding Soul, Funk and (later) Hip-hop.

And New Pop was not just championed by music critics but developed into a doctrine, often called Poptimism. The selling point of which, apart from it’s thrilling ‘newness’ and overlap with the then-similarly-new field of Post-Modernism, was that it seemed to do away with the problems anti-Rockism had uncovered. If Rockism feigned a spurious authenticity Poptimism would celebrate appearance. If Rockism valued spontaneity and self-expression (gathered up under the term “rocking out”), Poptimism celebrated considered gestures and songwriting polish. Art was artifice. How could it be anything else? Goodbye to the Clash, hello to ABC.

But this is not doing away with or resolving anything, it’s merely flipping the coin we already hold. Rockism and Poptimism are merely the two sides of that debased coin, in a currency that no longer feels current. Just as Dada had been anti-art, art against itself, Post-Punk existed to express those dilemmas. It made Rock’s central tenets problematic, while withholding offering any solutions. Its aim was to prick Rock’s naïve self-belief, to instil in it a little necessary self-criticism. Rock was not to be escaped, but attacked.

Besides, dichotomy thinking tends to prove false and Rockism versus Poptimism is a classic example. The Rolling Stones could rock out on stage. But they were also great songwriters. ’You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, as we commonly think of it, is a studio creation not the work of a live band which happened to get recorded.

This narrow focus also ignores other developments, or bends them out of shape to insert them into this framework. Parallel to New Pop, a parallel path opened up that evaded Rock not by progressing past but jumping back before it.

This was most linked to Post-Punk with the second Subway Sect album, ’Songs For Sale’ (1982) in which the ever-contrary buggers took to lounge suits and Swing. Driving away the grey macs without gaining any other audience, it sank without trace on release. But other iterations had more success. The same year Paul Weller left the Jam, surely one of the tightest and most effective Rock bands of the era, and with the zeal of the converted formed the continentally chic Style Council. He spoke of his “hatred of the rock myth and the rock culture", relabelled gigs ‘Council Meetings’ and exulted the virtues of cappuccino over beer.

The same year also saw the first Everything But the Girl single, the Cole Porter cover ’Night And Day’, and the debut album by Carmel. All this is both more interesting to talk about and more enjoyable to listen to than ABC. But strangely its sidelined by Reynolds.

Though sometimes referred to by the terrible tag Sophisti-Pop, this was in practice often subsumed under New Pop. Yet it was something else. Pop tends to be of the moment, exulting in ephemera, uninterested in history. Classic music was not in the frame. And that was enhanced by the times. There was a sense back then that even hit singles, once they’d inevitably fallen back down the charts simply vanished from memory, replaced by fresher goods, that the latest was inevitably the best.

This didn’t have the same basis. Post-Punk saw Rock as requiring emergency surgery, cut out the cancer and hope enough of the patient was left that he lived. Sophisti-Pop (still hatin’ that name) saw it as a childish thing to put away, alongside Action Man and Lego. All that shouty, chest-beating stuff was inherently adolescent, and it was about time we all grew up and got into something smarter. Step back to leap forward. In that, it was closer to Post-Punk than New Pop.

But, to swing back to the point, if Post-Punkers had ‘gone Pop’, to claim any kind of continuity at all they’d have to be ‘within and against’ Pop in the same way as they had Rock. Whether this is the way it happened, we’ll go on to see…

INTO THE ANTI (DADA RESURRECTED)

(...being the latest instalemnt in 'Intensify the Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk, which starts here)

“Let everyone proclaim that we have a great work of destruction and negativity to accomplish. Sweep and clean. The cleansing of the fellow will take place after a period of total madness and aggression, the mark of a world left for too long in the hands of bandits who are tearing apart and destroying the centuries”.
- Tristran Tzara, Dada manifesto, 1918

”Dada was a sort of nihilism to which I am still very sympathetic. It was a way to get out of a state of mind – to avoid being influenced by one’s immediate environment or by the past, to get away from clichés –to get free.”
- Marcel Duchamp

“Anti art was just the start”
- X Ray Spex, ‘I Am A Poseur’

So, as seen, Post-Punk borrowed from Modernism as widely as it could grasp. But some movements were more equal than others - and there was a special emphasis on Dada. How do you rip up Rock’s rulebook without writing your own to get lumbered with? The answer lay in its empowering negativity, being inside and against music the way their forebears had with art. Before PiL had been formed or even named, Lydon was already insisting they’d be “anti music of any kind”.

And this wasn’t too surprising. The early Eighties were in many ways similar to the inter-war years when those movements flourished. If we’ve already looked at their similarities to the Sixties, they were perhaps even closer to the Thirties - with a combination of deep recession and a resurgent far right who’d disrupt gigs as often as left/liberal political meetings. Reynolds recounts how Scritti Politti’s squat was but a few doors up from notorious Nazi band Skrewdriver.

There was a sense of utopian dreams not just unmaterialised but actually dashed. Though Reynolds perhaps overplays the importance of the near-simultaneous rightist victories of Thatcher and Reagan (the Labour government had long-since abandoned any progressive aspirations), he’s right that this felt like a momentous shift. Like the Sixties this period was only an echo of the Thirties, but the similarities were striking enough to be noted at the time.

While the actual millennium was a mere marketing squib, it was the early Eighties which actually exemplified the fin de sciele feeling. 23 Skidoo gave their 1983 album the apocalypse-dread title ’The Culling is Coming’. “We did feel we were on the frontline of Babylon,” comments Vivian Goldman. Writing of J.G. Ballard’s influence on Post-Punk, Reynolds notes “the traumatized urban landscape served as the backdrop but also in a sense the main character.” And you could say the same about Reynold’s book itself, which is stuffed with description after description of crumbling post-industrial cities. “There’s something about cities that were once prosperous”, he notes, “the residues of wealth and pride make a rich loam in which bohemia can flourish.”

Though formally unconnected to Punk, David Lynch’s cult film ’Eraserhead’ perfectly captures the same sense of social collapse and everyday life descending into nightmare. (In fact at the time I saw ’Eraserhead’ on so many Punk jackets I initially assumed it must be a band.) A similar example is John Lydon’s intonation “it’s all falling to bits… gloriously!” Everything that we know is going and the future uncertain, but we’re still glad to see the back of it all.

Moreover there was a more direct continuity via Fluxus. Fluxus was to Dada what Hardcore was to Punk, a souped-up pared-down comeback ready for a revenge bout. Consequently it placed an even greater stress on performance and provocation than Dada, and many of these involved anti-music – pieces where the score was determined randomly, or consisted of the opening and closing of a bunch of umbrellas, and the like. Often the audience would arrive and find themselves effectively expected to carry out the performance.

Fluxus made connections to the Sixties underground - but even before then had at times provocatively incorporated rock iconography. For example, in Robin Page’s 1962 ’Guitar Piece’, he held an electric guitar aloft in the standard ‘play’ pose - before kicking it through the auditorium, into the street and around the block. To follow the ‘event’ the audience were forced to give up their seats and chase after him. These sort of disruptive tactics would be highly influential on Post-Punk.

Of course it could be argued that this over–exaggerates the anti-art tendencies in Post-Punk. There’s a tendency in historicising any scene to smooth it into something unified, whereas in fact it’s made up of a multiplicity of often-contradictory elements. The glam-loving Banshees, for example, wanted to purge music of its rockist baggage but hankered for showbiz and had no desire to deconstruct the business of being in a band. Joy Division refused interviews and excelled in mystification. No use checking those sparse Factory records sleeves for phone numbers of pressing plants.

Other bands talked the talk more than they walked the walk. PiL, in many ways the perfect microcosm of Post-Punk, may have insisted they were a multi-media collective but actually delivered on little of this. (A bone of contention with bassist Jah Wobble.) After Throbbing Gristle split up, P.Orrdidge announced he was moving over to television as that was the next battleground for cultural domination. But this meant little more than forming another band named after television – Psychic TV.

It could even be argued that Post-Punk couldn’t  actually go any further, that it functioned best as a ‘loyal opposition’ within and against Punk and worst when it tried to take its rhetoric seriously and step outside these limits. It could be argued that anti-music was actually a cross between a provocation and some kind of Zen exercise. Like listening to the sound of one hand clapping, it was never intended to be something you succeeded at.

Reynolds notes how “the character in [Gang of Four] songs often seem to be on the brink of seeing through ‘false consciousness’… but they never quite make it”. It’s a shrewd observation, but maybe it didn’t come out of play-acting, maybe they were simply saying as much as they knew. As the band put it themselves, “avoid the answers” and “no escape from society”. Having staked their camp by having problematised rock from within, how was it possible for them to then move outside of it? 

There’s a telling moment in the closing minute of 'Anthrax', where the rest of the track continues orthodoxly as the guitar erupts into screeches and splutters. It’s taking things to the edge of what can be but in a rock song, but fading out before pushing them over. There are many similar moments in other Post-Punk tracks, where an incongruous element is rubbed up against the rest of the song. But is it signalling a wholesale departure from song structures, or is that juxtaposition the very point? Was Post-Punk a signpost, or merely a boundary post?

Gang of Four weren’t too concerned with trying to find out; as Hugo Burnham later recalled “we fucking rocked, rather than stand around in long macs looking miserable”. Conversely, Alternative TV’s ’Alternatives’ was a squirmy-sounding attempt to ‘democratise’ their gigs by handing microphones around the audience, allowing attendees to come up with their alternatives. Reynolds recounts how these “inevitably would degenerate into a farrago of abuse and squabbling”, whereupon Mark Perry would have to step in to “upbraid the crowd” for their un-Punkishness – effectively re-asserting his authority as spokesman.

Perhaps we could even argue that artforms have phases where they need the antidote of anti-art to purge them and keep them fresh? Painting in the Twenties, music in the Eighties. Is anti-art actually merely a corrective, a check to keep everything in balance?

Such arguments are not devoid of merit. But, even to the extent that they have validity, they only serve as a description of Post-Punk not a critique. Many times the tension brought by a contradictory response has made for a more memorable work than a simple manifesto statement. Jean Luc Godard simultaneously hated Hollywood and loved it, and his films are deservedly remembered when much more clearcut and straightforward polemics are forgotten.

Further, they tend to assume radical art exists in a vacuum outside of other social trends. Buzzcocks manager Howard Boon explains they self-released their first single “trying to locate kindred spirits who would get it and respond.” Reynolds’ book might be a great deal thinner if these kindred spirits had been absent. A combination of widespread social change, unemployment (liberating you from the workaday world if also emptying your pockets) and other factors make this period a radical one in general.

Radical art makes many demands upon its audience, but its primary one is for them to stop acting like an audience. As the Pop Group put it, there are no spectators. This was an era characterised by many a fundamentalist can-hurling paleo-Punk but also by many willing to take the bait and act like a non-audience in the face of anti-music.

In short, none of the above should suggest that the limits of Post-Punk are the limits of human possibility. Just as Post-Punk brought Punk in directions previously unimagined, it could then have been replaced by something which, while retaining enough rockist trappings to stay inside its sheep’s clothing, ventured in a much more Fluxus-oriented direction. For example, quite different (and possibly plagiarised) recordings could have been released with exactly the same cover and labels, stopping ‘fans’ from telling them apart. Some could have been recorded by random processes, each instrument’s contribution determined by laws of chance. Some of them might even have been blank, or containing nothing but recordings of absurd Fluxus-like instructions for the purchaser to carry out.

Live events could have done more to break down or sabotage the audience/performer divide. When PiL played New York’s Ritz club in 1981, they appeared only behind video screens. When the crowd became outraged they responded by chanting back “boo, they’re cheating us” until a riot ensued. Though that proved something of a one-off, other similar events could have been staged.

Simultaneously, it could have gone on the attack! Fluxus had already held Actions Against Cultural Imperialism, demonstrating against the ‘serious culture’ held in museums and concert halls. Contemporary with Punk, Italian Autonomist movements had not only picketed but also disrupted rock gigs. (Often run as ‘youth culture events’ by the Communist Party they despised as orthodox, and so labeled as “a provocation to the proletariat”.)

Though of course it should be asked - had any of this happened, so what? Martyn Ware dismisses as “one of the biggest myths ever” the notion “that Pop music changes the world”. Why should Dada art prank disguised as a pop record be any different? Conversely, as Stewart Home argues in ’The Assault on Culture’, capitalism is in part perpetuated by a divide-and-rule tactic played on its challengers - separating them into ‘political’, ‘artistic’ and ‘cultural’ spheres. It therefore follows that “cultural as well as political agitation is required if radical ideas are to have any impact on the repulsive society in which we live”.

A post-Post-Punk neo-Fluxus movement sabotaging gigs would be at best an amusing distraction and quite possibly just an annoyance if working in isolation. But if working in accordance with other more ‘political’ campaigns it may have strengthened the hands of both. But “since western society encourages specialisation, once any given samizdat movement loses its dynamism it tends to be pushed into a single arena of contestation.” Home’s example is Futurism being pushed into being an art movement, but its equally true that Post-Punk became merely music, a back catalogue of CDs to be evaluated and reviewed.

It’s academic anyway, because the actual next step taken was quite different. As we’ll see…

FROM DOCTORS WE TRUST (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Our latest Spotify playlist starts with the Delgados getting us on our feet, the Waterboys find the Christ in us (no easy task), Coil give a hallucinogenic account of the death of art-cinema auteur Pasolini, the Blue Aeroplanes struggle to recall elusive memories, the The offer a song-form helpline in the thickest of nights, my bloody valentine go woozily serene in the soft moonlight, the original Fleetwood Mac get bluesy till it hurts (as was their way), Bessie Jones goes gospel (called by no less than Alan Lomax “the Mother Courage of American black traditions”), Show Me the Body don’t get intense in any way nosiree, then noise rockers Gnod tear down the house we built. Happy listening!

(Illo from the all-time SF classic ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’.)

The Delgados: All Rise
The Waterboys: The Christ In You
COIL: Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini)
The Fall: Time Enough At Last
The Blue Aeroplanes: What It Is
The The: Helpline Operator
Brian Eno: The Fat Lady Of Limbourg
my bloody valentine: moon song
Fleetwood Mac: Love That Burns
Bessie Jones: You Better Mind
Show Me The Body: Now I Know
Gilla Band: I Was Away
Gnod: Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down

“You've got something to tell me,
I can taste it,
I know what it is”

MODERNISM’S LAST CRY (FINDING THE FUTURE IN THE PAST)

(...being the latest instalment of 'Intensify the Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk. First part here.)

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
- Pablo Picasso

“We hated everything that wasn’t modernist. It was like Cavaliers and Roundheads, total warfare.”
- The Human League’s Martin Ware, (G2 28/11/08)


Reader be afraid, be very afraid, for all this talk of musical influences has been but the warm-up to our main theme – Post-Punk’s chief influence was non-musical, even anti-musical. And it will take two instalments to cover. Post-Punk was at heart a late burst of Modernism. As Reynolds puts it, the era saw “the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature. The entire period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique”.

It had long been a truism that bands were formed at Art College not Music College. But then suddenly, out of the blue, it was no longer enough to hang around and soak up the bohemian ambience. You now needed to listen to the lectures!

Of course, like Punk, Modernism had set out to shock. Mayakovsky had titled his Futurist manifesto ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ while the Italian Futurists luxuriated in “the pleasure of being booed.” Like Post-Punk provocation was integral to the project, a scream against the shackles of custom.

There isn’t really a sound-bite definition of Modernism, so let’s try two. Sartre said of the Modernist sculptor Giacometti: “He does not recognise such a thing as progress in the fine arts… one must begin again from scratch.” Art history was not a march of progress but a set of shackles to be thrown off. The only way art can be created is to perpetually start again from first principles, what is already laid down is already suspect. And of course this was how Post-Punk saw the history of Rock music.

But also, Brecht described art as “not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” Art was no longer to concern itself with reflecting (and thereby reassuring) it’s surrounding culture, but shocking and challenging it. Agreed notions, even over something so simple or innocuous as what a vase of flowers looks like, were to be overturned. Consequently the artifice of art, the subjective view of the artist, was no longer to be hidden but emphasised, foregrounded.

‘Good’ art as some sort of end in itself was to be torn down. Art was now a cultural intervention, its function (social change) as much a function as with designing any refrigerator or airplane. Aesthetics was now not a comfort zone but a strategy. Manifestos detailing the aims and intentions of the artist became as important as the artwork itself… indeed at it’s most self-parodic Modernism came to feel like a set of provocative manifesto statements with a few artworks cobbled together last-minute in order to illustrate them. Again, the way Post-Punk saw music.

And at the same time it’s ceaseless questioning was also self-questioning, it remained ever-alert to the possibility it’s own methods were insufficiently radical. This perhaps reached an apogee with Duchamp’s anti-art, which was intended to be self-sabotaging as a means to take the rest of art down with it.

Unlike the multi-media approach, this was not something borrowed from the Sixties. The art styles filtered through hippy culture were Art Nouveau and perhaps some light Surrealism. Hippy ‘happenings’ were influenced by Fluxus ‘events’ (as we’ll see), but without the conscious emulation of Dada. Post-Punk stole from the Sixties Underground and from Modernism, but with two separate hands.

Prog, meanwhile, inclined to a Victorian Romanticism which itself looked back to Greek myths, medieval heraldry and the like. Their sleeves composed scenes and landscapes depicted illustrationally. Post-Punk could then react as strongly as Modernists had to the original Romanticism, and in much the same way.

True, Jaime Reid had been designing Dada-influenced sleeves before the Pistols even split. But Punk had always hidden such ‘arty’ elements under a bushel of feigned anti-intellectualism and cartoon yobbery. Needless to say, this only made the Post-Punks more keen to emphasise their Modernist influences. It proved the perfect opportunity to filch the library card carefully hidden inside Punk’s leather jacket, hold it aloft and ask to borrow it.

The chief influence in this was of course Krautrock, the prior music scene which had been most Modernist influenced. Kraftwerk, for example, openly acknowledged their inheritance from the Bauhaus, Faust from Dada. But these were two of many Modernist movements to have had a German base. It was something already there, something you could take to organically. Whereas Post-Punk took it up more overtly. Krautrock hadn’t come with a reading list, Post-Punk emphatically did.

The accepted wisdom had been that rock music supplanted visual art as the dominant form of youth expression. The electric guitar was so much more immediate, more kinetic, more modern that it made the paint brush redundant.

Post-Punk’s trick was to reverse all that by parading its Modernist influences. With its flag-waving for book-smarts, it held itself not only against Punk but even its two main musical influences. With Reggae you’re supposed to feel the force of Jah, not be won over by theological arguments concerning his existence. This tendency was more exacerbated with Dub, which lacked even Roots’ ‘conscious’ lyrics. Dub saw words as but another sound-source, to be played with even if that meant pulling them out of any coherent order. Dub was at heart spiritual music.

As this allowed a way out of Rock, it’s perhaps significant that music forms of Modernism (for example Futurist noise works or Satie’s piano works) were not particularly taken up by Post-Punks. Non-musical influences seemed a positive advantage, a way of dodging the now-familiar traps. (Similarly, a great many bands named themselves after a book, film or painting, from the Fall to Joseph K. Significantly, many bands today are more wont to puppyishly name themselves after terms already used by previous bands, such as Radiohead.)

You could even come to see Post-Punk’s internal divisions all coming from the factions picking one Modernist strand or other and then running with it. The Slits and the Pop Group were the Fauvists, banging their drum to slip the shaping shackles of ‘civilisation’ and rediscover some long-lost essential self – disrupting the normal to get back to the natural. (Or projecting this ideal onto some feral love object, as in the Pop Group’s ‘She’s Beyond Good and Evil’ with lines like “Western values mean nothing to her”.) The Slits smeared themselves with mud on their debut cover, in a literal bid to get ‘back to the earth’.

Gang of Four, Magazine and Devo took almost the opposite tack. Latter-day Dadaists, they ridiculed any claim that art was some automatic escape route out of culture. Their art was self-consciously conscious, anti-instinctive, always trying to draw attention to it’s own artifice. Magazine ridiculed such Fauvist notions in ’Back to Nature’, Devoto sneering the line “I couldn’t act naturally if I wanted to.” An early Gang of Four track crosstracked standard love-song devotions with a list of trivial details of the recording process.

Pere Ubu and Talking Heads were the Surrealists. Punk had kept Rock’s earnest notion that the lyrics to songs were ‘important’, they’d merely moved from meaningful pontifications to street-corner rabble-rousing. Throwing a spanner into this, they’d sing any nonsense with such conviction that the listener could still be fooled that it all must still mean something somehow. But, as Talking Heads put it, “Facts don’t do what I want them to.”

PiL, though their antics kept a foot in the Dada camp, were primarily Expressionists, creating soundscapes for psychic states. As Wobble said later: “PiL are expressionist, like Jackson Pollock... we were like those New York loft dudes in the 1950s.” Reynolds’ comparison of their seminal ’Death Disco’ to Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’ is a good one. In fact, the cover of ’Second Edition’ (‘Metal Box’s reissue), features the bands’ faces distorted in fairground-mirror echoes of the Scream. Lydon’s old sneering stabs and jibes were replaced by strings of impressionist inward-looking images – from jeers to wails, from Gillray to Munch. The similarly Expressionist Banshees even called their first album ’The Scream.’ 

The Human League and Heaven 17 were Futurists, in fact the Human League’s original name had been the Future! Though by the height of their fame they played pure Pop, they originally celebrated the white heat of the technology that was taking us into a bold machine-built tomorrow. (They sang on ’Blind Youth’ “Take hope… your time is due, big fun coming soon… now is calling.”)

Industrialists like Throbbing Gristle and Neubaten were yang to their yin. They took Futurism or, more often, Constructivism but unlike other factions they inverted it. Constructivism had embraced the link between man and machine and collapsed the distinction between artist, architect and engineer. But to the Industrialists things were no longer being built but just wearing down. The very term ‘industrial’ was ironic, a reference to recession-hit Britain’s ‘post-industrial’ status. Test Dept in particular were keen to play up Constructivism’s worker fetish and its shady links to totalitarianism. During the first Gulf War, they performed beneath a giant portrait of Saddam Hussein.

The only rule was not to be so obvious as to name yourselves after the strand you were most in sympathy with. That would be like turning up for a gig in the same band’s T-shirt. Hence the all-too-obvious Future had to change their name to the Human League. Cabaret Voltaire had their Dada elements, but despite the name were more of the anti-Constructivist camp. Bauhaus were, as Reynolds notes, not of the Bauhaus school at all but Expressionists. Only gormless Johnny-come-latelies Art of Noise gave away their copyism by naming themselves after a Futurist term. (Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto… but you knew that already, right?)

And we are not, in fact, done with Modernism just yet…