'ALIEN: ROMULUS' (A MINI REVIEW)

Some while ago now, I said “the Alien films all have to feature Ripley, just like you couldn't make a Dalek film without the Doctor.”

I like to think I’m big enough to admit it when I’m wrong.

She hasn’t shown up in the last two (not counting that one) and ’Alien: Romulus’ even finds ways to turn this deficiency to its advantage. First, where later sequels had become wrapped up in their own continuity this allows for a reset. (In internal chronology, it comes straight after the first film.) Also, this allows a new, young cast to blunder blind into the Alien universe and make their own mistakes. We shout helplessly at the screen “get out of there, it ’s got one of those in it?”. But how are they to know?

Of course in a standard horror film this would just be the teens visiting the haunted house. But here its a course correct, that takes us further back to where we were before then where we were before.

Furthermore, I am won't to complain that contemporary culture insists our protagonists must always be The Special One. (I blame Neoliberalism for this, typically enough, as it means our heroes have to represent not us but me who is not like all the others, not really. I expect you’ve heard me.) Happily, this series has in effect gone the other way. Ripley was not military but she was a capable Warrant Officer. While in ’Covenant’, Daniels was a coloniser. But Rain, our protagonist here, a young wage labourer, the nearest yet to some regular Jo.

And who is our regular Jo set against? I also said “the Alien may be the adversary but the Company are effectively the villain.” And this film is smart enough to get that. Some have complained it starts too slow, but this is info it needs to get over. We’re in a future dystopia, like now only more so. The scenario is ‘the maze and the Minotaur’ in which the Corporation has provided both. The characters become trapped between the Alien’s law-of-fang-and-claw and the demands of rapacious capitalism. (The films tend to exploit Social Darwinism for drama, rather than critique it.)

Plotwise, this is most epitomised by the two Andys. The de rigeur android has two settings; there’s a kind of special needs version who has his skills but also needs looking after himself (not far from the cat in the original), and there’s the other - highly effective but not at all on their side.

But of course, as ever, its most epitomised visually - by the two clashing aesthetics, industrial gothic against the weirdly alien. There’s an effective scene where the corridor they’re about to getaway through is found to be covered in alien… whatever that stuff is. (That industrial gothic look has become almost enhanced by the passage of time. We’re now aware what a mechanical world it is, of chains, metal hatches and grille gates. Monitor screens are analogue and flickery. A retro future.)

’Alien: Romulus’ is rarely lss than involving. You can’t help but get drawn in, feel the tension, jump at the right moments. See it. You won’t be bored.

But the second and third instalments (perhaps even the fourth, to a lesser extent) took all this and took it somewhere new. This is much more more than it is new. It follows the two rules of sequels, ‘bigger’ and ‘faster’. *Aliens’* had already gone for armies of Aliens, so this throws swarms of facehuggers at us, like mobs of spiders. And with this the remorseless inevitability of the first film is, unsurprisingly, gone. Aliens now seem able to not just gestate but grow full size in mere minutes. (I grew hopeless confused as to whether their arrival had let the facehuggers out, or whether the ships had already been overrun.)

The commercial and critical failure of ’Prometheus’ has certainly bounced the series into this more crowd-pleasing direction. (“Less cosmic pontificating, more chest-bursting” read the memo.) So is the result any more than ‘effective franchise instalment’? Not much. Even ’Covenant’, with its Medievalism and bestiaries, had more that was its own.

Added to which, the main place it does innovate doesn’t necessarily work…

(PLOT SPOILERS in next para)

We discover the Corporation have tried to bring capitalism and monster together, thinking to build the strongest creature of all, the best (in their minds) of both worlds. Here the title comes in, they have two spacecraft named after the Rome-founding twins famously raised by wild wolves. That didn’t end well for Remus, and it doesn’t here. But this feels like the film’s own failing, obliged to come up with a new monster variant for the finale, which it then projects onto the Corporation. (I may just object to lanky monsters. Personal reasons.)

But beyond that there are flickers. Trapped in mining jobs on a planet that never sees day is not a bad metaphor for the ceaseless demands of wage labour. Our young team escaping to bathe in sunlight for the first time is a striking moment. (Science Fiction often works best when it shows not the unfamiliar but the familiar from an unexpected angle.) And the zero gravity trick is neat. So… few admittedly, but there. Quite possibly this came out better than might have been expected.

POSTSCRIPT: TIME IS NOW

('Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', which started over there, ends here.)

“I had high ideals and crazy dreams, 
And they came to this.”
- Mark Stewart & the Mafia, ‘High Ideals and Crazy Dreams’

“Now it’s your turn!”
- The Desperate Bicycles

Reynolds concludes by commenting on the rise of a new wave of Post-Punk sound, which was emerging whilst he was writing this book. (It was first published in ’05.) Yet, as we’ve seen, it had arisen in quite a specific context, and ended with unusual neatness when that context was over. So this might seem strange, maybe even suspicious. While some of the original bands have reformed in the wake of this (such as Gang of Four), others have been more dismissive of such nostalgism.

Mark E Smith said, “I see a lot of bands influenced by us but I don’t see them getting the core spirit of it… there’s no belief in what they’re doing. The motives are suspicious. It’s like they just want a career in music.” He’s right, of course. History repeats itself, but only as farce. It’s notable for example that the new groups are rarely as political and still less tend to any anti-rockist sentiment.

Hang on, is he right? Of course what he’s saying should be right, in that it’s the most appropriate thing for Post-Punk’s self-mythologising. But isn’t the real point that we’re now in a very different era to then? Say the same thing in a different context and it’s like you said something else. Just like Dada, Post-Punk was a product of and response to its era, and attempts to reproduce its strategies and devices outside of that will only make for museum pieces. Make a collage today out of old bus tickets in order to be ‘anti-bourgeois’ and you’ll be a laughing stock. (The same thing goes for fanzines and ransom lettering, though alas it doesn’t stop them.) If Post-Punk’s sound has long since been reduced to mere music, why not play it as music? Wouldn’t it be worse if all that rhetoric were reproduced faithfully but emptily?

If in 1978 Rock felt stale, anti-Rock was something fresh and challenging. The insistence that bands were but business entities operating within an entertainment industry was meant as part-provocation, part-warning. Nowadays Rock (even Punk rock) is fully mainstream, selling more to the middle-aged than the young and even the Fall have their music set to car adverts. For a decade from 1997, Britain was presided over by a Prime Minister who (in between sending young men out to die in money-grabbing wars) boasted of having been in bands and revelled in being photographed with rock stars. Buying records and going to gigs and doesn’t change the world. To say it now is a banality, an exercise in the obvious.

Post-Punk’s “resolutely modernist obsess[ion] with innovation” and clamour for constant change, once unshackled from the original debate with the paleo-Punks, soon soured not just into Pop’s insatiable need for novelty but also Blair’s sound-bite crusades against “forces of conservatism”. Similarly Gang of Four’s alienation devices sound different when even adverts take on an ironic ‘metafictional’ tone (“don’t ask me, I’m just an actor!”) in an attempt to butter up their audience through flattering their intelligence.

Perhaps you could even argue that Post-Punk, which sought to liberate us from the confines of music, actually liberated music itself. The concept of music as the default medium of dissidence was once deeply ingrained, to the point where it hard to imagine a defiant youth doing anything else. Maybe music needed to free itself of such cultural baggage, to get back to just being itself. Being anti-rockist freed Rock of rockism.

You can list the way something similar has happened to all other Post-Punk strategies... In a push-button internet age, Industrial’s fixation with the ‘transgressive’ has long since become just another consumer option. The TV is forever showing seasons of the ‘banned’, ‘extreme’ or ‘forbidden’, in ever-escalating hyperbole in order to bring in viewers. In the late Seventies the first mass-produced plug-in-and-play synthesizers were only just becoming available, and their liberating effects carried the shock of the new. This has since been blunted by our celebrity-obsessed culture, which no longer even pretends that stars get their status from actually doing anything.

Not just the internet but the wider rock media have also infected Post-Punk’s focus on de-mystification. Music used to arrive in mysteriously symbolic covers, with scant information. It might stretch to a track listing, if you were lucky tell you who was in the band. Nowadays there’s a website, a magazine feature and a booklet with the CD reissue to spell out all the lyrics, detail the recording process, provide demo tracks and alternate versions, and sport a couple of dozen explanations of what it might ‘all mean’. Music has been historicised, catalogued - and with it neutered. These days a more meaningful plan might be to put all that mysticism back in…

More widely, it has often amused me how marginal figures see their ideas taken up by the mainstream, and assume they must have been so threatening they must now be defused - like some cultural bomb squad at work. Of course its often opposite. The mainstream needs the fringes and alternatives to incubate the concepts it could never think of itself. The alternative to this is to imagine corporate executives somehow coming up with their own ideas. See the problem there?

A classic example of this is Post-Punks’ interest in film and multi-media. As Reynolds shows, not only did this pioneer video but led to bands like Devo and Talking Heads fuelling MTV and using it as their platform – at the time the channel had little else to show, making it “almost inadvertently radical.” But of course, the accompanying video soon became a stock component of the pop release, and MTV very thankfully showed Devo the door. (Similarly, Sontag’s theories of syanethesis have been absorbed into the cross-marketing campaigns of corporations, where films must now also have video games, single tie-ins and other memorabilia.)

However, as the earlier quote from Stuart Home made clear, this doesn’t mean the inevitable fate of any idea is corporate take-up. Any form of radical art, unleashed upon a money economy, will in some form, at some point, become mere product. But a large part of the appeal of Post-Punk was that it never suggested differently. Instead of claiming authenticity it deliberately intensified, exposed and projected the contradictions of ‘militant entertainment’.

Simultaneously, even genuinely radical movements can only be absorbed by first smashing their homogeneity into digestible pieces. This happened to Post-Punk but over time, and as less favourable social conditions came along to make its inner glue less durable. If the money economy is always present, this does not mean its presence is always uncontested. 

In short, if Post-Punk’s strategies no longer work as the best way to ask awkward questions that doesn’t mean that no workable strategies exist. Reynolds wrote his book largely against the dismissive notion that the Punk spirit ended abruptly in ’78, so how absurd and futile would it be to just fast-forward this date by a few more years? Those who constantly bemoan the fact that Punk hasn’t “happened again” miss the most basic and vital point of Post-Punk, that it went ahead and did something new. 

It’s participants had no magic powers which allowed them to do this, any more than we live today under some sinister spell that prevents us. In fact the opposite is true, their struggles and experiments empower us by providing lessons from which we can learn. But we should take from Post-Punk what they took from Dub. We might appreciate the thing in and of itself. But we mustn’t mimic, we need to appropriate for what works in our own circumstances.

“So flower power failed,” said Lennon, early in the Seventies. “So what? We start again.”

Is it time to rip it up and start again?

That’s always the time.

QUIT WHILE YOU’RE BEHIND

(...almost concluding 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', first part here.)

“The show is over. The audience get up to grab their coats to go home. No more coats and no more home.”
- Vasily Vasileyevich Rozanoiv, ’The Apocalypse of Our Time’

Okay, so if Post-Punk shouldn’t have gone New Pop what should it have done? Just give up? The short answer is yes. Half Man Half Biscuit were a band from a slightly later era, but when they split in ’86 over “musical similarities” it makes you ponder how richer life would be should every band call it quits as soon as that one crops up. (Disclaimer: They got back together. No-one’s perfect.)

If Post-Punk was the successor to British Punk and Dada, let’s remember both were short-lived movements in themselves. Marcel Duchamp famously gave up Dada to play chess, and things would have worked out better if less Post-Punkers had become pop stars and more had become postmen, college lecturers and Underground train announcers.

Many bands did this anyway - Wire, Gang of Four and the Slits among them. While natural wastage is always high with bands, many seem to have set out to split up, as if starting was just a necessary evil which allowed them to stop again, as if sabotaging their own careers might by some kind of sympathetic magic sabotage Rock music as a whole. Josef K, for example, announced they’d only ever release one album. Throbbing Gristle announced their “mission terminated”, as if they were a commando squad formed for ends now achieved. Scritti’s Green revealed later he wished he’d just stayed in bed. Caught in the very trap they’d set themselves, pressing for radical social change while simultaneously insisting on it’s impossibility, no wonder so many sought to escape this bind.

Of course, some bands did survive without turning New Pop (what Reynolds calls “exceptions to the rule of entropy”), but they most achieved this by becoming essentially different bands. The Mekons did this the most extremely, moving to America and becoming a Country outfit - even recording an album called ’Rock and Roll’. The Banshees almost literally became another band, losing two members at a stroke and coming back with something strong in itself but nearer to a conventional rock sound. (In the process they invented Goth. But we don’t hold it against them.)

The Fall incorporated Smith’s new wife, the American Brix, in the team - and with her came a more businesslike, get-go attitude. Less wayward, skeletal and ramshackle, their sound became more orderly, more streamlined, at times almost machine-like – more like a band! Smith even stopped scribbling over their album cover and the band that had once seen advertising a new release as too showbiz chalked up a few minor hits! The notion that you could be inside the music business while at the same time against it, that seemed less and less viable. The game you now played was theirs.

The reason for this is a simple one – the times they had a’changed. The early Eighties recession was over, the economic boom had begun and their second electoral victory had cemented the Tories free market turn. The once-decaying factories on which Post-Punk had bloomed, like some mind-expanding slime-mould, were now being tarted up and turned into leisure centres. Many were now caught between what Aufheben called “the ‘stick’ of dole squeezes and the ‘carrot’ of new-found social affluence”. There were more-or-less simultaneous bids to cut student grants, to make courses more ‘vocational’ and career-oriented, and clampdowns on the squatting and free festival scenes.

Post-Punk was fast losing both its squatted stage and its radical audience, quite possibly hemorrhaging them. As Reynolds mentions, average sales of independent singles halved between ’80 and ’85. It’s hard to escape the notion that 1985 came down like a guillotine.

In short, Post-Punk didn’t go New Pop because of any inherent qualities coming to the fore, but because at that point *everything* had come back to Pop. By the mid-decade, the Eighties as commonly imagined had begun and commercial was the new cool. Attempts to smuggle more radical notions into the mainstream ran into a dividing line as solid as the Berlin Wall. You were now either a winner, with the hit singles and wads of cash, or an outsider.

Rather than being Post-Punk’s next step, this happened to pretty much every musical genre of the day. (Excepting Anarcho Punk, where any attempt to turn New Pop would have faced logistical difficulties.) It was common for once-popular bands to split in two. The Specials for example broke into the chart-friendly Fun Boy Three and the more political, less chart-friendly Special AKA. Even Subway Sect spawned the chart-friendly Jo Boxers.

From that point on, the world was inverted and it would be the bourgeoisie’s turn to shock the avant-garde. Quite simply, suicide had become the grandest gesture.

We’ve already noted Post-Punk’s debt to both the late Sixties and Dadaist Twenties. Its worth nothing that these were also radical eras swiftly followed by turncoatism and conservatism. Fascism had fixated its antagonism to Modernist ‘decadent’ art but also took on many pseudo-radical elements.

However, if Post-Punk degenerated into chart fodder instead of stopping, at least it didn’t do the worst thing which it could – go on. Its focus on change and innovation precluded it doing what most movements do the moment they stop moving – ossify into a set of rituals, pat ‘anti-Rockist’ gestures to overlay the ‘Rockist’ ones they’d set out to destroy.

And if you want to know what that looks like, try looking over to the museum-piece called Anarcho-Punk. Anarcho’s fundamentalist strictures were always nearer to Rock’s unthinking rituals than to Post-Punk, but as the Eighties wore on they aligned more and more. Crass split in the auspicious year of ’84, handing the Crown Prince of Anarcho role to the tiresome Conflict. In a now familiar phrase, when pressed by radical demands regimes respond with ‘the change that is no change’. Conflict offered the perfect corollary, threat that was no threat. Just as New Pop acts flattered the audience that they must be sophisticates for appreciating this quality stuff, Conflict told their eager fans they were part of an “ungovernable force”. They had as much potential to reshape society as ABC, and ABC had better tunes. Let us pause a moment and give thanks that the Pop Group never turned into Conflict.

POST-PUNK’S FRACTURE LINES (SHOPKEEPER THINKING IN A SEA OF SIGNS)

...continuing 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', first part here.)

“It is the destiny of signs to be torn from their destination, deviated, displaced, diverted, recuperated, seduced. It is their destiny in the sense that this is what always happens to them; it is our destiny in the sense that this is what always happens to us.”
- Baudrillard

So then… Post-Punk was a bold, rigorous programme with a clear plan to liberate music from commodification, unfortunately scuppered when too many practitioners were tempted away by dollar bills? Guess what? No.

In fact to claim there was a ‘real’ Post-Punk scene which then ‘sold out’ by ‘going commercial’ is to fail to grasp the single most fundamental thing about it - that it insisted upon, even paraded, it’s own lack of authenticity. We should take it at its word. If New Pop marked the failure of Post-Punk, the point where its libertarian militancy soured into a Po-Mo world of signs, it was weaknesses and contradictions already present in the Post-Punk scene which allowed it to appear.

First, let’s remember Modernism itself led to, and in fact set itself up for, Post-Modernism. Second, Post-Modernism (prevalent in academia since the early Seventies) was by this point already sending out tentacles into popular culture. Post-Punk therefore became the first Modernist movement after the concept of Post-Modernism had arisen, and so forced to co-exist.

Reynolds describes the era as “the systematic ransacking of twentieth century art and literature”; yet classic Modernist movements did little to cite or reference their brethren. If they did mention them at all, it was almost invariably to highlight their redundancy. This ceaseless referencing of Modernism is actually a feature of Post-Modernism! In other words, Post-Punk was riddled with Post-Modern concepts from the start. SPK’s Graeme Revell was fond of saying annoying things like “today there is no reality, everything is real and everything is unreal” even before he became a Hollywood soundtrack composer. Devo called themselves a “postmodern protest band”.

If Adam Ant drew the ire of the more truculent paleo-Punks, Green fits the bill for anyone who wants to yell ‘sell out’ in a more polysyllabic form. Like a soap villain, like Dali to the Surrealists, he obligingly ticked all the Judas boxes - explicitly moving from an interest in Gramsci and other Marxists into Post-Modernism. (Which mostly involved saying smart-sounding rubbish like “what has meaning is what sells, and what sells is what has meaning”.) In a hilarious image, Reynolds recounts him contemplating his shift while listening to Michael Jackson and reading Derrida. In this way he followed the example of many of the original French and Italian Post-Modernists, ex-Sixties militants who needed a justification for their inaction which was still rooted in ‘radical’ terminology.

But Post-Punk had exploited an ambiguity which in some senses related to the difference between Modernism and Post-Modernism. As Reynolds himself has said “Post-Punk still had a tremendous seriousness, a tremendous conviction that music had power or that it could change the world… it was pre-irony, it was pre-retro culture.” The Fall memorably sang “I still believe in the R+R dream.” Without creating such conundrums, its doubtful Post-Punk would have been successful on any level, as music or as cultural provocation. Nevertheless, by problematising its own statements Post-Punk opened the floodgates to the sea of signs.

Similarly, Post-Punk drank deeply from Conceptual art. As Reynolds says of Throbbing Gristle, “their music was in a sense merely a delivery system for their ideas”, but he could have picked any band from these pages really. Indeed, it’s quite possible many bands saw their main delivery system as ranting to the ’NME’ about prizing Brechtian alienation techniques above guitar solos, but needed to go through the cumbersome process of releasing a record to get the ’NME’ interviewing them in the first place. Conceptualism isn’t the same thing as Post-modernism. It makes art that is more about ideas than about works, which doesn’t necessarily suggest there are now only ideas. But inevitably the concepts blur, and arguably blur more in the popular mind than they do on paper.

Another thing the paleo-puritans like to do is counterpose the ‘independence’ of smaller record labels against the majors, what Reynolds called “a post-socialist micro-capitalism in the face of top-down corporate culture” and Green dubbed “squattage industry”. Again, Green made himself an obliging target for this when he abandoned Rough Trade for Virgin. Reynolds feels inspired by their “rapid response nature, so much more suited to the speedy stylistic fluctuation of the Post-Punk universe”. The small labels and fanzine production system, and the DIY ethic in general, was doubtless important in enabling a lot of material that would never have been conventionally released. But when it is presented in this purist way its tempting to ask a simple question – isn’t micro-capitalism … ahem … just a form of capitalism that’s... er... smaller?

Furthermore, one of the perils of the self-styled avant-garde is being slightly – but only ever slightly – ahead of events. Micro-capitalism and post-Fordism were then becoming vital touchstones of the Thatcherite ‘revolution’ then sweeping Britain. As Jon Savage, the Wise Brothers and so many others have argued, Punk’s DIY ethic fed neatly into the Thatcherite cult of entrepreneurship. For example, Factory gained its name from the preponderance of ‘Factory closing down’ signs they saw around recession-hit Manchester - they thought maybe they should open one. In fact their famous club, the Hacienda, actually replaced an old textile factory. (Now a block of yuppie flats named, with no sense of irony, after the Hacienda.)

But the humour was double-edged; light-weight, flexible, leisure-based, they were one of the ‘new industries’ Thatcher extolled while the slow, lumbering majors worked more like the cumbersome centralised factories. This was successful enough as a business model that many majors were forced into ‘partnership’ with minors, or even to absorb some of their practices.

The electronic bands even became scabs! (In a manner similar to the Wapping strike against new printing technology.) The Musician’s Union had started a ‘Keep Music Live’ campaign and strike at the BBC, concerned they’d collectively lose their jobs to a plug-in box. Ian Craig Marsh of the Human League recollects the mentality as “almost Stalinist”, while the band responded with the slogan ‘Keep Music Dead.’

New management practices extended to within the ‘bands’ themselves. Many abandoned the fixed employment, everyone-on-a-wage structure for a flexible labour model where “a production company could hire (and fire) session musicians on a flat-fee, no royalty basis.” Once Scritti had followed the commune model, where whoever was staying at the squat was in the band. Green defended their new working practices, ironically enough with the same argument that had named Public Image Limited – they’d become “a kind of production company”. Yet PiL’s name had been a provocation, behind which existed (at least in theory) a camaraderie of equals. Green’s corporate-looking Scritti was instead just what it said on the lid.

And crucially, the shopkeeper mentality that was a necessary component of DIY had always contained the seed of such entrepreneurial thinking. Independent labels had been a route to an important end. But to suggest they are inherently ‘outside the system’ is absurd. As Andy Gill argued, defending Gang of Four’s then-controversial decision to sign to EMI: “the point for us was not to be pure… It just wouldn’t be on our agenda to be on a truly independent label, as if such a thing could even exist.”

CONFORM TO DEFORM? (CRITIQUING CULTURAL ENTRYISM)

(...continuing 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', first part here.)

“You talk a lot, but you’re not saying anything” 
- Talking Heads, ‘Psycho Killer’ 

“Being clever, how’s that working out for you?”
- Tyler Durden, 'Fight Club’ 

Of course some throw their purist hands up at the very idea of cultural entryism. (We generally call those people “Crass fans”.) But, truth to tell, it can be a valid pursuit. Beatles fans returning their copies of ’Revolver’ because something had “gone wrong” with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the ITV switchboard jamming with complaints after the fabled last episode of ’The Prisoner’, the furore the Pistols caused on the Grundy show – rupture points in the normal are to be celebrated, and the world needs more of them.

The problem is not with the concept, but the fact that Reynold’s chronology works better in reverse. The real era of cultural entryism was Post-Punk itself. The New Pop acts either defused what had been smuggled in, or simply threw straight back out again. Arguably, while Anarcho had been obsessive over building ‘alternatives’ outside of society (with Crass boasting of being “outside the machine”) Post-Punk had always aimed to undermine as much as it did confront.

Mark Stewart explained The Pop Group’s chosen name; “The whole idea was to be a pop group – an explosion in the heart of the commodity... If you wanted to get an idea across, you wanted to put it across in a big way.” Stevo of Some Bizarre perhaps more pithily summed up this spirit with slogans like ‘conform to deform’ and ‘use the music industry before it uses you’. He got the scarcely mainstream Throbbing Gristle offshoot Psychic TV signed to WEA via, among other tactics, sending them dildos etched with the legend ‘Psychic TV Fuck the Record Industry’. 

Band mainstay Genesis P. Orridge commented “I want to be part of popular culture, involved with everyday life and responses; not an intellectual artist in an ivory tower, thinking I am special, revered and monumental.” (Remarks ironically made while on trial for obscenity!)

As ever, Reynolds provides much of the evidence for this himself. For example, he says “Punk threw the record industry into confusion, making the majors vulnerable to suggestion, and fluxing up all the aesthetic rules so that anything abnormal or extreme suddenly had a chance.” Much of this was down to the clueless majors being unable to recognise Punk for what most of it was – traditional Rock and Roll played a little faster and a whole lot worse – but the result was the same. “You could hear the Fall and Joy Division on national radio and… groups as extreme as PiL had Top Twenty hits which… were beamed into ten million households.”

Of course, there was something wider at work than just hoodwinking a major. Chart placement was a tactic for some, of no interest to others. An early manager of Pere Ubu warned them they needed to smooth out their sound or, while they would continue to release records, they’d never transcend cult status. “Our eyes lit up,” remembers Thomas. “That sounds pretty good.” Yet not just Ubu but even more obstinate and esoteric ends of Post-Punk could shift surprising amounts of units, with the alternative charts of then often outselling today’s mainstream. And all this from a gang of bedroom operators who couldn’t tell a business plan from a signing-on day.

Of course New Pop sold better – but so what? Cultural entryism is about something of quality cutting through against the odds, and can’t be measured merely quantatively, by the mere accountancy logic of units sold. Scritti’s ’4 A Sides’ only hit the alternative charts while the later ’Cupid and Psyche’ won a gold record, but the former’s sales were still the bigger achievement.

It may help clarify if we compare Post-Punk to a music scene with no interest in cultural entryism. (And without Anarcho’s politicking.) Again, Reynolds does this for us! Comparing LA Post-Punk to its neighbouring free impro scene, he writes: “at a time when Punk had opened up the possibility for weird shit to sell substantial amounts this indicated a striking lack of ambition… [a] sub-cultural backwater.” He’s still with the cash registers, but here he’s close to striking the nail.

Scenes like free impro can have weaknesses. It isn’t that they’re too culty, too highbrow or commercially unsuccessful. It’s that they tend to operate in isolation, and so become insular and self-congratulatory. Post-Punk was to do with popular music, and popular culture is something to do with all of us. You may not be expected to like every popular music genre, but you are expected to get it. Just by being so labelled, it’s become a part of your world. 

Cult status is only bad when it becomes a closed system, with predictable releases selling only to a pre-set audience. Post-Punk was Cabaret Voltaire touring Sheffield in their van, insistently playing on the high street whether anyone wanted to hear it or not. Free impro by comparison was being played inside a room with an ‘invite only’ sign on the door.

In short, the true measure of cultural entryism lies not in aesthetics or any innate qualities, but in its effects. It’s significant, then, that in his second half Reynolds tends to sidestep such questions and retreats more into the standard mode of the ‘cultural commentator’, reading a significance into trivial details where it doesn’t belong.

On his website Reynolds exults that a bottlecap included on the photocopied cover of the first Scritti EP is reprised on the New Pop ’Anomie and Bonhomie’, but this time as an “ultra-glossy, hyper-realist painting”. This to Reynolds is a sign of ‘continuity’, that Scritti kept their early allegiances but just went about them in a different way. It’s like a cross between an evangelist finding a crucifix on the lapel of a lapsed believer, and a man diving into a po-mo soup of self-referentialism - a hermetic world made only of signs, which only ever point to each other and never to the world around them.

The point is not the bottlecap, and it never was. There is no point in treating a bottlecap like it’s some rich repository of symbolism, and that is precisely why it was used. The point of the first cover isn’t its content but its aesthetic, and the random accumulation of objects enhances the DIY nature of this aesthetic. (Green readily admits he used it purely because it was lying around.) The sleeve exists as, in Reynold’s own phrase while still in Mode A, “a snapshot of a lifestyle.” Fixating upon it as a bottlecap is like trying to understand Kurt Schwitters’ Dada collages through studying the history of bus ticket production.

But even supposing Reynolds was right, that all these signs and secret codes were in place and set to transmit just what he says - so what? It’s a tenet of Post-Modern thought that we live in a ‘post-ironic’ world where everybody is equipped with the correct antennae to decode all these signs. But to most people, Pop music is simply the soundtrack to an evening out. Upon such a crowd, what effect is “I’m only wearing this suit ironically” likely to have?

Of all the New Pop acts, only Gary Numan had any real right wing convictions. (And those rarely rose explicitly in his music.) The least Punk outfit of them all, Wham, played benefits for the striking miners and later effectively boycotted the music industry in its entirety. Yet none of that stopped New Pop becoming a soundtrack to the ‘aspirational’ Thatcherite Eighties, where everyone was free to feel good. Even pointing this out feels redundant, like re-iterating a painfully obvious cliché. If it was ever recognised at all, the clever phrases and name-dropping were just taken as a vague sign of classiness – like designer clothes, lines from art cinema or wine bottle labels.

Billy Childish famously said of BritArt that it successfully reflected its era, and that was its grant failure. It was smart-sounding but superficial and mercantile, just like its times. And the same is true of New Pop. Good art will challenge its times, not tell its viewers they are the fairest of them all.

At other points the pop-plugger places a very rockist stress on the importance of lyrics. When he starts venerating Depeche Mode’s anti-bigotry doggerels you half-expect him to drag in Culture Club’s ‘War is Stupid’ while he’s at it. This is not only absurd but also a refutation of a central tenet of Post-Punk, that radical talk crammed into the form of conventional music was meaningless. (“Wave your arms in the air if you’re against racism!” etc.)

Reynolds’ biases are again showing when he happily slates rock bands who went in for this (particularly targetting the Tom Robinson Band), yet praises Pop acts when they do the same! (And while TRB’s rouse-that-rabble rhetoric was often excruciating, at least it had slightly more content than “hey, let’s be nice!” Give me Wolfie Smith over Michael Jackson any day.)

Of course I don’t actually care about any of this, in the sense that I have no moralist objections. I’d rather they became Pop stars than New Labour ministers. And whingeing about alternative middle class people reverting to careerism is like complaining about the prices going up at Christmas. It’s simply that our intelligence is being insulted by the paucity of excuses on offer.

Green wrote endless screeds on why Scritti should ‘go Pop’, but like most people who talk too much he was actually avoiding saying something simple – he was sick of living in a run-down squat without a bathroom. I used to live in a run-down squat without a bathroom, so my most immediate reaction is to sympathise. I just wish he’d either cut the crap about it, or learn to lie more convincingly. At least John Lydon’s later career was honest (“I’m going over to the other side, Happy to have, not to have not”), but that’s something which gets him sidelined from the second half of this book.

Another of New Pop’s inheritances from Post-Punk which Reynolds is keen to stress is its wit and cerebrallism. He writes of how Kid Creole and the Coconuts “tried to bring to disco the sort of panache and sophistication last seen in popular music during the Forties”. New Pop may have the sweetest melodies, but from Post-Punk it gained the tang of irony, filling it with Wildean quips.

Yet the Coconuts are another band with no Post-Punk inheritance. And besides, mostly that stuff just plain got in the way. Julian Cope found the quote marks in Scritti’s ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ “annoying” and “clever-clever”, and he was right. The smartness of Post-Punk was devised as an antidote to rock’s self-mythologising about “keeping it real”, a put-down, a heckle. But by the Eighties Pop was so blatantly inauthentic and manufactured it counted for little to point this out, it was something you were better off suspending disbelief about. An ingredient in Post-Punk that had meant to defuse Rock, to draw out and pillory its unspoken rules, had ended up adding something – making music that, in exposing the clichés, escaped them. Similar notions were intended to enhance New Pop, to give it an extra coat of cleverness. Paradoxically, they just took away, with a neither-nor result that even as Pop music isn’t particularly memorable.

Reynolds often suggests Abba set the bar on New Pop, and perhaps they did. But Abba’s achievement was taking all their songwriting craft and sheathing it inside something that sounded shimmeringly simple and fresh. They don’t sound accomplished, they sound good. New Pop just reversed the equation, rapping about Jacques Derrida and feigning a ‘sophistication’ they rarely possessed, not that it would have mattered if they had it. What New Pop number can be said to rival, for example, the soaring majesty of ‘Dancing Queen’? 

The closest contenders were the ones who shed their Post-Punk baggage the quickest. Yet again, Reynolds tells us all this himself. The Human League uncoupled themselves from their “smarter-than-you” schtick by splitting with Heaven 17, and were then free to go all-out for Pop like it was the only thing on their minds. ‘Don’t You Want Me’ is quite simply a song about someone not wanting someone any more, with Derrida conspicuous only by his absence. The same is true for all the other better New Pop acts. Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and Soft Cell were the least cerebral, the most fresh-faced and the most willing to sing like they meant it.