“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.
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