‘THE SHAPE OF THINGS: STILL LIFE IN BRITAIN’

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

The State of Things Back Then

Still lives, we’re soon told, had traditionally been pushed to the bottom in the hierarchy of the arts. Laid out in rank order, these were - Historical scenes, Portraiture, Genre painting, Landscapes and (as you may have guessed) Still Life. That slightly oddly named “genre painting” meant everyday scenes. So what this came down to was Important People Doing Important Things, Important People Looking Important, Unimportant People (Possibly Doing Things), No People But Big and Not People Not Even Big. You can see the thinking. They weren’t educational or morally instructive, they were just of things. 

So what was any self-respecting Modernist to do? Upend the hierarchy, of course. Pull the bottom level out to collapse the thing, like a Jenga tower.

Yet in one way this can seem counter-intuitive, for we think of Modernism as being about creating newly dynamic art for a newly dynamic age. But it also, in general not just in art, took against the grand historical sweep and took to the close focus. The most clear-cut example must be Joyce’s ’Ulysses’ (1920), reworking the Odyssey into a single day of a quite regular life. At the time physics turned its gaze from stars and planets to particles.

Perhaps the ranking wasn’t all that surprising. We are egocentric creatures who are primed to see reflections of ourselves, and in no place less than our art. In fact, it can sometimes feel like we invented the thing just so we could make ourselves a flattering mirror. And as always, taking something out can create its own form of presence. When not sated our innate egoism doesn’t go away but into overdrive. Denied the desired sight of human beings we carry on looking for it anyway. And this can be put to use, in different ways…

How often, for example, have you seen a scene such as the one above? Solid-looking furniture before an open log fire, accumulated and exotic objects, clearly a mansion of some kind. But instead of the tweed-wearing Lord, in ’Amaryllis’ (1951) Stanley Spencer has placed a plant. (The plant of the title, in fact.) Pushing itself front and centre, running almost the full length of the frame, occupying the space art normally reserves for humans, it grabs at your attention. While the plant has more than one flower, one is firmly turned to face us, accentuating the anthropomorphism. You’re soon ascribing some form of sentience to it, just from context and positioning. (‘Day Of The Triffids’ was published the same year. Coincidence? Yes, probably.)

Whereas William Nicholson’s ’The Silver Casket and The Red Leather Box’ (1920, above) hints at a helmeted human figure. Intentional or otherwise, you cannot not see it there. Pushing this implication further is the silhouette of, presumably, the artist reflected in the casket.

But there’s as many approaches to still lives as there are in any other genre. Edward Wadsworth’s ’Bright Intervals’ (1928, above) places together a clutch of objects. Now objects should be simple, functional things, instruments for our use. And we immediately see they’re all related to the sea, and are painted in a vivid but limited palette, almost like a striped flag. (It was painted in tempura.) The title emphasises both these at once.

So its a work which should surely be easy to parse, yet somehow its not. Its like a sentence made up of words you know, which seems to follow grammatical order, but gives up no sense. I suspect its concerned with the distinction between the ideal world, represented by the objects in the foreground and the real word beyond, represented by the sea. The curve of the blueprints is echoed by the prow of the ship. It has the deep blue we associate to the sea, which is here rendered green. A barrier (a wall, a window?) lies between the two. The territory never matches the map.

Yet of course the whole point here is that we don’t understand, that these simple objects elude us. How did such a thing come about?

Prior to Modernism, many works were tableaus. They were painted via models holding stilted poses for long periods, while the artist debilitated and laboured. And for the most part they looked it. Their purpose being to convey a point (the Nativity, victory in a battle and so on), naturalism wasn’t strived for. So, while ostensibly of people, they were stiff and rigid. Art stilled life. Still lifes such as this essentially reverse things, painting inanimate objects as an arrangement of elements, but in a manner which feels elusive.

But there’s another, more oblique, influence. Edwaert Collier’s work above is titled ’Vanitas Still Life’ (1694) and Vanitas was often used as a name for this Dutch genre. “They sought,” the show says, “to convey the transience of life through arrangements of inanimate symbolic objects.”

(We’re also told that from the Seventeenth century these were imported. I confess to not being sure how we’re supposed to take this. This is a show devoted to, in its own words, “Modern and Contemporary British artists”. Had the snobbery over still lives been stopped a good couple of centuries before Modernism began? Or were they considered exceptions to the rule, before Modernism came along to take them up? But no matter. Let’s focus on what they did, and how they were received.)

The stillness of them feels foregrounded, creating an eerie calm. It’s like breaking into the room of a person long dead, their possessions lying as they are. We become aware what has happened to them will come to us. We are transient, our things will outlast us.

At this point I’ll take a guess. My guess is that this was not how they were received, at least not at this point, the early days of British Modernism. Some of the symbols used are effectively universal, the widely repeated skull to stand for death scarcely needing much interpretation. But many were specific to another time and place, a shared understanding gone. (In the way that one work here uses roast beef to represent England.) They arrived to British Modernists inscrutable and mysterious, devoid of a code book. Which of course made them enticing. So why not do the same to someone else?

And this leads to works such as Mark Gertler’s ’The Dutch Doll’ (1926, above) which possess a sinister, suggested animism, lurking near the surface without emerging. If you looked away and back, would things have moved? As the show says, ‘Still Life’ is “a contradictory name”, why not play that up?

The doll, placed centre where the human figure would normally go, is a clear enough source of this. As children we imbue dolls with life, a habit we never absolutely break from. But the picture is full of such suggestions. The flowers are of course painted, but on their vase is a painting of flowers. The playing cards also perform a picture-within-a-picture function. While the plant to the left seems to be composed of moving tendrils, enhanced by the sharp painting style. And the red curtain to the right suggests we’re looking at a stage, which makes everything on it props but also actors.

Outside this show, elsewhere in the gallery, Claire Rudland is quoted as saying: “There is more than what we see, there is something other.” She’s describing her own work. Yet it’s as fitting for this and many other works in the show.

Ask Not What, Ask Instead How

Objects, then, can be both present and elusive. But there’s also other approaches. One is to paint not just still lives but the same few objects over and over. With familiarity they fade from your attention, which instead falls on *how* they’re depicted. Which is perhaps Modernism in essence. Questions of how can never be disentangled from questions of why. (Cubism played a similar trick.) And from there, you’re free to take any route you want.

In ’The Cup And Saucer’ (1915, above), Harold Gillman homes in and fills the surround, so the title objects contain almost the only white in the composition. But rather than give them a smooth coat as would befit china, the paint is crusted thickly and in varying shades. Rather than something dull and solid, they seem to radiate and shimmer before you. (Who could have guessed a cup and saucer could be made into something so vivid?)

John Duncan Fergusson’s *’The Blue Lamp’* (1920, above) bears some compositional similarity - close-cropped, and centred around a white object. But its made up of bright, solid blocks of colour, held within thick red outlines, to the degree it could almost be a screenprint. The elements act almost like notes in a composition. In style, the two works are worlds apart.

While Winnifred Gill’s ‘Still Life With Glass Jar and Silver Box’ (1914) keeps the heavy outlines, then makes the colours beneath them shift around and recur. Gunmetal grey seems reserved for shadows, but the two shades of brown dart around the composition. (The restrictions of the First World War already in place, Gill used a tea chest lid for a canvas.)

The Path To Abstraction Is Paved By Things

As artists were mostly interested in cups or fruit not in their own right but for their formal qualities, this meant still lifes played a prominent role in the path to abstraction. You can see the timeline over several Ben Nicholson works in the show. The first step is to make them into symbols. With ’Striped Jug and Flowers’ (1928, above) you don’t imagine grasping that jug by the handle. It’s an image of a jug, flattened into a representation, abstracted from any environment. Even as the flowers seem more three-dimensional.

Then eighteen years later, the almost fully abstract ’Still Life, Cerulean’ (1946, above) retains the lines of the jug handle at upper right.

…all of which may be true. But you cannot help feel the show overplay this a little, in order to fit it to their theme. The *’Expressionists’* show at the Tate (currently still running) demonstrates the same thing happening with landscape art. (Yes, one whole rung up the Academy’s hierarchy of genres!) At this time, all roads non-figurative led to abstraction - and sometimes figurative too.

Things During Wartime

Remember how we came in? The still lifes which inspired all this conveyed the transience of life by depicting the relative permanence of things? And how British Modernists instead created works which were dazzling and brilliant?

Then it seems something came along to burst this bubble. Around the year 1939, should you need a clue. And so we arrive at a room called the jolly 'Death, Decay and Post-War Austerity’. Skulls were back in a big way.

One of the best works is Edward Burra’s ’Still Life With Teeth’ (1946, above), precisely because it eschews such standard images and instead manages to make a fruit bowl menacing. The objects aren’t just pushed to the foreground but monstrously oversized. And other apparently domestic objects are also infused with lurking threat, the show talks of how the cutlery is imbued with “the sinister allure of weapons”.

The teeth and shoe are the only signs of human life, save a tiny figure fleeing the scene, long-shadowed in a de Chirico boulevard. Our misadventures have borne these monstrous fruits, which now dominate and push their creators from the frame. This is life thrown out of balance, as hallucinogenic as Dali yet more intimate. (This would be a good time to remember that the Pallant House once had a great show dedicated to Burra.) 

Things - Not What They Used To Be

Then, after that final twist, things lost their lustre. Modernism had essentially won its battles, nobody was really talking about the hierarchy of genres any more, and so  still lifes had little use. But it's natural enough. Nothing is useful forever, not even things. 

Alas the show, which has up to now been enthralling, doesn’t work out this is the time to stop. Instead it progresses into Pop Art. Which does something entirely different. The representation of things, which had once been central, was no longer a question. Now the closer you could make the representation to the things themselves, the better. In a time of mass production, make art which looked like product. Airbrush. Or screnprint. Collage. Or just take the objects themselves and use them.

And what does this change? It changes everything! Pop Art appropriates, takes and recombines. (This is particularly daft when the Pallant House has already had a Pop Art show, which laid out all of this.)

Though one work which both belongs in context and is worth seeing is John Bratby’s (rather splendidly named) ’Still life With Chip Fryer’ (1954, above). As translucent doesn’t work well in painting, you can by tradition use white for glass. Here Bratby uses pure white not just for glasses and bottles but a whole bunch of objects, including a sieve. Others are bright blue.

Products include brand names, which might seem classic Pop Art. But all this is amassed together onto a drab brown table with drab wooden chairs in a drab room of bare floorboards. It looks like a collision, a clash of reality systems, a foreign invasion, almost like the Science Fiction device of sticking alien spaceships in Trafalgar Square. Its a fifties were the Forties and Sixties were struggling for control. (Regular reminder - great artists weren’t always great people. Bratby was an abuser.)

But let’s end there before we run into Rachel Whiteread. If this show loses its way later on, art did too. So let’s look to its successes. Early Modernists had a slightly paradoxical relationship to the still life. They saw a life in things which loftier-minded artists had missed. While at the same time they saw a nailed-down subject which allowed them to focus on questions of how. The result is works on what might seem the dryest and dullest of subjects, which are full of life. 

'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.

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…