THE FIRST FESTIVE FIFTY! (AND ALSO THE TWENTY-FIFTH)

First drafts of history are never neat.

Take for example the first John Peel Festive Fifty. (Where listeners chose their favourite numbers.) Though ending the auspicious year of ’76, it contains not one single Punk track. Rather than ’Anarchy in the UK’ topping the list, its ’Stairway To Heaven’. It’s like one of those alt futures where we never escaped the servitude of the Roman Empire, except instead it’s listening to the guitar solo from ’Free Bird’. 

Peel himself seemed less than impressed. The following year he decided he was picking all the tracks himself.

Perhaps more unexpectedly, listeners took the all-time request seriously. So the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Dylan and Hendrix all show up. (Tho’ nothing from before the Sixties.) And even when it does go Prog, the more bloated excesses (Rush, ELP) are happily absent. Yes creep in at No. 50 with ’And You And I’, probably one of their least proggy moments. (King Crimson may be the most curious absence.) For me, it was the more the AOR and classic rock stuff which was the obstacle. Jackson Browne and Poco were soon skipped.

But overall, as a snapshot of music up to ’76, it actually makes for a pretty good playlist. Sure its strange hearing ’No Woman No Cry’ segue into ’Supper’s Ready’. But not in a bad way.

Okay, British Punk was only just getting going at this point. The Pistols (for example) had released one single, ’Anarchy in the UK’. If it could conceivably have headered the list, there was no possibility of Punk packing it. But perhaps more conspicuous by their absence are the two biggest influences on British Punk.

You know the story of how, prior to forming the Buzzcocks, Shelley and Devoto took a trip to London to see the Pistols without having heard them? Because they played Stooges songs? And yet, you guessed it, no Stooges here. In fact American Punk appears only once, with Jonathan Richman’s ’Roadrunner’. 

And mid-Sixties Powerpop, that shows up not at all. (‘My Generation’ made the 1979 and 1980 lists, but nothing in ’76.) Those lies John Lydon liked to tell, about British Punk supposedly having no influences (despite playing Stooges songs)… it looks like, at the time, people swallowed them wholesale.

As you might expect, subsequent years saw a slow decline in votes for ’Stairway to Heaven’ and a growth in Punk and Post-Punk. 1982 saw both an all-time and a year-only list, everything went year-only from then on.

Then, as a one-off for the momentous year of 2000, the all-time list was brought back. And it looks back as far as the original, some tracks make it from the early Nineties - roughly the same time lag.

But this time out its much more Eurocentric; almost half of ’76 had been American, this time precisely five Yanks make the cut. Despite many American acts not just being played but getting sessions on the show. And that with the simultaneous disappearance of Prog, which had always been a highly Europeanscene.

Remarkably, a mere three tracks from ’76 reappear, with two falling down the list. Take Hendrix’s ’All Along the Watchtower’, once no. 5, now to be found at no. 37. Dylan’s ’Visons Of Johanna’ fares similarly. Only Beefheart’s ’Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ moves up. And the early Seventies disappears almost entirely. (The Beefheart track is from ’72, but he was more a Sixties artist.)

But perhaps more significantly, a number of older tracks which could have been on the ’76 list suddenly show up. Tim Buckley’s ’Song To The Siren’ can perhaps be explained by This Mortal Coil’s cover, scoring much higher. But the Velvet Underground and Nick Drake? While the Beatles, who had been represented by three tracks, now switch to a new entry - ’I Am The Walrus’. (Still, surprisingly, no Stooges.)

Of course, you never hear music from the past directly. It cannot do other than come through the filter of the present. Perhaps, had there been another Festive Fifty two or three years earlier than ‘76, ’Tarkus’ and ’Tales From Topographic Oceans’ would have proudly reared their gatefold heads. Perhaps ’Kashmir’ and ’Supper’s Ready’ did suddenly sound bad in the context of the late Seventies, only to reach today and get good all over again.

But more, some songs go up like a firework and leaves a stain in the sky, while others have a slow-burning fuse. It takes a while for people to catch on to them.

Slightly bizarrely, this even takes in the world’s best-selling band. ’Walrus’ was one of the most radical-sounding Beatles songs. (Alongside ’Tomorrow Never Knows’, which stays inexplicably absent.)

Stories about the Velvets being shunned in their day get a little mythologised. In their time, their sound got slowly less extreme and their audience correspondingly increased. Plus their resurgence happened sooner than this might imply. Post-Punk openly owed them a debt, and by the time I was getting into music (early Eighties) they were already on the must-hear list. Had the all-time lists continued past ’82, I’d guessed they’d have shown up pretty soon.

Curiously, it was the much sweeter-sounding Folk-hued Nick Drake who took the slower lane. A press release from his own label proudly announced his new release wouldn’t be shifting any units either, but they were putting it out anyway because they liked it. After playing the track, Peel speculated about how Drake might feel about the change in response to his music.

Given which, supposing another all-time list could somehow be compiled now? Another quarter-century down the road?

Certainly, some things seem to take longer still to take. Krautrock’s era was roughly ’68 to ’75. But, despite being so big an influence on Post-Punk, it shows up not once. That would doubtless be different now. Maybe even… finally… the Stooges.

The premise of Peel’s show was the present. All-time lists stand out because they were a slightly counter-intuitive thing to do. Today, music seems to have gone the other way, with the past raked over at the expense of the present. There can be little left now that needs digging up, but still the slew of re-releases. So I’d expect a lot more leaning into the past and - most of all - much less of a difference in sound between bands of then and now.

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…

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTERVENTIONS IN ANY MEDIA

(The latest instalment of 'Intensify The Contradictions', a deep dive into Post-Punk which starts here.)

“(We) use every tool, every energy and any media we can get our collective hands on.” 
- John Sinclair, The White Panthers Party

“We want to use a complete environmental thing where all the senses are moved and used. We want people to get stoned on the show, not on acid and things.”
- Nik Turner (from Carol Clerk’s ‘The Saga of Hawkwind’)

For the generation which came straight after Punk, Post-Punks often seemed peculiarly pally with the Hippies. There’s two main reasons for this. First, they were similar eras. As Reynolds puts it “the post-Punk era certainly rivals the Sixties in… the way that the music seemed inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of the times.” After a Seventies thaw, the Eighties witnessed what’s come to be called the Second Cold War, a return to the threat of nuclear Armageddon and (more conceptually) the sense of a world inherently predicated on opposition and conflict. Green described Scritti Politti as “index-linked to a large social upheaval.”

Reynolds adds “there was a similar mood-blend of anticipation and anxiety, a mania for all things new and futuristic coupled with fear of what the future had in store.” Upon this coin of utopianism/ dystopianism things did spin.

And these parallels were obvious at the time. The growing conservatism marked by the elections of Thatcher and Reagan led to the concept of the SixSixSixties – the notion that the permissive society ushered in by that era had turned society rotten, and all it's times a changing now needed changing back. (Largely by tearing up the social contract. Which had been made in the mid-Forties, but hey-ho.) It had been one thing for rebel Punks to jeer at hippies back in ’76, too mellow to throw bricks. By the Eighties that meant siding with the most establishment figures.

With this Sixties underground influence came a refreshed emphasis on multi-media performance. (Plus a reaction against Punk’s fetishisation of the primacy of the live event.) The ‘happenings’ had their main root in the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests, while the Velvet Underground had their Exploding Plastic Inevitable show. Susan Sontag busily theorised about the Gesamtkunstwerk, where all works of art would come together into one. Music was already being ‘matched’ by album cover design, while bands ‘performed’ rather than just played – their look, actions and general attitude as important as the music. (If not more so.) If all media were converging, the new medium of rock music seemed a handy unification point. (Like the Twenties the Sixties are now looked back on as quaint and innocent, full of classic cars and cuddly mop-tops. But they saw themselves as cutting edge, pushing forward, arriving at the future ahead of schedule.)

But multimedia performances were also a means to get back, to the basis of art - in drum-thumping, wall-painting tribal ritual, before all the various disciplines had veered off and got separated. And the charm lay in this combination. Multimedia simultaneously offered a way forward, embracing technology and innovation, and a way back, reconnecting to the primitive.

Post-Punk inherited this attitude, with Fast Product coining the slogan “interventions in any media.” A young P. Orridge, before Throbbing Gristle or even COUM Transmissions, had joined Transmedia Explorations – a kind of British Pranksters who arranged happenings at arch-hippy hangout the UFO Club. As the Human League’s Martyn Ware put it, “the whole atmosphere around the record was as important as the music – it all came together as a piece of art.” Gerald Casale of Devo commented “the theatrics and the ideas and the staging were as important as the music.” Test Department favoured derelict spaces over ‘proper’ music venues.

In fact it not only took things further, it took things beyond where they could actually then go. A downside of being ahead of your time is that you want to start travelling on modes of transportation that haven’t actually been invented yet. Tuxedomoon and the Residents were like the Babbage engines of multimedia installation art, existing before the technology to enable such a concept so stuck with having to pretend to be bands. (Or more accurately for the Residents, they were provocateurs keen to disseminate a bunch of dubious-sounding urban myths and the easiest way to do that was to make out they were in a band.) Like the early electronic bands, most of their equipment was built or hodge-podged together themselves. And, before video, there was no medium to show the fruit of their wares outside of the live concert.

But there was an important difference between the generations. As is well known the Grateful Dead had begun as the house band for the Prankster’s Acid Test events, but soon became a headline band in their own right. And that was a telling shift. All media need to converge. But Rock music, young and vibrant, was inevitably going to push its way to the front. Unifying everything else around the music added to the sense of modernity, of being “in touch with the kids”. Post-Punk reversed this polarity, seeing multi-media as a chance to minimise the role of music in their operations.

For example, the Human League wanted to carry out a support slot for the Talking Heads as an “automated cabaret” or “cinema you can dance to”, which they themselves would watch from the audience. “It was going to be this big multimedia show”, explained Martyn Ware, almost “Exploding Plastic Inevitable level.” Too much for the Heads it was called off, and adverts amended to read “the Human League will not now be appearing.” (As if that clarified anything.) This reversal rests on a general generational shift and something central to Post-Punk, which we’ll come to…