Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: Vision On

Un articolo sul Guardian di oggi sugli anni 80...interessante, ben fatto... 
copio e incollo.
Un saluto a tutti ma vado di fretta... ma non volevo che si peredesse questo 
bel pezzo.
ciao
It is time to adjust history: the golden age of British pop lies in the late 
Seventies and early Eighties, not in the Sixties. From Adam Ant to ZTT, a 
bizarre assortment of radicals, artists, chancers and unclassifiable 
oddballs took over the mainstream, and for once we had the best of both 
worlds. Simon Reynolds, leading pop historian of the period, makes the case 
that we never had it so good
Sunday April 24, 2005
The Observer
Liverpool 1978: Gawky student Julian Cope and self-styled poet-ruffian Pete 
Wylie are hanging out at Kirkland's cafe, nursing half-drunk cups of coffee 
while 'rehearsing' their band the Nova Mob - that is, taking turns to 
describe in detail a song they have yet to actually write.
Birmingham, 1978: A disillusioned punk called Kevin Rowland flicks morosely 
through a stack of second-hand singles at a market stall. A flicker of joy 
wipes the scowl from his face when he lights upon a seven-inch single by 
raspy-voiced Sixties R&B singer Geno Washington.
Sheffield, 1979: Martin Fry, writer for the fanzine Modern Drugs, arrives 
from Stockport to interrogate the experimental electronic outfit Vice Versa. 
The 'zine interview turns into a job interview: by the end of their 
conversation, Fry has made such an impression on the Sheffield boys they 
offer him a position in the group.
Flash forward four years: all these unlikely characters have become pop 
stars. That's one of the most remarkable aspects of the post-punk era. You 
expect the underground to be a hospitable place for eccentrics and misfits. 
But during that period, the weirdos and visionaries actually wormed their 
way into the mainstream.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, those hyper-accelerated years 
from 1978 to 1984 rival the equivalent, but far more fabled, period from 
1963 to 1969 commonly known as the Sixties. But for all the freak imagery 
and wanton derangement, there was a certain plausibility to the pop stars of 
the Sixties. From the Beatles and Stones to Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, 
by and large, the biggest stars were the best musicians and the finest 
singers; they also tended to be the best looking, the ones most endowed with 
animal magnetism and charisma.
All that changed after punk. Post-punk retained the principle that anyone 
can do it, eventually translating punk's do-it-yourself imperative into the 
New Pop philosophy 'anyone can be a star' and 'anyone can have a hit'. Sheer 
belief in this egalitarian (and, on the face of it, hopelessly unrealistic) 
notion gave people the confidence to go for it full tilt, and a surprising 
number actually pulled it off.
Recently I finished writing Rip it Up and Start Again, a history of the 
post-punk era. The process of research, rather than demystifying everything, 
had the opposite effect: the more I found out about the back story to these 
characters' improbable trajectories towards fame (or obscurity), the more my 
sense of wonder increased. At the end, I was left more astonished and 
impressed than ever by the feats of the postpunk adventurers - these 
strivers and visionaries, schemers and dreamers.
One primary impetus for the book was pure generational rivalry. Baby boomers 
need to stop hogging the retro spotlight. It's high time we mythologised the 
amazing sounds and stories, personalities and events, of post-punk. The 
1978-1984 era matches the Sixties in terms of the sheer volume of amazing 
music created, the spirit of quest and risk that infused it, and the way the 
music seemed inextricably intertwined with the social/political/cultural 
turbulence of its day. There was also a similar atmosphere permeating the 
time, one that mingled anticipation and anxiety; a hunger for all things new 
and futuristic coexisting with a dread of what the future had in store.
From 1978 onwards, punk actually lived up to its promise of a musical 
revolution. Ironically, this only happened when the bands catalysed by the 
commotion and calamity of 1977 started to break some of punk's own 
prohibitions and strictures, and instead embraced longer songs, sonic 
subtlety, a wider spectrum of emotion; when they explored the sound-warping 
possibilities of the recording studio, looked to the radical rhythms of 
contemporary black dance music (funk, disco, reggae), and the futuristic 
potential of electronics.
Some of the liveliest minds to emerge during punk, such as the Slits and 
Siouxsie and the Banshees, didn't even put out records until 1978 or '79, by 
which time they'd evolved far beyond the kind of basic fare that roused the 
rabble at the Roxy. The Slits teamed up with UK dub producer Dennis Bovell 
and drummer Budgie to create the punky-reggae classic Cut, the desolate 
dream-drift skank of songs like 'Newtown' and 'Spend Spend Spend' light 
years beyond the exuberant racket of early tunes like 'Vindictive'. With The 
Scream and Join Hands, all serrated metal guitar and piercing ice-dagger 
vocals, Siouxsie and the Banshees invented (and surpassed in advance) goth. 
Then they too recruited the polyrhythmically perverse Budgie, resulting in 
Kaleidoscope, Juju and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, and a series of singles 
such as 'Spellbound' and 'Fireworks' whose baleful sensuality cut a swath of 
dark glamour across Top of the Pops in the early Eighties.
Today we tend to think of post-punk as consisting entirely of angular 
agit-prop (like Gang of Four) or ominous angst (like Joy Division), partly 
because those groups have influenced the current spate of fashionable 
retro-post-punk outfits, from Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand to Interpol and 
the Rapture. But it was also a great period for pure pop sensibility. 
Consider the geometric tautness and melodic concision of Wire's Chairs 
Missing, the sweet shambles of Postcard groups like Orange Juice and Josef 
K. Then came the contagious exuberance of 2-Tone outfits such as the 
Specials, Madness, and the Beat; synthpop bands such as the Human League and 
Soft Cell with their fire-and-ice combination of cold, glistening 
electronics and hot, heartfelt passion; the bright, rejoicing melodiousness 
of Liverpool bands like Echo and the Bunnymen or the Teardrop Explodes 
(Julian Cope finally getting round to writing songs rather just talking 
about them in the Kirkland cafe). All this made the late Seventies and early 
Eighties a golden age for the seven-inch single, for radio, and for music 
TV. Top of the Pops was essential viewing in those days, like Ready Steady 
Go! in the swinging Sixties.
For a few years, top of the pops was full of people who simply wouldn't be 
let through the celebrity barricades nowadays, when stars are groomed and 
choreographed to the point where they might as well be computer-generated 
animations. Consider Martin Fry, with his acne scars, slightly strained 
vocals, and hulking frame. A year after he joined Vice Versa, the Sheffield 
group had changed its name to ABC and its jarring electronic sound to a 
slick disco-funk, while Fry had been promoted to frontman. On Top of the 
Pops, performing the group's debut single and first hit 'Tears are not 
Enough' in a gold lamË tuxedo, Fry couldn't quite play the part he'd 
assigned himself - the bygone panache of pre-rock showbiz meets the 
melodramatic splendour of 'I Will Survive'-style orchestral disco. Yet punk 
had endowed him and the other members of ABC with the self-belief and sheer 
nerve to aim for the stars.
With some help from über-producer Trevor Horn, they reached the pop 
firmament. Their dashing, strings-swept debut album, Lexicon of Love, number 
one for a month in the summer of 1982, was embraced by the general populace, 
not just NME readers who had seen the group's manifesto-like interviews. 
That will-to-power is what Fry alluded to when he declared, some years 
later: 'I am a punk. I always have been and I always will be.'
Even more remarkable is the story of Dexy's Midnight Runners, the group 
formed by Kevin Rowland and based on the horn-powered Sixties soul template 
he found in those second-hand Geno Washington singles. Rowland is no oil 
painting, and he had a voice that only a mother could love. Despite all 
that, he turned himself into a compelling frontman, overcoming his 
limitations and ending up sounding something like Joe Strummer determinedly 
struggling to sing Stax. Dexy's fans seemed to respond to the group's aura 
of puritanical zeal (Rowland's pre-Dexy's punk band was called the Killjoys) 
and its monastic/pugilistic image of hooded tops and boxing boots. When 
music journalists asked Rowland to define his 'new soul vision', the singer 
declared an embargo on the press. For two full years, Dexy's spoke direct to 
their fans via a series of communiques in music paper adverts, paid for out 
of the band's own pockets.
The post-punk period was a golden epoch for a particular breed of messianic 
or masterplan-touting pop stars such as Rowland. Punk had knocked the record 
industry off balance, leaving the big labels highly suggestible and 
vulnerable to anyone with nerve, verve, and a sharp line in 
self-salesmanship. It's hard to imagine any other phase in pop 
history -during which a figure like Malcolm McLaren could have fashioned the 
group Bow Wow Wow - whose subversive concoction of ditties celebrated home 
taping (then the record industry's bogeyman) and underage sex, underpinned 
by pounding African rhythms - and sold them to two different major labels in 
succession. When Bow Wow Wow didn't pan out on an equivalent culture-seismic 
scale to the Sex Pistols, McLaren opted to do something even more unlikely: 
become a pop star in his own right. He convinced another big record company, 
along with ABC's producer Trevor Horn, to help him pull it off. With 
'Buffalo Gals', McLaren became the first British rapper in the pop charts, 
despite having absolutely no sense of rhythm (following countless abortive 
takes, Horn was obliged to tap out the beat on -Malcolm's chest while the 
latter rapped into the microphone, in order to help him keep time).
McLaren briefly worked with Adam Ant, helping him to come up with a whole 
new image and lyrical shtick (before stealing his band to form Bow Wow Wow). 
Adam may have had the pretty boy looks and a decent enough voice to make it 
in any era, but Antmania was still a distinctly peculiar pop phenomenon. 
Adam's biggest hit, 'Prince Charming', fused an Aboriginal chant melody to a 
lurching waltz-time beat, while the follow-up, 'Ant Rap', featured MCing 
even more pitiful than McLaren's effort and a video in which Adam plays a 
knight in shining armour and Lulu stars as a damsel in distress. Like Fry, 
Rowland, and McLaren, Adam started out a punk rocker. He'd appeared in Derek 
Jarman's Jubilee and sang kinky S&M-inspired songs like 'Whip in my Valise' 
and 'Beat my Guest' to the delectation of a devoted cult audience, many of 
whom went on to form goth bands. But by 1982 Adam the Sex Pistols fan was 
appearing in the Royal Variety Show and shaking hands with Her Majesty.
Scritti Politti's Green never went that far into the world of showbiz, but 
he did make the Billboard Top 20 - not bad for a former member of the Young 
Communist League and a fan of English folk whose musical experience, prior 
to punk, consisted of playing jigs, reels and Morris dances on acoustic 
guitar. After two years as a squat-dwelling do-it-yourself band, Scritti 
decided that infiltrating the pop mainstream was more subversive than 
malingering on the margins. Green stopped singing about hegemony and started 
crooning love songs. Sort of. The jaunty 'Jacques Derrida' declared, 'I'm in 
love with Jacques Derrida/ Read a page and I know what I need ta/ Take 
apart/My baby's heart.' Scritti's biggest UK hit 'The Word Girl' was a 
deconstruction of desire influenced by another French theorist, Jacques 
Lacan. The single's cover even featured a page fragment torn from Lacan's 
classic text Ecrits.
All these post-punks and New Popsters had something in common: they were 
chasing some kind of vision through pop. They didn't want to be famous for 
the sheer sake of it. Success was pursued avidly, but as a necessary 
component of the masterplan. So many of the post-punk renegades and New Pop 
infiltrators came out of art school originally, and even those who didn't 
were arty-as-fuck, as much as they might have scorned the word 'art' or 
jeered at intellectuals and academics (think John Lydon and Mark E Smith 
here as classic post-punk autodidacts).
The culmination of a half-decade's massive injection of art ideas into pop 
music was ZTT - or to give the label its full, magnificent name, Zang Tuum 
Tumb (originally a snatch of Italian Futurist prose-poetry, Marinetti's 
onomatopoeic evocation of the sound of cannons firing in the Balkan wars). 
ZTT's house band wore the word 'art' like a banner in their very name The 
Art of Noise, again borrowed from the Futurists (Luigi Russolo's 1913 
manifesto for a new music for the then young 20th century). Art of Noise 
consisted of four studio musicians/technicians/producers (Anne Dudley, Gary 
Langan, JJ Jeczalik, and Trevor Horn) so unsuitable for Smash Hits it was 
decided from the group's inception that AoN would never be photographed or 
appear in their videos - plus former NME journalist Paul Morley, whose job 
was to come up with the song titles and sleevenotes. It sounds utterly 
preposterous, yet Art of Noise made the charts with 'Close (to the Edit)' - 
musique concrete meets Duane Eddy over a hip hop beat.
What struck me when I began to consider writing a history of post-punk, and 
what was soon corroborated when the research plunged me into the 
leather-bound volumes of yellowing music papers at the British Library's 
National Sound Archive, was the sheer pace at which popular music moved in 
those days. Trend followed trend (industrial, ska, mod, electropop, 
avant-funk, -psychobilly, goth etc) and a series of cities took turns to be 
the next hot spot (Akron and Cleveland in industrial Ohio were first, 
followed by Leeds, Sheffield, New York, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, San 
Francisco, Glasgow and Edinburgh, DËsseldorf, New York again, Berlin...).
The initial Big Bang of punk scattered shards hurtling outwards in all 
directions, each fragment nurturing its own version of what punk had been 
'all about' and its own vision of how best to further the spirit. You can 
feel the urgency in the careers of individual bands too: the giant leaps 
made across three albums by Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings and 
Food, Fear of Music, Remain in Light) or PiL (Public Image, Metal Box, 
Flowers of Romance). There was a total commitment to modernism and 
innovation, an absolute confidence that there were still virgin frontier 
zones for rock music to explore, an impatience to get to the future ahead of 
everybody else.
For a few millennia after the Big Bang, the universe was dense, turbulent, 
and unimaginably hot. Post-punk was a bit like that too, seething with 
activity and dissension. This overheated atmosphere owed a lot to the UK 
music press. It was almost a structural condition, an inevitable by-product 
of the competition between the four weekly papers - New Musical Express, 
Sounds, Melody Maker, Record Mirror - to find the Next Big Thing, along with 
the equally fierce competition within each magazine between writers looking 
to make their messianic mark. This greenhouse effect resulted in things like 
the Pop Group getting on the cover of NME in late 1978 before the punk-funk 
'beatniks of tomorrow' from Bristol had even released a single, purely 
because they'd become emblems of the way forward, ciphers of total 
possibility.
If rock criticism was born in late Sixties America, in the late Seventies it 
was reborn in the UK. NME, in particular, recalled the original Rolling 
Stone in the way that it treated rock as the key element in a much broader 
oppositional culture. The British weekly made connections between music and 
other artforms (cinema, literature, comics), and between music and politics. 
Along with features floridly burnishing the mystique of the dead saviour Ian 
Curtis, or heralding some esoteric outfit currently in heavy rotation on the 
John Peel show, you'd also find lengthy profiles of Rock Against Racism and 
its sister organisation the Anti-Nazi League, interviews with politicians 
like Tony Benn, and investigations of inner-city decay in places like 
Liverpool.
During the late Seventies and early Eighties NME also ran a regular column 
called Plutonium Blondes about the deployment of US cruise missiles in 
Britain, along with other nuclear-related issues. There was a palpable sense 
abroad that nuclear annihilation was a real and impending prospect. This 
dread was stoked by the renewed frigidity of the Cold War following the 
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 'Evil Empire' rhetoric of Ronald 
Reagan, as echoed by Margaret Thatcher. She had come to power in May 1979, 
after a winter of industrial strife that convinced many that the UK's social 
fabric was disintegrating. The resulting swing to the right was hugely 
demoralising to the post-punks, who tended to lean to the left of Labour (at 
that point still home to concepts like the nationalisation of the banks!) 
and now felt like exiles in their own country. The anxious tenor of the time 
can be gleaned from a three-part series, 'The Consumer's Guide to 1984', 
published in NME in late 1980. Written by the late, great Ian MacDonald, the 
essays undertook a panoramic survey of all the dystopian trends paving the 
way for the emergence of a police state in Britain.
Yet in a weird way, certain aspects of post-punk can be seen as totally in 
tune with Thatcherite entrepreneurial ideals. Rough Trade, de facto leaders 
of the independent label movement, wanted to build an alternative culture of 
music and fanzines free of major label control. Although it was a privately 
owned company, in its day-to-day operations Rough Trade functioned as a 
co-operative, with each staff member having equal pay and equal say.
Beneath the collectivist patina, Rough Trade and their fellow independent 
labels were exemplary self-made businessmen to warm the cockles of Maggie's 
iron heart. Indeed McLaren, who despised the indie ethos, dismissed Rough 
Trade and their ilk as mere 'grocers' a slur that deftly connected the 
'hippie capitalists' in Ladbroke Grove with the 'grocer's daughter' at 
Number 10 Downing Street.
Actually, if the indie labels had politics they were at base neither 
socialist nor conservative but autonomist. Punk's call to self-empowerment, 
unleashed an avalanche of self-released music: seven-inch singles with 
hand-stamped labels and covers folded on the kitchen table, albums released 
only on cassette and sometimes disseminated gratis on receipt of a blank 
C60. What Green called 'the squattage industry' unleashed a heap of 
self-indulgent, sub-Dada drivel and horrible hapless din, of course. But it 
also generated innumerable one-off strokes of inspiration, too. Some 
barely-known-back-then figures are currently the focus of cult worship, 
groups like the Homosexuals and Storm Bugs - neither of whom, despite being 
a fairly avid consumer of the obscure, I ever heard of, let alone heard, at 
the time.
It is time the story of several thousand of the most pretentious people on 
the planet at one time was told. Pretentiousness, of course, being a good 
thing, in my book. Far better to over-reach than to aim low; as Adam Ant 
sang in 'Prince Charming', ridicule is nothing to be scared of.
· 'Rip it up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984' is published by Faber at 
£12.99.
Miranda Sawyer
The author and critic recalls that era as the time of Shalamar, Howard 
Jones - and Kajagoogoo
'I can remember watching Top of the Pops in summer 1982, when ABC performed 
'The Look of Love', and Martin Fry wore a gold suit. I thought they were 
great. But on the same show, Shalamar's 'A Night to Remember' played, and 
the group's Jeffrey Daniels, in pointy fringe and suit with nothing 
underneath, gave the nation's teenagers their first demonstration of 
body-popping. He was absolutely, unbelievably fantastic.
'These days, it's okay to appreciate ABC's pop wit and charm, but to say you 
like Shalamar's soapy soul is unacceptable. But 1978-1984 was just as full 
of rubbish pop as any other time, and its younger fans (I was 11 in 1978) 
were no more discerning than they are today. At different stages, I 
worshipped the Specials, Frankie and Orange Juice. But I also loved Howard 
Jones and Kajagoogoo (pictured). I heard 'Too Shy' on Timmy Mallett's show 
and thought, 'That's brilliant! Definitely a Number One!'
Gordon Moakes
The bassist in Bloc Party, 2005's hot punk-funk quartet, on the Fall, Gang 
of Four - and even early Simple Minds
'There was something a lot more subversive about the bands that appeared 
after punk. In fact, post-punk had implications more wide-reaching than 
punk, in the sense that it shaped pop music. And while people think of 
post-punk as a very particular kind of thing - dance punk music - all of the 
bands involved were trying to do something different, from the Slits and Joy 
Division to the Fall (pictured) and Talking Heads.
'I was a huge Simple Minds fan as a teenager - I loved their trad rock years 
at first. But then I heard their early work, records like Empires and Dance, 
and I was astonished by their freshness.
'Then, of course, there's Gang of Four. My brother got me into them, like, 
10 years ago when they weren't cool. I was really intrigued. Strangely, 
though our percussive guitar sounds are kind of reminiscent of Gang of Four, 
our guitarist (Russell Lissack) knew nothing about them until recently.'
Post-punk's best albums
The Slits, Cut
With Ari Up's wonky warble stapled to itchy guitars and skanky bass, this 
should have proved to be the birth of a genre.
PiL, Metal Box
Death disco and dread dub encased in a grey film canister that made it 
tricky to remove the three vinyl discs without damage.
The Fall, Early Years 77-79
The Fall at their sulphate-scorched peak, from the rockabilly-ish 'Fiery 
Jack' to the eldritch 'Rowche Rumble'.
Scritti Politti, Early
The group's self-deconstructing, 'scratchy-collapsy' music deliciously 
complicates Green's gorgeous way with melody.
Gang of Four, Entertainment!
Stringent funk + unsentimental dissections of the mysteries of love = 
post-punk landmark.
Talking Heads, Remain In Light
From the jerky 'Psycho Killer' to the funkadelia of Remain..., no post-punk 
band travelled so far so swiftly.
Orange Juice, The Glasgow School
Sparkly guitars midway between Chic and Loaded-era Velvets jostle with Edwyn 
Collins's schoolboy warble.
Cabaret Voltaire, The Living Legends
From Yorkshire garage punk to Eastern Bloc dub, this compiles the Sheffield 
trio's classic singles.
The Associates, Fourth Drawer Down
Glam reborn: Roxy's For Your Pleasure meets Bowie's Low for a tour de force 
of glacial yet torrid Teutonica.
Siouxsie and the Banshees, Once Upon A Time - The Singles
Glam reborn #2: The icy Siouxsie rides a sound indebted to the Velvets and 
Psycho's shower scene
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