Yob Rock (Melody Maker 1996)

Apropos of nothing in the news, honest! 

The Yob versus Romo War

For the June 29 1996 issue, Melody Maker investigated the phenomenon of "Yob Rock", convening a round table that has a number of people representing ladpop and ladette-pop but also a rather large contingent of Romo musicians and Romo-writers, who deplore the Loaded-ladded culture. 

There's also a sort of historicising thinkpiece about the yob tradition in British rock by Taylor Parkes 

The Yob Rock debate -  Orlando members and Romo-in-spirit Placebo singer plus Simon Price critique the ladpop, while Ben Stud + some lad and laddette performers retort that this is elitism and snobbery and stereotyping

I think is actually the UK music press at its best - purely ideas-oriented and ideals-oriented argumentation - flashbacking to similar debates about e.g. Synths in Pop, or the New Mod, that Sounds might convene.

It gets pretty fiery.

Ben Stud: "Romo.... was a comprehensive failure" from the most acrimonious bit of the exchange

You might draw some discomfiting conclusions from the fact that in this Lads versus Dandies furore, the women present barely get a word in edgeways....   suggesting that Cavaliers versus Roundheads is just a fratricidal battle within the Patriarchy - Sons versus Sons.

In following weeks the surviving Romos out there bite back at the Yob Champions

- but futilely. 

And then Oasis have the front cover for two issues in a row - Loch Lomond and Knebworth

Followed, with a week's interval (Ash) by The Stone Roses 

(At Knebworth, John Squire joined Oasis on stage)

And then this!

A brief flicker of Romo-adjacent ambiguity

And then Oasis again!

Ladrock's grim hegemony maintains

(1996 was really a dead-arsed year when I think back to it - outside of dance music and R&B)

The Complete Romo Saga (Melody Maker 1995 / 1996

 Apropos of nothing in the news, honest!

This is the maxi-version of this earlier mega-post at Shock and Awe on Romo as the Re-Renaissance of Glam 

I remember Romo fondly as the last blast of the old-style weekly music press - a scene willed into being, semi-fictionalized, born aloft on the rhetorical efflorescence of its champions

The product of hype in its purest sense -  the job we music journos do for the sheer sport of it

The original Romanifesto, penned by Simon Price and Taylor Parkes, is a classic of the genre

Wilde at heart!

Nothingelseon, heroic scanner and tweeter of the UK weeklies, has recently gone through that period and what has surprised me with each weekly deposit is the extent to which Melody Maker continued to throw its weight behind the movement through late '95 and deep into the following year

There was a MM-associated tour of the UK with the leading lights

There was a cassette, Fiddling While Romo Burns...

 

The big groups on the scene got double-page spread interviews

Also what surprised me is the controversy - the letter page Backlash was full of, well, backlash... romophobia ran rampant...  the debate raged right through into the spring of '96 

Here, below -  because I am little insane -  is pretty much the entire run of this twilight-of-the-inkies phenom - from the earliest twinkly inklings, through the Special Issue, and on to the continued coverage .... Singles of the Week....  letters pages fizzing with disapproval, Parkes and Pricey taking turns to fight back ... the big features...  a report on the tour from Simon P.... and then finally a backlash, in the form of the Yob Rock issue and subsequent acrimony. 

I was in America and missed almost the entire thing, although I do remember on a visit to UK going to a concert at which three of the most touted groups played... I think it was Dexter and Orlando and maybe one other... one group seemed rather Duran Duran circa Rio...  overall I wasn't swayed as much as I'd have liked./   I do remember being quite taken with Minty and picking up one of their singles or EPs... 

But it hardly mattered if the music substantiated the hype, really... the point was to put the ideas out there, shove them into the mix... and make that grand gesture against the laggardly ligging laddishness of  post-peak but still dominant Britpop

A bit of context:

The things that Romo defined itself against, rebuked, flashed garish against the dowdy flock included aforementioned Britpop (now in its Bluetones / Cast / Shed Seven / Northern Uproar / Sleeper  phase).... there was also still grunge around...   bands like Garbage, superficially brighter and poppier but essentially Viggist...  Bis... Skunk Anansie...  and there was the faceless brainfood or footfood of drum & bass, post-rock, IDM, Mille Plateaux...  

But there were fellow travelers with the Romos in terms of a move towards sharpness and image: Pulp (in their ascendancy)... Moloko.... the EZ listening initiative (the Ratpack-homaging Combustible Edison + Mike Flowers in the charts, travestying "Wonderwall")...  the modder faction within Britpop: Gene, Menswear.... neo-glam (70s rather than 80s) flickers from Denim and Earl Brutus...  neo-mod suit-wearing from  Ian Svenonious's new groop The Makeup....   old glam gods lurching back into action (David Bowie, Boy George, Mark Almond, Human League) and then right there in middle of pop, accidentally aligned with Romo, there was Babylon Zoo... and poking through towards the end of this phase, Placebo  

So some kind of gathering rejection of post-grunge and post-Britpop ordinariness was being disparately mounted

ROMO - THE BUILD UP 

The first mention of Romo I could find is from June 1995 in this Pricey review which makes Sexus single of the week.

ROMO - THE MELODY MAKER FRONT COVER

x

ROMO RAGES ON (AND ON)

Tips for 1996

By June '96, Romo has pretty much petered out -  making for a year of livening up the pages of the paper,  since it was June '95 that Pricey's made Sexus's "Edenites" Single of the Week

 

A few diehards don't want to turn the page

August 31 1996

And Simon Price still flies the flag now and then 

That's September 1996

But it won't be until electroclash circa 2002 that Romo-ish ideas get back in the ascendant (and even then they don't go mainstream)

The mainstreaming would come with the re-re-renaissance - and it would be female-led - Gaga, La Roux, etc