Jonh Wilde - Tin Machine - Tin Machine II - Melody Maker - August 31 1991

 

Apparently there is a new documentary on David Bowie - I think it's about the later years of his life, making a case for his continued creativity - and at one point, they present the journalist who wrote the brutal take-down above with his own words. Which he hadn't seen in decades.  Startled by the disrespect to the (inter)national treasure and immortal icon, he recants it. Or at least expresses regret for the harshness.

I dunno, though...  there's a certain zesty vehemence to the way the verdict is handed down, but I can't actually see anything inaccurate about the points made. 

File under: "right-footed in real-time". 

I get it - I've certainly winced now and then at some of my more savage reviews from back in the day...  

Yet while the task of demolition might have been gone about with an unseemly exuberance, invariably the reason for the demolition stands. 

I also think (having received some bad reviews over the years, nasty missives to the readers' letters page, plus the sort of bizarre aspersions and attributions of motives that pop up in the channels of  online chatter) that if you put yourself in the public eye or public ear, you kind of have to take your lumps... 

Here's what I wrote about Bowie's Tin Machine phase in the Aftershocks section of Shock and Awe: 

1989, May 

The Eighties started out looking like they were going to be the Bowie Decade, both in its terms of his own full-spectrum dominance (album sales and tours, but also starring film roles like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and acclaimed Broadway roles like The Elephant Man) and his influence being legion. But by the mid-decade point, it all went very wrong: Tonight, the Live Aid “Dancing In the Street” video team-up with Jagger, the  preposterously overblown Glass Spider tour, Never Let Me Down, the flop Jim Henson movie Labyrinth.... Bowie later recalled being unhappy and directionless for much of the late Eighties, while his friend Julien Temple spoke of the singer’s struggle with the “grueling nature of reinvention... the huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically.”

Bowie-ism itself has gone out of style, with a shift towards underground rock and anti-glamour. Bowie’s antennae, sharp as ever, detect this. Although he has sometimes mocked the notion of himself as a chameleon – pointing out that the lizard changes colour to be inconspicuous, to not stand out from their surroundings: hardly Bowie’s M/O or desire! –  “chameleonic” fits what he does when he forms Tin Machine. Influenced by alt-rock groups like Pixies and Sonic Youth, who’d been developing the template for what would later reach the mainstream as grunge, Bowie subsumes himself for the first time within the band format.  Tin Machine, at least in theory, is a democracy:  on the self-titled debut’s front, Bowie appears as just one bloke among four equals. The album is recorded live, with no overdubs,  a raw blast of guitar, bass, drums and voice, that is intended - says guitarist Reeves Gabrels - as a two-finger gesture to all that dance crap on the radio. Tin Machine songs are “screaming at the world”, adds Gabrels  - and note how the interviews pointedly involve the entire band, not just the star front man. In another first, Bowie grows a beard – a sign of the coming times, anticipating the facial hair soon to be rife among alt-rock and grunge bands.

I seem to remember one of my colleagues getting the chance to interview Bowie for the first time off the back of that debut Tin Machine album. Finally a chance to meet the hero of his youth!  And then, he told us  bitterly, he was ushered into the record company conference room and found Bowie flanked by the other three members of Tin Machine. How his heart sank! He'd dreamed of a tête-à-tête with the most fascinating man in all of rock. Instead, there was he was, sat on one side of  the conference table, Bowie deferentially letting his colleagues speak, Reeves Gabrels expatiating about guitar sounds... 

On the cover, not only is it not just Bowie's face on the front  - as it was with all his previous album covers - but he is the smallest and furthest back figure.  The suits and ties don't look very alt-rock admittedly.  But the Julien Temple megamix promo film above does show "audience members" jumping onstage and diving off again at one point, which does seem like an attempt to reposition DB with the young thing. Also struck by the fact that Tin Machine played Town and Country Club - i.e. the sort of venue the likes of Pixies and Loop would play - and much smaller than the kind of venue Bowie could command normally. 

I suppose the parallel work at that time to Tin Machine / Tin Machine II -  elders trying to get with the young thing - would be Achtung Baby.  After the debacle (not commercially but in terms of credibility as well as quality) that was Rattle and Hum, U2 had a major rethink and an aesthetic refueling / reorientation. And apparently what they listened to was things like The Young Gods and My Bloody Valentine  - i.e. the Maker canon.   

In fact, here is an Eno quote about the self-induced transvaluation U2 underwent:

"Buzzwords on this record were trashy, throwaway, dark, sexy, and industrial (all good) and earnest, polite, sweet, righteous, rockist and linear (all bad). It was good if a song took you on a journey or made you think your hifi was broken, bad if it reminded you of recording studios or U2. Sly Stone, T. Rex, Scott Walker, My Bloody Valentine, KMFDM, the Young Gods, Alan Vega, Al Green, and Insekt were all in favour. And Berlin ... became a conceptual backdrop for the record. The Berlin of the Thirties—decadent, sexual and dark—resonating against the Berlin of the Nineties—reborn, chaotic and optimistic ..."

Now, who the fuck were Insekt? I have always wondered that and have never thought to find out!

Also "rockist" as a no-no? You can't get more rockist - in the sense of exulting-in-guitar, than MBV or The Young Gods (albeit in their case done through sampling punk and metal riffs)... Alan Vega is pure rock'n'roll: Elvis filtered thru Iggy..  T. Rex is the eternal spirit-sprite of rock'n'roll.,, 

But I get what Eno means - U2 were rejecting a certain kind of rockism prevalent in the compact-disc Eighties: that godawful Robbie Robertson album (that now I think about it he made with Daniel Lanois), the comeback of John Fogerty, Dire Straits's Brothers In Arms...  with Achtung, they were jettisoning all that rootsy, bluesy, Memphis-invoking bollocks that infused Rattle.

But U2 being rockers (and rockist) at core far more than Bowie ever was, on Achtung they managed to pull it off handsomely. 

I wonder if it was galling for DB to see U2 scoring hits and plaudits having done such a similar move to what he'd attempted on the two Tin Machines...

Richard Cook - Abba - The Singles: The First Ten Years (NME, 1982)

 

At the event in North London for Rip It Up and Start Again in 2005, I remember a voice in the audience piping up - apropos of absolutely nothing that the panel were discussing -  to cry out: 

"ABBA were better than the Velvet Underground!"

A poptimist, obviously - responding to an uncontrollable contrarian urge from within. 

At the time I thought that - alongside its Tourettic quality and irrelevance to what we were talking about at that moment - that this was a really silly opposition to make. As if you had to choose, or to rank one above the other. Isn't Poptimism supposed to have freed itself, and all of us, from such binaries and hierarchies, rather than simply inverted them? 

(Some years later I watched a doc on ABBA and concluded that they operated just like any other "artistically autonomous unit" from the mid-Sixties onwards. They were a proper band, writing their own material and producing it themselves, aspiring to superhuman levels of  craft and musicianship, with lyrics that grew increasingly adult and emotionally sophisticated. Structurally, then, ABBA were "rockist" - operating very much not like a boyband or girl group (bossed around by producers, singing words written by professional others). So ABBA's true peers at that time would be Fleetwood Mac, as opposed to The Jacksons.).   

Perhaps the outcry was based on a sense of historical injustice,  ABBA having not been given their fair due? 

Well, they are the first entry in the Spin Guide to Alternative Music, so some respect had been granted in the 1990s. 

And in fact, if you go back to the music press of the time, you will see a fair amount of positive commentary on ABBA's pop genius. 

And it came from musicians too: Elvis Costello famously described them as a big influence on Armed Forces (the dramatic piano cascades of "Oliver's Army", the sleek bright tightness of the sound throughout). 

Okay the Richard Cook review is a little retrospective,and after the event, coming out in 1982, but hey look here's Dave McCullough raving about them in their "imperial phase" real time. 

And then a few years later you have Paul Morley describing Human League as the new ABBA. 

My ABfav ABBA tune

What a strange, super-sophisticated song structure! So many hook-full phases, such great playing.

Number 2 would be "S.O.S.", jostling hard - equal probably -  with "Dancing Queen". 

RIP Jack Barron

Saddened to hear of the death of Jack Barron - who wrote for Sounds and then NME among other places - after a long illness. 

I didn't know Jack well but I really enjoyed the couple of encounters we had.

 The first was when we were both sent as representatives of our respective music papers (Sounds then still, for him) to Warsaw to cover the first ever East-meets-West festival of alternative music in March 1987- the Carrot Festival, aka Marchewka. (You can read my report on it in this RIP post about David Thomas, who performed there).

Jack looked then almost exactly the same as in the much later photograph above, minus the eyepatch (which gives him a bit of a salty sea dog look)

Jack was already a seasoned veteran of visits to the Eastern Bloc countries and he had come prepared. His suitcase appeared to be entirely full of cassettes - advance copies of albums he'd been sent as a journo but that as released records would be extremely hard to get hold of behind the Iron Curtain. He told me that these advance tapes, once gifted, would then be copied, and that copy would be recopied, and so on.... ultimately circulating throughout Communist Europe. 

I was very impressed by this act of munificence and the following year, when there was a second Carrot Festival, in Budapest (my report can be found in the same David Thomas tribute post), I came prepared myself, with a large cache of advance tapes of recent alternative releases. 

However I could get no takers for them - and ended taking them all back home with me.

 Hungary then was one of the most liberal and permissive of Soviet-aligned nations - I remember being struck by a billboard of a glamorous, made-up female TV presenter, whereas Warsaw had been completely devoid of advertising, apart from the odd propaganda poster, a fabulously desolate and grey place. And because of that relative freedom and the country's proximity to Austria, Hungarian hipsters could get hold of all the music they wanted. Indeed they all seemed quite blasé about the festival and the weirdo-rock visitors from the U.K, whereas the first Carrot was treated as an enormously significant event by the Polish media (Jack and I were both interviewed by TV reporters) and by all the Poles we met.

Jack had a dry, low-key manner with just a gruff hint of baleful - which he possibly deliberately developed. At one point he mentioned having studied (I think in college - doing linguistics?)  how speech patterns and conversational cadence could be deployed to exert an almost hypnotic control over people. Something to do with speaking slowly and quietly and with pauses of a certain length - this compelled attention, the listener would be forced to lean in and couldn't break away. 

 Which was not unlike the way he spoke when telling me this...

The second time we met was when I was researching Energy Flash and I interviewed him along with his partner Helen Mead (both of them working for NME) and Barry Ashworth from Dub Pistols. These three friends were veterans of acid house from its early days. 

Jack had some extraordinary tales about his adventures with MDMA. Let's just say that he plunged into the scene with great commitment and intensity and took it as far as almost anyone at that time. 

 

He seemed none the worse for wear, though - his characteristic dry wit intact. 

A fine writer and one of those unusual characters who found a place in the menagerie that was the UK weekly music press. 

Here's an early-ish singles review in which swipes amusingly at Paul Morley while acknowledging the greatness of Art of Noise. 

 

And here's an interesting take on the Cocteau Twins

Early on, Jack was one of Sounds's main writers about reggae and dancehall. Jamaican music,  as I noted here, received sustained and serious coverage by the paper, far more than you'd imagine given its reputation as an oracle for Oi! and NWBHM. You'll find many pieces by Jack in that post. 

As I also noted in an earlier post here, his pen name is possibly an alias taken from the science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron. 

Looking at the Rock Back Pages bio, I see Jack actually wrote for a while for Melody Maker, in 1998, a good while after my time there was up. This makes him one of those rare examples of the "inkie clean sweep" - someone who wrote for all three leading UK weeklies. (Another would be Vivien Goldman). 

 (Sorry - I don't count Record Mirror as "leading". Mind you, there are even-rarer examples of people who wrote for all four, I believe). 

Lester Bangs - On the Road with the Clash, 3-part epic (NME, 1977)

 

The Stud Brothers - The Housemartins - Melody Maker, 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - The Bible - Melody Maker, May 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - Phantom Tollbooth - Melody Maker - summer 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - Bruce Gilbert - Melody Maker - May 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - Deacon Blue live - Melody Maker - December 19 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - the Art of Noise - Melody Maker - October 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - The Durutti Column - Melody Maker - November 27 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - The Bolshoi - Melody Maker - October 31 2987

 

Paul Oldfield - The Chills - Brave Words - Melody Maker - October 1987

 

Paul Oldfield - psychedelic house versus neo-psychedelic rock (Chicago Jackbeat / Nik Haeffner) - Melody Maker 1987

 

Jonh Wilde - David Sylvian - Secrets of the Beehive - Melody Maker - October 1987

 

As a counterbalance to the recent Japan-love posts, here is  Jonh Wilde both befuddled by and scornful of the veneration for David Sylvian (including his usually closely aesthetically aligned comrade Chris Roberts, whose viewpoint is incorporated into the review) 

I do find bracing these Radically Other takes on bands you love - and I've never forgotten the voice like hair lacquer line. 

Musicians as critics (3 of ??): Malcolm McLaren on rock and roll, rawness, Africa, folk rhythms of the world, the spirit of the hobo (NME, Christmas 1982)

 "Musicians", loosely understood, although Malcolm had broken out as a performing artist by the time he wrote this for the NME Christmas look-back on '82 / look-forward to '83.