ABC, Essential Bop, Restricted Code: Bristol Bop! Glasgow Pop! It's As Easy As ABC!

by Paul Morley

Lemon Sucking refers to the practice of sucking in the cheeks to affect the 'rock'n'roll' wasted look. Chewing, or neck bending, refers, I would suppose, to getting stuck in. Getting on with the job. Action!

"There should be more chewing," pronounces ABC's Martin Fry in a full flavoured Lancashire/Yorkshire crossover accent, "and less lemon sucking."

Fry and ABC saxophonist Stephen Singleton are sat on a settee in a friend's London flat, sorting out the contents of their manifesto, making sure I know they mean business. Action! "if we do get our 15 minutes," states Singleton in a dry and croaked Yorkshire accent, "we want it to be five three-minute singles in the Top Ten."

Fry gets stuck in. "I want the music to be more sex, more exertion on the part of both parties – player and listener. The death of post-modernism, that dreary attitude..."

The interview comes to a close. On a TV in a corner that's silently flickering through some commercials, the actor who played Meg Mortimer's husband in Crossroads, killed by a heart attack whilst being held hostage by a terrorist group including David Hunter's son Chris, appears on the screen smoothily and toothily advertising Queensway furniture.

"That's a good sign," chorus Fry and Singleton in sheer delight. "Hugh Mortimer's alive! That's a sign of the new optimism!"

ABC – attache-case commuter band vice-versa transmutes to radical dance faction, a five piece chainsaw pop group, throwing shapes, much more than 'the idea'...down the slide:
david robinson – drums
martin fry – vocals
mark lickley – bass
mark white – guitar
stephen singleton – saxophone BUMP!!!

Records – as Vice Versa 5 track EP 'Music 4' (Neutron) Sheffield compilation 7" 1980: 'The First Fifteen Minutes' with Clock DVA, I'm So Hollow and The Stunt Kites.

"It was a document for that time, not something that's going to sell for ever and ever. It was meant to be in people's attention for a short while. It didn't generate much interest, but that's life."

STEVE BUSH, Essential Bop's singer, meets me off the 125 at Bristol Temple Meads. In the darkness of the platform he passes the cigarette he's been nervously smoking from one hand to the other so that he can shake my hand. Straight away we're chatting like friends: are we supposed to be enemies? By the time we climb into his Mini-estate we've dropped into the inevitable conversation.

What's it all about? We charge out of the station car park, hurtling through Bristol's knotty city centre towards the Avon flat of his girlfriend. His driving is manic: he deals out drop dead looks to fellow drivers, swings the car from kerb to road centre at will, talks non-stop, swerves too quickly around corners. When we've finished the dizzying drive he apologises for his car handling.'

"It reflects my personality," he admits.

Bush, studying Humanities but not keen on the student ethic, is a zealous communicator, animated and eccentrically articulate. A would-be poet alarmed by the lack of respect and serious attention given to the contemporary poem and poet, he eventually saw no real life in poetry and attacked the pop openings with flawed grace and gaudy good will. His conversation, his heartlifting worldview, reminds me of something somewhere between Andy Partridge and Howard Devoto: between wacked and racked, if not between wacky and wary. He seems to be continually on the verge of a' nervous breakdown, urging himself through real and imaginary obstacles: he gets worked up, so how could we not get on?

"I'm interested in the grey areas between the right and the left, the extremes...I feel blank half the time. I don't feel hate, I don't feel love, I don't feel good, I don't feel bad. Most of us, I think, I feel a lot of the time just don't experience those extremes. I can stare at the wall all day. I just don't know what to think. I don't think anything!! That's a mysterious world that people don't write about. I think it's interesting. I want to know what's happening up there when I'm switched off."

He stares at a wall: but he's very switched on. Anything to exorcise the wailing Pop Group ghost. He talks into the microphone of my tape recorder. "We're going to be literate, we're going to have style, we're not going to be po-faced, we're going to be danceable, we're going to have variety and we're going to get you whether you like it or not, whether it takes three months, three years or three decades."

ESSENTIAL BOP – the painted sound/the eloquent sound, twisting the arms of common sense: dislocating the rock'n'role rationale. part the curtains:
steve bush – voice
simon tyler – keyboards
danny cotteril – guitar
dave robinson – bass (recently left)
phil howard – drums
APPLAUSE!!!

Records – Essential Bop 4 track EP 'Eloquent Sounds' (Monopause).

"The EP satisfies our vinyl lust after two and a half years."

ONE OF the very very few things the bursting bubble of Scottish bang-bands have in common is that they get interviewed by NME in a pub just off the Carnaby Street parade. Orange Juice, Josef K, Positive Noise...now Restricted Code, gathered around a deep brown wooden table. Drinking cider could be another thing they have in common.

The letters of mild abuse straggle in: accusing this writer of 'manufacturing' a Scottish scene for financial benefit. There's no scene: just something to be seen. We should rise up to the challenge. There's been lots to smile about when it comes to music from the two cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh: nothing to get paranoid about.

"There is no Glasgow scene, it must be repeated. We don't think about it much anyway. The only time we would think about it would be if there was a Scottish backlash in the press just as we started to feature. We're in a good position though, cos we're a Glasgow band signed to an Edinburgh company, so all the Glasgow bands think we're an Edinburgh group and ail the Edinburgh bands think we're a Glasgow band...so we can sit above it!"

They self-consciously squirm a little on their hard brown chairs. There's an unaffected and unexpected shyness they're struggling to dispel: it's at odds with their fresh (faced) and unspoilt directness, it doesn't push them in the right direction. "We really do think that we're an honest band. All our songs are completely unpretentious in their approach." They grin at each other. "Maybe we've been reading too many Dexy's essays."

Now more than ever; though, I say, there has to be an arrogance in groups such as Restricted Code.

"Definitely. If you're not arrogant and you don't push yourself then someone less worthy is going to do it and get ahead of you. It is just something that has got to be done. We're not very forceful, we're not very pushy. It's maybe not arrogance on our part but self-confidence. We'll make it because we are better than other people."

RESTRICTED CODE – for radio, dancing and escaping from this room into that room, the fall popped up: pop to fall over with, still young (and) so right, open the box:
torn cannavan – vocals and guitar
frank quadrelli – guitar and vocs
kenny blythe – bass and vocs
robert mccormick – drums
(currently unable to join permanently – too young!)
ZING!!!

Records – Restricted Code two songs on Statik Glasgow compilation Second City Statik.

"We don't like that. We don't play the songs anymore. We try and forget about it. We were really embarrassed when Sounds gave it five stars."

Single on Pop: Aural 'First Night On'/'From The Top'.

I'M RANDY for singles: this year an overwhelming demand I've developed over the years was satisfied. Most of my favourite groups have put out two or three smash singles. Orange Juice, Beat, Skids, Banshees, U2, Wah! Heat, Orchestral Manouvres, Magazine, Josef K. Dexy's, ACR, Joy Division. Then there's been special things from Ludus, The Bongos, Snatch, Adam, Grace Jones, Bow Wow Wow, Eric Random, Girls At Our Best, Ultravox, Au Pairs, Fire Engines, And The Native Hipsters, The B-52s, Cure, Cristina, TV21, Revillos, Fall...

This is no rampant collectors fetish: stacking them up like matchbox labels. Just being caught up in excitement that can exist on some level.

Put all this together: make up connections, blend some trends, submit to some blind spots and you could see and then say that there's an up-tempo pop-beat: on some level it's been an ace year. Nothing that could convert anyone to anything in particular, though. Some times it wakes you up and makes you tingle to divide things up, back things in, vote for your favourites, but it never makes anything clearer.

If on some level it's been an ace year, nowhere near enough has been done to shift the emphasis away from rock'n'roll statistics and tradition and it's massively overestimated raving. The iceberg – inert, lumpy, vast – is taking centuries to melt. Wishful thinking isn't warm enough to melt it.

I TALK with the three permanent Restricted Code lads the day after a groggy gig at the Hammersmith Odeon with the Human League. I wondered if once it would have been their ambition to appear in such an 'important' hall: a peak in one's career!

"Maybe a year ago." grimaces Tom. "Then we might have thought this is it!" agrees Frank. Kenny will say little: his face will remain deadpan. Tom: "But not now. We've got bigger and better goals." They decide they won't ever play a place like that again. Let's hope! It was so cold!

Restricted Code don't belong in the fashioned man's world of rock'n'roll, all that dopey dues-paying and learning the trade. They're not extraordinary enough to shock the socks off you. In their proper place – a nightclub between videos of Velvet Underground and Monochrome Set, daytime radio, Get It Together – their anxious presence would be sharp and nippy and there would be an attractive tension. Their twist-turn pulp-pop/soul is as refreshing as The Distractions, a fluid collision of the trite, the enigmatic, the familiar and the unclassified.

Cannavan's voice quivers, implores with an unscientific elegance. Their songs are not smooth or frigid: their surf ace is serrated, tripping guitars fret and foam. There are still packs of possibility with the three minute song/bass/drum/guitar/voice...idiomatic, expressive and effective...see also Fire Engines, Au Pairs...

"We are a very anti-keyboard band, and I think that's just a reaction against the keyboard bands. There are so many of them and they are all sort of alternative chart based. Some people do use them well, but we think that the guitar/bass/drum line-up used well can be the most exciting and passionate sound you could hope for."

They play an up-dated pop music-fired from a pop-gun for fun and friendship – but say they feel out of synch. Is this so? There are queues of inspired pop groups.

"Well, there are certain steps that we could take that could put us in synch...basic things like appearance. 90% of new bands have certain things in common...a female band member for a start, a fringe, and the songs are not so much doomy but they all attempt to be..." Tom struggles for the phrase. "Sort of social realism."

And in so doing probably end up less pertinent than an austere Restricted Code comment. The Code correctly sneer at the crabbed, cramped new underground.

"A year ago we would have loved to be in the underground charts, but now it doen't mean as much. It would still be good, but certainly not an end."

Bob Last's Pop: Aural label was formed to carry devious, succint new pop music down an unorthodox channel into the charts. The label is all at once idealistic, an exercise, practical, compact, tasteful, over-calculated. In less complicated times it was fine for Fast to work towards setting up a vibrantly critical, constructive alternative and to point out the ineptitude of the major labels and the lethargic vulgarity of rock'n'roll through the early haphazard bursts 2.3, Human League, Scars, Gang of Four, and The Mekons. People took notice, even if that early spikiness was eventually promiscuously absorbed by the establishment. In today's chaos, it's not so easy. Setting up an alternative is not enough. The establishment have reacted to punk insensitively from our point of view but successfuly from theirs.

Last's second stage. Pop: Aural, with discreet sense of occasion acknowledges the different climate: the poorness and restriction of the charts, the complete smugness of the alternative champions. It fashions a pop awareness that's as measured as EMI's with Sheena Easton, that specifies the counter-style of Fast. It doesn't want to be remote. But will it work?

"Not at the moment, and I don't think that Bob sees that it will. He's not a member of the BPI for a start. But he can make moves to break down something, take certain steps, license the label out. Bob has a vision for Pop: Aural. The ideas pour out of him. "He knows the label is out of synch with what's happening at the moment, but he's very quietly confident, as are we, that it's only a matter of time. "Tom laughs at yet more 'cheek.'

Restricted Code look good inside Last's attractive Pop: Aural structure. Pop: Aural recognise, as they need to, that the pop single is product, and needs to be sold as something special, yet trivial. Pop: Aural's presentation and promotion is well defined.

"Yeah, we liked that about Pop: Aural. That's important. Their track record also interested us, as Fast. Human League and The Mekons were all great at the time. We sent demos off to lots of people, got responses from a few, but Bob just came straight through and said come in. I think he was impressed that we didn't pretend to be anything other than a group who weren't ashamed to say they wanted to make great singles."

Pop: Aural's version of pop, their confident pop vision, has been dourly contested. Pop: Aural singles have not been received too well.

"We're very aware of that. I don't know if we're naive but we're hoping that people will listen to our single as our record and not anything else. It's not a very hip label at the moment. I don't know why."

Blame it on pop papers' loss of priorities: they're not bothered about working out a coherent framework. But rock paper's predictable colour blindness isn't so much of an obstacle.

"We are aiming for Radio One and Peter Powell, but it's going to be a gradual thing. What we'd really like is a gradual change in Radio One's standards."

This is said with a sparkle in the eyes. Are Restricted Code going to burn up?
"We just exist for the moment. In practical terms, people whose opinions we trust say our new songs are better than the ones we were writing two months ago...We're just going up. Bob's got a lot of faith in us. If this single flops then we put out another, if that flops we put out another and on and on. We're not going to left on our own. If we went back to doing pub gigs in Glasgow I don't know what it would be like. But we don't think in those terms at all. We don't even imagine it. Too much self-confidence."

Restricted Code are a 1981 pop group. Tom frowns, although he manages to smile at the same time.

"The thing is, you know it, and the people who read you know it...Maybe we should be talking to the Daily Mirror and the Sun. But who'd listen?"

RESTRICTED CODE, with a sulk on their well-scrubbed faces, report that it's been disappointing year. I know what they mean. Radio One chivalrously abolished their dreaded playlist, but daytime radio just got many times worse. The spaces between exciting records got longer and longer. The new pop allocation was mean, disturbingly biased towards unpropitious dilutions of the new style and distinction of the new pop. It was as if Radio One meant to spite the critics who for an age snidily decried the playlist's existence. OK – out it goes. Now see what happens.

TOTP, that chronic church of wet dreams, went away – as if to fatefully spite 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' charting – and came back promising to be looser and livelier: it became a joke, an adult addition, almost, to BBC's typical variety output. The charts – mirror in the pop-room – degenerated.

There's been all these hot singles this year and who would know it! The odd pop writer, the eager compiler of 'alternative charts', the reader of well-mannered fanzines, the single buyer who never ever falls asleep...

If there's a renovating return to an emphasis on style, on colour, to the tantalising disciplines of the active, loquacious three to four-minute song: if there are a thousand and one versions of the pop vision from Stray Cats to Cabaret Voltaire, if dance and excitement and gossip and neoteric demands are seeping back into fashion, you wouldn't know it through Radio One or TV pop. You certainly wouldn't know it through the alternative charts, which by their very nature seem to want to drape everything in grey, although maybe you could just sense the change coming...The mood is there: scattered, but coalescing.

I'M LISTENING to Steve Bush, and sometime during the past 18 months he's been listening to the Mark in The Pop Group. Let's lecture.

"'Why aren't you doing anything, Steve,' he was saying...Well, I said, I am doing something, I've got the group, I'm trying... 'Yeah, but what you're doing isn't the right thing!' Well, what do you mean? 'Everyone should be allowed to do what they want!' Yes, Mark, yes. You have to embrace some kind of French resistance attitude to everything. I had to take two days off work after this confrontation."

Bush calls the Pop Group 'beatnik fascists,' They are a symbol of dodgy elitism, of confused dialectic, they told us what not to do with our guilt and our shame... The Pop Group averted our gaze away from Bristol. How many more were there like that! Bristol is caught up in itself, making awkward attempts via unappealing labels like Heartbeat and Fried Egg, to communicate something outside the city borders. More than any of the obvious cities that have been burdened with 'scene' tags, there is a Bristol community, almost completely locked in its own dimension.

"A gold fish bowl," says Bush, "where everyone swims around and round each other inside the glass." The Pop Group, maybe, contaminated Bristol – from outsiders' and insiders' points of view. Bush talks unchecked for 15 minutes about the snobbishness and cliquelshness and isolation of Bristol. He's battling against Bristol, and being stuck inside Bristol, instead of battling against the bigger things outside.

"You can only hit out at the things that you see. And for us that's been the Bristol bullshit, and there has been a lot of it. This has been the bands' fault, the fault of people ignoring what's been going on, certain attitudes. There have been a number of times in Bristol when there have been a lot of good bands, and if they'd been encouraged they could have come on. It's dormant now, just beginning to build up again. Something will have to happen, or it will just drop again. We are concentrating on the outside now. The EP is to get us outside after two years, and to say – look at us! We're going to go on making records until people really start buying them, and talking about us. 'Eloquent Sounds' is our first shot but it's no way our main shot. A little teaser, really."

At the moment Essential Bop's rich would-be cabaret pop lacks definition and power, can succumb too readily to convolution and equivocal mannerisms. Essential Bop are apt to gush a little, but they're a long way from being plain. Bush's vocal heroes are Aznavour, Sinatra and most of all Scott Walker (next year's big thing). He sings – a joyous, copious collision of syllables and images – with mad elegance, switching from suaveness to seriousness to all tensed up. The Bop sound is an abbreviated psychedelia... early Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, snatches of gentler Velvets, dashes of Pebbles pulp, twisted around the new days stylings of Magazine and The Associates. Going over the top. Going round the bend. A dangerously sonorous sound.

Bush shows, me a letter from a local BBC TV producer – Bush had tried to get Bop on a local tea-time magazine programme. The producer called Essential Bop 'way out...too rock'n'roll with five A-levels...' which is indicative of a wet, old-fashioned, even slumming attitude that maintains pop can never by intelligent, adventurous, emotional...the old rock, laws. Fear of sophistication and change and new/style.

Essential Bop find themselves, peculiarly, in the middle of a road.

"We get it from both sides. We get the highbrow accusation from one side, 'oh they're just trying to impress us', and then we get the 'you're too rock'n'roll' from The Pop Group school. We're just a beat group!"

A beat group with an absurdist slant.

"There's horror in our music, and there's humour."

The Bop need to smarten themselves up in all ways. Keep a few secrets. Get a sharp manager who can tell them what not to do. Smile as if they know something no-one else does, or as if they're crazed, or don't smile at all. Amplify the good things in their make-up, smother the ugly things. With discipline they could get very good, and they would be talked about. It's better to calm down than to try too hard: in some ways.

WHILE THE pop charts have been smoothed down, and have become harder to penetrate, at the other extreme the new underground has settled in place. A stern circuit of protest and featurefess tenacity. The establishment of the alternative charts is important – it reveals there is a demand for musics that are not pitilessly churned out by the record industry, that realms of imagination and innovation exists in new rock – but it has given groups a false sense of security, a low sight to aim for.

Alternative charts have helped the new underground cement. They have become an end, not a beginning.

But there is definitely a new mood spreading not something that gives in to crass commercialism. A mood that picks up and re-models the dreams and themes of the original punk groups, that opposes the uselessness of starring in the alternative charts in these days of Easton, Waterman and Streisand that aims to blast through into people's. consciousness.

Teenagers who are picking up on pop for the first time should have a fresh, changing choice not a stiff handed-down one. The rock jumble sale, those seventh hand emotions, those worn out tricks, those cracked egos.

The mood is there. From Bow Wow Wow to Orange Juice, U2 to ABC Change of images. Towards an overground brightness, fighting for the right to bring life back to radio, to make the single count, to be let through to their natural audience. Modern excitement. As ABC, now as neo. "Vote with your feet." Smash the Radio One dictatorship.

"Democratic dance music!"
For choice and value.

STEPHEN SINGLETON has thought of an ambition: "When Gail has an argument with Brian Tilsley (Coronation Street) and then goes upstairs to sulk, I want her to play an ABC record...that subliminal interference."

Then we'd know that there had been a shift in emphasis. ABC are highly organised. Their galvanising pop sensibility incorporates and impetuous appreciation of the subtleties and sensationalism of pop: ABC want to impress with exhilarating style. They know that image and presence and projection – discreet or romantic – is all important. ABC are fans, they intuitively understand the pop images and pop moods that turn us on. The metaphysical attractions.

ABC are not ashamed or scared of the word, the suggestion, 'pop'.

"People tend to think that pop is a bad thing and that all the things that go with it are wrong. Oh Radio One, on Top Of The Pops, oh no, that's terrible. But those things are there to be used. It doesn't matter about the rest of the groups on, if there's one that's good then it's worthwhile. We've got to be the one thing that is worthwhile."

Are ABC dreaming?
"You've got to be confident about what you're doing. You've got to think that this is the best thing ever, or why else bother?"

ABC were Vice Versa: three piece electro-pop group whose stage presence was volatile, music excitable and intentions dramatic. They played their last show as V.V. embedded in the Leeds Futurama listings. The transformation fulfils the need for change that is a fundamental part of their strategy.

"Change as stability, change as strength. Ours is a doctrine of perpetual development."

For Fry and Singleton, the change from V.V. to ABC is like: "From Tyrannosaurus Rex to T. Rex, from Radio Interference to Radio One, from Matt to Gloss. A brand new name: a new brand name. We've discarded synthetic rhythm patterns in favour of natural organic sound – the drum and bass axis."

On a postcard sent out to interested parties V.V.'s impulsive manifesto was outlined. Fry, Singleton and White claimed: "We're...more related to Northern Soul than rock'n'roll...We will provide the soundtrack for the second industrial revolution. Vice Versa have no time for the popular public image generated by the majority of people operating in the electronics field. We remain anti-cybermen, anti-digitalsterile, anti-docile mannequins, we want to usurp twee 'moderne' mannerisms. Two tonic or teutonic, we want to meet you. We adapt clarity and distortion, melody and dissonance, adrenalin, dance and momentum."

With Robinson and Lickley joining from a funk orientated base, the music alters radically. ABC leave behind the futurist/elitism circus (personified by Stevo, a 17th rate Steve Strange) and its artificial compendium and numerous trap doors and create explicable, explicit glossy now-funk noise. A beautifully formed new form.

"We needed to change to keep interested. We were not achieving what we wanted to before, we were absorbing and swelling but not progressing. We wanted to get away from the dependence on synthesizers. We were frustrating ourselves. Now we have more sounds at our disposal. With the electronic thing we were lumped together with all those other bands, even though we were trying to do something more electric and kinetic...Fad Gadget, Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres. But the trap wasn't so much being categorised, we just felt trapped by the instruments we'd got.

"ABC is a manifestation of the Vice Versa manifesto. The idea that you can be a pop group and be exerting, legitimate, credible. It is now soulful, a stimulant, a proper dance music. Change, challenge, now as neo...

"We were also getting frustrated because the music we like is more Rose Royce and James Brown than Fad Gadget and we were getting lots of weird letters asking us what kind of electronic music we liked, and they were shocked by the types of music we liked. Throbbing Gristle to T. Rex and Chic. Just because we played electronic music didn't mean we had to agree with everything everyone else did with electronic music. Words like 'artistic integrity' are meaningless these days...it's got to be colour, dance, excitement...Spandau Ballet are just scratching the surface."

ABC talk too much, but there's more to their words than just passion or theory. Something can happen in 1981, and ABC can be part of that.

They did a tour with Cowboys International a while back, and learned how not to do a tour. It gave them an insight into the rock business, and they didn't want to know about it. They've played the Marquee and the Middlesbrough Rock Garden: they want to find different ways of getting through.

"It's do or die. We've played all those horrible places, and there must be other ways of putting on a show. So we're going to go out and avoid doing supports and avoid having people support us, and we're going to put on a show so that people are coming to see US, and if every group did something like that things could change. We'd have a master of ceremonies, a full disco...groups could emphasise aspects of their unit. You can get through if you keep working. We're going to do it. Simple as that."

And the ultimate ambition?
"To write a perfect pop single."

THE NEW optimism...or yet more promises? Is it possible to kiss the life back into popular pop music? The new mood is to oppose the rock'n'roll way of working: the futile toiling, the dirty gigs, the crippling routines, the weak style, the limited language, that whole senseless draft and duty.

Certain labels already point the way. For them music is more than just music: it's something to dress, up. Intelligence, intrigue, a love of the little things in life, re-applying and reinforcing the essentials of the pop spirit for the new age. From the plotted avant garde to the processed pop: the urge is for excitement. Extreme and enriching. This doesn't mean escapism. But you can't moan all the time.

Perhaps the hippies in the establisment are so deeply rooted and so widespread they can dissipate this mood, like they did all the others. They have control. Perhaps it'll stop at Adam, Stray Cats, Spandau, Bow Wow Wow...pinched before it's had a chance to explode. This could be our last chance.

While there are groups like Restricted Code and ABC, with their determination and their design, there's hope. The groups keep coming: but it's getting like a traffic jam. From all over the place!

ABC, Essential Bop and Restricted Code are three: vitally eclectic, anti-rock'n'roll, desperately frustrated. No longer is there an acceptance of that cob-webbed corner they're shoved in. They want to be noticed, to be loved, to be involved. They want a big display in the supermarkets, not to be stuck on a high shelf in the corner shop.

We could go on as though nothing was wrong.

Or we could dance! dance! dance! to the radio.


New Musical Express, 20th December 1980