Paul Rambali - The Pop Group - NME - 30th September 1978

 

Pardon me if I've misunderstood, but amongst all those pretty speeches and petty let-downs didn't somebody once ask for 'new music night and day'? And did they get it? Not quite.

Maybe you, like a good few others, feel more than a little deflated at this moment. And then again maybe you don't. Maybe it summons no wince at all to hear of members of Generation X swanning across the Atlantic with a high fashion vamp on each arm. And maybe you're perfectly happy to frequent some dismal hole in the vain hope of finding something to pogo to.

The hairstyles may come and hairstyles may go but the facts remain the same. And one of the more incontrovertible facts, is that much of the promise and hoped held forth over the past two years simply hasn't been fulfilled. Some of it has, of course, and I'm grateful for that.

But there's also the fun-while-it-lasted line you will sometimes hear sobbed over a pint. And if you weigh these two attitudes, both somehow on the forcedly bright side of regret and disappointment, against what might have been, the discrepancy is obvious and the potential still massive.

I refer you now to The Pop Group. They are neither punk saviours nor any other kind of great white hope embittered scribes are wont to foist upon their hapless public. But they are just about the proudest example of what Rotten and Perry's edicts should have wrought that I've encountered in a long time.

This is no idle connection. I could have set The Pop Group against a background of technological and industrial neuroses, ideological masterplans, intellect, eclecticism and weirdness. They would probably have owned up to about three counts and this year's myth would have stood up to one more parade.

Yet the perpetuation of myth is something none of us needs, and is indirectly something The Pop Group rail against. To put it simply: they want you to think for yourselves and do for yourselves.

Some of our older readers may perceive an echo of the '60s most enduring catchphrase: "Don't Follow Leaders". Younger factions will recall only the aforesaid inflammatory call-to-arms and ensuing promises, promises. Both would have to agree that The Pop Group put those words into practice.

Chances are The Pop Group are an unfamiliar quantity. They aren't given to turning up once a month at the local watering hole, and they've yet to make a record. The name itself leaves no clues. Think about it. At once it conjures everything and anything. From this ambiguity the least you can expect is the unexpected. And you wouldn't be far wrong.

Guitars don't talk they scream and words just won't give it away. Comparisons will not do either, because if I said they were like Smokey you probably wouldn't read on whereas if I said they were like Television or the Magic Band you might, this being the kind of deadly conditioned response The Pop Group want to dispel.

They're a hard band to contain.

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What shakes me up most about this music, simply, is that it has the open, spontaneous temperament of the best jazz – a rare quantity as jazz itself sinks further into the synthi-musak mire. Even rarer to find this coupled to raw, breathless, insurgent rock.

I wonder how they did it, when so many who began from the same point seem now to merely aspire to begin this week's pop sensation or next year's headbanger herd leader.

"Because we just approached it in a different way." explains Bruce matter-of-factly. Only himself and guitarist Jon Waddington had any previous playing experience.

There's so many things involved, mutters Mark. "It's not just picking up an instrument. We're not just musicians."

Back to Bruce: "That's the problem with a lot of these guys in bands. All they concern themselves with is music, which is okay, but they cram their heads with it and end up with blinkers on. Everything else gets shoved aside."

Dialogue with The Pop Group goes back and forth like a tennis ball. One person will explain and expand on what the previous has said. They are, on the whole remarkably unselfconscious.

"We try to leave ourselves open," says Gareth, "like Leonardo Da Vinci. You know the way a child of five wants to learn all the time? He just stayed like that."

"That's what we want to do," chimes Mark. "People only use a small amount of their potential. I don't see the point in just giving up at a certain stage and sinking into a comfortable lethargy with comfortable all-sewn-up attitudes."

"Yeah," Bruce again. "You've gotta keep learning and keep discovering and keep going forward all the time..."

Mark fumbles for a record. The afternoon's listening encompasses Miles Davis live with Gil Evans ‘Leggo Dub’ and James Brown's ‘Get Up Offa That Thing’. I groove instinctively.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Onstage and off, Mark Stewart looks like an archetype teenage hunk – all, lean and hungry. When I first saw them I thought I had it sewn up: this lot may not sound like a pop group, but they definitely think they look like one. My theory goes down like egg on a new suit.

It was Mark, Bruce Smith and Gareth Sager who originally formed the band some eighteen months ago. They'd known each other for years and Mark finally talked Gareth into buying an old Burns guitar. Bruce already had a drum kit, and the first song they played together was ‘My Generation’. They got the chords right and couldn't stop, a crazy noise that lasted for three hours, mark straining his lungs in the absence of a microphone.

Gareth, apart from being a compelling onstage visual factor, at times ranks as a willfully obnoxious runt. "He's the only person I know," says Bruce, "who doesn't mind people disliking him, and sometimes goes out of his way to get just that reaction."

Bruce, born in California but relocated to Britain at the age of seven, is almost the opposite: an outgoing, salubrious person who obviously takes great pleasure in conversation. Mark is pensive, speaking in short, angular bursts, much like his singing and onstage demeanour.

Simon Underwood, in whose small Bristol flat we are gathered, is talkative, enthusiastic – he'd never even looked at a bass guitar before joining the band – while Jon is simply taciturn.

They've acquired a reputation for being intellectuals, because they like the stimulus of ideas, and reclusive, because they'd rather dictate their own pace in the quiet Bristol confines than scramble for the big city at the merest favourable noise. I could throw in a few book titles spied on shelves for elitist measure, but suffice to say they walk, they think, they have girlfriends, they have fun. Their collected ages add up to almost a hundred, their collected 'A' levels add up to one. They have unusually keen appetites for knowledge. They steer clear of dogma.

"People often can't figure that out," says Bruce, his Americanisms at odds with a West Country accent. "They can't understand why we haven't been to university, why we haven't spent six years at music school. All we've learnt is what we've learned from all around us."

Gareth: "It's not that we've got anything to hide. Nor is it like The Residents, we're not trying to concoct some big mystery. We're just average characters who got pissed off very quickly."

Pissed off with what?

"Everything."

Oh.

Mark breaks this temporary deadlock: "we're in exactly the same position as everybody else really. But the difference is we're trying to make something happen where a lot of people aren't. People can make things happen outside of bands, they could do all sorts of things."

Bruce: "It's just that music is a very effective form of propaganda – you can get across to everybody."

"That's why people call us a rock band," muses Gareth. "Because we're up there with guitars and things. I try to say I'm not in a rock group but it's pretty difficult."

Must be a case of guilt by association, I offer.

"The thing is, we use the standard rock instruments..." Bruce's words solicit groans all around. This has obviously been repeated enough times by them to attain cliché status. Mark gives analogy: "We're just using words that don't really mean anything anymore."

"...And we try to do things with those basic instruments that people don't usually do, instead of getting a synthesiser, say, to create new sounds. If you provide yourself with a limit then you can work inside it. Constantly hit the walls and just see if you can't actually break them down.

"There's so many people," he adds in exasperation, "who thinks the only thing you can do with a guitar is play like Jimmy Page.

"We're showing different places to work in," says Mark. "It's like: we've got arms and legs and so forth and we've done this. You've got arms and legs, think what you might be able to do."

Bruce: "It's a question of setting yourself free and not worrying about inhibitions and people saying you can or can't do that. We want people to question as much as possible. All the rules, conceptions, everything. They should question every action they take."

And they want to make you do this not by soapbox sloganeering, because most likely this would just substitute one set of glib, comfortable delusions for another, but through suggestion. In the sense that their music itself is a pointer towards unexplored, unconsidered possibilities, they disrupt expectations, force you to respond on instinct.

"And the harder we try the more we're going to get across – the more people are going to start thinking about that kind of thing.

I like to think that when people are watching us they really feel something, some kind of emotion. They don't just get up and bop around or sit down and contemplate."

That's the reason why we don't give so many performances," continues Mark. "We give everything. We're like stripping ourselves bare when we go out there. We don't hold back and act casual or relaxed, we give everything we've got. And we hope people realise we give everything we've got and maybe give everything to us."

He brightens suddenly.

"That'd be great. We'd meet in the middle like a big ball..."

With a broad sweep of his arms he gestures coming together and eruption.

"Chaos. And after the chaos maybe something new will happen. I'd love to inspire people. To inspire somebody would be one of the best things we could possibly do."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It's no act conducted for the benefit of the visiting journalist, and they are at pains to ensure he goes away with a proper understanding of the band and not some half-baked combination of selected fact and projected fantasy.

They speak their minds, they know what they want, and even have a few ideas about how to get it. They are self-contained and autonomous and want to remain so, sharing the chores – creative and otherwise – of keeping the band in action amongst themselves and a group of friends who have grown with them.

There's a short tour forthcoming, the proceeds of which will go via Amnesty to help prisoners of conscience. This isn't trendy concern for trendy causes – the last benefit they did was for old people's homes and you can't get less fashionable than that.

After which they will record an album. Matumbi's Dennis Bovelle agreed to work with them but his band commitments have sadly scotched the project. They're now considering using John Cale.

They might seem like impassioned young idealist but they deny the charge. They reckon what they want is not an ideal so much as a fact that just needs waking up to – they're optimistic realists.

They don't want to pull the wool over your eyes, they want to pull it away. Are we so cynical yet?

Paul Oldfield - PJ Proby - Melody Maker, 1987

 PJ Proby, 

Hardcore 

(Savoy Records, 1987)

Even if you never hear it, another catastrophic shockwave travelling through the body pop. True, this is fanatical obscenity, a record you could probably be prosecuted for owning, even. Hip hop at its most impacted crosses HM stalactite chords and guitar-abuse solos. Be startled by the disappearance of the beat: it propagates until there is a stentorian thunder, mistracking-stylus mode. It reaches an idiot-hyper-sexuality. Innuendo, rock's usual figleaf, is bypassed. So much sexual message is broadcast that 'sex' burns out, is exhausted in an outrage of artlessness and celebration of the sexual drives that pop usually polices or orders. Absurdly apocalyptic, it calls itself "the last Rock'n'Roll record made in England", wants to be the last moment, pop's supernova. It spirals into scam, claims to be the collaboration by PJ Proby and Madonna. I listened to it twice and turned to a pillar of salt.

David Stubbs - Go West - Melody Maker June 6 1987

GO WEST

Melody Maker, 6 June 1987

by David Stubbs


The last thing I want to do, of course, is say they're wretched.

That would be too easy. Go West are an easy target. They are significant and reviled, as the first perennial chart band of the Eighties to drop from nowhere into the charts. Prior to Go West, the vigorous chart-gloss was made up of the likes of The Thompson Twins, Heaven 17, Spandau, Wham!, bands that, at one point, had in some way or another, paid their dues, played the toilets, run themselves by "us". Even Duran Duran were heralded, if not initiated, by two-page spreads in the music press. Go West, by contrast, did not run in from the left under some vague pretext of a revolt into style and colourmotion, had no pretensions to irony or spike.

"We were both in rehearsal bands, never did any gigs. We played material with an American feel, like Kenny Loggins, or Michael MacDonald, at a time when that sort of thing was completely unfashionable. When we did become fashionable – five years on – and were signed, the record company had the advantage of being able to get everything together at the same time – the video, the single."

Go West's tale of chart success is one that pop strategists such as ABC might have been excused for imagining had been dispensed with forever; drop a demo tape in the fruit machine and come up trumps. Go West are what happens when A&R men learn how to ignore the music press, ignore the live circuit, the indie dirtbox, cut corners and construct their own (notion of) "Celebrities". Go West were suitable because they looked like Wham! – and played like Phil Collins. Go West's muso globalism, clipped by funk and compensated with passion was, at once, a pleasing return to the old values – a major language, the rewardable virtue of competence – and also conducive to the demand for boys and lager-funk. Go West were Proper Musicians but also lads on the make. The perfect combination! After them come Wet Wet Wet and Living In A Box – a pop hell, in which "our" bands no longer have a hand at all.

But the last thing I want to do is say that Go West are wretched. I want to hear them speak. So I'm driven out to their hideaway, an estate in Chessington with rehearsal facilities, to meet these hounds from hell in their natural habitat. I want to make being Go West seem like the most reasonable thing in the world, just to show that it could happen to you or me.

It's a long journey and there is time to listen to the new album. As I expected, Songs From The Couch, finally available after delays due to technical difficulties and illness, is not a masterpiece. There are things in our culture that exceed it – the paintings of Tintoretti and Botticelli, for example or the singles of Racey. 'Crossfire' is akin to being made to eat a travel brochure dipped in honey. 'Chinese Whispers' and 'True Colours' are pasted pastiches of Level 42 so uncanny in places as to be worthy of the late Max Beerbohm. 'From Baltimore To Paris' is a song about Edward and Mrs Simpson. 'Masque Of Love' is good, and boasts a riff that has become as familiar to me as a brother.
'I Want To Hear It From You' is a song that I should like to have played at my funeral, but not before. It's glutinous, over-produced state-of-the-art stuff, with a grossly overstated voice deployed to compete, loudly, against the technological over-determination. That's what always galls about these records; it's not that they are flashy but that they are fleshy. It's not that they are too busy playing with metal to know what's going on but that they are well-meaning, reluctant to lose themselves in the callous jouissance and impersonality of pop.

Having said all that, I'm not expecting Go West to be friendly and well-meaning to me. Their rehearsal schedule is tight and, what's more, they know my sort. Time and patience are short. Peter Cox, however, is affable and, like all these coves who have Ruined Pop As We Knew And Loved It, is likeable and open, with nary a hint of Antichrist, nor any suggestion in his demeanour that he ever burnt down an orphanage in his life. He's one more good bloke.

Richard Drummie's initial politeness does soon give way to broody suspicion. He stares at me throughout the interview with what seems to be utter loathing. His grim, gimlet eye appears to be conducting a silent narrative of its own. Something like: "Why do you people bother us? What is it we're supposed to have done wrong? Become Pop? But it's perfectly obvious that we don't want to be that plastic or ephemeral. But then, we don't want to be revolutionaries either. It would be nice to occupy that middle ground. It would be nice just to get some respect. Oh, that bloody word, we're stuck with it – respectable! Level 42? That name always crops up, as if we both came out of the same  box! Yes, we're musos. Why should we be ashamed of that? All we want to do is carry on as we are and get a bit of money for it. Is that unreasonable? I would have thought that was universal. We're not rich. Taking a band like this out on the road costs a bleedin' fortune, and we have to pay for it. What will I be doing in 30 years' time? That has to be the stupidest question I've ever heard."

Peter, when you look at pop, do you dislike what you see?

"Gimmick records do so well. Americans can't believe our charts. I saw Top Of The Pops last night and you had a sequence of Spurs scoring a goal. I couldn't believe that. There are musicians, like, one rung below who are denied a chart place because of Hoddle and Waddle. It's no big deal, I suppose, but, in a perfect world, the music charts would be full of music."

"You have to fight to be uncontrived. Every circumstance is un-natural, photograph sessions, videos, but (giant sigh) you have to give it the time. Chrysalis don't give us money because they like us. But we never quite succeed in coming across as we'd like to, you never do. Personally, I don't feel that I benefit in any way from that image side of things. We have a low public profile and we prefer it that way. The song 'Let's Build A Boat' is about escape and that's how we like to work – away from it all. In Denmark. In The Isle Of Man."

It seems to me that you want to have your cake and eat it to enjoy the remuneration of pop without fulfilling any of the responsibilities.

"What, like going out and smashing things up, or going out nobbing some dodgy personality?"

That would do for a start. But then there is the glamorous, the tragic... "We have our feet more or less Super-Glued to the ground. We enjoy ourselves but not riotously. We don't want to be boring people but we think you can be interesting without being shiny."

Richard: "When you talk about 'pop', we don't know what your tag is."

Go West, I'm saying, are too heavy and soulful to be considered pop.

"Well, yes, we'd rather be considered a soul band than a pop band."

Steady on, that wasn't meant as a compliment.

Do you feel that you have any kind of duty to your fans?

"Yes, if fans don't understand something about the music, then interviews are a good opportunity of clarifying matters."

Do you feel you have any kind of duty to the people who are most definitely not your fans?

"What do you mean?"

That even if you sell two million LPs, that still means that the vast majority of people don't like you; to them you are an irritation, on the radio, the TV. This is often forgotten.

"But they're not interested in us, are they?"

Richard: "How is this responsibility supposed to manifest itself? As an apology?"

That would do nicely.

"No, I'm sorry, if they haven't the intelligence to switch off the radio then I can't feel sorry."
What about jukeboxes? You see it really is very difficult to get away from you. We get pop whether we like it or not.

"Well, I must admit we don't lose sleep over that one. I suppose at one point we ourselves went into pubs and said to ourselves: 'We're fed up of all these dodgy records, let's make some of our own dodgy records,' ha ha!"

Go West are fugitives from pop. Like all "mature" pop, their "seriousness" consists in abstaining from the spectacle rather than engaging with it. Instead of ambiguity, mischief and front, they offer us biography, anxiety and accomplishment, all apologies for pop. Genesis to Exodus – Go West are forever on retreat. But who can blame them?

Out there in the real world, it's raining Wet Wet Wet and posters advertising Songs From The Couchare bursting out like boils all over the West End. I'd rather be on their side than our side. This is a nice place they've got here. I am the only interruption.

In fact, by the end of the interview, I want nothing more than to join Go West, join them in their green  seclusion, flee with them away from pop's reckless claustrophobia, get a bit of peace and do my own thing. I could learn rhythm guitar, or acquire basic keyboard skills, or maybe just start off as a roadie. Well, why not? After all, like Go West, I'm a reasonable bloke, I'm only human.

Paul Oldfield - Pulp "Freaks"

PULP
Freaks
Melody Maker, May 1987

by Paul Oldfield

"FILE between Ian McEwan and Charles Hawtry," concluded one reviewer two years back, leaving us to tease out what that "between" is. Pulp are easily underestimated as ghosts from the Ealing or Hammer studio lots, standard bearers of the English-ness and depthless drollery we'd usually expect from El records.

The word "freak" comes nearer to their connection of comedy and horror: it suggests what's aberrant but recognisable, a source of laughter and shrinking fear. Even if Jarvis Cocker's vocal delivery brings Pulp within sight of It's Immaterial or The Fall, it's the crepuscular ballads, always bordering on histrionics, of Sixties godlike genius Scott Walker that are the nearest precedent.

Everyday life assumes the shudder of the uncanny in "Anorexic Beauty", where the ashen-faced and comically immobile mannequin girl exercises this dreadful attraction, comes too near beauty. In "I Want You", love is a catastrophic immolation. "I'll throw myself away, I'll break you because I love myself in you". In "They Suffocate At Night" intimacy develops till it wraps itself in polythene sheets, becomes exhaustion and vacuum, and "The Never-Ending Story"'s juggernaut Khachaturian refrain mimes endless reprieves for a failed love-affair.

Far from eccentric, Pulp's pasteboard theatre finds the freak limits of behaviour amid life's parking meters, bed-sits and milk floats of mundanity.