I vividly remember this review - recently recirculated by NME80s. I cut it out at the time but then at some point mislaid it. "Defunkt are to funk in 1981 what the Pistols were to Rock in 1977. About time too." I was sold. Literally: I was down the record shop in a flash and bought it. The album very nearly lived up to Angus MacKinnon's hype too.
What puzzles me now, though, is the opening scene-setting - the characterisation of the State of Funk as flaccid and enervated. This is January 1981 - what would he have been talking about?
I mean, if "funk" is narrowly understood as P-funk type stuff, then yes, at that precise moment the Clinton clan was in disarray, tangled up in legal disputes with record companies, and musically right off the boil.
But surely the start of the 1980s was a great moment in discofunk. And the first glimmers of electrofunk and that postdisco club sound were coming through. Synth-bass. Drum machines.
In 1980, you had frabulous gooey bass monsters like this Yarborough & People's smash
And that same year The Gap Band romped across the charts with a string of rump-spanking grooves like "Burn Rubber" and "Humpin'". It was the era of the massive snare-thwack.
And there was this Tom Browne hit, which I bought at the time.
Slave were active, Rick James was peaking, you had things like Zapp's debut album, The S.O.S. Band... not forgetting Prince's Dirty Mind.
Sonically, funk would appear then to be in rude, evolving health, as 1980 flipped into 1981.
Perhaps McKinnon was referring to the lack of any kind of politically militant or just broadly insubordinate voices in the area of danceable Black American music. Something in the continuum of Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, Gil Scott Heron, and the darker intimations within Chic (who by 1980 were losing their touch - their commercial touch, certainly)
On the Defunkt album, there's a track that reworks "Good Times" - already shadowed with bleak ironies - into a song about heroin addiction.
Of course, MacKinnon wasn't to know that rap - at that point, probably seeming like a novelty, a fad, as opposed to the birth pangs of a counterculture ("Rapper's Delight" = another reworking of "Good Times", of course) - would be within a year or two exactly what he was calling for: dance music with an aggressive street edge and gritty realism ("The Message").
The NME Funk Wall Chart from May 1981
Here's a little interview I did with Defunkt leader Joe Boyd when music from that debut album and the follow-up was compiled at the other end of the Eighties:
Along with the Defunkt review, I had another MacKinnon cutting amongst my earliest NME scraps: his 1980 interview with Jah Wobble. Done just before he left PiL, round the time of his solo album The Legend Lives on... Jah Wobble in 'Betrayal'. Wobble comes across as the "nice one" in PiL, the George Orwell fan always going down the library. I'll have to dig it out.
Ooh - another take on Defunkt from around this time, I Punman at his most Punmanliest. June 6 1981
