Simon Frith - Afterpunk: the different drummer (Melody Maker, spring 1979)

A critic right-footed by history  - not through the success of his coinage "afterpunk" (postpunk would be the winner there) but through siding with the right side in the schism of Artpunk versus Realpunk 

(also known as Street Punk and later Oi!)

 

"Consuming Passion" was an overview-oriented column Frith and others did in Melody Maker - this was a time when MM was giving NME a run for its money on the writing front, if not the design. Along with Frith, the team included Jon Savage, Mary Harron, Vivien Goldman, Chris Bohn, Ian Birch, James Truman, Idris Walters, as well as veteran staffers like Richard Williams, Michael Watts, Allan Jones, Brian Case.... 

Garry Bushell - Gang of Four - Entertainment! - Sounds - October 6 1979

Not quite an example of critics totally missing the significance of an epochal record in real time, as this does get a measured 3 and a half stars out of five from Gaz, with Entertainment! further described as "erratically brilliant".  

Included in the series more because the critique comes from a well-informed position (SWP member conversant with Brecht etc) yet advances a stance contrary to the now historically sanctioned viewpoint (here it is arty postpunk that's deemed is the wrong direction out of punk, the diversion of energy).  Instead of "rip it up and start again", it's more like "reiterate it and stay street". 

RIP Paul Rambali

 

I was really saddened to learn last week of the death of Paul Rambali, one of the main writers at New Musical Express during its postpunk heyday, and later an editor at The Face. 

I met Paul some years ago in Paris, where he'd moved and continued to work in the media. I was there to promote Retromania, I think - at any rate after whatever it was we were doing together (a radio thing?) we had a lovely chat over lunch, during which he told me interesting stuff about how the music press worked back in those days and just how widely read the papers were, thanks to their phenomenal pass-on rate (many eyes looking at each copy). Some years later, I quoted him from memory in this tribute to the music papers I did for Pitchfork (have a look here, but hurry before it disappears behind a paywall,)

When I was a boy reading the NME every week, I used to have a handful of heroes whose by-lines I'd look out for and who I'd read virtually every single thing by. And then there were the other writers, the bedrock of the paper, who I'd read when they wrote about something I liked or was intrigued by. But when I returned to the music papers for Rip It Up and read through years and years of NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, and some of the monthly magazines too, I found myself more impressed by the work of the writers who weren't attention-seeking show-offs. At NME, writers like Angus Mackinnon, Paul Du Noyer, Dave Hill, Lynn Hanna, Andy Gill, Paul Tickell, Cynthia Rose, Graham Lock, Richard Grabel, many others....  and Paul Rambali. I appreciated the intelligence, clarity, and directness of what they did. It's not that they lacked for passion or incisive opinions or ideas - not at all. But they tended to also do the journalistic work of finding out the facts, telling the story. Which I probably took for granted at the time, but now - as someone undertaking the second draft of history as it were -  I found incredibly valuable. (The same went for their equivalents on Melody Maker and Sounds). 

Rambali in particular did some fantastic work on groups like Pere Ubu and The Pop Group, amongst many other key bands of that time. 

You can find the motherlode of Rambali's punk and postpunk era writing here at Rock's Back Pages

An interview with Joy Division 

Text of that interview here

Here's his review of The Pop Group's Y. 

And here is a famous cover story he did with Captain Beefheart (with famous shots by Anton Corbijn)

When I have a bit more time I will try to dig up some other pieces by Paul. 

Titanic #2 (Ray Lowry versus Ian Penman) (1981)

 

Ray Lowry

Titanic Refloated

New Musical Express, June 20 1981

Ian Penman

Titanic Resunk 

a.k.a. Political Conscience Every Now and Then. Pub Every Night. NME Every Week.

New Musical Express, June 17 1981

Unusually clearcut for the Punman then -  and a piece that did some rewiring of my ideas in those formative days, so deftly did it demolish the quaint 'n' clunky idea of  politics + pop that the Lowry tirade wished to restore, with such clumsy yearning (stick to the cartooning, boy, you're ruff at that).

I believe this is the last of the Titanic-themed pieces that NME did. 

Missing from the sequence: the proto-Titanic piece that Mick Farren wrote at the very start of 1976, a sort of warming up to the theme of "things have gone adrift". I feel that I have at some point read that proto-piece, but where it would be and how to get my hands on it, I'm not sure....  

Unabashed by being thrashed, in October 1981 Lowry continues to demand generational voices of angry sanity from within the ranks of rock. 

"I promise I'll be funny again soon - when the economy looks up"

A reader dresses down Lowry

Barney Hoskyns - ICA Rock Week - January 10, 1981 - New Musical Express

 

A counterview to the "instruments of discourse" idea in the previous post (Steve Sutherland in '87 remembering Josef K and an allegedly different climate of rockwrite).

I didn't read this Barney review at the time (came across it much, much later) but got the drift from his subsequent writing on....  everything, really, but especially The Birthday Party and the marshalling of his personal Dionysian  pantheon that enshrined The Stooges above all....  but others too (the Stones, Suicide, etc) (see closing peroration here).

The basic drift: music should not be a vehicle for social comment or critique, for meta-musical positioning.

It should be "about" nothing except the ecstasy it grants us -  access to sacred frenzy. 

Hence the call for a new kind of Rock Theatre of Cruelty. (Reminding me I still haven't got around to reading Artaud).

The stance here is not unlike the "irony and reference points are the dark destroyers of music" line that Bill Drummond took in the early '90s, inspired by rave. Except in this 1981 bit o' rhetoric, it's more a case of "earnestness and reference points are the dark destroyers of music". 

Integrating this credo into my own way of hearing, I eventually ended up with the bliss-rock polemic and then (finally escaping the forefather's vision! or at least sufficiently transmuting) the ardkore years ("ecstasy" conjoined with literal Ecstasy).

Despite regaining some love for the postpunk way of (over)thinking, it remains a consistent base-line of expectation and demand. 

Reactivated most recently with the frustrations expressed about conceptronica (where's the release, why won't it let loose? - well, I know why.... but I'm a greedy listener) 

As with the ICA scene - a.k.a postpunk - that Barney critiques, the music is trammeled by its own articulation and positioning.... which becomes a form of self-repression

(The comment about how "art is replaced by subsidy" and jibes at the ICA as institution also anticipate  the conceptronica critique). 

Where does this greedy listener find the bliss?

Not many places at the moment...  but around the time of conceptronica, it was this stuff, floodingly so... 

chiglo

Steve Sutherland - Josef K - Young and Stupid / Endless Soul - July 18 1987 - Melody Maker

 

When I first read this review, of a group I'd almost forgotten the existence of by 1987, I was really struck by the phrase "instruments of discourse." as used by Steve Sutherland to describe Josef K and other groups of that postpunk-into-New-Pop moment. 

Not so much as a revelation, but simply as recognition.

For that was the way I habitually processed music almost from the start of reading the music press.  

As much as they made music, groups existed to be conversation-starters. They would initiate a conversation, or they might try to disrupt the existing conversation, make it swerve off course -  go somewhere different, somewhere new.  In the hyper-conscious climate of postpunk>>>New Pop, music-making could be a form of active criticism.  Which Steve conveys here with his sharp line about how Josef K "recorded reviews, not records. They could / should have all been journos..." 

The unspoken corollary of that, though, is the disorienting thought that criticism, at its utmost, could be a kind of unsounded music-making*. A real contribution to the evolution.  

The thing that puzzles me now about this review is why Steve situated all this in the past - six long years ago, a lost golden age of discourse fever. 

Why the elegiac long-face, Mr. Melody Maker Features Editor Sir?  For surely the pages of your own magazine at that very moment teemed with "instruments of discourse." What was A.R. Kane if not an intervention, a gauntlet thrown down - a purposeful polarizer of a proposition. As were, in different ways, with different degrees of intentionality, Throwing Muses, The Young Gods, and others...   Groups then in the process of formation would in time reveal themselves as mirroring the rhetoric and write-ups that framed the late Eighties surge, as much they were reflections of the surging sounds themselves.

"Spotty, unshaven visionaries"** -  Steve was surrounded by them. Because he'd hired them. 

* C.f. Christopher Small's idea of musicking --  a term he invented to convey and encompass the ways in which a music culture is sustained not just by the craft and creativity of musicians but many other kinds of contributions and activities: fans and listeners, critics and reporters, A&R and publicists, photographers and record designers, managers and booking agents, radio deejays, promoters..... We are all musickers.  

** Morley, clearly. 

Late Addition: Forgot that I reviewed some Josef K reissues a few years later and picked up on Steve's line. From October 20 1990

Jon Wilde - Joy Division / New Order - Melody Maker - September 15 1990

A sacred cow shunted into the abattoir of critical revisionism!  Joy Division get unexpectedly savaged by Jon Wilde (here dropping the earlier "h" from his name - i.e. Jonh Wilde). Yet he esteems New Order greatly (well, from "Blue Monday" onwards)  even though the singer is even less of a conventionally equipped singer than the previous occupant of the job. 

I disagree with it completely (even to the point of thinking New Order get steadily less compelling from "Blue Monday" onwards) But as with the Steve Sutherland "Scott Walker solo is shite, should have stayed in the Walker Brothers"  review, it is refreshing to read such a counter-consensual take(-down)

"The ranks of the unattended legends" - nice phrase, and I guess Joydiv probably were  at their  lowest ebb reputationally in 1990, in terms of being an influence or something cited by other bands. And few things could have been less related to the baggy positivity emanating from the very same city at the time of writing. 

Loop had done a Joydiv-ish single earlier that year ("Arc-Lite", and quite soon Disco Inferno in their early glacial monochrome phase (pre-postrock) would swim into view. There had also been a cool American band with some of that postpunk scouring dourness - Nice Strong Arm.  

But no, in 1990, hardly anyone was referencing or drawing from Joy Division.  

That would change -  but it took another decade-plus...  and a couple of films certainly helped.

Nowadays the cover design of Unknown Pleasures is everywhere, a T-shirt you can buy in malls, in the same league iconically as the Stones tongue-and-lips logo. Their canonic eminence seems permament. 

RIP Jane Suck / Jane Solanas

Sounds punk-era legend Jane Suck - who later wrote for NME as Jane Solanas, presumably an alias in homage to Valerie as in SCUM Manifesto - has died. 

Here is Suck's intro / manifesto co-written with Jon Savage for Sounds's landmark New Musick feature package that started November 26 1977 and continued  on December 3 1977.

And here is a piece she wrote as Solanas that is markedly different - a sympathetic take on Kate Bush at a time when the music press still largely scorned her as a kook with an overly dramatic / decorative and passe style of art-rock.  ( Indeed even in the dek / standfirst, written no doubt by some male editor, they can't resist getting some digs in: "Kate Bush has moulded herself in an icon of pop erotica — so much that suburban couples claim her breasts stimulate their love making. Yet to like her voice and music is the ultimate in being uncool. Jane Solanas decides to give Kate the benefit of the doubt." )

Scans first, followed by the text

KATE BUSH profile

NME October 15th, 1983

by Jane Solanas

"Dear Kate

I love you. My brother is in the army and he's a git. I couldn't tell anyone else that. And no one else seems bothered about soldiers getting blown up young. I know you care. I just don't know you…"

"Dear Kate

Me and my wife watched you on the tele and we found your breasts stimulate our love-making…"

"Dear Kate

Your being Roman Catholic interests me…"

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

There is the school of thought that Kate Bush is for mums and dads. Freakily lovable. The ET of pop — something to laugh at when females impersonate her on TV by donning explosions of brown wig, making stabbing actions with their hands, all the while wailing like a cat fight.

And there's a school who believe Kate Bush is "profoundly subversive", like Fred Vermorel.

Fred — more familiar to NME readers as Malcolm McLaren's old philosophical sparring partner, and co-author of a brilliant book, The Sex Pistols File — for some reason, freaked on Kate's nipples, which stuck out on the first EMI promotional poster, and went on to weave an almost demi-goddess identity for her, largely drawn from the rustic history of the Bush clan and Kate's turbulent schooldays. (EG: why did Kate never fight back when girls pulled her hair?)

But among a younger generation, the school of thought seems to be that liking Kate Bush is about as hip as owning a set of Melanie albums or else that she is… wonderful.

Someone at EMI said:" I 've yet to see anyone sum Kate Bush up."

Kate Bush said: "The thing I don't like about NME is it seems so cynical…"

Those are the two main problems.

^^^^^^^

It would be so easy to be horrible about Kate Bush. A hundred, even affectionate, jokes immediately come to mind.

The press tend to think Ms Bush is immune to satire, innuendo and downright rudeness. Somehow it's alright for Simon Bates to phone her up live on Radio 1 and bellow down the receiver about Kate's bank balance and sex life. The press can always say, "fuck you, you turgid cretin", but a household name is trained to be polite. It's a shame.

But on the other hand, Kate Bush is enigmatic, and what do you do when you don't understand someone? Either attack them ("Kate Bush is a spaced-out druid with lush tits…" is a familiar cry), or build fantasies around them a la Fred Vermorel.

I fell foul of the latter approach. I had so many preconceptions about the woman it was becoming painful. I expected her to be into horror movies, astrology, mysticism and sex, and based my questions around those subjects. I also expected her to have a sense of humour that would have me rolling in the aisles. I asked about the Kate Bush sense of humour at EMI and was told, yes, it existed but it was "off the wall". Unfortunately, it seemed to be out of the room when I was present, but then I shouldn't have expected a side-show.

I don't think the press would get Kate Bush so wrong, if she did not marry her music, which is strong enough already, to a controversial visual presentation. We've all got an instant picture of Kate Bush to draw on: "Oh yeah, she dances, don't she?" being another familiar cry. But think about it, how many dancing songwriters can you count on one hand?

Kate Bush has been somewhat dogged by her past, particularly in the light of the fact that she has been out of the public eye for over a year and her last major tour was as long ago as 1979. Hence impressions of Kate tend to be hopelessly outdated.

I never saw Kate Bush live, and had no interest in her work until the release of the 'Sat In Your Lap' single, so I asked EMI to show me some videos. I watched the Hammersmith gig from '79 and got a total shock: all Kate's songs which were finely imprinted on my brain were transformed into something straight out of Salem's Lot.

I got the impression that the 21-year-old Kate Bush was trying to be Peter Pan, but to me she came across as Varoomshka crossed with a vampire. It was genuinely frightening watching Kate stalking around the stage in various strange garb being man handled by two male/slave dancers, and pulling pained expressions with that extraordinary face of hers. Subtle it wasn't.

Four years on, Kate has calmed down a bit. I watched a preview of her Single File video; as might have been predicted, she is in her element on video. There's still quite a lot of frantic arm waving (and jeezus has she got a pair of arms!), but when she interprets her later material, she's easily one of the most entertaining musicians on film. The one's to look out for are: 'Army Dreamers' (see Kate get blown up), 'There Goes A Tenner' (see Kate blow a safe), 'Sat In Your Lap' (see men wearing goats' legs) and 'The Dreaming' (see God?).

Kate Bush hit her artistic peak on The Dreaming album. Yet sadly it wasn't recognised as an important or courageous album, and caused more confusion than fuss. The three singles taken from it, 'Sat In Your Lap', 'The Dreaming' and 'There Goes A Tenner', were her finest ever and sounded to me like sure-fire radio hits. But the Radio 1 DJs (except David Jensen) tittered nervously, and 'The Dreaming' just about did the whole station in.

She blew away that MOR' Wuthering Heights' image by changing her voice (lowering it) and injecting aggression into the music. There's a note on the bottom of The Dreaming album instructing you to play the record LOUD! Before, Kate Bush as a flaming great noise would never have occurred to anyone.

Kate Bush has always been a unique talent on the music scene. Her individuality and imagination are unusual in an industry which constantly makes do without either. As a songwriter she has the ability to take intriguing subject matter — yes, Wuthering Heights, Houdini, Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw, aspects of war, anything from aborigines getting mowed down by trucks to soft porn — and condensing it into song.

She wrote one of the best anti-army songs ever ('Army Dreamers'); and, of course, she has that voice, distinctive and constantly changing.

Her attitude to work is interesting. It's well known that the EMI machine has been good to her, allowing an extraordinary freedom in the running of her career. But there is still the pressure to promote herself and she has wilfully taken a back-seat. She spent so much time working on The Dreaming, she knackered herself and scrapped plans to tour. She is currently working on new material, but this is still only at the demo stage, and how long she will spend in the studio throwing her voice of walls is anyone's guess.

She is reluctant to do press because of bad experiences. She seems obsessed with doing things right, be it a performance or a photograph, and she does not seem afraid to wait. I find that a rare quality.

^^^^^^^^^^^

The interview I did with Kate Bush for two hours in a dance studio in South London was marred by the preconceptions I mentioned earlier.

I've got only one clear impression of Kate Bush's personality: she's sweet. She wouldn't stomp on a spider if it was three inches wide and crawling through her hair; she wouldn't shout at anyone no matter how obnoxious they were being. I got the feeling that all the energy other 25 year olds might expend on being sassy, sexy and a minor hell-raiser in order to impress their personality on the world, for her is contained and released in her work.

This is not to say Kate Bush outside of a studio or off a stage is vacuous or innocent, but she is unusually quiet. I saw no trace of the extrovert that comes across in her music: I don't think I gave her enough scope to talk about the things, chiefly her songwriting and her dancing, that she would have liked to.

A lot of the time was spent patiently explaining no, she wasn't into this or that, or no, that was an interesting way of looking at it, but not her way. As a "fan", I was probably cute. As an interviewer, a load of crap.

For example, I liked the way she handled this question:

Fred Vermorel wrote a curious thing about your lacking aggressive emotions. Yet The Dreaming seemed to work because it sounded so aggressive. Can you comment on that?

"I think the last album is about trying to cope… to get through all the shit. I think it was positive, showing how certain people approach all these negative things (war, crime etc). I don't think I'm actually an aggressive person. I think I can be… but I release that energy in work. I think it's wrong to get angry. If people get angry, it kind of freaks everybody out and they can't concentrate on what they're doing."

I thought that was an admirable piece of logic. I wasn't so keen on Kate's surprised dismissal of my question on her sexual identity as a female performer:

I once saw a photograph of you taken from your live tour and you were covered in sweat and licking the barrel of a gun. I found it erotic but frightening, because it was so blatant. (I also accused her, after watching the video of the Hammersmith gig of oozing sex all over the stage.) What, as a performer, are your feelings with regard to an audience's erotic reaction to you?

"I suppose it's something I don't really know about. Your energy on stage dictates the character you are (then). I'm too subjective. I just see me… either I get embarrassed or it's working."

It seemed to be news to Kate that her visual presence might have a dramatic sexual effect on people. I closed that part of the conversation with a muttered, "Well, it must be my filthy mind (chortle)". But later I remembered all the comments I'd heard when I'd told people I was going to meet Kate Bush: "tits" and "naked photographs" being uppermost.

Also, in a later question about her initial press identity, Kate remarked, "When I first appeared the press couldn't handle me in any normal way. I was the girl who sang in a funny voice with — 'The Body'…"

There is a video on the Video File that shows "The Body" to wonderful effect. As you can imagine, I buried the next question, Do you think women get off on you?, in fine flippant style. But I liked her candidness in other areas.

Do you like books?

"Yes. But I'm a really slow reader. Every time I read a good book it's in my head for weeks… like The Shining (Stephen King), that went straight into a song."

We had already established that Kate was a keen film fan when I asked this one:

Do you like gory things or taboo subjects?

"Some taboo subjects definitely attract me… I don't think I do like particularly gory things. Like, Don't Look Now, Psycho (films Kate likes), its not the gore so much as the emotional effect — the distortion. I don't think I'd ever go and see Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday The 13th, things like that. It think it's sick. You KNOW everybody is going to die disgustingly. I prefer films that work around the subject, build you up…"

Did you ever go through the hippie stage?

"No. I was just a few years too young. In some ways my attitudes could be associated with the time. I mean, I was growing up in the '60s…" (EG: Kate is well gone on The Beatles).

Were you ever into teenage (fashion) cults. Like a skinhead (titter) or something?

"No. I don't think I ever felt I could be convincing enough in any of the roles."

Do you ever get drunk?

"I don't really like alcohol. It doesn't get on with my body… (But) I've got a strong stomach. I can eat a lot… a great combination of things."

Well, I think it's far more interesting to know that Kate Bush is a gut than that Lena Zavaroni is a Freudian anorexic.

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

You wouldn't believe how physically small Kate Bush is. After the interview, I looked down at her and, for a split second, I wondered how she'd ever make it across the street, let alone be someone people would like to touch, annoy, know. She lacks the cynicism and mistrust of the '80s, yet she's got a single-mindedness that transgresses all the pitfalls of fashion and falling sales. We should stop bugging her.

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

And here is Solanas reviewing a book by her erstwhile hero / ally / role model (?) Julie Burchill

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

More Jane Suck through the auspices of Sounds Clips