It wasn't all bad though
Some of it was great
But it was a peculiar directionless period when things got a little bit... wet (wet, wet).
Like new pop without either the awkwardness OR the ambition - just polished and clever and cosy.
Or like postpunk without the edge
This group were massive (well in the indie charts) but somehow i think i managed to never hear them at the time
Probably I did but they've evacuated themselves utterly from my memory
But that's a slight digression from the main drift, inspired by the Kitchenware tape, which is that phase when a lot of hip-to-be-square moves were being made
e.g.
Microdisney saying they aspired to be MOR, admired Andrew Gold
It was some kind of big gesture of performative wannabe-mainstreamness when Roddy Frame got Mark Knopfler to produce the Knife album, and Aztec Camera did the cover of "Jump"
Paddy Mc talked about what a cool cat Paul Mc was
Which is true but it was very much a statement then (given "Ebony and Ivory" and "The Frog Chorus" were his most recent hits).
Kane Gang were one of several to express admiration for Steely Dan
The Kane Gang started out a bit soulcialist and stalwart, like a Wham! who canvassed for their local Labour Party candidate in the election of 1983.
Notably part of the "headwear" phenom of mid-80s NME-beloved indie-ish music - small cap division rather than than wide-brim hat.
Christ, this is bad
Bad enough to make the Top 40 in America in 87!
No really, it did. (Helped by the Tears for Fears /"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" style promo no doubt).
Actually went to the release party for that album, on a boat on the Thames - but only cos we liked a free drink at Melody Maker. Plus Joy was going back to NYC after a year of studying abroad (ie in London) so Stubbs and I wanted to give her a good send-off. Or at least an inebriated send-off.
The unutterably bland polish of this Kane Gang album ought to be haloed with poignancy and lustrous memory then, but I cannot remember a thing about it.
There were two kinds of music that came streaming down from Scotland
All the stuff like Primals and Pastels and BMX Bandits and not forgetting Jesus and Mary Chain
And then - completely opposite - all this superslick funky-rocky stuff
Like this group inexplicably touted by some quarters within the UK music press
And this lot - the singer a close mate of Alan Horne
So oddly both streams or strands seemed to come from Postcard, from a fatal confusion within Orange Juice... Or at least, within their music, it was a fruitful confusion, a tangle of contrary impulses (raw versus slick, Velvets versus Chic) that came out wonderfully. But when separated out those impulses led on the one side to Pastels and on the other to Del Amitri
Aztec Camera were the archetypal trajectory from Postcard-compatible to mainstream (wannabe)
Well, Lloyd actually titled an album Mainstream.
Even Davy from the Fire Engines tried to go pop, go slick
Somehow I've not mentioned Wet Wet Wet yet - who I actually interviewed (for the Observer - nice lads, at least the non-singing ones - never met Mr Pellow), and who scholars of the era will know derived their name from a line in a Scritti song from Songs To Remember, "Gettin' Havin' and Holdin"
Yes a lot of this would-be slick, soulie-Steely-wannabe mid-80s stuff came from Scotland or from Northumbria.
Deacon Blue - named after a Steely Dan song, in fact.
I wonder what it is that keeps drawing me back to the Bad Music Era.
Well, there's the motto at the top from Mr Eno - "really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" . But in a lot of cases, this stuff isn't even awful, it's just nothingness, neither one thing nor the other. So for me it's more like a sort of personal decadence in my taste and listening habits, where I find it perversely fascinating to contemplate mediocrity and misguided directions.
And then there's also something to do with remembering the savage disappointment of the post-postpunk moment - that feeling of entropy and creeping crapness cropping up all across the spectrum, from the alternative underground indie-charts scene to the toppermost of the poppermost... everything going wrong
Partly it's to remind myself that soon enough it all went incredibly right ... the lull turned to a surge
But it's also a cautionary tale... about the dangers of cautiousness, in fact... what happens when the will weakens... when people start playing the game
I think I'll do the Style Council and Respond Records in the next installment.
[this post partly inspired by Nothing Else On having reached 1983 in his grand scanning the UK music papers project]
13 comments:
Phil Knight sez:
One of the most intriguing bands of this era were James King and the Lone Wolves - kind of like a very nasty version of Orange Juice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR1D15PFaos
I remember there being an enormous amount of hype about them and then....nothing.
But at least they understood the importance of being aggressive and unpleasant. My favourite band at this time were Green On Red, primarily because they were one of the few groups that gave off a decent aura of hate.
A lot of this music, especially the Scottish stuff, seems to be proto-Blairite - compassionate, humanistic sentiments presented in slick, professional packaging. A remarkable consistency of messaging across all b(r)ands, that gestures towards the New Gold D:Ream.
So I think that a new consciousness was emerging here, which was very un-punk, but which had to pick up the nearest available musical idiom.
yeah i think you are spot on there with the proto-Blair
perhaps to keep it in the Eighties context, these groups represented a sort of SDP position
their descendants being stuff like The Beautiful South
by the way Phil, did you see this post at the other blog dedicated to you?
http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2019/09/knightmares-on-wax-tune-going-out-to.html
Phil Knight sez...
Much obliged, skipper. I think I actually remember that one...
Tying this together, my feeling is that popular culture, and especially popular music, alternates between two poles - discord/disruption and unity/peace. You could posit "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Imagine" as the respective ideal forms of these poles.
I'm becoming quite sceptical of the idea that the energy of punk dissipated in the mid-eighties. I rather think that there was a transition, beginning circa 1983, away from discord/disruption and towards unity/peace which eventually found its voice in rave, and those indie bands smart enough to incorporate dance elements into their music (Stone Roses being the prime example). Before rave appeared though, I think the unity/peace instinct was stuck with having to express itself through some fairly mouldy existing forms - MOR, blue-eyed soul, DIY indie etc.
Blair was, initially at least, the political manifestation of the peace/unity instinct. Until everyone found out what he was really like, of course.
Hello Simon,
Great read.
When you write 'Partly it's to remind myself that soon enough it all went incredibly right ... the lull turned to a surge' do you mean post-84 the post-punk promise/potency (re)ignited or that something 'other' ignited (e.g. dance/house)?
Ta
I also remember this weirdly listless period, though from a different perspective. As a suburban American teenager, I wasn’t exposed to the bands above—fortunately, I guess-- but I do remember sensing the general decline you've outlined. Although it was a few years after the period you've bracketed, I registered the shift in the realm of music videos. I remember feeling confused and disappointed by the launch of VH1, MTV’s boring sibling. Despite knowing it was aimed at a slightly older audience than MTV’s, I was still terrified to think that VH1 somehow represented the evolution of pop music, that the thrilling misfits I liked in the early 80s had graduated into shoulder-padded avatars of snooze-pop. OMD seemed to epitomize the shift from quirky energy to professional efficiency; I had some affection for them and seeing “If You Leave” in daily rotation on VH1 left me ashen as I imagined what the future held. Would all the good bands end up tamed and neutered, flattened out into safe, Reaganite lifestyle products? What seemed to you as a “post-post-punk” period was, for me, just how things were going to be from now on. (Reflect on the horror of that!) Thankfully it didn’t last.
an interesting dialectic, although i think to see rave as entirely luv'n'peace misses out the frenzy and delirium of the culture ('rave' after all connoting madness, crazed enthusiasm but also can mean 'rage'). it weren't all baggy jeans, bowl cuts and Candy Flip lamely covering 'Strawberry Fields Forever'.
punk did linger long and deep into the Eighties - things like Redskins ('talk like the Clash walk like the Supremes' was their slogan) etc. Style Council in its own way ('Walls Come Tumblin Down' etc) but i'm getting ahead of myself, that'll be the next post. perhaps not the 'violence/chaos' side of punk, although then again you all the sick noise type groups etc. Jesus & MC as as a form punk nostalgia - riots at the gigs etc
i was thinking more of the wave of exciting guitar groups that started coming through in 87 into 88 - initially mostly American (dinosaur jnr, sonic youth, big black, butthole surfers etc etc) but then you Brits get in on the action (My Bloody Valentine, Loop, Spacemen 3 etc). And then there was the hip hop - rap seemed like an expiring fad in 1985 (no really it did) but in 86-89 you had Def Jam, Eric B and Rakim, Schoolly D, Salt n Pepa (really great initially, no really), loads more.
but yeah the whole acid house / rave / bleep / hardcore thing was even more exciting - and all the more so for being this huge popular wave involving people who didn't read music papers
forgot the pixies and throwing muses. oh and how could i forget AR Kane. Also there was some industrial-ish action - young gods, front 242, skinny puppy. all the things we put on the front cover of Melody Maker basically. whereas if you look at what MM or NME had on its front cover in the mid-Eighties - for want of anything to choose from as much as any lack of editorial vision - the only redeeming things are i dunno Smiths, REM, Cocteau Twins
yeah i can imagine it must have been a depressing time. although a friend of mine Michaelangelos Matos is writing a book about 1984 as the peak of pop music. it probably did feel like that if you were young and watching MTV. in the UK 84 is when it's feeling like things are going really wrong in chartpop, with a few exceptions like the ZZT thing and Scritti
interesting response to VH1's launch. i remember watching it much later and actually quite enjoying it as a sort of middle-of-road filtering of recent pop history, it was interesting to see what fit the format filter in terms of their sense of their demographic. and before YouTube it was the only way to even see Eighties or (earlier) pop promos, so it had a sort of pop history educational or archival function. often i would see old pop videos that i had never seen in the UK, didn't know existed. then it really into the whole retromania thing with all the documentaries and Behind the Music. when i first proposed Retromania as a book, i said i was going to VH1 and ask to be guided through their vaults - i felt like they were a major force in this atemporalisation of pop history. never did though. since then they seem to have really faded as a channel anyone talks about.
Yes, in 1984, from the U.S. vantage point nothing about pop music seemed particularly wrong (except, heh heh, everything). Outside of New York and L.A., UK music came to us in an undifferentiated lump (“New Wave”). The periodizing you did above would have baffled me utterly. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of your work, speaking as an American reader, is realizing just how great the divide between the US/UK really was. Living in the suburban U.S. was almost like being behind a cultural Iron Curtain; the music weeklies (which I discovered later) were like Radio Free Europe in reverse.
You're correct about VH1's role in retromania, for sure. I wouldn’t have understood it as such, of course, but even back then it was obvious the format skewed older. Have you seen this YouTube clip?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKnpbaHf6_0
The program is “Beatles A-Z”, which is retro enough, but the VJ bits and the commercials are also backwards-looking. Sun Country Wine Coolers ran two spots trotting out exhausted stars (at 16:49 The Four Tops, at 25:01 Ringo Starr). A graphic shows Temptations tour dates and a VJ hypes an upcoming celebrity VJ set by The Turtles. (I distinctly remember, also, that VH1 always ran the Time-Life/K-Tel type compilations of hits of the 50s and 60s, though an example isn’t included in the link above.) The anemic cable commercials (collectible coins, charities, LIFE Magazine) also contributed to the ahistorical feeling, as you put it. So just to watch an hour or two of VH1’s normal programming was to drift into a parallel Boomer mindspace which seemed deeply at odds with the current pop scene as shown on MTV. As I said, it was depressing because VH1’s premiere meant that the number of music videos available on cable TV doubled overnight, yet the expansion was actually a detour into a landscape of nostalgia populated by aging stars trying desperately to remain relevant. My reaction was that of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”: “Fuckin’ hippies”. But I surfed over to VH1, from time to time, because the programmers at MTV and VH1 reliably rewarded viewers with occasional gems. Also, I suppose I didn’t mind because boredom seemed a standard feature of teenagerdom back then—I’m tempted to say a healthy one, in retrospect.
Do you subscribe to Joshua Clover's angle, 1989, the fall of the Wall(s) and with it what you would term 'retromania' supplanting any notion of forward thrust?
I recall 1989 with a definite feeling that things would be ever different, or difference forever as sameness (if that makes sense). The Stones Roses' ersatz-delia only typified it
Interesting points about MTV/VH1, 1989 was also when BSB/SKY gained a foothold into UK consumer living rooms, as you say, the histories suddenly were 'there'/'here'
P.S. I also think of Trow's 'Within the Context of No Context' with how the UK became subsumed by TV-glut from 1989.
The images of music overrode the sounds
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