"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. welcome to the drivel blog of "music detractor, Simon Reynolds"
Managed by a music journo James Brown (then features editor at NME but soon to start Loaded) and fronted by another NME journo. Not promising, eh?
I remember a Fabulous feature in which they were playing a gig in the provinces and Brown explained to the reporter that he never booked a hotel for the band in such circumstances - "if they don't have the nous to cop off with someone after the show, they don't deserve to be in Fabulous".
1991 - so a little bit too ahead of the coming Shitegeist
Every country in the world has its musical shit but there is something unique about Britshit.
Really truly shaky musical propositions can get surprisingly far - onto music paper covers, TV youth shows, record deals, and even into the charts.
There is something about the British tolerance for deficiency that is unique - Joe Carducci talks about a kind of listening where you sense the group's intention and supply it aurally even when it's not achieved or barely even gestured at. He was talking specifically about how after punk and its ethos of deskilling, you had a lot of rhythmically substandard outfits who got very successful - how British rock in the '60s and '70s had been all about great drummers and rhythms sections but after punk you could prosper as a band with barely adequate drumming, feeble rhythms etc. That only got worse with indie and Britpop.
There's a kind of solidarity-based listening where you like the attitude or line of patter that the group puts out - support their values or reckon they are good people - and as a result are prepared to turn a blind ear to the manifest failings in sonic execution. You imaginatively project the kind of musical substance that they ought to have and would supply if capable of it, or prepared to go to the bother of learning how to deliver it.
Far away the country singer that I have the most time for
The world of regret and shame he puts into the word "foolish"
A few other country things I love
Not for the sentiment, but just the peal of the chorus, the keening nasal explosion of voice
Tried to persuade a girlfriend that this song was in its own way as harrowing as Joy Division
She wasn't buying it
(But it is coming from the same place as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" - mundane pain, stoic dignity)
Country was on the alt-indie agenda for a moment in the Eighties
The best song on the second Commotions album - the only one good enough to be on Rattlesnakes
Costello ahead of the game here (1981) but the Almost Blue album is a void, the only one in that run from True to Punch that leaves me numb
Most alt-indie takes on country were pretty tepid
One of the exceptions
Things got so desperate in the Bad Music Era, I even bought a Jason and the Scorchers album - big mistake
Countryisms and Americana in general was a big contributory factor to the badness of the Bad Music Era
Gram Parsons = a very hip reference point for a moment there
I used to find that song very touching - "thought about a calico bonnet from Cheyenne to Tennessee" but I can't re-access the feeling now
Almost none of that country rock (late Sixties school or the 80s redux) compares to the real thing, by which I mean the straight down the line Nashville mainstream, countrypolitan strings and all
Less interested in the supposedly real-er thing.
the Outlaw movement etc
And never got around to Joe Ely
I was just looking at a picture of him and thinking he had that Montgomery Cliff cleancut look that Joe Strummer had
not realising that he done this
and actually sung on the Clash original
some kind of mirror image narcissism attraction syndrome going on there between the two Joes
10,000 Maniacs seemed the epitome of worthy, earnest, wholesome fare - not quite "Bad Music Era" because never less than palatable and well-made, but just part of the filler of the time
Except, they did have two Moments - perhaps two-and-a-half
A possible reference point here - Patti Smith in she-shaman mode - Natalie dancing barefoot, literally, on stage in those days, often (albeit not here)
A certain gamey aroma to the persona at this point
But the music of "My Mother the War" is coming out of postpunk and into a folky American-ness - a path paved by R.E.M. (the Gang of Four traces in "9+9") and Violent Femmes
postpunk residuals on this song being the high-toned melodic basslines (quite frilly), the slashing guitar
Natalie M as the distaff Stipe is the main thing that comes over - the vaguely mystical vibe, the abstract-leaning imagery, the aura of invocation
(Stipe also a big fan / influencee of P. Smith)
I think also of Golden Palominos and that unexpected intersection between John Lydon and Richard Thompson
Then a shift towards a wholly (and wholly wholesome) American frame of reference (fellow travelers would include Camper Van Beethoven, Maria McKee, Throwing Muses etc) - a shift discernible across the board in college rock (although Anglophilia remained a stubborn persistence - the cult of XTC, Robyn Hitchcock solo etc )
College towns make up this sound's prime geographic constituency, not just the coastal states and the N.E. liberal bastion, but blue enclaves within Southern red states ... Athens, archetypal in that regard... Austin, also... Chapel Hill
Natalie's voice at its most buttermilk-pancakes here
Video directed by Ade Edmonson (!) and there is an attempt to glam up Natalie (not so gamey, the aura now) and focus entirely on her (the band appear only momentarily, as silhouettes), with the record company possibly already envisioning a breakaway solo career
And then the "half" that makes it "two and a half" moments of gorgeous glory
When they did this unexpected cover version, my awareness of Cat Stevens was limited to the "Matthew and Son" 1960s 'character song mini-boom' phase - and then the much later
"(Remember The Days of the) Old Schoolyard" which I found poignant as a boy (still at school). Oh and there was "Morning Has Broken" of course.... But I had had no idea he'd been a huge star in America in the early 1970s, riding the singer-songwriter boom, with tunes like this -
I found this an oddly touching song to re-present, earnestly, to the Alternative Nation - at the risk of considerable scorn from your S. Youth / Forced Exposure types
But the other songs of this phase were issue-and-cause oriented, caring 'n' concerned in a way that didn't play well with us Young Gods fans - and lyrically too blunt and literal for us Kristin Hersh fans either.
proto-Lilith Fair fare
If they never did anything quite as mawkish as "Everybody Hurts", they never did anything as perfectly pitched and piercing as "Losing My Religion" either
Aha! Talking of Patti Smith
And then the solo career, about which the missus wrote a sarky piece for the NY Times
The post-Merchant Maniacs carried on without her! And did that thing of replacing the singer with as close a facsimile as they could find.
An unlikely cover - and with a thumping 4to-4loor kick drum underneath, perhaps trying to have an Everything But the Girl meets Todd Terry "Missing" style hit?
Actually Cabaret Voltaire kept on making good records all through this period (84-85-86 = BME prime-zone) - I particularly liked The Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord and interviewed them in '86, when they seemed a little lost (as did another Sheffield group, Heaven 17, also interviewed around that time)
Flipside has a nice hypnotic electro-refrain in the "Sensoria" mode
Another from Microphonies
But Cabs are first-wave industrial-funksters who just kept on keepin' on - pioneers turned settlers.
What about the real second-wavers?
Also from Sheffield, there was Hula
Also from Sheffield, there was Chakk
Also from Sheffield, there was The Box (an offshoot of Clock DVA)
Not from Sheffield, there was Portion Control...
Also not from Sheffield, there was A Primary Industry (some of whom would become Ultramarine). Sweatbox, the label they were on (RIP Rob Deacon), was a hotbed for 2nd-wave A-funk)
23 Skidoo, 400 Blows, and Shriekback were kind of on the cusp between first-wave and second-wave (first wave I would say was Cabs, A Certain Ratio, Clock DVA)
Shriekback in their abstruse first phase, before the EST-shaped upfulness of Jam Science.
But going back to the Sheffielders
Chakk was my first cover story for Melody Maker
By that point they'd signed to MCA for a supposedly massive amount
Certainly it was substantial enough to set up the Fon studio (whence would come the early Northern house tune "House Arrest" by Krush, a huge chart hit (you can find copies on discogs going for 13 pence!) and through which some notable bleep tunes would later be sluiced. Mark Brydon of Chakk would go on to be the music-man in Moloko, while Krush's Mark Gamble would be half of Rhythmatic, major bleepologists on the Network label.
I remember going up to Sheffield in mid-86 for my very first visit to the fair city. Kipping on the sofa in the flat of Amrik Rai, Chakk's motormouth manager (and former NME journo). Cheapskate didn't spring for a hotel!
(While I was there I also interviewed Treebound Story, another of Amrik's bands - a pleasant janglepop group loosely aligned with C86 but more instrumentally able - an outfit notable mainly for featuring the precociously proficient guitar stylings of Richard Hawley.)
Amrik was pals with, or perhaps management-ly involved with, Cabaret Voltaire - and I recall we also went around Richard H. Kirk's gaff. I remember being surprised they smoked pot - somehow it didn't seem like something Cab Voltaire would be into, a bit hippy-ish (how naive I was in those days).
Talking of being green... A little later there was a trip down to WOMAD to see Chakk play live, in a e mini-bus paid for by MCA. (There was a label executive on board renowned as one of the last of a dying breed who bought coke on expenses).
Chakk were good but like all second-wave avant-funksters suffered from that sound having become formularized - terra cognita rather than a startling surge into the unknown.
A year before, I'd in fact written a critique in Monitor of this very development: avant-funk as codified genre. From "Radical Dance Fictions", the relevant portion:
".... A genre developed based on a profound perversion of funk’s sexual tension into a different sort of het-up charge, one of unease and dread. The disco backbeat became the given, the “natural” springboard for these experimentalists with their collages of industrial decay and social fragmentation. One reason was the neutrality of disco--it wasn’t loaded with associations that rock was, it was outside pop history, so it could be used as an element in futurist music. The idea was simple--marry technology and savagery, control and madness, the cerebral and “feel”. Music embodying both the system of industrial society and the breaking free (into violence, debauchery, excess) of instincts suppressed by the system. The musicians’ ambivalent feelings towards Control and Collapse (attracted to both) is bound up with the old egghead problem/project--how to think yourself past thought, or as Talking Heads’ put it--“help us lose our minds”, “stop making sense”. Jam Science, the Shriekback LP title, is the most succinct and distressingly pat expression of the goal... Chakk and Hula are two current outfits who reveal both the extent and the limits of what can be achieved within this genre. The obvious musical strands--found voices; distorted, FX-ridden vocals; trails of discordant sax; somber swathes of synth; filched ethnic noises; basslines and drum patterns that bear a formal resemblance to funk but are fatally drained of sex and soul--are strung around the familiar concepts and content: cut-up theory; the ambivalent obsession with religious/jingoist fanaticism, atrocity, psychosis (via J.G. Ballard); totalitarianism (via William Burroughs’ Control). Even the titles instill a sense of deja vu--“Delirium”, “Cut the Dust”, “Tear up”, “Out of the Flesh”, “Pleasure Hates Language”. Hula’s Murmur and Chakk’s recent Peel session contain music that can emote and excite, but both groups make worthy additions to a pre-existing field, rather than enlargements or developments to it..."
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.
There is this mid-Eighties Brit-indie sound that I think of as wide-brim hat music
I would have fingered Dream Academy as absolutely archetypal except I can't seem to find much evidence of them wearing hats
They do have headgear of varying kinds on the cover of this though
The wide-brim hat seems to go hand in hand with a non-rocking, wussy innocuousness, combined with an over-layered, slightly florid thing
It's these fine fellows I think who are the actual archetype - and again I'm not sure if it's even "wide brim", it's just hat-wearing - that was a real thing on the indiepop scene 1984-85-86
Ha! Look! I was right - in this TV clip from the show Wired, the presenter who's introducing Martin Stephenson and the Daintees is wearing one of those hats, and he stops right in front of a hat shop, and he says "they'll be banning hats next" (in reference to some Thatcher government measure against homosexuality).
Still flying the Wide Brimmed Hat Flag in 1988
Who else had hats?
The Woodentops!
Who - at least for the duration of the first four singles - are not Bad Music Era at all - in fact I really liked them.
Interviewed them around the (disappointingly wussily-produced) debut album Giant, which did have a few lovely dreamy tunes like this one -
- but overall got a bit sickly and spoiled by overproduction.
You can forgive any hat-wearing tendencies when it's muscular driving trancebop like "Well Well Well", "Move Me", "It Will Come" - but when it gets all wispy and wimpy, the hats start to seem like the problem...
Who else then?
I might have fingered Microdisney as culprits, but on quick glance can't see much hat-wearing evidence and I'm not going to start poring through old videos, that's for certain (never cared for their supposedly subversive-MOR sound)
James (like the 'Tops another group I liked then - but only for a moment) appear to have gone bare-headed
Aha - Virginia Astley had a big old hat in the photo sessions around her second album, 1986's Hope In A Darkened Heart, as you can just about see from this cover.
I am not sure that a woman wearing a hat of this kind is so potentially culpable as it is when a man does it, though. However it does go hand in hand with some wispy, florid, non-rock-instrumentation-bedecked music, though, in Ms Astley's case. The strawberries-and-cream dove-toned Englishness of her music would have been something I'd not have been able to stomach at the time - but nowadays, an aging expatriate pining for the rolling hills and horse chestnut trees of the motherland, I have developed a fondness for it. Perhaps it can even be considered part of the proto-canon for hauntology.
The Blue Nile put out an album actually calledHats, of course - with a chap on the front cover wearing a hat - but I don't think they took to going hat-clad onstage or in photo sessions. The Nile didn't really have a look as such - nor would I be able pick any of them out of a police line-up.
Postscript/Addendum
Lots of good suggestions coming through in the comments, e.g. Fairground Attraction
Andy Prieboy (Wall of Voodoo) - the 'western' style was in
vogue for a while in the mid 80s.
Tracy Pew (a bit earlier)
Blixa Bargeld (a bit later, circa The Weeping Song, 1990)
Fields of the Nephlim
Wayne Hussey
Slash
I think with Pew and Bargeld the hats have a more macho evocation than the wide-brim thing I'm talking about.
Pew's whole image was a sort of Texan shit-kicker, a sartorial foretaste of the Southern Gothic direction that the late-period Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds would plunge into.
My favorite Pew quote, about the early skinny-tie art-pop of Boys Next Door - "we made the unpardonable error of playing to thinkers rather than the drinkers"
And yeah with the Mission / Nephs and with G'N'R, it's definitely something else than the Daintees / Woodentops idea
(the Nephs went so far as to put "desert dust" on their hats for the full spaghetti western wilderness look - actually flour, which made them the butt of endless Melody Maker jokes about Mother's Pride) Perhaps what is
needed is a typology of Eighties alternative music millinery! c.f. the leather cap look mentioned in the comments. Bit more from Andrew
Another nomination: Lindy Morrison (Go-Betweens) on the
cover of Liberty Belle ...
Slash's hat could have been worn in the late-60s
Haight-Ashbury scene, which was an inspiration for the paisley underground
scene of the mid-80s.
Not sure goth should be eliminated as the bands were
intentionally evoking the distant past (Victorian era lace and boots).
Other nominations: Mike Scott (The Waterboys),
and moving further from alternative music Boy George, the woman from The
Thompson Twin I was going to mention the Waterboys and then forgot, although their sound is a bit more epic and windswept (the Big Music - cf. the hatted tendency of U2 circa Joshua Tree)
and one from the 90s, which actually I rather like
Friday, July 6, 2012
the Bad Music Era, part 17
in the mid-Eighties and late-Eighties, a lot of bad rock music was made and released in the United Kingdom, and a lot of this shite got written up enthusiastically in the music press and hailed as the best thing since sliced bread
Head was one of those groups
from the album A Snog on the Rocks - described by someone who's actually heard it as "bluesy, funky, post-pub rock songs about sleaze and booze, often laced with sophomoric innuendo"
strangely one the key members of this group had an illustrious (and quite unlikely given Head's rockism, or failed rockism more like) pedigree
his previous-to-Head form includes
yes it's Gareth Sager
not that I'm a fan of Rip Rig and Panic (bit too wacky-daft, "free"-as-free-for-the-players-not-so-much-the-listeners-let's-be-honest).. but RR&P couldn't be much further from Head really... how did he get there from here?
