Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Sticking to his script, to keep things extremely sweet, Weller split the biggest group in the country at the height of their powers, just after his best blue-eyed soul effort ‘The Bitterest Pill’ reached number two in summer ’82. ‘Beat Surrender’, the farewell single, was the Jam’s third to go straight in at number one, a feat which had only been achieved by one act in British pop before. ‘I’d hate us to end up old and embarrassing like so many other groups do,’ said Weller, telling the press before he’d informed his bandmates. ‘I want us to finish with dignity. What we have built up has meant something. For me it stands for honesty, passion, energy and youth. I want it to stay that way and maybe exist as a guideline for new groups coming up to improve and expand upon.’

  He quit at just the right time. Weller’s career has been up and down since, mixing the sublime and the gorblimey, but he’s rarely been dull, and he would be the last person to relive his glory days by re-forming the Jam. Having turned fifty, his 2010 album Wake Up the Nation was his most adventurous since Sound Affects.

  The Jam’s contemporaries came to stickier ends. Jerry Dammers faced a mass mutiny from the Specials when Terry Hall, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding left to form Fun Boy Three. They scored a string of oddly muddy brass-honk hits before splitting spectacularly in 1984 on Channel 4 TV show The Tube; while playing the Doors’ ‘The End’ absolutely straight, they set fire to an American flag. At the end of the song, Terry Hall leaned in to the microphone and asked: ‘Does anybody get the joke?’

  Terry Hall, Paul Weller and Jerry Dammers, none of them was a run-of-the-mill pop star. Yet as eccentrics and wilful personalities they paled alongside Kevin Rowland. Dexys Midnight Runners emerged at the end of 1979, also from the Midlands, also with a leaning towards the soulful sixties (Stax rather than ska), but they turned down an opportunity to sign to 2 Tone, going with ex-Clash/Subway Sect manager Bernie Rhodes instead. ‘We liked the fact that everybody hated him,’ said Rowland. ‘If somebody is hated by a lot of people then there must be a lot of good in them.’

  Kevin Rowland, over six foot, an Irish-bred bruiser, was wont to come up with such contrary statements. Dexys were built on controversy. Their first album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, began with the sound of a radio dial scanning the airwaves, settling briefly on the Specials’ ‘Rat Race’, the Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays in the Sun’ and Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ before Rowland roared to his eight-man team, ‘For God’s sake! Burn it down.’ Very quickly, they reached the top – number one in the spring of 1980 with second single ‘Geno’ – and very quickly it fell apart; ‘There, There, My Dear’ reached a more than respectable number seven, but ‘Keep It Part Two (Inferiority Part One)’ was too intense, an uneasy listen. It failed to chart at all that autumn and the entire group, bar Big Jim Paterson, left Rowland to form two other brass-led combos called the Bureau and Blue Ox Babes. ‘I just had something to say,’ says Rowland. ‘I was disappointed with success – we were still cramped in a minibus on hot summer days. I did not think in any way that “Keep It” was difficult. It was truthful, one hundred per cent truthful. “Geno” had been a number one – so I thought if you like that amount of emotion, try this amount of emotion.’

  Rowland licked his wounds, dropped the donkey-jacket look for that of a prize boxer, and released his best record yet in ‘Plan B’: ‘Bill Withers was good for me, pretend I’m Bill and lean on me.’ Strong, romantic, who could resist? Almost everyone, as it turned out. ‘Plan B’ stalled just inside the Top 75, but by the summer of ’82 Dexys were back at number one with ‘Come On Eileen’, repeating the feat in the States, where the Jam and the Specials had barely sold a record. It’s the all-time wedding song, ironic when you consider how dirty and personal the lyric is: ‘These people round here wear beaten-down eyes, sunk in smoke-dried faces. But not us, no, not us. We are far too young and clever.’

  The parent album Too-Rye-Ay was a best-seller, reaching number two and staying on the UK chart for just under a year. They had survived and prospered. The follow-up album, Don’t Stand Me Down, was an astonishingly personal and beautiful record. The problem was it came out three years after ‘Come On Eileen’: ‘I remember coming out of the studio thinking “That’s the best I can do”.’

  Don’t Stand Me Down emerged in a far less open era than Too-Rye-Ay. New wild-hearted outsiders like the Smiths and the Jesus and Mary Chain were entirely ignored by Radio 1. When Rowland appeared on TV interviewed by Muriel Gray, she was obsessed by the fact he was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. Meanwhile, radio could afford to turn a blind eye – there was no single.

  ‘It was a stupid mistake,’ Rowland sighed. ‘I wanted “This Is What She’s Like” to be the single, a ten-minute single. The manager said, “Good idea, or … no single at all?” It was a chance to be like the groups of the early seventies, like Led Zeppelin. I thought that would be great, but I wasn’t sure. There was a new guy at Mercury and he was like, “What?” That was it. I said, we’re definitely not releasing one. Mercury went with Don’t Stand Me Down for about a fortnight. Then they moved on to something else.’

  The album tanked, only to be reassessed in a kinder climate as a lost classic. 1985, after all, was no time for mavericks. The Specials’ In the Studio did similarly badly, and even Paul Weller’s Style Council weren’t guaranteed a Top 10 position for just any old single. But, before those hard-getting-harder times, there would be more than a few diverting pleasures and a whole slew of new heroes.

  1 They were introduced by DJ Kid Jensen, who paid due respect by mentioning ‘new wave’.

  2 At a little under two minutes, ‘Too Much Too Young’ was also the shortest number one since the sixties, the Beatles’ ‘From Me to You’ being the last sub-two-minute single to top the chart, in 1963.

  3 One of the number ones was with Chrissie Hynde (‘I Got You Babe’), another with Pato Banton (‘Baby Come Back’). As more time passes, it becomes harder to recall that for a while UB40 were subversive – hell, they had a Top 10 hit called ‘The Earth Dies Screaming’!

  46

  A SHARK IN JET’S CLOTHING: AMERICA AFTER PUNK

  Darby Crash had one of the sweetest punk names ever, and his story distils the difference between British and American punk. Crash sang with the Germs, an LA punk band who made a fierce noise but were fatally indebted to UK punk’s worst clichés. Nazi jewellery? Check. Smack habit? Check. Sid Vicious, the twit, was James Dean for these kids. When the Germs broke up in 1980, Crash and Pat Smear formed the Darby Crash Band – a tired, dreary, pre-punk appendage of a name. Sensing that even his footnote in the punk annals was slipping away, Crash injected a huge amount of heroin into his veins and pinned a note to his bedroom wall that read, ‘Here Lies Darby Crash’. You’d have called him a professional fuck-up, only his timing was horrible. Crash killed himself on December 7th 1980. The next day John Lennon, the long-haired sell-out, the dinosaur, the commie-turned-capitalist apologist, and pop king of the pre-punk world, was shot dead; any column inches a small-time suicide may have received were lost.

  Darby Crash’s life and death were as much a pop artifice as the career of Bucks Fizz, or New Kids on the Block, or Milli Vanilli.1 American punk initially treated the new music as an excuse for all manner of spoilt-brat behaviour – upset your parents, do the V-sign at teacher, draw a swastika on your cheek. The herky-jerky wackiness of new wave also blended into the US punk aesthetic: the B-52’s pioneered the cute girl/annoying boy vocal style (later perfected by the Sugarcubes) which, with their atomic-age bouffants, only distracted from some rich Brill Building-spun songcraft (‘Give Me Back My Man’, ‘Roam’, ‘Song for a Future Generation’); from Akron, Ohio, Devo wore flowerpots on their heads and made Talking Heads seem naturalistic; the Dickies played old TV themes very, very fast. Check the crowd in the video for Blondie’s ‘Dreaming’ for its high poseur factor and play it alongside the Sex Pistols’ Huddersfield footage. Spot the difference. Punk in the US copped the anti-Establishment
attitude of Britain while missing its situationist liberation. In June ’77, with ‘God Save the Queen’ still in the chart, Mark Perry’s Alternative TV were already renewing, switching from first-generation punk’s two-chord howl: ‘If my band don’t relate to punks I’m sorry, I apologise, but I’m never going to change. I’m into Zappa and Can and jazz.’

  Punk affected America very differently from the way it affected Britain. Again, the size of the country meant there was no obvious hub, and there was no Sex Pistols equivalent. It was niche and didn’t threaten the charts, let alone the government. Things moved at a snail’s pace. America took the speed, the shouting, the DIY aesthetic of UK punk, and burrowed deep, pared it back until, years and years later, it came up with something uniquely American called hardcore, by which time most British observers had long since turned away.

  Post-punk New York was all-embracing, and altogether different from the rest of America. It also had a head start; it was as if post-punk happened there before punk – prior to the Sex Pistols swearing at Bill Grundy, Blondie, Patti Smith and Talking Heads had created sounds that would inform the music of the late seventies and early eighties. Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ – a number-one single – was the beacon pointing to a way forward from two-chord Ramones punk. On the west coast, and in the Midwest, disco may have sucked, but not in NYC. Instead, as it faltered in the 1979 mainstream, disco was absorbed into a more intriguing dance-driven, post-punk noise. Beyond Blondie it may have had little Top 40 sway, but it was a crucial step forward. New York label Ze released a compilation called Mutant Disco, which was a succinct description of New York’s vision for pop life after punk. With Reagan in control in America and Thatcher in Britain, it felt like any minority needed all the help it could get to survive the new decade.

  ESG – or Emerald, Sapphire and Gold – never cut a ‘Heart of Glass’-size hit but were the quintessence of New York in 1980. From the South Bronx, they were four sisters called Scroggins, of Afro-American/Cherokee/Irish descent. ESG covered all racial and sonic bases with a tight, super-minimal, super-rhythmic pop (two-note basslines, one-note guitar solos, cowbells all over the shop); they supported the Clash, played the last night at the Paradise Garage and were produced by a visiting Martin Hannett. ‘You’re No Good’ applied Hannett’s space shuttle-cum-grain silo deep, deep sound to a haunted rewrite of the Supremes’ ‘Where Did Our Love Go’. It was quite astonishing, an NME Single of the Week. But the Scroggins girls were too sweet, and loved their mom too much, to move out of the Bronx – ‘All we want to do if we make a lot of money is buy her a house. That’s all. And some furniture to put in it.’ They continued to play live, their B-side ‘Moody’ became a second national anthem in New York clubs, and they got sampled to death, but ESG would stay a New York secret for another decade and a half.2

  Ze Records was a more self-conscious link between CBGB and Studio 54, and fancied itself as channelling Andy Warhol’s Factory to boot. Its offices were above Carnegie Hall. If Joe DiMaggio had been the doorman and Woody Allen their analyst it couldn’t have been more New York. Ze’s founder was the heir to the Mothercare fortune, a Jewish Iraqi called Michael Zilkha, who was beetle-browed and wore a money ed smile. He’d been to Westminster School and then Oxford, where he switched from economics to French because he wanted to read Balzac in its original form. Zilkha put his entire inheritance into Ze and trusted his instincts. ‘The only stipulation I make is that the rhythm should go boom-chuck and there should be black vocalists on the record,’ he said, and everything about Ze bore his stamp. It was witty without being smart-arsed, colourful without being lurid. Avant electro mambo. And eventually, after three years of consistent flops,3 Ze got big with Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ Tropical Gangsters.

  ‘I don’t give a damn about having the hippest record label in the world,’ declared Zilkha, ‘I’d much rather have the hits.’ August ‘Kid Creole’ Darnell wore zoot suits, his backing singers wore bunches of fruit, and Tropical Gangsters couldn’t have been timed better for a new-pop UK audience.4 ‘Stool Pigeon’ sounded like a herd of elephants (one ridden by Carmen Miranda) storming down Broadway; ‘Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy’ was like ‘Billie Jean’ retold by Lenny Bruce (‘See, if I was in your blood then you wouldn’t be so ugly’); ‘I’m a Wonderful Thing’ had Darnell as superlover, clawing and slapping his way through his little red book. All three were UK Top 10 hits in ’82, though they meant zip in America. Darnell was sweetly relaxed. ‘People in America would say, “What did you do to get that sort of coverage?” I just said, “I put out some crazy music and it found a following.”’ No fool, he moved to England in the mid-eighties and has stayed here ever since.

  With hindsight, you can draw a line from seventies classic rock, through the more knowing college rock of the eighties and on to grunge. You can also draw one that goes from disco through electro and on to house and techno. Parallel lines. The only point at which they cross is in post-punk, and Blondie were the apogee of this cross-pollination.

  From the misty, water-coloured memories of people old enough to remember, you could get the impression that every edition of Top of the Pops from 1978 was chock full of wonderful post-punk weirdness and guns-a-blazing disco delights. The reality, at least in February ’78, was ELO’s Beatle pastiche ‘Mr Blue Sky’, the Brotherhood of Man’s own-brand Abba, and a bunch of pub-rockers called Yellow Dog singing down a telephone in a faux-Jamaican accent. Glamour was virtually non-existent. Then Blondie appeared and it was immediately clear what pop had been missing.

  Blondie looked like a gang, self-contained and self-assured. Most importantly, the gang was led by a girl, an exotic blonde. There were tough-girl precursors: the Shangri-Las, who had been mismanaged so badly they lost the right to use their own name; the Runaways, puppeteered by svengali Kim Fowley; and Suzi Quatro, who had the leather and the look, but it always seemed like the band were her minders. Debbie Harry, it was quite apparent, was the leader of this gang. The song Blondie played on Top of the Pops in February ’78 was a piece of late doo-wop fluff called ‘Denis’, originally a US Top 10 hit for Randy and the Rainbows fourteen years earlier. They made it hard and shiny, and it went to number two in Britain. They reappeared on our screens a few weeks later with ‘(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear’, a love song to a kid with ESP, and upped the exotic stakes. A few months later they released an LP called Parallel Lines and Debbie Harry became the biggest pop star in the world. It had been that quick and easy.

  Harry had been born some thirty years earlier and was adopted, never knowing her real parents but always believing her mother was Marilyn Monroe. Prior to Blondie, she’d already gone through several lifetimes of experiences: a high-school cheerleader, she moved to downtown New York after leaving school and waited in cafes, then became a Playboy Bunny, made an LP with a group called the Wind in the Willows (imagine a hippie Mamas and Papas), got into heroin, got into yoga, and by 1972 was teaching exercises in a health spa.

  She heard about a girl group called Pure Garbage and became obsessed with the idea of them before she’d heard a note of their music; when they broke up, Debbie formed a new group, the Stilettos, with two ex-members. As a waitress at Max’s Kansas City she’d hung around with Warhol superstars – now Debbie was partying with the New York Dolls and very much becoming a face on the New York underground scene. The Stilettos were True Confessions trash, tough-girl pop in the Shangri-Las tradition. By the time Chris Stein saw them at the Hobury Tavern in 1974, where the stage was a pool table with its legs sawn off, Debbie was already writing quality songs like ‘In the Flesh’.

  Stein, a twenty-one-year-old guitarist who’d been in groups since the mid-sixties, hit it off with Harry well enough to join the Stilettos. Now things began to move. Stein and Harry split the group, put an ad in the Village Voice that read ‘Freaky energy rock drummer wanted’ and got Clem Burke, an Anglophile and Rodney Bewes lookalike with a Keith Moon fixation. He had freak energy to spare. They wanted a pianist bu
t ended up with Jimmy Destri and his Farfisa organ, which, it turned out, became entirely essential to the Blondie sound. Gary Valentine became the bassist because he’d written a couple of great songs (one of which was ‘Presence, Dear’), and that was reason enough.

  ‘It’s not cheap retrospection. We’re just living the dreams we had,’ said Destri in ’76. Blondie hooked up with producer Richard Gottehrer, who had already been behind some of pop’s most enduring songs – the McCoys’ ‘Hang On Sloopy’, the Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ – and soon he was guiding Debbie’s gang through an LP of locker-room putdowns (‘Rip Her to Shreds’), ‘Be My Baby’ drum rolls (‘X Offender’) and pinched news headlines (‘Youth Nabbed as Sniper’). Teen dreams: brazen, stylish, humorous and sexy. Lester Bangs described Blondie as ‘unselfconscious fun … what rock ’n’ roll has always stood for’. In ZigZag, Kris Needs said they were ‘all the great American pop styles rolled into one, but fuelled with the energy of the super soaraway seventies’.

  When they had first arrived in Britain in 1977, Blondie were supporting press darlings Television. It was a marriage of convenience. Journalists frothed at the mouth for Television’s intellectualism and Tom Verlaine’s new guitar moves, but Blondie – insisting they were merely a pop group – were sidelined. In the NME, Tony Parsons was a dissenting voice when he said ‘seeing Blondie was like hanging around an amusement arcade while Television made you feel like you were sitting in church’. Always a group to namecheck the 1910 Fruitgum Company ahead of Ray Charles, Blondie loved to throw curve balls, and peppered their pudding with a healthy Warhol-babies cynicism.