by Bob Stanley
In spite of the dystopian settings in his songs, Gary Numan turned out not to be cold at all. He was childlike, happy to explain his odd private world to Smash Hits: ‘On stage, the robots are pyramid-shaped … you say “robot” and people think of something that does this [gesticulates mechanically] and clanks about, and really that’s the most unpractical shape you can think of because it’s so unstable. It keeps falling over all the time.’
Without a frame of reference for an electronic-music poster boy, the press found him easy to kick, constantly comparing him unfavourably to Bowie. The NME called him ‘the slug who sold the world’. Bowie himself was deeply suspicious, and had Numan thrown out of a TV studio when he tried to sneak in and watch his hero rehearsing. Antipathy among rock fans was just as extreme: ‘I mean, I went to New Zealand once, got off the plane and the first thing I saw, written on the side of a building, was “Numan, Fuck Off”. I thought, twelve thousand miles for this!’ Yet he bossed the UK charts in 1979, scoring two number-one singles, two number-one albums, and at one point placing three albums in the Top 20. The reflective Telekon, with its synths given atmospheric support by piano and viola, became one of the least commercial UK number-one albums ever in 1980; after this Numan briefly retired, became better known for crashing planes and voting Tory than for his music, and subsided into cult status before a considerable reappraisal in the nineties. ‘I think,’ he said modestly, ‘possibly to a lot of people, I’m a symbol of something new.’ In Detroit and the Bronx he really was. As for his strangely personalised sci-fiworld, take a look at some of his song titles – ‘Me! I Disconnect from You’, ‘My Dying Machine’, ‘I Dream of Wires’. They predict the twenty-first-century condition uncomfortably well.
Düsseldorf fitted Kraftwerk like a glove. Conversely, no group in history has been as stigmatised by their home town as Depeche Mode. From Basildon, Essex, their first few singles in 1981 – ‘Dreaming of Me’, ‘New Life’ (UK no. 11), ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ (UK no. 8) – positioned them as a pre-school Kraftwerk. They looked incredibly young, and their music sounded like the 1960s artists’ sketches of Basildon New Town come to life – the mums with their bright new pushchairs on gum-free pavements, the clean modernist lines of brand-new hospitals and unthumbed libraries. Their spotlessly clean but historically vacant home town led the British music press to regard them as a novelty; they wouldn’t take them seriously for years. Kraftwerk would have wept tears, real tears, to have come from a town so antiseptic. Besides, there has to be true, deep melancholy in a brave new world built, as if over a graveyard, on the shanty plotland settlements of Essex.
Vince Clarke, with hair like a downy duckling, wrote pretty much everything on their debut album Speak & Spell, including the gurgling baby synth hook on ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’, but within a year he left, first forming Yazoo, then, in 1985, Erasure, who came across like secondary-school Pet Shop Boys underlings and racked up seventeen Top 10 hits. As close to instant disposable pop as anyone has ever got, it was possible to acquire a bunch of Erasure singles without ever being close to any of them; they were entirely confectionery.
The rump of Depeche Mode, left stranded on an Essex plateau by their sole songwriter, decided to carry on. Dave Gahan’s voice grew deeper and more disturbing; curly-topped Martin Gore’s wardrobe switched from frilled white smocks to fetish wear. It soon became apparent that they weren’t a confection at all, unless you consider leather thongs, smack, religious intolerance and sadistic synth crunch suitable for children. Outside the UK, where no one knew or cared about Basildon and thought it was probably a becastled fiefdom run by Count Dave Gahan, they became one of the half-dozen biggest groups in the world, certainly the biggest synth act; they walked a line between heavy electronica and a strain of goth metal which had yet to be invented.
Having influenced a generation of UK chart pop – Bowie, Numan, Depeche Mode, the Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Kraftwerk got their due, or benediction, when ‘The Model’ became a surprise UK number one early in 1982. It was a melancholy examination of the emotional disconnect of modern communication – it’s not until the last verse that you realise the singer is telling us about someone he’s never even met.
Rather ironically, by the time ‘The Model’ reached number one the sound of Düsseldorf was beginning to curl a little round the edges, and after the ‘Tour de France’ single a year later Kraftwerk were clearly playing catch-up with their own progeny. But 1982 was also the year when their influence made itself most keenly felt, with the arrival of Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’, Arthur Baker’s electro-dub production on Rockers Revenge’s ‘Walking on Sunshine’, and the paradigm shift of electro. ‘Planet Rock’ in particular took Trans-Europe Express’s foundation stone and turned it into a whole plug-in city. As ‘The Model’ hit number one, the Human League’s 1978 single ‘Being Boiled’, a strange and disturbing noise inhabiting its own half life,3 belatedly reached the UK Top 10, eventually peaking at number six; just above it at number four was OMD’s ‘Maid of Orleans’, with an atonal thirty-second intro that was pure Radiophonic experimentation. The electronic revolution had been postponed for long enough.
1 They remained anonymous by BBC diktat. This could have been a socialist show of solidarity, but was more likely imposed to stop independent minds getting ideas above their station. The mental challenges of running their own electronic playground while knowing they had to remain in complete obscurity were enough to drive two of its brightest minds – Delia Derbyshire and John Baker – to drink and an early grave.
2 More suspicious yet was Britain’s Musicians’ Union. By 1976 it had put an end to miming on Top of the Pops as it claimed it put real, dues-paying players out of business. An MU representative, who bands nicknamed Dr Death, insisted that every TOTP guest re-recorded their single or played it live on the show with session players – the results were risible and viewing figures slid. But even more than miming, the MU hated synthesizers. Synthesizers broke the laws of labour: all you had to do was wave a hand, press a button, and out came a sparkling fresh fountain of sound. The machine did all the work for you. In the mid-seventies many saw synthesizers as decadent.
3 It’s unlikely that any other Top 10 hit in the UK or US opens with the final words – Gary Gilmore’s ‘OK, ready, let’s do it’ – of a man about to be killed in the electric chair.
48
ADVENTURES ON THE WHEELS OF STEEL: ENobody in Britain had heard of Flash when DebbieARLY RAP
If black musicians are getting their inspiration from Kraftwerk, that shows how low things have sunk.
DJ Chris Hill, NME, Christmas 1983
Tom Silverman was a doo-wop fan, a disco nut, and a record collector from way back. He used to get his vinyl fix at a shop called Downstairs Records on 42nd Street. Without blinking, he’d pass the triple-X peep shows, the card sharps scamming tourists, the pimps passing out flyers and the junkies inside dumpsters. The shop was a small box-like space: the counter was to the left, and on a wall to the right you could leave messages and calling cards. It had an intense atmosphere – they never let you listen to anything. One day in 1981 Silverman was surprised to find a new room at Downstairs. The size of a cupboard, it was called the B-boy Room. Records on the wall at ten dollars a pop included the Eagles’ ‘The Long Run’, the Incredible Bongo Band’s ‘Apache’ and a jazz album by Bob James. The kids in the room, all black, all very young, were not only buying these bargain-bin regulars at inflated prices, they were buying two copies of each. Silverman was intrigued. He asked one of the kids where the hell they’d heard such an exotic blend of sounds. ‘Oh, there’s this guy in the Bronx called Bambaataa.’
Sometimes, looking back on pop, you come across stories which seem chronologically distant but turn out to be concurrent. Star session musicians Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey worked on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde in 1966; their next job, the very next week, was playing on the soundtrack to Elvis Presley’s Harum Scarum, an Ara
bic adventure story that included songs like ‘Go East, Young Man’ and ‘Shake That Tambourine’. McCoy and Buttrey must have felt as if they had jumped back two decades. Yet there is no greater disconnect in the story of modern pop than that between late-seventies pop – Smokie, the Boomtown Rats, Grease – and the birth of hip hop. Its evolution, over several years, occurred in solitude in one of pop’s twin capitals.
Hip hop was bricolage. It was about making music from found sounds, new pop from old, with nothing but a stack of vinyl, two turntables and a microphone. The DJ, for the first time, wasn’t just the trendsetter but the creator of the music. Scratching – dragging the needle back and forth in time to the beat, the invention of New York DJ Grand Wizard Theodore – took tiny splinters of sound from records, melodic or just rhythmic; it was a primitive precursor to sampling. You didn’t need a guitar. You didn’t even need the three chords Mark Perry gave you on the cover of Sniffin’ Glue.
Club- and turntable-based, hip hop was a relative of disco, and grew up in tandem, yet it remained entirely underground, unknown outside a few square miles of New York, and only broke cover when disco was brought to its knees by the Knack and irate baseball fans. Unlike disco it wasn’t sexy, certainly not romantic, and definitely not sexually ambiguous. Disco had revelled in anonymity – the dancers were the stars; hip hop reintroduced the cult of personality associated with early-seventies rock. Grandmaster Flash even DJ’d with his feet like a Technics Hendrix. And it was more self-referential than any modern pop since first-wave rock ’n’ roll.
Hip hop can trace its history back to one man. Clive Campbell was a Jamaican who moved to the Bronx as a kid in the late sixties and missed the sound systems and yard parties, so he decided to throw them in his new neighbourhood. He first caused a sensation at his sister’s birthday party at a hall in the Bronx in 1973 by using two turntables to mix records together over a sound system that may have been standard in Kingston but made people’s bowels quake in the Bronx. Pretty soon, he discovered that kids danced especially fiercely, with moves based on contemporary kung fu movies and James Brown’s athleticism, to short bursts of certain records, the parts that were entirely rhythmic. So he got two copies of these records, placed one on each deck and could then extend these breaks indefinitely. It was pretty primitive – Campbell dropped the needle onto the record without attempting to mix them à la Tom Moulton – but he soon became the only fun in town. The dancers tagged themselves ‘break boys’, or b-boys; Campbell became DJ Kool Herc, and over old James Brown 45s and his signature tune, the Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of the Shadows’ ‘Apache’, Herc started delivering spoken raps inspired by the Jamaican toasters he knew from his home town.
One of his greatest admirers was an ex-Black Spades gang member called Afrika Bambaataa. At the turn of the seventies the South Bronx – cut off from even the rest of the borough by the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the sixties – had become a no-go area, run by rival gangs who based their image on Hell’s Angels, the dirtier looking the better. There was no more street-corner doo wop in the Bronx of 1970. Bambaataa had watched the film Zulu when he was a kid, and was deeply impressed. Instead of seeing Michael Caine as the hero, he sided with the Africans fighting for their freedom against the British colonialists. He saw his destiny at a Kool Herc party. Pretty soon he became a rival DJ, discovering his own breaks in the strangest places – Grand Funk Railroad, the Monkees, Bob James – and he interspersed them with Malcolm X speeches and his own philosophy, eclipsing his mentor. In 1975 he organised a landmark ‘free jam’ to break up the Bronx turf wars – ‘Leave your colours at home!’ This was the beginning of his own Zulu Nation, and the motto was ‘Peace, love, unity, and having fun’. It worked. In no time he had an expanding gang of MCs, DJs, graffiti writers, b-boys, b-girls, all decked out in natty satin, bright colours, an alternative for the Bronx youth to the Mad Max decimation of the gangs.
Herc was the godfather, and Bambaataa provided the social glue. The third crucial name in early hip hop is Joseph Saddler, a proper little scientist who grew up in a house full of girls in Fort Apache, west of Bambaataa’s manor. Instead of being involved in the pitched battles outside his window, Saddler used to sneak around the rubble, raiding abandoned cars for radios, apartments for hairdryers – anything that plugged into the wall, anything he could try and fix with a screwdriver and a soldering iron. His dad had a huge record collection, which little Joseph was allowed to look at but never, ever touch. Forbidden fruit. He became obsessed with vinyl, stayed in his room for months mastering the art of DJing, building his kit, using breaks and other super-short snatches of songs, actively manipulating the records he spun to create something brand-new. And when he had a seamless set, he played out for the first time, expecting instant worship. So sure of his greatness was Joseph that he christened himself Grandmaster Flash. But no one danced, no one cheered; he got nothing but blank stares. He went home and cried for a week. Like Joe Meek’s ‘I Hear a New World’ and Tom Moulton’s Fire Island mix before, nobody had known what to make of it. When he spun again, it was with help from local rapper Robert ‘Cowboy’ Wiggins; soon the Glover brothers – Melle Mel and Kidd Creole (not the Ze Records singer) – were on board, and within weeks the freshly named Furious Five accompanied Flash at every party he played, to wild acclaim. Later, Life magazine would call him ‘the Toscanini of the turntables’.
In 1977 hip hop was still an incredibly localised scene, barely even breaking into Brooklyn and Queens, let alone Manhattan. Herc, Bambaataa and Flash largely had the Bronx sewn up until a city-wide power cut that summer; there was widespread looting, and DJ supply stores were among the most heavily ransacked. Within weeks there were enough new DJs in the Bronx to make the scene actively competitive – who could throw the best party? Who could get the most people to throw their hands in the air and wave them like they just don’t care? Using electricity tapped from street lamps, the DJ battles echoed the sixties ‘battle of the bands’ contests that had sprung up across the States in the wake of the Beatles and the astonishing boom in sales of electric guitars. It was a young and totally unauthorised scene. The DJ battles were in parks; there were no police, no adults. It was super-competitive.
The question is, how did these raw, vital dance dens stay off pop’s radar for so many years? For one thing, no outsiders ventured into the Bronx in the mid-seventies; it was in such a state of burnt-out desolation that it was used as a 1945 Berlin movie set. Secondly, there were no records. As far as hip hop’s instigators were concerned they were playing other people’s records, for several hours, and freestyling over the top of them. How do you turn that into your own piece of vinyl? Enter Sylvia Robinson. A pop Zelig, she had first scored a hit as half of Mickey and Sylvia on the cowbell-led ‘Love Is Strange’ (US no. 11 ’57), one of rock ’n’ roll’s out-and-out sexiest records. She resurfaced in ’69 as the creative force behind a bunch of New Jersey-based soul labels (All Platinum, Stang, Turbo and Vibration), co-writing and producing the Moments’ million-seller ‘Love on a Two-Way Street’ in 1970 (US no. 3). By 1973 she was purring her way through ‘Pillow Talk’ like a proto-disco Eartha Kitt, and scoring a soft-soul hit in Britain (no. 12) and America (no. 3). A few lean years left her on the verge of bankruptcy in 1979, but she gave it one last shot and started the Sugarhill label.
That summer, Robinson was at a party in Harlem, heard some guest rappers with a DJ and knew it was a sound she could sell. The very next week she got session bassist Chip Shearin into the Sugarhill studio and asked him to play the bassline from Chic’s ‘Good Times’ for fifteen minutes straight, with no mistakes. By the end Shearin was sweating bullets. Sylvia told him it would all make sense in the end: ‘I’ve got these kids who are going to talk real fast over it; that’s the best way I can describe it.’ The Bronx rappers she approached showed no interest, but her son had been chatting to someone who worked in a pizza takeaway and claimed to be a rapper. This is how Wonder Mike ended up as the first rapper
ever to commit his verse to vinyl, sounding like a slightly apologetic children’s TV presenter as he explained what the hell this new-fangled thing called ‘rap’ was all about.
Robinson had found two other rappers to make up an amateur trio, unimaginatively tagged the Sugarhill Gang, whose brags made them seem like rather underachieving looters: ‘I got a colour TV so I can see the Nicks play basketball!’ Still, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was irresistible, all fifteen minutes of it, and within days of release it had become the best-selling record in New York. In a few weeks it was in the US Top 40, was number three in Britain by Christmas and reached number one in Canada in February 1980.
Sylvia Robinson and the Sugarhill Gang were the Bill Haley and the Comets of hip hop. Almost accidentally, they started a pop revolution. Meanwhile, back in the Bronx, the originators of the sound were outraged, but instead of bitching they got themselves signed up to Sugarhill and made records of their own. Using the house band, most of their singles sounded like KC and the Sunshine Band on the comeback trail. It took Grandmaster Flash to take it up a level with his ‘Adventures on the Wheels of Steel’.1 If rapping vocals were new to most ears in 1980, this melange of disco (once more Chic’s ‘Good Times’ was the spine), sci-fi (‘the official adventures of Flash …’), soft rock (a spoken section, sounding a lot like actor Robert Vaughn, taken from the Hellers’ 1968 album Singers … Talkers … Players … Swingers … and Doers), Queen (‘Another One Bites the Dust’) and Blondie (the Flash-referencing ‘Rapture’) was a whole new world. No choruses, no singing, nothing ‘new’ at all in fact. Even now, Flash’s textures, dextrous scratching and ebb and flow sound thrilling. So daring, so confident, so much fun. In the NME, Ian Penman wrote a page-long appreciation of it. The seven-minute, twelve-inch-only single ended with whooping party celebrations, and who could blame Flash? A whole new genre was invented. Those months and years scavenging and soldering paid off in one hit.
