by Bob Stanley
Bambaataa, meanwhile, bided his time. ‘I don’t want to be a star,’ he said, ‘because stars fall.’ So he set himself up to become a legend instead. With rappers the Soulsonic Force – Mr Biggs, Pow Wow, G.L.O.B.E. – he ditched the live Sugarhill sound, and borrowed a synthesizer from keyboard player John Robie and a beatbox from producer Arthur Baker. Inspired by Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express and the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s electro/computer pop, Bambaataa and Baker created ‘Planet Rock’. It was eerie and, again, seemed entirely new. On its own it spawned electro, another new modern pop genus. Electro gave American pop a new sense of space, as New York producers mixed dub with Korg and Roland’s evolving keyboard and beatbox technology, and created something undeniably futuristic – Bambaataa disciples Planet Patrol and the Jonzun Crew both wore space suits, and it made perfect sense. One of electro’s early landmarks was Man Parrish’s ‘Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop)’, a record that featured a colossal bassline, barking dogs and camp, echoing squeals, but no rap at all; somehow it ended up as the record that christened a genre.
Electro bled into soul in the summer of ’82. Hip hop aside, b-boys feasted on the pleasures of Evelyn King’s ‘Love Come Down’ (UK no. 7), DJ François Kevorkian’s cut-glass production of D Train’s ‘You’re the One for Me’ (UK no. 30), and ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ by the Peech Boys, an outfit assembled by Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan.
Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn was a record shop, the Music Factory, managed by brothers Dwight and Donnie Calvin. They cut a cover of Eddy Grant’s ‘Walking on Sunshine’ under the name Rockers Revenge. Recorded at Blank studios, like so many Ze hits and almost-hits, it was the Music Factory’s number-one best-seller in their own shop. They pressed the records, spun them in the shop and sold them direct to paying customers. Who needed distributors, who needed Tower Records, when you had the hottest record in town?
Like Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’, ‘Walking on Sunshine’ was produced by Arthur Baker, the man to finally take the sound out of New York and around the world. By the time it reached number four in the UK in the summer of ’82 Baker was all over the NME, hailed as a new auteur; he was in discussions with Brit funk group Freeez (the resulting single, ‘IOU’, was a number two the following summer) and the nascent New Order. The South Bronx’s isolation, created in the sixties by New York’s city planners, rapidly collapsed. Bambaataa organised a European tour with rapper and graffiti artist Rammellzee and Zulu Nation DJ Grand Mixer DST, plus b-boys the Rock Steady Crew and female counterparts the Double Dutch Girls. Hip hop’s influence grew apace. With its lean, mechanical sound, its wit and fearless sense of progression, nothing could stop it.
1 Nobody in Britain had heard of Flash when Debbie Harry name-checked him on ‘Rapture’ (US no. 1, UK no. 5) at the tail end of 1981. The NME’s rave review of ‘Wheels of Steel’ appeared a whole month after ‘Rapture’ was a hit – Harry’s rap may have lacked for content (‘eating cars, eating bars’, yadda yadda) after its initial nod to the scene’s leading lights but, still, this was an outrageously brave and very cool move. Meanwhile, in Chelsea, her erstwhile rival Patti Smith just carried on quoting Rimbaud’s greatest hits, taking no chances on looking uncool.
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HERE COMES THAT FEELING: NEW POP
We lend enchantment to vulgar material.
Guillaume Apollinaire
I think it’s just taking it back to cabaret – showbiz for showbiz’s sake more than anything.
Gary Numan
Joy Division seemed like a full stop to post-punk’s exhilarating but monochrome and unadorned realism. ‘Ian Curtis is dead,’ said Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Andy McCluskey in 1980, ‘and now there’s nothing else to do but dance around his grave.’ Curtis’s suicide was a trigger. His death had been a definitive end to an era – things could only get brighter. It was now or never if the mainstream was to be conquered by post-punk’s philosophies.
The NME’s Paul Morley was an architect of new pop. He had championed post-punk, but by the end of 1980, with Joy Division gone, he wondered out loud where modern pop was heading. Like Andy McCluskey, he figured the only possible direction was towards ‘overground brightness’, and in the NME’s Christmas 1980 issue he challenged musicians to ‘bring life back to the radio, to make the single count’.1 He can’t have failed to spot a single called ‘Antmusic’ by Adam and the Ants, which had moved up to number seven on the Christmas chart. Where the Clash had been terrified that Top of the Pops would contaminate them, singer Adam Ant recognised it could amplify his music and challenge his fans. As Malcolm McLaren had before him, Adam understood that the formats and possibilities of mainstream broadcasting, from Top of the Pops to Smash Hits, were not only available but wide open, and had huge and thrilling expressive potential. Morley most likely had Adam and the Ants in mind when he declared that modern pop’s new names had ‘ambition that is never justified or considered but that is some grand narcissistic design to grow larger than life’.
New pop took punk’s self-determination and sense of urgency and married them to values that post-punk had spurned: flash, cash, high theatre, high chart positions, great image. Like French New Wave cinema, it was born from a love of pop history: for Godard read Horn, for Antoine Doinel read George O’Dowd. It was the perfect place and the perfect time – with the public and the charts loosened up and shaken up, with punk having knocked the industry’s confidence, with everyone looking for a way out of 1980’s slough of despond2 – and a new crop of undesirables were allowed to slip into the charts and onto Top of the Pops unmolested. As post-punk had trashed the notion of bands having to move to London to make it, many of the new pop stars came from Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow. Smash Hits’ Dave Rimmer said new pop was ‘like punk never happened’. But it wasn’t really. These new faces were birthed by punk’s gleeful independence as much as they were by disco’s hedonism and swishy silkiness. New pop sent rock music to the margins. And it had a new language – nobody had used the word ‘sericulture’ on a Top 10 hit before.
(I roll my eyes at Patti Smith for constantly mentioning Rimbaud, so why do I find it OK for the Human League to use an obscure term for silk manufacture and open a song with the line ‘Listen to the voice of Buddha’? Why do I find one good for pop and the other bad? Maybe because Patti Smith was using Rimbaud as a prop, a symbol of rebellion. Quoting Rimbaud meant ‘Take me seriously’, and it was a trick that worked for her in the long term – she’s been a permanent fixture on the arthouse circuit since 1976. The Human League’s Phil Oakey turned up to rehearsals with a lyric for ‘Being Boiled’ that used a word the rest of the group had never heard of. Quite possibly, Oakey didn’t know what it meant. But they kept it in, simply because – with no major-label jobsworth to stop them – they could, and because it sounded good.)
New pop was anti-rock, and it was against easy critical respect. Symbols of rebellion (as opposed to actual, living rebellion) were frowned upon. PiL’s Keith Levene would have been thrilled that Chuck Berry riffs were entirely absent in new pop – they seemed unnecessary when there was an abundance of exciting eighties soul, dub, lovers’ rock, rap and electro to draw on. Lyrically it was OK to sing about sericulture, Jacques Derrida or your favourite shirt. ‘Rockism’ was a term first coined in an NME interview with Wah! Heat’s Pete Wylie in 1981: he railed against clichés of production, presentation, sound and stance. New pop went hand in hand with anti-rockism. It embraced brazen eccentrics like Marc Almond, Julian Cope, Green Gartside and Phil Oakey, but it also found room for the kind of pop acts – the Nolans, Bucks Fizz, Dollar – who had been washed up and binned by punk just a year earlier. There was a new, chart-pop-literate wave of British music writers – Paul Morley and Ian Penman (NME), Dave McCullough (Sounds), Sunie (Record Mirror) and Neil Tennant (Smash Hits) – ready to write essays on this new pop Utopia and its endless possibilities.
The man who had fired new pop’s starting pistol, Adam Ant, was originally Stuart Goddard. Pale, intens
e and pretty, he’d lived in a Muswell Hill bedsit. Back then he was in a pub-rock act called Bazooka Joe. They played at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on November 6th 1975; the support act, making its debut, was the Sex Pistols. Blown away by the Sex Pistols’ brio, Stuart quit Bazooka Joe on the spot, became Adam and started to write songs about fetishism.
Adam and the Ants signed to Decca in 1977, quite possibly because Lulu, the Rolling Stones and Lieutenant Pigeon had all signed to Decca – there was no year zero for Adam. Decca didn’t get punk at all (their only other signing was Manchester’s thuggish rockers Slaughter and the Dogs) and their first single was the marvellously perverse ‘Young Parisians’, closer to the Kinks’ music-hall leanings than Johnny Rotten’s. It was funny and knowing, too: ‘Young Parisians are so French – they love Patti Smith.’
Adam was all about strategy. So when ‘Young Parisians’ flopped and he resorted to releasing his next single, ‘Xerox’, on the tiny Do It label, he decided to pay Malcolm McLaren £1,000 for some career advice. For his troubles he got very little (a cassette of some Burundian drummers) and lost a lot (his entire band, which McLaren rechristened Bow Wow Wow, with the underage Annabella Lwin as replacement singer).3
That alone would have destroyed anyone with a less than stainless-steel resolve. Adam began to write songs with a sidekick called Marco Pirroni, who looked like the Michelin Man with a gold-blond fringe. He employed two drummers, like the Glitter Band, and they used the one thing McLaren had handed over for his thousand-pound bounty – the Burundi drum sound. ‘Sex music for ant people,’ he said. ‘Ant music for sex people.’ Then Adam bought himself a pirate jacket, had an American Indian white stripe painted across his nose and got a deal with CBS. ‘Dog Eat Dog’, with those punishing drums and guitars like dodgem cars, reached number four in 1980, shortly after his former bandmates’ ‘C30 C60 C90 Go’ limped to number thirty-four. McLaren got the front cover of the NME with Bow Wow Wow; Adam and the Ants became the biggest pop sensation since T. Rex.
What made them so exciting is that they were pop about pop. ‘None of the ideas are mine,’ Adam would say, ‘it’s just the way Marco and I have moulded them together.’ He patented his image with the Merchandising Corporation of America as if he was trying to make himself a one-man Monkees. ‘Antmusic’ reached the Top 10 in December 1980, in the same week Paul Morley’s NME clarion call was published, and likewise it was a new pop manifesto: ‘Unplug the jukebox and do us all a favour. That music’s lost its taste so try another flavour.’
It reached number two. ‘Stand and Deliver’, which entered the UK chart at number one in April ’81 (something that had only happened twice in the previous seven years), was huge, and reinvented Adam as the dandy highwayman: ‘I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention.’ No one could deny it. By the summer, with ‘Prince Charming’ at number one (‘Don’t you ever stop being dandy’), the Ants were already sounding a little defensive, a little under siege, but no one noticed as they marvelled at the single’s Technicolor Carry On Ken Russell video, with its voluptuous guest star Diana Dors. Christmas single ‘Ant Rap’ was a mixture of primitive hip hop, the massed ranks of a thousand Orangemen and a soupçon of harpsichord. Hilarious! In 1981 Adam and the Ants were the teen-scream future dream, part of a rare lineage including the Beatles and T. Rex, and Adam didn’t enjoy a second of it. Incrementally his anxiety worked its way into his singles and by the end of ’82 they were becoming hard work: one title, ‘Desperate but Not Serious’, was a little bit of both. His fall was precipitous and by 1985, at Live Aid, Adam was almost a laughing stock. If only he hadn’t taken himself and his art so seriously. As it turned out, he had no choice. An unsettling letter he wrote to Time Out in 2002 was the first public suggestion that he had Asperger’s syndrome, which retrospectively explained a lot. His records were gleefully giddy, sonically and lyrically on a precipice. Ridicule, he taught us, is nothing to be scared of.
Adam was a lone trailblazer. Just behind him were the regulars at Soho’s Blitz club who, for better or worse, ended up tied to each other. If Adam had the look, the glamour and the attitude, then the Blitz kids – suburban scenesters in thrall to Bowie, Roxy and Vivienne Westwood – had the sound of new pop. Often it was electronic, post-Numan, evoking smoky Third Man-era Vienna, with fat analogue synth chords to cover the novice bassist or guitarist’s deficiencies; the definitive hit in this style was Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’ (UK no. 8 ’81), fronted by Blitz gatekeeper Steve Strange.
To a large extent, new pop was influenced by black American dance music. For years, soul and funk had been largely ignored by white blue-collar America, but they had been crucial to the musical tastes of working-class Britons since Tamla Motown broke in the mid-sixties; clipped funk guitar and popping basslines became the bedrock for even new pop’s most orchestrally lavish adventures (ABC’s ‘Poison Arrow’) or cold synth surrenders (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s ‘The New Stone Age’), while northern soul fed Soft Cell’s hyped-up beats. New pop also uncovered a yearning for the return of singers, as opposed to post-punk’s vocal expressionists (Lydon, Curtis, Rowland); Frank Sinatra was re habilitated. The Human League’s Phil Oakey had been unintentionally responsible for opening this can of worms: Siouxsie Sioux had praised his ‘real voice’ in 1980, at a time when John Lydon was still the most imitated singer in Britain; he was soon followed by the Associates’ Billy Mackenzie (‘Party Fears Two’, UK no. 8 ’82) and Tony Hadley, who led Spandau Ballet to a string of hits with a voice that harked back to the very dawn of modern pop – Al Martino’s ‘Here in My Heart’ played godfather to Spandau’s ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’ (UK no. 5 ’81).
From Sheffield, the Human League had originally been cold-wave synth pioneers, with a hatred of guitars, until they split in half in 1981.4 Singer Philip Oakey was a deadpan humourist. ‘I collect models of Sylvester the cat,’ he told Smash Hits. ‘I have 274 of them.’ Left with only ‘director of visuals’ Adrian Wright from the original League, Oakey chatted up a couple of schoolgirls at a disco, and they joined the group in time for Dare, a 1981 album with hooks like steel traps. ‘Love Action’ (UK no. 3), ‘Open Your Heart’ (UK no. 6) and ‘Don’t You Want Me’ (UK and US no. 1) were singles so good, so easy and instantly lovable, it almost felt like cheating. Yet they stuttered, only releasing two singles in the next two years (‘Mirror Man’ and ‘Fascination’, both UK no. 2), and when they added a guitarist to the line-up in 1984 it was all over.
Haircut 100 were from Kent, wore ski jumpers and belonged to the white-funk axis of new pop. Brass and slap bass were leavened by singer Nick Heyward’s kinship with the Monkees: ‘Favourite Shirts’ (UK no. 4 ’81), ‘Love Plus One’ (UK no. 3 ’82) and ‘Fantastic Day’ (UK no. 9 ’82) were rays of breakfast sunshine, and Heyward went on Radio 1’s Roundtable extolling sixties architecture and telling Kevin Rowland how much ‘Plan B’ had reminded him of Little Richard. If anyone in new pop still read the Beano, it was Nick Heyward. He was doe-eyed and goofy, Beckenham’s own Peter Noone, and, in a jealous fit of pique, the rest of the band sacked him in summer 1982. Neither camp kept their boat afloat for long after that.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were from the Wirral, which meant they were teased by the Liverpool groups – ‘Leo Sayer with synthesizers,’ yucked the Teardrop Explodes’ Julian Cope. They looked and dressed like accountants, which also got the music press’s backs up. And singer Andy McCluskey danced like a wally, like someone’s dad impersonating Ian Curtis, which made everyone laugh who wasn’t already laughing. Yet they crafted songs like ‘Souvenir’ (UK no. 3 ’81), heartbreaking, romantic electro pop that would have graced the soundtrack to Un homme et une femme.5 After supporting Gary Numan on tour they scored their first hit with ‘Messages’ (UK no. 13 ’80) and ended the year in the Top 10 with ‘Enola Gay’, a song about bombing Hiroshima that subtly drew attention to the (seemingly constant) early-eighties fear of imminent nuclear destruction. Their subject matter
was almost always singular – they wrote songs about a power station (‘Stanlow’), an independent nation on a platform in the North Sea (‘Sealand’), Joan of Arc (‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘Maid of Orleans’, both top 5 UK hits) – and they used Korg synthesizers to build chord patterns that were straight out of Vaughan Williams. Their third album was a million-seller, with a sleeve designed by Factory Records’ Peter Saville, and a title – Architecture and Morality – from a municipal library shelf. As soon as they fell into an old rock cliché, by referring to themselves as an abbreviation of their name – the flat and functional OMD – they got less interesting. By the time they broke America, with the fortuitous placing of the mediocre ‘If You Leave’ at the climax of John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink (1985), they were just another eighties synth duo. No more songs about power stations, no distinguishing marks.
In 1981 the least likely Blitz character to have a hit single would have been cloakroom attendant George ‘Boy George’ O’Dowd. Virgin Records already believed in George, which is just as well because no way did this pouting fellow, with his hands (at least, as Steve Strange suspected) in the pockets of the Blitz clientele, fit anybody’s contemporary jelly mould of a pin-up pop star. A year on from ‘Fade to Grey’, whose success had made him a pusball of envy, George released two singles with his band, Culture Club, which were well received by the press – earning them a Record Mirror cover story – but failed to chart. By the time of the third single, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’, he’d had a few square meals and got the hang of cosmetics. It reached number one and the all-new cuddly George, a girl/boy conundrum, instantly replaced Adam in the nation’s affections. He said he preferred a cup of tea to sex, and with this he even had the nation’s grandmothers on his side. Beloved Boy George.
