In 1980, irony imploded. Beauty and atrocity were played straight. Cupid and a starving child, who in punk would have been juxtaposed, each stood alone. The cover of Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’ was a photograph of snow and woods. I found its openness heartbreaking.
47
Forever young
What a life.
What a time.
What I felt. Then. Gone.
ALI SMITH, Hotel World
The day Margaret Thatcher came to power in May 1979, I went to see The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s documentary of The Band’s last concert. Here were Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters and Ringo Starr, and I somehow couldn’t see any of them. The only person I knew immediately was Neil Young, because of his voice, which sounds like that of a tinned cat. I had been told by my friends that this film was momentous, but came away with the impression of a lot of mumbling and shuffling. Yet I disliked most films about music precisely because they seemed so contrived.
In 1976, Thames Television broadcast Rock Follies, the story of a girl band. It was soap opera and rock opera in one: low-budget gritty drama played out in bedsits, squats, pubs and rehearsal rooms combined with fantasy musical numbers. Their dreams and slogans were no less cheesy, no less naïve than those of the Partridge Family but coming out of English mouths, from women who cropped their hair, shared lovers, rode motorbikes and chatted while lying naked in the bath, they didn’t sound so bland. At fourteen I loved Rock Follies and wanted to be any one of those women because while they had boyfriends and mothers and money problems, they also had each other and music, and they would walk away from anyone, no matter how much they loved or needed them, in order to make music. Could music give me the strength to do something like that?
The band was called the Little Ladies and made it into the charts, only I knew they weren’t real and, in any case, the music was the worst part of the show. It was terrible, doing its best to sound like rock but made out of the same stuff as the stage musical. It belonged as firmly in a show as real pop music didn’t.
Watching bands play on television was mostly disappointing. The experience was never as good as going to a gig or listening to a record, but hovered uncomfortably between the two. There was one ‘real’ music programme, The Old Grey Whistle Test, filmed in a studio that looked as if it were built out of plasterboard held together by insulation tape. It was like a cross between a boiler room and a gym, with no attempt made to hide its fuse boxes, ladders and looped cables. It worked because it was doing its best not to be a show. You never noticed the lighting or any special effects, and the presenters were casual and low-key.
Film added nothing to music; it took something away. Even the most straightforward documentary took on a narrative and then it would seem as if everyone were acting. I wanted to see Woodstock and Gimme Shelter because they were about historical events – epic rock festivals where people took acid and rolled around naked in the mud, where babies were born and someone got shot. I was watching, not listening.
These films struck me as American: outdoors, pioneering and collective in ways of which the English were incapable. We made films about music the way we made films, so that even punk, in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, ended up as a kind of Ealing comedy.
I sat through The Last Waltz wondering why I was there but even under such circumstances, I could be caught out by a song. ‘Forever Young’ struck me as a serious warning. Not knowing the words and forgetting all about the bunch of hippies who’d performed it, I held on to that phrase: ‘May you stay forever young.’ I was almost seventeen and for the first time I felt as if I were not young but as if I had been young and had not noticed.
48
Punk est mort
The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the future so that it was an electric-like shock, a definite nervous experience … to cross that threshold, if it could be so called …
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender is the Night
The whole lot of us decided to go to Paris and then Daniel collided with a car on his motorbike and broke his leg. In casualty they cut off the tartan bondage trousers his mother had made for him. I left him behind and set off in my black plastic trousers and pointed three-inch spike-heeled boots, as if going out for the evening. The boots were killing me but I could not admit this and so kept them on during the three-hour train journey to Dover, the overnight ferry to Calais, and the four-hour train ride from there.
I was armed with a pre-war map of the city I’d found in a trunk at home (a red-leather bound book like a pocket novel) and a camera I thought was a Box Brownie because it came in a brown box. Tom was half French so we deferred to him and also to his aunt’s recommendation of a hotel, which turned out to be as out of date as my camera. The sheets and windows, walls and floors were grey-brown-yellow, the bathrooms even more so: they looked splashed and splattered, and sometimes they were.
We took two rooms with three beds in each and slept more or less girls in one, boys in the other. To reach our rooms, we had to sprint along corridors and up and down stairs pressing light-pushes which resulted in little more than a dim flicker. Sophie and I talked ourselves to sleep at night with stories of rape, murder and fire.
The Pompidou Centre was three years old and on that first day in Paris it was thrilling – modern and foreign all at once. My eyes were used to brick, plaster, thatch and concrete and here was steel and glass, and scarlet and turquoise tubes. Best of all, it was inside out. Everything that would be hidden was on display and so I could trace how it worked. I didn’t think it beautiful because I could not conceive of it as a whole but I had never before come across a building (or song, or person?) that did not hide how it was put together.
We followed Tom (‘He’s half French! He knows where he’s going!’) into the night and he chose the dingiest bar in the darkest backstreet he could find. The six of us squeezed in alongside two or three mute locals, ordered beer and looked at each other. What now? We didn’t talk much. Each of us was telling themselves that this was authentic and untouristic and rock ’n’ roll. We chose restaurants in the same way, wanting above all not to fall for what was waiting for a bunch of English teenagers unsupervised and abroad. We chose the worst-looking places in the hope that they would be a local secret. Many of the bars had jukeboxes, most of which carried the Belgian New Wave hit – ‘Ça plane pour moi’ by Plastic Bertrand. A year earlier, Émile had taught me the words, but only to the first verse, and now I sang along too eagerly and saw myself become a joke.
Refusing sightseeing and having little money, we had nothing much to do. We spent a lot of time in the hotel, as we would in our bedrooms at home, and once went into a cinema on the Champs-Élysées because it was showing the Who documentary, The Kids Are Alright.
One day we decided to move out of the hotel and managed to do so. Then I decided to go home. Before leaving, I set off for the Pompidou Centre, using my map. I stood on corners and turned it round and round, unable to find streets which were no longer there.
When I saw the Pompidou Centre for the second time, I felt tired of it already. I didn’t want to know how it worked, I just wanted it to work. I didn’t want to watch people travel from one place to another but for them to simply appear and disappear, as they did in life. I chose not to go in and stood outside, enjoying my decisiveness. I had celebrated my seventeenth birthday in Paris. I was walking around the city on my own. Robert had lent me his Vivienne Westwood mohair top, all loops and holes, scarlet, yellow and black. Two boys stopped and looked. One of them approached.
‘Punk est mort!’ he bellowed as the English do to foreigners.
‘Punk is dead?’
‘You English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. So’re we. From Harrogate.’
Two boys from Yorkshire shouting the news in French to a girl from Essex. I knew they were right. We could see how it worked and so it stopped working. Or at least we needed to know what next,
what more?
49
Split the lark
Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music –
Bulb after bulb, in Silver rolled –
EMILY DICKINSON
Punk evolved into New Wave, which suited my seriousness and pretensions. I smoked Gauloises and carried Russian novels in my raincoat pockets. The colours of punk refined into graphic blocks of red, white and black, and homemade noise into the colder simulations of electronics. Music was more ambitious, more serious, but also becoming lyrical again. Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex was renamed Seditionaries. Gym-slips, blazers, kilts and nappies gave way to suits and dresses. Girls started growing their hair; sugar and water were replaced by hairspray and gel.
Punk was first an idea and then an act. Musically it was unfixable as, by definition, it was thrown together and fell apart. We had got the idea now, and could scrutinise the parts. I knew too much – that music wasn’t something that simply filled the air, but something constructed and transmitted. All of a sudden it mattered what it was played on. By then we had inherited an uncle’s lumbering Seventies stereo system which was far more powerful than our old machine but still not good enough. Stereo equipment had to be either all of one spectacular brand (Bang & Olufsen) or customised: the amp (NAD), the deck (Dual), the speakers (Wharfedale).
There was more and more to think about. Music was produced and critiqued; it revealed influence and allusion. I read the New Musical Express, which was delivered to the house each week (we were allowed one magazine each and I had graduated from Jackie to Pink to Cosmopolitan to the NME). My father, who never minded what I wore or said, threw the NME across the kitchen in disgust. He could not stand the prose.
Serious music criticism was then very serious indeed. Records were assessed not only musically but also according to their cultural context and philosophical connotations. I didn’t understand my father’s response. To me, this wasn’t being pretentious but serious. That’s the problem with this country, I said. No one is prepared to be Serious, especially about Art. I liked the way these critics wrote and fell under the rhetorical spell of their semi-colons, qualifications and parentheses. Their casual appropriations, novel compounds and elaborate metaphors spoke of a mind that believed itself equal to anything. What’s more, they believed that talking about music was talking about the human condition and so pronounced on both. I admired that.
This is from the other music paper, Melody Maker, which occupied the status of opposition party but sounded the same. It is from Jon Savage’s 1979 review of Joy Division’s first LP, Unknown Pleasures:
At the time of writing, our very own mode of (Western, advanced, techno-) capitalism is slipping down the slope to its terminal phase: critical mass. Things fall apart. The cracks get wider: more paper is used, with increasing ingenuity, to cover them. Madness implodes, as people are slowly crushed, or, perhaps worse, help in crushing others. The abyss beckons: nevertheless, a febrile momentum keeps the train on the tracks. The question that lies behind the analysis (should, of course, you agree) is what action can anyone take?
One particular and vigorous product of capitalism’s excess has been pop music … It’s as much as anyone can do, it seems, to accept the process and carefully construct their theatre for performance and sale in halls in the flesh, in rooms and on radios (if you’re very lucky) in the plastic … The song titles read as an opaque manifesto; Disorder, Day of the Lords, Candidate, Insight, New Dawn Fades … Loosely they restate outsider themes (from Celine on in); the preoccupations and reactions of individuals caught in a trap they dimly perceive – anger, paranoia, alienation, feelings of thwarted power, and so on … Leaving the 20th century is difficult; most people prefer to go back and nostalgise, Oh Boy. Joy Division at least set a course in the present with contrails for the future – perhaps you can’t ask for much more. Indeed, Unknown Pleasures may very well be one of the best, white, English, debut LPs of the year.
Problems remain; in recording place so accurately, Joy Division are vulnerable to any success the album may bring – once the delicate relationship with the environment is altered or tampered with, they may never produce anything as good again. And, ultimately, in their desperation and confusion about decay, there’s somewhere a premise that what has decayed is more valuable than what is to follow. The strengths of the album, however, belie this.
Perhaps it’s time we all started facing the future. How soon will it end?
These journalists used a cultural vocabulary which we deployed with the same thoughtlessness as teenage slang: postmodern (good), semiotic (?), eclectic (usually good), esoteric (v. good), moderne (trying too hard), post-industrial (interesting), decadent (usually bad). Everything was intoned ironically, whether or not irony was meant. Irony protected you from accusations of sincerity – so much for being serious.
To speak of a record was to speak of more than music: it was a production and a design. A photograph was ‘an Anton Corbijn’. A sleeve design was ‘a Peter Saville’. Then there was the question of the mix. Until now I hadn’t given much thought to producers. I’d heard of Phil Spector and his ‘Wall of Sound’, and admired Quincy Jones’s funk arrangements but I didn’t understand what it was they did. Then I read about Martin Hannett and saw his name on records by Joy Division, the Buzzcocks and Magazine. I began to listen differently, like someone who has grasped prosody reads a poem differently. You have an idea of form and expectation and so are able to detect the ways in which the thing resists them. It was thrilling to know that the drums shouldn’t sound like that or be that high in the mix but they were because this record was produced by Martin Hannett and the way he made them sound like heartbeats exploding was by using digital delay with an immediate cut-off. Did knowing about digital delay make the exploding heartbeats less magical? I don’t think so.
Hannett was talked of in the music press as a genius with just the right kind of off-his-head skin-of-his-teeth brilliance. Stories were told of his enigmatic approach: ‘Right, I want you to play that again – only this time make it faster, but slower.’ We obsessed over him as football fans might the manager of the England team. Joy Division live were a big noise but on record, Hannett separated out the components of their sound as if arranging space. I was used to the vocals standing in front of everything else but here Ian Curtis’s voice was arterial – buried but driving everything. It didn’t sound artificial so much as if Hannett had found an acoustic that would reveal its essence. It sounded like Ian Curtis, only more so.
We were about to step back across the line punk had drawn. The more we broke music down, the more it kept joining itself up again: punk to reggae to blues to jazz.
Daniel and I stood around in our buttoned-up raincoats, looking at the parts of music and the parts of ourselves. Would we find a way to talk to each other? Could we try just talking to each other?
* * *
Bert van de Kamp: The development of electronic instruments has widened the range of possibilities drastically, hasn’t it?
Martin Hannett: Yes, but don’t forget that the conventional instruments have not been used to their full extent …
50
Expressive values
… to have eaten of one’s mother’s heart and so to understand the language of birds [is] more beautiful than an animal psychologist’s study of the expressive values in bird-song.
ROBERT MUSIL, The Man Without Qualities
Sophie and I were sitting in the library filling in university application forms. Neither our parents nor our teachers took much interest, which was more a sign of the times than of any neglect. The person who seemed most concerned was a sour sociology lecturer who gave us each a piece of advice. She told Sophie that she should forget about university and do a secretarial course and me that I had native wit and that would get me so far but no further. I would probably fail.
You had to choose six universities. Someone had suggested to Sophie that she consider Lancaster.
‘Where’
s that?’
‘Up north.’
‘Where?’ No bands came from Lancaster.
My geographical focus was the thirty-five miles between my Essex village and London. I knew Devon, the Isle of Wight and Wales from holidays, and Sussex and Northamptonshire from grandparents. North of London there was a blank expanse and then a cluster of cities: Manchester (Joy Division), Liverpool (Echo and the Bunnymen, Big in Japan), Sheffield (the Human League). Somewhere towards Wales was Bristol (the Pop Group).
We applied to universities on the basis of what we’d heard of and then each threw in a kamikaze choice for fun. Sophie picked Lancaster and I applied to a place that wasn’t a proper university to do a course that wasn’t a traditional degree. I didn’t want to study English, it seemed too obvious and I read all the time anyway. I was interested in art history, philosophy, politics, French cinema, and here was a modular course which offered something of each. Otherwise I chose anywhere near London, including Sussex because that meant Brighton (Mods and Rockers fighting on the beach).
The Importance of Music to Girls Page 14
