Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  It was perhaps essential that the era of synth-pop coincided with the rise of the music video. Equally important, as the very name of the New Romantics suggested, was the role of synth-pop in courtship rituals – as described in ‘Don’t You Want Me’. ‘It’s hypnotic as dance16 music’, said Dave Ball. ‘That’s the whole essence of it. People are so limited and restricted, crammed into offices and trains. They can’t move around, so they just want to shake and go wild. Dancing is what they do rather than hitting or killing somebody.’ Just four years after the detonation of disco in Comiskey Park, a nightclub such as London’s Camden Palace could be crammed five nights a week with office workers and teenagers displaying their peacock plumage at events billed as ‘Sweat Attack’ and ‘Dance Your Ass Off’. Pleasure, dance and music were once more partners in delirious extravagance. Moreover, outwardly gay performers such as Boy George (Culture Club) and Marc Almond (Soft Cell) could flourish and be accepted by the British public – Boy George’s endearingly gentle public persona winning him fans across the age spectrum, from those who would once have been horrified by the sexual ambivalence displayed by Mick Jagger or Marc Bolan.

  There was still a conscious divide between those who welcomed the pansexual, preening extravagance of the new pop, and those who clung to the more political, abrasive textures of punk. In its aftermath, when a plethora of small labels had offered alternatives to the more regimented product of the major record companies, there was a pronounced kudos to the notion of being ‘independent’ in a corporate world. Echoing the pioneering adventures of American labels such as Sun, Chess, Atlantic and Motown, many of Britain’s independent labels became mini-factories of pop experimentation – each of them, from Factory to Postcard, Some Bizzare to Rough Trade, boasting its own defining vision of what pop (and rock) might be. In this expanded landscape, there was room for every nuance suggested by the freewheeling invention of the post-punk bands.

  Avant-garde electronica existed here alongside revivalist rock rooted in the mid-1960s, or the Velvet Underground, or in punk itself. But right across that spectrum, the early 1980s found artists of multitudinous hues accepting the inspiration of black America – soul, funk, jazz, disco, or a medley of them all. To choose one emblematic example: Orange Juice from Glasgow approached the dilemma of how to follow punk by retrieving the musical motifs of the Byrds and the Velvet Underground, and then coating them in a fey, esoteric sense of style. Within a couple of years, the band had begun to slide almost invisibly from 1960s revivalism towards a very contemporary, African-tinged form of funk, shedding few of their original devotees while achieving mainstream pop success. All roads, however recherché, seemed to lead inevitably towards the dance floor.

  Equally inevitably, some found this destination intolerable. For independent purists, ‘indie’ music entailed guitars, rock and the tradition – from the 1960s through the Velvets to punk – which the likes of Orange Juice had chosen to pervert. In this school, ‘indie’ could often entail a deliberate amateurism, with a shambling, defiantly undanceable sense of rhythm – nonconformist where punk had been iconoclastic. This approach culminated in C86, a mixtape promoted by the NME in 1986, which included such indie luminaries as Primal Scream, the Wedding Present, Stump and Bogshed. (It was originally issued on cassette, in keeping with the self-assembly ethic of the movement.)

  Absent from C86, although they were the embodiment of the indie elite, were the Smiths – led by Johnny Marr, a guitarist who could rival the melodic inventiveness of the Byrds or Richard Thompson’s work with Fairport Convention; and Morrissey, a droll and self-consciously literary lyricist, whose grasp of pop melody was somewhat more limited. He specialised in an almost adolescent self-pity exemplified by ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, and an astute grasp of English social etiquette, making him (alongside Ray Davies) the bard of embarrassment. The Smiths were both radical – Morrissey’s vocabulary and wit was as groundbreaking as Lou Reed’s literary depiction of New York’s underbelly – and innately conservative in their refusal (or Morrissey’s refusal, to be exact) to countenance the relevance of dance rhythms. Their 1986 single ‘Panic’ achieved notoriety via its indelible chorus line, ‘Hang the DJ’, which was widely taken as an attack on black music, an interpretation Morrissey did little to dispel. (The DJ had earned his death sentence by not providing an appropriate soundtrack for Morrissey’s life, a peculiarly solipsistic attitude to popular music.) It was a sizeable hit, but it represented the last fanfare of a beleaguered bugler, alone on the barricades while all around him throbbed with the uncompromising rhythms of the future.

  Techno sounds like a pneumatic17 drill with synthesised sounds on top.

  Daily Express, 1994

  Most acid records18 have no vocals whatsoever, so it’s difficult to understand how they’re promoting drug use.

  Soul Underground magazine, 1988

  Once renowned as the home of America’s auto industry and the Motown Records soul empire, Detroit emitted the stench of terminal decay by the early 1980s. In a city where arson and murder were rife, and poverty endemic, young African-Americans found relief in music that emanated from elsewhere – perhaps from outer space, to judge by its alien, robotic rhythms. Like many of their peers, teenagers Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson relished sounds that bore no relation to the heritage of their own city: the computerised beats of Kraftwerk, Donna Summer’s electro-disco cuts with Giorgio Moroder, the pioneering synth-pop of the Human League and Depeche Mode. The three boys formed a musical collective they named Deep Space, and embarked on individual experiments with primitive synthesisers, drum machines and tape recorders.

  The first evidence of Deep Space’s revolutionary impact on global music came in the form of ‘Alleys of Your Mind’, a 1981 single by Atkins under the name Cybotron. Its Germanic feel – as if Tangerine Dream had cut a rudimentary demo with Kraftwerk – was apparent in another release that year, ‘Share Vari’ by A Number of Names. Each has been claimed as the launch pad for a new genre of electronic music: Detroit techno. Over the next few years, each of the Deep Space collective toyed with similar ingredients, creating dance music gradually stripped of all unnecessary ingredients. Indeed, by 1985, when Atkins made ‘No UFOs’ under the name Model 500, its electronic instrumentation was almost entirely percussive, with no attempt to provide melodic hooks or enticements. Its vocals were equally inhuman, extending the featureless technique of Gary Numan or the Human League’s Phil Oakey. Derrick May pushed the boundaries further away from the traditional elements of the popular song with two 1986 singles, ‘Nude Photo’ (synth patterns never quite gelling over a drum-machine track) and ‘Strings of Life’. The latter, issued under the pseudonym Rhythim Is Rhythim, suggested that the robots were now in control of the factory, subverting any hint of melody or pitch in their sequenced frenzy. One could imagine automatons proudly unveiling this music to captured humans, to demonstrate who were the masters now.

  Detroit’s electro found a ready audience in Chicago’s dance clubs, where local DJs and musicians were lapping up a similar mixture of British post-punk, ‘krautrock’ and disco. At the Warehouse in Chicago, Frankie Knuckles was pulling people on to the dance floor with his home-made amalgamations of synthesised rhythms and the emotional pressure points from Philadelphia dance hits. ‘I had a razor blade19, a Pioneer reel-to-reel and spools of recording tape’, he recalled. Unlike his counterparts in the Bronx, Knuckles and his imitators weren’t providing the raw material for rappers: their jerry-built productions were designed to be sufficient unto themselves. By the early 1980s, they were augmenting their record and tape decks with drum machines and sequencers, effectively improvising their own dance tracks which existed only in the moment that they were performed. Using a Roland TR-808 drum machine at the Playground club, Jesse Saunders recalled, ‘I’d let it play along20 with the tracks, then I’d mix it in and out, let it run by itself, and start mixing stuff in and out.’ It was like a return to the days before recorded sound; in
evitably, the precedent of history ensured that Saunders would preserve his impromptu creations on vinyl.

  His 1983 single ‘On and On’ encapsulated his approach, a barrage of percussive sounds in different registers fighting for recognition. Every element that would once have been human – handclaps, drumbeats, the feel of fingers on a keyboard or thumping a bass guitar string – was provided by machines. But like his rival and contemporary Jamie Principle, who worked with Knuckles at the Warehouse, Saunders wasn’t afraid to match these electronic pulses with vocal elements reminiscent of the soul tradition, whether they were borrowed from other records using a sampler, or supplied by humans. Sampling technology also allowed producers to steal basslines and drum fills. As Sheryl Garratt explained, ‘Stripped of their songs21, these recycled riffs sounded alien and new, like raw, minimal messages transmitted from another world.’

  While techno accentuated the machine, house music (alias the music they played at the Warehouse) blended sequenced electronica with motifs of soul. As America’s club audiences were stricken by AIDS, ‘The contents of the lyrics22 of Chicago house music were often sexually explicit’, as the academic Hillegonda Rietveld noted. ‘There was also a celebration of purely being alive in these hedonistic, frenzied dance gatherings.’ But once established, neither house nor techno stood still. The producer Marshall Jefferson introduced a variety known as ‘deep house’, which heightened the soulful elements of the music, using a real string section and keyboards over the hypnotic rhythms. Jefferson also worked with DJ Pierre, who under the pseudonym of Phuture made one of the strangest and most influential dance records of the 1980s: ‘Acid Trax’. Its distinctive squelching bass tone, amidst a swirl of percussive patterns, was produced by ill-treating another Roland machine, the TB-303 – a bass synthesiser and sequencer which was intended to substitute for a bass guitar, but was perverted to mess with the realities of pitch and time. In honour of this record, house records centred around the TB-303 were dubbed ‘acid house’ – a title which proved to be so popular in Britain that all of Chicago’s house output, and much of Detroit’s techno, would eventually be swept under this blanket description. Cynics dismissed house as mechanical and emotionless, but for devotees – such as Hedonism promoter Slinkey – ‘it’s all about feeling23. You can think within it, live and breathe within very simple, very unstructured and beautiful music … House is pure soul music.’

  House arrived in Britain during a period, spanning the mid-1980s, when every corner of white pop was soaked in the influence of black music. Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s production team constructed epic dance landscapes spattered with aural diversions – witty, jolting, even (on the sex instruction guide that was their debut hit, ‘Relax’) erotic. Dead Or Alive and Bronski Beat borrowed the hi-energy sound of gay disco; Fine Young Cannibals and Paul Young modernised the sound of 1960s Southern soul; the Style Council combined radical rhetoric with vintage Motown rhythms; Scritti Politti and Swansway focused the experimental ambition of 1967 pop on white soul, a rare gift that was imitated but not matched by Deacon Blue and Wet Wet Wet. Britain’s two most enduring discoveries during this era shared this effortless command of black and white traditions, George Michael (with and without Wham!) blending Motown with sweet soul, Pet Shop Boys proving that it was possible to squeeze arch social satire and a droll expression of passion into contemporary dance tracks.

  With only heavy metal (and, inevitably, the Smiths) remaining immune to this African-American electricity, the UK was prepared to have its rhythmic horizons extended. Dhar Braxton’s ‘Jump Back’ from 1986 hid a house instrumental track beneath her semi-spoken vocal lines. Two months later, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ carried the unadulterated sound of Chicago house into the British Top 10 – spasms of frantic keyboards, faux gospel chorus, layers of percussive rapture, all topped by Darryl Pandy’s spectacularly effusive lead vocal. Then Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley’s ‘Jack Your Body’ in January 1987 demonstrated that house wasn’t just another name for soul, but a revolution of the body and the mind. This time there was no comforting R&B anthem to smooth the passage into the future: nothing obstructed the beats, played out in a variety of electronic tones and rhythms, each chorus slightly different from the last, as if house wasn’t a hybrid of disco and ‘krautrock’ but actually a strange love child of jazz.

  The British charts were already awash with remixes of vintage hits; the shops full of multiple formats of every single, each containing subtly different revamps, rearrangements and reconstructions of the same basic track. These not only boosted singles sales, as such gimmicks as picture discs and coloured vinyl had done earlier in the decade, but led embittered survivors of the pre-disco age to ask: ‘Why do they need to keep remixing the same song? Couldn’t they get it right the first time?’fn1 Adventures in clubland provided the answer, each self-contained scene requiring its own tempo. Producer, songwriter and remixer Ian Levene identified the lust in Britain’s clubs for dance music which could match the internal pace of brains and bodies responding to desperate sexual desire, aided by judicious use of poppers. He co-wrote and produced a dance anthem called ‘High Energy’, vocalised by American soul diva Evelyn Thomas. The record lent its name (suitably abridged, as time was tight, to Hi-NRG) to a style defined by its beats per minute and its message of defiant hedonism.

  Poppers weren’t the only stimulants on offer: from summertime clubbing in Ibiza came not only a blend of Euro-disco and house which was dubbed Balearic beat, but free access to the drug MDMA, better known as Ecstasy. It promoted a surge of serotonin which broke down social barriers, encouraged a feeling of unity with strangers, and lent itself to ecstatic dancing – requiring in turn a soundtrack of extended dance anthems building to climax after climax, the communion of the dance replacing erotic urgency as the trigger for exhilarating displays of self-abandon. As Sheryl Garratt recalled of her baptism at the Paradise Garage in New York, ‘I remember how friendly24 people seemed, how joyful, only years later equating their dilating eyes with Ecstasy. I don’t remember the records, or even how long I stayed. What I do remember vividly was the sound. The fact that the music didn’t just hang in the air, it came inside you. It was physical. You didn’t just hear it, you felt it.’ By the time that vibe reached London, it had acquired a home-grown soundtrack: M/A/R/R/S’s ‘Pump Up the Volume’, Coldcut’s ‘Doctorin’ the House’, and then ‘Theme From S’Express’ (created by disc jockey Mark Moore), a hook-laden monster which brazenly encouraged its audience to ‘enjoy this trip’. By spring 1988, that record was No. 1 in the British charts; giant warehouse parties (or raves) were spreading the ecstatic gospel across North London; and the national press slowly became aware that a sizeable proportion of the capital’s teenagers were in thrall to something called ‘acid house’. No matter that they were smiling and dancing, rather than rioting or fighting: this outburst of youthful expression was a menace, and needed to be stopped.

  But how could you quell a storm that was thundering in every home, from every television and radio, in every high street store? As TV stations selected brief motifs from Hi-NRG, house and techno records to run beneath montages of sports highlights, or link programme trailers, and the smiley-face logo of the Ecstasy-fuelled dancing congregation was branded on to a million T-shirts, sweats and badges, the sound of the underground became a universal language – while remaining a social evil to the press. For anyone unacquainted with the multitudinous categories of dance music, there was nothing to divide acid house from the Hi-NRG sound of Britain’s top pop producers during the second half of the 1980s, Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Their amalgamation of bubblegum pop and synthesised dance beats outraged musical purists, but transformed an Australian soap actress (Kylie Minogue), Anglo-Jamaican sisters from London’s East End (Mel & Kim) and the drummer from a Lancashire soul band (Rick Astley) into pop stars. As Mike Stock explained, ‘We worked out that the average25 resting heart works at 60 to 80 beats per minute, so we always made our songs
twice the resting heartbeat with the intention of generating excitement and getting the feet tapping.’ The climax of their colonisation of British pop was the joyous innocence – much ridiculed at the time – of the Reynolds Girls’ ‘I’d Rather Jack (Than Fleetwood Mac)’, as emblematic a record as any generational statement in pop history: ‘Golden oldies, Rolling Stones, we don’t want them back’, the teenagers sang, more than a decade after the Clash vainly proscribed ‘No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977’.

  * * *

  fn1 To quote from Wink Martindale’s rhythm-free ‘Deck of Cards’, ‘I was that soldier’. But given that I was writing about eight virtually identical mixes of Paul McCartney’s lacklustre ‘Press’, perhaps I can be forgiven for my pig-headed myopia.

  1, 2

  THE MURDER OF John Lennon in December 1980 punctured the fantasy of a Beatles reunion. Like Elvis Presley’s death three years earlier, it also offered millions of fans another chilling glimpse of their own mortality. (The fact that Lennon was shot by someone who claimed to be a fan demonstrated how dysfunctional that relationship could be.) Meanwhile, the Who had been jolted by the death of Keith Moon, after a long history of alcoholism and drug abuse. Narcotics had also come close to ending the career of the Rolling Stones, when Keith Richards was arrested for possession of heroin.

  In his bid to avoid a similar fate, Bob Dylan – revered for more than a decade as a prophet who might conceivably hold the answer to life’s mysteries – was seeking his own salvation. His revelation in 1979 that he had become a born-again Christian shocked many who saw him as the incarnation of their iconoclasm. But his work had long been steeped in biblical references, and many of his followers persuaded themselves that his Slow Train Coming album was merely a passing aberration. Those beliefs were dispelled when Dylan took the stage at the Fox-Warfield theatre in San Francisco, for a lengthy run of shows in which he performed nothing but his contemporary Christian material. ‘The man must decide3 if he is going to be an entertainer or a preacher’, said a Billboard reviewer. ‘He took the fans’ money and never gave them any of the songs they had full rights to expect to hear.’ Here was a contradiction: the so-called spokesman for a radical generation was spouting not just evangelical rhetoric, but right-wing political views which could have come from the mouth of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Yet what could be less conservative than confronting your audience with an entire show of new material? And what of the fact that the jaded Dylan of 1978 had been replaced by a man electrified with the righteous passion of his cause? Much of his audience would have preferred him set in stone a decade earlier, offering reliable predictability.