CHAPTER 3
TRIBAL REVIVAL:
THE POP GROUP AND THE SLITS
THE SLITS AND THE POP GROUP founded their own independent label, Y Records, which went through Rough Trade. But before the two groups joined up to form a kind of postpunk tribe, they both made separate stabs at the infiltrate-from-within strategy. Signed to major labels and releasing debut albums in 1979, the Pop Group and the Slits were regarded as two of the most exciting and innovative bands of postpunk’s first wave.
The genius of the Pop Group lay in the way they were pulled every which way by their passion for black music. They couldn’t settle on just reggae, or just funk, or just jazz, so they went full throttle for all three simultaneously. This identity crisis caused their ultimate downfall, but along the way the Pop Group’s chaotic gigs and flawed but compelling records served as a blazing beacon for countless other bands looking for the way forward.
Funk was one of the things that sustained the future members of the Pop Group during the midseventies prepunk lull. “We were the Bristol Funk Army,” says the group’s singer, Mark Stewart. “We’d go to clubs and dance to heavy bassline imports from America, tracks by B.T. Express, Fatback Band, Ultrafunk. I was fourteen in 1975 but could get into clubs because I was six foot seven.” For U.K. funkateers, clothes were as crucial as the music. “We wore things like brothel creepers, zoot suits, plastic sandals, mohair jumpers,” recalls Stewart. “Later I discovered that in cities all over the U.K. before punk there’d been similar kids into funk and fifties clothes. And most of them got into punk when it arrived.”
As for reggae, the Pop Group assimilated that almost like inhaling the Bristol air. The city had a substantial black population, due in large part to an influx of Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s, but also to the fact that Bristol was one of England’s leading ports for the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Mostly concentrated in the St. Paul’s area, Bristol’s Caribbean population made the city one of the U.K.’s great zones of punk and reggae intermingling. A shabby neighborhood of terraced houses and low-rise apartment blocks, St. Paul’s didn’t really look like a ghetto, but in April 1980 it unleashed one of the most destructive antipolice riots in U.K. history. Stewart and future Pop Group drummer Bruce Smith and bassist Simon Underwood regularly ventured into St. Paul’s to check out the blues parties. “Generally we’d be the only white guys there, but we’d never get any hassle,” says Smith. “Well, maybe I’d get ripped off trying to buy weed, before I got wise!” They also devoured reggae vinyl. “Every Friday when we were fourteen or fifteen, we’d go to this record store Revolver to check out the new reggae prereleases that had just arrived from London by van,” recalls Stewart.
Along with funk and reggae, the young friends began to explore jazz, thrilling to the ferocity of its abstract emotional expressionism, its lofty intellectual edge and cosmic ambition. Undeterred by lack of technique or formal grounding in the music, the Pop Group hurled themselves into improvisation, with Stewart’s howled vocals and Gareth Sager’s sax blasts being the most obviously “free” elements in the maelstrom. “My remembrance of us playing was that it was either really extraordinary or pretty awful,” laughs Smith. “There wasn’t much in between!” The Pop Group worshipped the Beat culture surrounding jazz and poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. Stewart’s original fantasy version of the group was called the Wild Boys, after Burroughs’s novel.
Blue-eyed funkateers, white Rasta ranters, “beatniks of tomorrow,” as they dubbed themselves in one interview—the Pop Group refused to choose a single identity. Bearing impeccably hip references and exhibiting vaulting ambition, the Pop Group arrived on the postpunk scene with perfect timing, just when everyone was scratching their heads and wondering, “Where next?” Their impact on the music press was instantaneous. The Pop Group appeared on the front cover of NME in September 1978, before they even had a record out. Their very amorphousness made them a Rorschach blot for critical fantasy, a color-saturated canvas for exploring ideas about “after-punk.” “Older journalists dug us, because they could use us to talk about the stuff they secretly preferred to punk rock—dub, Captain Beefheart, Miles Davis’s early seventies records,” says Stewart.
It didn’t hurt that the Pop Group looked great. Their suits evoked both a timeless, unrock stylishness and a bracing sobriety and seriousness. In interviews, they came across as intellectual firebrands. Early features on the Pop Group typically started with the journalist’s marveling at the group’s erudition and argumentativeness while noting their impressive book and record collections. “We were sixteen, seventeen, staying up all night talking, smoking weed,” recalls Smith. Sparks flew as systems of thought—Wilhelm Reich’s libidinal liberation, Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, situationism’s revolt against alienation—collided and came into friction. Drunk on ideas, the group dedicated itself to systematically breaking down all assumptions and received ways of thinking. “We started challenging everything right down to the core of personal relationships, the things between the audience and the band,” says Stewart. According to Vivien Goldman, a journalist friend of the band’s who dated Stewart for a while, “The Pop Group had this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything.”
Out of all this turmoil of inspiration and self-questioning emerged a kind of Dionysian protest music, a maelstrom of writhing noise and imagistic words that dissolved the artificial divisions between politics and poetry, lust and spirituality. Stewart saw the Pop Group as part of a grand tradition of politically engaged avant-garde artists, a continuum stretching from the radical salons of the French Revolution, through dadaists and surrealists who were also committed Communists, to 1960s movements like Fluxus and situationism, which saw radical art and political revolution as inseparable. Just as the situationists railed against affluent consumer society’s “poverty of everyday life,” Pop Group songs like “We Are Time” blazed with a rage to live. “Not wanting to just be alive,” says Stewart, “but to rid yourself of all constrictions. We had this romantic idea of going through nihilism, this intense deconditioning process, and emerging on the other side with something really positive.” Comparing the Pop Group to the then little-known syndrome of spontaneous human combustion, Stewart told ZigZag, “Our creating music is the result of acute internal pressure.” Fire figured in the Pop Group’s imagination as an ideal state of being, evoking inner-city riots, pagan rituals, the 1960s free jazz of Archie Shepp’s Fire Music. One of the band’s best songs, “Thief of Fire,” used the Prometheus myth to talk about the quest for “prohibited knowledge, going into unknown areas.”
The Pop Group’s rise had a wildfire quality. Within a few shows, they became the epicenter of the Bristol postpunk scene. Soon they were opening up for major artists like Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and the Stranglers, whose singer, Hugh Cornwell, was so infatuated that he produced and financed their demos. In the late spring of ’78 the Pop Group accompanied Pere Ubu, then at the very height of their critical stature, on their debut tour of the U.K. The band began talking to Andrew Lauder, the founder of Radar Records (who put out Ubu’s Datapanik EP). A veteran A&R man who’d deftly survived the transition between prepunk progressive music and the New Wave, Lauder had previously signed the Stranglers and Buzzcocks while working at United Artists. Now he was looking for cutting-edge groups for Radar, a quasi-autonomous label that combined an edgy, independent sensibility with all the benefits of major-label distribution.
Released by Radar in March 1979, the Pop Group’s debut single, “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” was an exhilarating splurge of disco bass, slashing punk-funk rhythm guitar, and deranged dub effects, with Stewart caterwauling lines like “our only defense is together as an army/I’ll hold you like a gun.” Lyrically, says Stewart, the song was “a very young attempt to mix up poetic, existentialist stuff with political yearnings. The idea of unconditional love as a revolutionary force—the way it ki
nd of switches on a light, makes you hope for a better world, gives you this idealism and energy.”
To record “Beyond Good and Evil,” the Pop Group hooked up with Dennis Bovell, who at that point was the only British reggae producer brilliant enough to bear any comparison with the Jamaican greats like Lee Perry and King Tubby. A key figure in the U.K. reggae scene, Bovell had operated the Jah Sufferer Hi Fi Sound System, formed the popular British roots band Matumbi, and pioneered the hugely successful genre of lover’s rock (a homegrown U.K. fusion of reggae and soft American soul that appealed largely to women). If that wasn’t enough, he wrote and produced the backing music for militant poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s albums while releasing his own LPs, like Strictly Dub Wize, under the name Blackbeard. Bovell’s musical scope stretched way beyond reggae, though. He’d played lead guitar in a Hendrix-influenced band called Stonehenge and believed that Jimi had created the first dub track ever in 1967 with “Third Stone from the Sun.”
Bovell’s mix of acid rock wildness and dub wisdom made him the perfect foil for the Pop Group. For “3:38,” the B-side to “Beyond Good and Evil,” he took the A-side’s music and ran it backward, psychedelic-style, then built a new rhythm track for it with Bruce Smith. “That really blew the band away,” Bovell chuckles. Necessity was the mother of invention here. “We’d almost run out of studio time, that’s why I reused the A-side.” Creative and cost-efficient, Bovell was the ideal candidate for the not so enviable task of giving the Pop Group’s unruly sound some semblance of cohesion.
Working on their debut album Y, Bovell quickly grasped that the rhythm section held the whole band together. “Simon Underwood and Bruce Smith, they were the Sly and Robbie of the postpunk period, tight,” says Bovell. “The thing that was not together about the Pop Group was Gareth Sager’s and John Waddington’s guitars and Mark’s singing, which would be drifting all across the frame.” Although the sheer funk force of Underwood and Smith makes the up-tempo songs like “We Are Time” physically compelling, elsewhere Y veers into texture-saturated abstraction with sound paintings like “Savage Sea” and “Don’t Sell Your Dreams.” Distended with effects and positively varicose with creativity, Y garnered a mixed reception. Typically, the faint praise was something along the lines of NME’s verdict, “A brave failure. Exciting but exasperating.” Today, it seems a notch more admirable and impressive, a heroic mess, glorious in its overreach.
The Slits started from the same chaotic place as the Pop Group, but unlike the latter, they didn’t initially have a solid rhythm section to anchor the anarchy. Only the faintest subliminal skank indicated the Slits’ punky reggae intentions. Whereas other punk bands talked about not being able to play but were secretly competent, the Slits were genuinely inept. Some people reckon the “true” Slits sound is their early naïve cacophony, the glorious racket of girls struggling with their instruments and vocal cords, impelled forward by sheer glee and gall. Actually, the Slits got better when they got, ah, better, picking up some rudimentary instrumental skills and establishing a firmer rhythmic foundation following the departure of original drummer Palmolive, who was unable to provide the reggae-inflected groove the rest of the band wanted. The Slits enlisted a male drummer called Budgie (who would later join Siouxsie and the Banshees) for their classic 1979 debut album Cut, on which producer Dennis Bovell also played a crucial role, helping the Slits transform their rampaging racket into a more shapely disorder.
In the beginning, though, the Slits were a feral girl gang, onstage and offstage. Just fifteen years old in 1977, singer Ari Up recalls being “wild and crazy, like an animal let loose, but an innocent little girl with it too.” From her striking image (tangled dreadlocks, underwear worn on the outside of her clothes) to her seemingly presocial antics, Ari Up inspired fear and fascination in equal measure. On one infamous occasion, she urinated onstage. “It wasn’t to shock anyone,” she insists. “I needed to pee. There wasn’t a toilet near. So I pissed onstage—on the side, but everyone in the audience saw it. I just didn’t care.” The singer came from a wealthy German background, but her heiress mother, Nora, was a bohemian and a rock scenester. The family home served as an open house for all kinds of stars, from Yes vocalist Jon Anderson to the Clash’s Joe Strummer. Slits guitarist Viv Albertine attended art school, where she met the Clash’s Mick Jones. Blonde, charismatic, and trailing a host of male punk admirers, Albertine shared a squatted apartment with Keith Levene and played in a short-lived band with him and Sid Vicious called Flowers of Romance. Balefully dark-haired and laconic, bassist Tessa Pollitt came from another all-girl punk group who trumped the Slits with a name—the Castrators—worthy of radical feminist Valerie Solanas, founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men.
A fan of Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Malcolm McLaren attempted to manage the Slits, seeing them as the female Pistols. Legend has it that his managerial come-on was, “I want to work with you because you’re girls and you play music. I hate music and I hate girls. I thrive on hate.” But instead of thinking up outrageous ideas worthy of Valerie Solanas or Sid Vicious, McLaren’s master plan was wildly sexist and degrading. After attacking the rock industry with the Pistols, he now wanted to infiltrate the disco movement. At first, he tried to get the Slits to sign to the cheesy German disco label Hansa. Then, when Island moved to sign the band and invited McLaren to make a movie around them, he came up with a screenplay that envisioned the Slits as an all-girl rock band that goes to Mexico only to find themselves effectively sold into slavery and ultimately turned into pornodisco stars. The Slits shrewdly extricated themselves from McLaren’s grasp. But they did sign to Island and started working on their debut album with Dennis Bovell in the summer of 1979.
Bovell was an obvious choice. The Slits, especially Ari Up, were reggae fiends. “We used to find the blues parties just following the bass,” she says. “We would be streets away and listen for the vibrations. In those days, there were almost zero white people at sound system parties. But I got away with it because I was dancing the hell out of their blues parties. Back then the style of dancing was called ‘steppers’ and I was such a good stepper. I was also the only white girl with dreads. In fact I was the first person to have the ‘tree’—I had my locks up in a tree-type shape.” As Ari Up developed beyond the basic punk screech into plaintive, reedy singing, her Bavarian-meets-Jamaican accent made her sound a bit like a dreadlocked Nico, on spliff rather than smack.
Punk diehards sometimes claim that Dennis Bovell dulled the Slits’ edges, domesticated them. But the Slits were ambitious. They wanted to be pop stars. Island boss Chris Blackwell thought that they had potential in spades and he gave Bovell as much studio time as was required. “The Slits had so much input that it was more a case of sorting out what should go,” said Bovell. “They were just bulging with material and I had the task of sorting it out and saying ‘this goes here.’ It was like an enormous jigsaw puzzle all dumped in your lap.” Cut’s songs do often sound like polyrhythmic cogs and spindles cobbled together to form slightly shaky but captivating contraptions. Albertine’s itchy-scratchy rhythm guitar darts between Pollitt’s sinuous basslines and Budgie’s clackety clockwork drums. According to Bovell, Albertine “was no Jimi Hendrixette. She’d do the occasional bit of single-note lead guitar, but mostly she was more like a female Steve Cropper from Booker T. and the MGs, doing all these great rhythm things. She was always very conscious of not wanting to play the guitar like a man, but actually trying to create a style of her own.”
The most delightful element in the Slits’ sound on Cut is the strange geometry of the clashing and overlapping vocals, as Albertine and Pollitt weave around Ari Up’s shrill, slightly sour warble. On the opener, “Instant Hit,” the girls form a roundelay of haphazard harmonies that the singer describes as “a kind of ‘Frère Jacques’ thing.” Albertine’s lyrics to “Instant Hit” depict an unhealthily thin boy who “don’t like himself very much/’cos he has set his self to self-destruct”—a barbed portrait that applied equally
to Sid Vicious and Keith Levene, her junkie bandmates in Flowers of Romance. “So Tough,” a frenetic pisstake of macho posturing, gives way to the doleful skank of “Spend, Spend, Spend,” its sidling bass and brittle-nerved percussion perfectly complementing the lyric’s sketch of a shopaholic vainly trying to “satisfy this empty feeling” with impulse purchases. “Shoplifting” turns “Spend, Spend, Spend” inside out: The first song’s woman-as-consumerist dupe is transformed in the second’s petty-thief-as-feminist rebel. Frantic punk reggae, “Shoplifting” surges into adrenalized overdrive as Ari Up, caught red-handed, yells “do a runner.” The song climaxes with a shattering scream that mingles terror, glee, and relief at escaping the supermarket detective, a yowl that collapses into the giggled gasp, “I’ve pissed in my knickers!”
The fast songs on Cut are exhilarating—“Shoplifting,” “Love Und Romance” (a romance-as-brain-death parody), and the single “Typical Girls” (a diatribe against un-Slitty females who “don’t create, don’t rebel,” and whose heads are addled with women’s-magazine-induced anxieties about “spots, fat, unnatural smells”). The most emotionally haunting songs, though, are down-tempo and despondent in the mold of “Spend, Spend, Spend”: “FM,” “Ping Pong Affair,” and “Newtown.” The last takes its name from towns built from scratch after the Second World War, some encircling London and designed to absorb the capital’s population overflow, others built in the rural middle of nowhere. All of them, typically, started life as an architect’s and urban planner’s utopian vision before swiftly degenerating into characterless gridzones of anomie and despair. “Newtown” draws a disconcerting parallel between the normal citizens hooked on cultural tranquilizers like “televisiono” and “footballino” and the Slits’ own bohemian peers zonked on illegal narcotics. On the track, Albertine’s jittery scrape mimics the fleshcrawling ache of cold turkey. Withdrawal of an emotional kind inspired “Ping Pong Affair.” Ari Up measures out the empty postbreakup evenings with masturbation (“Same old thing yeah I know/Everybody does it”) and cigarettes.
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 7
