Dub-inflected and desolate, Cut’s slow songs impart a spooky impression of atomized individuals numbing their pain with pop culture’s illusions, romance junkies and glamorholics adrift in a haze of cheap dreams. Underneath it all you can sense the Slits’ yearning for a simpler and more natural life. Cut’s famous cover photograph of the group as mud-smeared Amazons combines nostalgie de la boue with she-warrior defiance to jab the casual record shop browser right in the eye. Naked but for loincloths and war paint, the three Slits stand proudly bare breasted, outstaring the camera’s gaze. Behind them you can see the wall of a picturesque cottage, brambles and roses clambering up the side as if to underline the “we’re no delicate English roses and this is no come-hither look” stance. The cottage was Ridge Farm, the studio where Bovell produced Cut. Says Ari Up, “We got so into the countryside when we were doing the album, to the point of rolling around in the earth. So we decided to cover ourselves in mud and show that women could be sexy without dressing in a prescribed way. Sexy in a natural way, and naked without being pornographic.”
Cut’s cover echoes the photo of the Mud People of Papua New Guinea on the front of Y. Like the Slits, the Pop Group pined for a lost wholeness that they imagined existed before civilization’s debilitating effects. On “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” Stewart had declared, “Western values mean nothing to her.” A tape of African drumming preceded the Pop Group’s arrival onstage during their 1979 Animal Instincts Tour and they appealed to their fans via a Melody Maker interview to bring drums and whistles to the shows and transform them into tribal ceremonies. In another feature, Gareth Sager argued that Western civilizations, being “based on cities,” were sick because they were cut off from natural cycles, unlike African tribes where repression simply didn’t exist. He proposed abolishing school and spending the money to help people deindoctrinate themselves. The song “Words Disobey Me” even hinted that language itself might be the enemy, that underneath all the layers of conditioning lay a pure, inarticulate speech of the heart. “Speak the unspoken/First words of a child…We don’t need words/Throw them away,” beseeched Stewart.
The Slits shared the Pop Group’s idealization of noble savagery and pure instinct, a cult of innocence and intuition that sometimes took on an anti-intellectual tinge. The two groups got “so close we were like one tribe,” says Ari Up. Bruce Smith replaced Budgie as the Slits’ drummer and played both sets when the two groups did a joint tour of Europe. There was even tribal endogamy. Sager went out with Albertine, Sean Oliver (the last of Pop Group’s several bassists) fathered a child with Pollitt, and Bruce Smith dated and eventually married Neneh Cherry, a friend of Ari Up’s who had joined the Slits as a stage dancer and backing vocalist. Full merger as a single tribe was formally anointed in 1980 when the groups founded Y, their own indie label, administered by Pop Group manager Dick O’Dell. By that point the Slits had parted company with Island, while the Pop Group severed their links with Radar after learning to their horror about the parent company WEA’s own links to the Kinney conglomerate, which was involved in arms dealing.
The Pop Group’s mounting revulsion for corporate capitalism and corresponding desire for “purity” in a corrupt world inspired the single “We Are All Prostitutes,” the band’s first post-Radar release. Musically, it’s their most powerful recording. The lyrics, though, abandoned Y ’s imagistic delirium for a histrionic rant against consumerism, “the most barbaric of all religions.” Stewart warned, “our children shall rise up against us.” The Pop Group seemed to be changing from lusty poet-warriors to puritanical doomsayers. In interviews of the time, Sager declared that it was frivolous to be “talking about music” when they—the Pop Group, but implicitly all postpunk bands—could and should be discussing “external things,” such as politics, current affairs, famine, war. “I don’t see the point in entertaining just now, it’s pure escapism,” he told NME. “Rock and roll is taking your mind off reality.”
The Pop Group weren’t alone. Many postpunk musicians were fighting back with protest songs and benefit gigs galore. Rock Against Racism became the template for a host of issue-based compaigns, including Rock Against Sexism, Rock Against Thatcher, and Scrap the SUS, a campaign against nineteenth-century antivagrancy laws that enabled police to harass black youth at will on the grounds of “suspicious behavior.” The Pop Group did benefits for Scrap the SUS and Cambodia, amongst many other causes. “We gave away virtually all our money from concerts through doing so many benefits,” says Stewart. At one point, the Pop Group had to do a benefit for themselves because they’d gone into debt!
Still, something about the Pop Group’s stridency started to rub their former supporters the wrong way. The backlash came in March 1980, triggered by a split single that paired the Slits’ “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm” with the Pop Group’s “Where There’s a Will.” NME’s Ian Penman mockingly dissed them as “Bristol Baezes,” evoking sanctimonious sixties folkie Joan Baez. The second Pop Group album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? got panned as self-righteous soapbox agitprop. The music was still fiery, and actually more focused than Y, but it was hard to stomach the crude finger-pointing of songs like “Blind Faith.” The band seemed to proceed methodically through a checklist of issues—“Justice” dealt with police brutality, “How Much Longer” with Nixon and Kissinger’s war crimes—and the self-flagellating guilt trip vibe was off-putting. “There Are No Spectators” chided the politically disengaged and passive, declaring, “There is no neutral/No one is innocent.” The album was relentlessly pinned to the specifics, from the sleeve with its collage of news clippings about outrages such as East Timor to songs such as “Feed The Hungry,” all blurted statistics and denunciation. Hectoring and lecturing, For How Much Longer was as unpoetic as a fringe leftist pamphlet.
For the Pop Group, and above all Mark Stewart—always the intellectual engine of the band, its autodidact bookworm—the shift to plainspeaking and speaking out was simply the righteous response to the urgencies of the era. Thatcher had surged to power in May 1979, carried by a massive political swing to the right. “It was a fiery time, you felt something was about to kick off,” says Stewart of 1980’s apocalyptic atmosphere. “See, I never felt that politics was this dreary thing. When we were ranting, it was all from the heart. It came out in a mad rush.” Stewart had absorbed the music of the Last Poets, black Muslim radicals sometimes credited with inventing rap, who’d lashed “white devils” and Negro counterrevolutionaries alike on early seventies albums like This Is Madness and Chastisement. He’d also been hanging with Linton Kwesi Johnson and organizations like Race Today and the Radical Alliance of Black Poets and Players. Linton Kwesi Johnson didn’t exactly mince words: His antifascist anthem “Fite Dem Back” vowed “We gonna smash their brains in/’Cos they ain’t got nuffink in ’em.” Johnson wasn’t actually a Rasta (indeed he upset many Jamaicans when he mocked Rastafarianism as an ostrich religion), but his patois-thick voice and baleful cadences gave the words, which look simplistic on the printed page, a power and authority that Stewart aspired to.
For many white British bohemians, though, it was precisely roots reggae’s mystical millenarianism—Rasta’s imagery of “armagideon,” “crisus time,” retribution and redemption—that resonated with their own sense of internal exile. “We did feel like we were on the front line of Babylon,” recalls Vivien Goldman. “Rasta provided this mesh of the political, the spiritual, and the apocalyptic, and it helped you define your enemies.” There was friction, naturally, between trendy liberalism and Rasta’s Old Testament morals and sexual chauvinism, but the sheer inspirational force of the music swept reservations aside. “With the roots worldview, the logic was often questionable, but the feeling of spiritual uplift was undeniable,” says Stewart. “Going to sound systems with black mates, they were like huge evangelical meetings, and you didn’t get that kind of energy with rock gigs. That kind of yearning for a better world, that questioning of the system—it just made my hairs sta
nd up on end.”
As Stewart felt the pull of reggae, admiring the way it could shout down Babylon without lapsing into sloganeering, the other members of the Pop Group were being tugged in the opposite direction. They wanted to explore their free-jazz side more deeply. “It wasn’t that I disagreed with the things Mark said,” recalls Bruce Smith. “I was just concerned about it getting so dogmatic. It was like Mark saw the music as just a vehicle, a platform for messages.” Stewart, in turn, found it increasingly “difficult to sing on the abstract stuff.”
Stewart was also becoming increasingly involved in organized protest during 1980, spending three months working in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s offices helping to coordinate a massive antinuclear rally to be held in Trafalgar Square. After almost withering away in the early seventies, CND’s membership resurged as cold war fears intensified in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. NATO’s December 1979 decision to install American-controlled cruise missiles in the U.K. convinced many Britons that their country was degenerating into little more than a U.S. launching pad. The Trafalgar Square rally in October 1980 was the last time the Pop Group performed together. “We did a version of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem,’ because I’d wanted to do a rallying cry for all the different age groups there,” recalls Stewart. “That song is a real socialist anthem, but visionary and idealistic too, Blake being this real prophet.” After this high point—playing to 250,000 people—the Pop Group fell apart. “An organic disintegration,” says Stewart. “There was no ill will.”
Meanwhile, the Slits drifted along, with Ari Up succumbing to a Rasta-infused mystic pantheism. “I just see the Creator in everything,” she told an interviewer. Proposing a kind of cosmology of rhythm, “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm” hymned all the pulsating patterns that structure reality: “…God is riddim…Riddim is roots and roots is riddim…SILENCE! Silence is a riddim too!” She and Neneh Cherry had encountered the early underground hip-hop scene on a trip to New York, and hearing rap for the first time inspired her percussive, chanted delivery on “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm.” “Every sound that you hear is rhythm,” the singer explained. “Fucking is rhythm and so is the earth going round and every footstep and every heartbeat. The way you go about your music is the way you go about your life…. Rhythm and life go together.”
As a sideline to the Slits, Ari Up formed New Age Steppers, a collaboration with dub producer Adrian Sherwood and his session musicians Creation Rebel. Another white reggae fanatic, Sherwood shared a squat in Battersea with Ari and Neneh. “Adrian was a hustler in a true sense,” Ari says. “He managed various reggae artists and toasters, distributed reggae records and sold them out of the back of his van, taught himself how to do studio engineering. We partnershipped and I came up with the name New Age Steppers. ‘Stepper’ as in dancing to reggae, and ‘New Age’ as in representing the new millennium.” Released in the first week of 1981, the group’s debut single, “Fade Away,” features one of Ari Up’s finest vocal performances, but its trust-in-Jah fatalism (the power-hungry and money-minded will all “fade away,” leaving the righteous meek to inherit the earth) seemed disconcertingly passive, suggesting a retreat into hippielike serenity.
One more Slits album, Return of the Giant Slits, saw the group abandon the independent scene for a major label, CBS, even bigger than Island. Influenced by African music, Sun Ra, and Don Cherry (Neneh’s father and a pioneer of ethnodelic jazz), the record’s diffuse, low-key experimentalism fell into a hostile marketplace. In songs like “Animal Space,” Ari Up’s pantheism took an ecomystical turn. “Earth-beat,” for instance, was a lament for a sorely mistreated Mother Earth (“Even the leaves are wheezing/Even the clouds are coughing”). After the band finally fell apart, the singer fled Babylon (aka the industrial First World) in search of any remaining havens of unspoiled Nature. Flitting from rural Jamaica to the jungles of Belize and Borneo (where she lived with tribal Indians), she became a real earth mother with a family. For others in the Slits/Pop Group milieu, getting into world music sufficed. Africa’s “rhythms of resistance” became the new roots reggae for a certain sort of postpunk.
The Pop Group splintered into multiple bands. Maximum Joy and Pigbag pursued slightly different versions of funk. Pigbag, helmed by Simon Underwood and still associated with Dick O’Dell’s Y label, became a real pop group, scoring a massive U.K. hit with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag.” Bruce Smith and Gareth Sager, the Pop Group’s most fervent free-jazzers, formed Rip Rig & Panic, named after an old Roland Kirk album. They peppered their interviews with beatnik patter like “cat,” “dig,” and “out there,” while the music capered and cavorted in antic whimsy. Rip Rig & Panic was basically the Pop Group minus the reggae input and the politics. “Yeah, it was only the music,” says Smith. “We didn’t even have a singer. Sager and our piano player Mark Springer would warble a bit into the mike now and then, but we didn’t really have vocals until Neneh joined later.” In one early interview, Sager obliquely dissed erstwhile comrade Stewart, arguing, “It’s definitely time to give the moaners the elbow. I like the cats who are complaining but they’re saying ‘yeah’ at the same time.”
Stewart, meanwhile, developed a relationship with Adrian Sherwood and the musicians surrounding the latter’s On-U label. He sang on the first New Age Steppers album, then made his solo debut in October 1982 with a fully realized version of the English hymn the Pop Group massacred at Trafalgar Square. Produced by Sherwood and marrying churchy organ swells to dub’s thunderquake bass, “Jerusalem” unites Blake’s vision of Albion as promised land with the Zion of Rasta’s dreaming. Its declaration, “I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/’Til we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land,” served as a mission statement for Stewart’s ongoing career as culture warrior. Amazingly, almost thirty years later he’s still shouting down Babylon.
CHAPTER 4
MILITANT ENTERTAINMENT:
GANG OF FOUR, THE MEKONS, AND THE LEEDS SCENE
IN BRITAIN, THE 1970S felt like one long crisis. There were endless strikes, power cuts, runs on the supermarkets by hoarding housewives, rising crime, student protests, and riots triggered by racist policing. Fascism resurged on the streets of major cities, while the IRA’s terror campaign extended beyond Ulster to the mainland with pub bombings and assassinations. The kingdom was disunited, simmering with resentments. Some mourned the nation’s lost imperial role and recoiled from the multicultural reality of modern Britain. Others pushed for revolution, seeing every successful industrial action as a worker’s victory bringing the Glorious Day a little closer.
In the midseventies, the trade unions were at their absolute peak of power. Their rank and file understandably demanded pay raises to keep pace with runaway inflation, but this only made prices rise faster and the country feel even more out of control. Using their full arsenal of weapons—sympathy strikes, secondary picketing—the unions effectively brought down the Conservative government in 1974. During the period of Labour rule that followed, many felt the Trades Union Congress was effectively coregent with Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. An inevitable right-wing backlash gathered momentum. People speculated about coups being plotted by the military and whispered of private armies, led by retired brigadiers, training in English meadows under cover of darkness. Legitimate pressure groups emerged like the Middle Class Association and the National Association for Freedom, dedicated to taming the unions, resisting “declining standards,” and restoring the word “Great” to its proper place in front of “Britain.”
In this polarized context, the decision by a bunch of students at Leeds University to name their band Gang of Four was a provocative gesture. The name was a derogatory term for the four top leaders of China’s Cultural Revolution Group, who’d been running the country right up until shortly after Mao’s September 1976 death, when they were arrested by the People’s Republic’s new premier.
&nbs
p; The 1965–68 Cultural Revolution—Maoism at its most radical and uncompromisingly antibourgeois—was fresh in the public memory. In 1977 you could still find Maoist groups active on many U.K. campuses. Gang of Four weren’t actually Maoists, or even card-carrying Communists, but they were definitely products of the left-wing university culture of the seventies, which even more than the previous decade was characterized by student militancy. At Leeds and elsewhere throughout the U.K., students swelled the ranks of Trotskyite groups like the International Marxist Group and the Socialist Workers Party and joined picket lines alongside striking miners and dockers.
While the committed activists spouted the textbook party line, a more diffuse left-wing academic culture existed based around an eclectic pick-and-mix approach to radical theory. This trendy-lefty autodidactism was fueled by secondhand paperbacks and beginner’s guides to the key thinkers of the twentieth century, including the neo-Marxist pantheon of Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, and Althusser. Leaving the 20th Century, a slim, green, attractive-looking anthology of situationist texts and graphics, was the radical-chic fetish object of its era. Blending often incompatible systems of thought, the resulting hodgepodge lacked rigor from the stern standpoint of academics and ideologues alike. In rock music, though, even a little bit of rigor is rather bracing and galvanizing. Too much is plain rigid, of course, but Gang of Four managed to hit just the right balance. In the grand tradition of British art rock, theory helped Gang of Four achieve the sort of conceptual breakthroughs that more organically evolving groups never reach.
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 8
