Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  Unlike Pere Ubu, who happily remained a cult band, Devo’s mission to subvert from within would only work if the band was massively successful. With this in mind, they moved to Los Angeles, capital of the entertainment business, and with 1980’s Freedom of Choice made a record even more calculatedly commercial than the clinical-sounding Duty. The concept was “electro-R&B” but the results were more like a fusion of New Wave and Eurodisco. Everything was played by the band in the studio, but it sounded like it was programmed using sequencers. The electronic textures felt standard-issue, like the preset sounds you get on a synth. Still, Freedom of Choice achieved a New Wave–inflected dance rock sound that Billy Idol would later ride to stardom. And it gave Devo their own platinum album, spurred on by the Top 20 success of “Whip It.”

  Written during the ailing twilight of the Carter presidency, “Whip It” offered Dale Carnegie–style advice to the embattled leader. “Come on, Jimmy, get your shit together,” laughs Mothersbaugh. By the time Warner Brothers allowed Devo to make a promo clip for the song, it was clear that Reagan was heading for a landslide victory. Devo made the video into a surreal commentary on America’s shift to the Right. The result was a video that twenty-five years later is not the least bit dated looking and is still a huge hoot. It was Devo’s one true moment of mass-cultural triumph.

  Pitched somewhere between a John Ford Western and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, the genuinely creepy video for “Whip It” perfectly crystallizes Devo’s “freak show aesthetic.” As a bunch of Texan stud muffins and blonde bimbos gawk and giggle, Mothersbaugh wields a whip and one by one lashes away the garments of a strange Grace Jones–like amazon of a woman, whose legs start trembling in an indescribably abject way as she waits for the final whip crack to strip off her last shred of modesty. Meanwhile, the rest of Devo performs the song cooped inside a cattle pen—pasty-faced spud-boys wearing shorts that show off their scrawny knees and the famous “flowerpot hats.” “We were horrified by Reagan’s ascent,” says Casale. “So we were just making fun of myths of cowboys in the West. It was based on a magazine I’d found, one of those 1950s gentlemen’s magazines with soft-core nudies. It had an article about a dude ranch owned by an ex-stripper and her husband. As part of the entertainment, he’d whip her clothes off in the corral for all the guests to watch.”

  As the new decade proceeded, the original “eighties industrial band” got chewed up by the industry. Slowly, steadily, Devo capitulated to the record biz way of doing things. The band had sold two million albums by 1981, but this only made Warner Brothers increase the pressure in hopes of breaking them even bigger. “They wanted us to be at the Cars’ level,” sighs Casale. Even as they railed against Reaganism with songs like “Freedom of Choice” and “Through Being Cool,” Devo found themselves increasingly bossed around by their record company. They struggled on for years, wrangling for the “Whip It”–scale radio hit that never came, stuck at a middling success level just a notch above cult. In a savagely ironic twist, they succumbed to their own unique form of devolution, winding up as a sort of New Wave version of Kiss, peddling costume rock for nerd diehards. Obsessed with flashy high-tech projections, they resorted to playing gigs to a click track fed through headphones in order to stay in sync with the visuals. Instead of a parody of regimentation, they became the real thing—slaves to slickness, peons in the “corporate feudal state.”

  CHAPTER 6

  LIVING FOR THE FUTURE:

  CABARET VOLTAIRE, THE HUMAN LEAGUE, AND THE SHEFFIELD SCENE

  SHEFFIELD AND MANCHESTER, the twin engines of the industrial revolution in Britain, were peculiarly receptive to the bleakly futuristic, synth-enhanced sounds of Devo and Pere Ubu. Less than forty miles apart in Northern England but separated by the Pennines mountain range, these cities shared with Cleveland a self-belief only slightly dented by having fallen on hard times, a sort of “we used to be great…and we’ll show you yet” attitude. Both cities also had their own equivalents to the Flats in Cleveland, harsh-on-the-eye hinterlands where heavy industry clanked and pounded day and night.

  Sheffield was the home of innovations like stainless steel and Bessemer’s converter (which made mass production of low-cost steel possible in the late nineteenth century). Although just a ten-minute drive from the picturesque Peak District and the vales of Derbyshire, Sheffield’s enduring popular image is grim and gray, based on the inner city and the heavily industrialized East End. “That’s where I lived with my parents,” says Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire. “You looked down into the valley and all you could see was blackened buildings. At night, in bed, you could hear the big drop forges crunching away.” Human League’s Martyn Ware likewise talks of growing up in a clangorous science-fiction noisescape, all the strange machine sounds generated by Sheffield’s steel industry.

  One of the first British cities to become industrialized, Sheffield rapidly acquired a proletariat in the classic sense defined by Karl Marx—human beings reduced to appendages of flesh attached to machinery, acutely conscious of both their exploitation and their common interest in struggling for better conditions. Until recently, the city was a bastion of old Labour, the pre–Tony Blair party that was closely linked to the trade union movement and whose members took seriously the Labour charter’s commitment to state ownership of major industries such as steel, 90 percent of which was combined into the publicly owned British Steel Corporation in 1967. The Sheffield region was nicknamed “the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire,” on account of the city’s hard-line Socialist council, who actually flew the red flag from the town hall.

  For those who grew up in the suburban south of England, becoming a left-wing militant was rebellious, a way of defining themselves against their bourgeois parents. But in Sheffield, where hard-Left politics was an everyday thing, the dissident thing to do was to become an artist. For the teenage Richard H. Kirk, being a member of the Young Communist League was almost like going to Sunday school. “My dad was a member of the party at one point, and I wore the badge when I went to school. But I never took it really seriously.” Instead, Kirk was drawn to Dada’s unconstructive revolt and intoxicating irrationalism.

  Although other heavily industrial parts of Britain suffered steadily rising unemployment and factory closures in the seventies, Sheffield remained relatively prosperous. The steel industry didn’t sharply decline until Thatcher took power in 1979. If there was deprivation, it was cultural. Nonconformist Sheffield youth grabbed on to whatever sources of stimulation they could find: pop music, art, glam clothes, science fiction, or, better still, some combination of them all.

  That’s why A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess’s 1962 book, Stanley Kubrick’s 1970 film, and Walter Carlos’s electronic movie score—had such an impact in Sheffield. Set in a near future Britain, A Clockwork Orange focuses on a marauding gang of teenagers, vicious dandies who live for gratuitous “ultraviolence.” Roaming a grim cityscape of high-rise apartment blocks, power plants, and dilapidated Filmdromes, these glammed-up thugs mug old people for a lark and spar bloodily with rival gangs. Although Burgess drew specific inspiration from his hometown of Manchester, Clockwork Orange’s backdrop was familiar to anyone living in urban Britain during the 1970s. Tower blocks, skyways, shadowy underpasses: This was the desolate psychogeography of a new England created by town planners and Brutalist architects from the early 1960s onward. The Human League titled their second EP, The Dignity of Labour, after a mural in the high-rise Municipal Flatblock where Clockwork Orange’s antihero, Alex, visits his parents. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh later named their post–Human League outfit Heaven 17 after an imaginary pop group in the novel. Adi Newton, a former associate of Ware’s and Marsh’s, called his band Clock DVA—“DVA” meaning the number two in the pidgin-Russian slang that Alex and his “droogs” speak.

  As for Walter Carlos’s Clockwork Orange score, this was simply the first time most Sheffield kids heard full-on electronic music. There’d been tantalizing glimpses of synthesized so
und here and there in progressive rock from groups like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. “ELP were awful rubbish apart from when Keith Emerson was playing the Moog, and then it was sublime,” says Phil Oakey, singer of the Human League. Otherwise, just about the hardest hit of electronic sound you could get from pop in the early seventies was Roxy Music, which featured Eno’s abstract spurts of synth noise.

  Roxy were massive in Sheffield. The group’s flamboyant, future-retro image inspired the posthippie generation to glam up and dance at Sheffield clubs like the Crazy Daisy. And Roxy performed regularly in the city. “When you went to see them you’d wait until you were on the bus before applying the glitter, so your mum and dad didn’t see,” recalls Oakey. “Martyn was more daring than me, he’d be going through the toughest areas of town in green fur jackets and high-heel shoes.” At parties, people used to greet Ware and Oakey with, “Oh, look, it’s Mackay and Eno,” Andy Mackay being Roxy’s fruity-looking saxophonist. Ambiguously pitched between irony and romanticism, Roxy were the aesthete’s option. “I remember buying the first Roxy album and listening to it with the gatefold sleeve open, spread out on the floor,” says Ware. “The entire atmosphere around the record was as important as the music. It all came together as a piece of art, for me.”

  The early seventies were the golden age of both theatrical rock performers (Bowie, Alice Cooper, Peter Gabriel–era Genesis) and rock theater (musicals such as The Rocky Horror Show and Rock Follies). So it’s only right that in glam-besotted Sheffield, a future generation of local pop stars would be nurtured in a youth theater project. Funded by the city council, Meatwhistle evolved into a kind of experimental performance space for bright teenagers. Amongst its participants were a good proportion of the future prime movers in Sheffield’s postpunk scene, including Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware of the Future/Human League/Heaven 17, Adi Newton of the Future and Clock DVA, Paul Bower—founder of the punk zine Gun Rubber and leader of the band 2.3—and Glenn Gregory, who would become the singer in Heaven 17.

  “Meatwhistle started in the summer of 1972, when I was about sixteen,” says Marsh. “They came up with this idea of opening up the Crucible Theatre to teenage schoolkids for the summer.” After a wildly successful production of Marat-Sade, Meatwhistle’s organizers—arty bohemian playwright/actor Chris Wilkinson and his wife, Veronica—were given an entire vacant school. “It was a big, old Victorian building, three or four floors, huge ceilings,” recalls Ware. The Wilkinsons lobbied successfully for funding for lights, video cameras, and musical instruments. “Gradually Meatwhistle got a lot more experimental and creative, as all the disaffected juveniles in Sheffield started congregating there,” says Marsh. “Bands were rehearsing at Meatwhistle because there were loads of spare rooms. Generally speaking, everyone was free to do what they wanted.” There was a strong element of everybody colluding, Marsh says, to get away with as much as possible. The name itself, Meatwhistle, was dead cheeky. The Wilkinsons claimed it was Chaucerian. Actually it’s slang for the male member.

  Each Sunday, the Meatwhistle collective staged a show, which might encompass anything from bands playing to short plays to comedy sketches. It was for one of these Sunday revues that Marsh formed his first group, the shock rock duo Musical Vomit. “I got the name from a Melody Maker live review of Suicide. To MM with its prog-rock attitude, Suicide were a sheer insult to your ears, so the reviewer described them as ‘musical vomit.’ I thought, ‘What a great name for a band.’ This guy Mark Civico sang and I’d go onstage with a guitar I could barely play, making percussive noise and feedback.” After a while Marsh left and Musical Vomit became closer to a proper band, albeit with a spoof rock edge and an ever shifting, expanding, and contracting lineup that included at various points Glenn Gregory, Paul Bower, and Martyn Ware.

  By this point, Meatwhistle was a cross between an “intellectual youth club” (as Ware puts it) and an experimental-pop laboratory, with an endless stream of imaginary bands that only existed for one night’s performance and had names like the Underpants, the Dead Daughters, and Androids Don’t Bleed. “The vibe was very New York Dolls, everyone dressing up madly and adopting fake names like Eddie Brando and Dick Velcro,” recalls Marsh. Musical Vomit, meanwhile, had graduated to performing intermittently before real audiences. With sick, humorous songs about masturbation or necrophilia, and stunts like the lead singer puking up vegetable soup, the band operated somewhere between Alice Cooper–style shock rock and the satirical-theatrical comedy rock of the Tubes. Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex later declared Musical Vomit, whom she’d seen in the midseventies, to be Britain’s very first punk band.

  Although they didn’t participate in Meatwhistle, Cabaret Voltaire sank many a pint with the Musical Vomit crew. One thing they had in common was a passion for Roxy Music. “That era in ’73 when Roxy were really at the cutting edge, that’s what really got us going,” says Richard H. Kirk. “We’d read Eno in interviews talking about how anyone can make music because you don’t need to learn an instrument, you can use a tape recorder or a synth.” The group were such fans that Kirk and fellow Cab Chris Watson even went to hear Eno speak at Bradford Art College, clutching a reel-to-reel tape of their early recordings. Unable to buttonhole him after the lecture, they cornered Eno in the men’s bathroom and pressed the demo reel into his apprehensive hands.

  Echoing Eno’s rhetoric, the group initially saw themselves less as a musical entity than as a “sound group,” says Kirk, doing a lo-fi, garage band version of musique concrète. “We started in late 1973 and initially there was a large group of people involved, a gang of mates interested in a bit of art and some films and a few strange books.” Most prominent among those “strange books” were the works of William S. Burroughs. In the early seventies, Burroughs was esoteric knowledge. His sixties notoriety had waned, he’d disappeared into reclusion, and his novels weren’t that easy to find. Cabaret Voltaire were especially taken with the cut-up techniques developed by Burroughs in tandem with Brion Gysin. These involved chopping up text or sound and recombining them in order to disrupt the linearity of thought, each snip/splice serving as a fissure through which “the future leaks,” as Burroughs and Gysin put it. You can hear another Burroughsian influence—the flat, matter-of-fact depiction of extreme and grotesque acts of sex and violence—in the spoken-word voice-overs that accompany some early Cabaret Voltaire pieces, such as the fetid imagery of “Bed Time Stories”: “With dogs that are trained to sniff out corpses/Eat my remains but leave my feet/I’ll hold a séance with Moroccan rapists/Masturbating end over end.”

  Kirk, who left art school after the first year, was a fan of the original anti-art art movement, Dada. The name Cabaret Voltaire came from the Zurich nightclub/salon where Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, et al. declaimed their sound poetry while World War I raged across Europe. Chris Watson, outwardly the most “normal” member of the group (his day job was working as a telephone engineer) was also a Dada fiend. He’d stumbled on a book about the movement as a teenager in 1970, an experience that “just hit me so hard it changed the way I’ve thought ever since.” Dada’s assault on meaning and taste, along with its collage techniques, fired the group’s imagination.

  By 1974, the gang had whittled down to Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Watson, whose attic became their sound lab. “We studiously went there Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and experimented for two hours or so, during which time we’d lay down maybe three or four compositions,” recalls Kirk. The trio recorded their abstract sound collages straight to tape, resulting in a massive archive, some of which was exhumed for Methodology ’74/’78. Attic Tapes;, a box set released in 2002. Creaky and homespun, the Cabs’ early stabs at concrète, such as “Dream Sequence Number Two Ethel’s Voice,” have an alien-yet-quaint quality, while more ferocious tracks like “Henderson Reversed Piece Two,” all rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheets of sound, recall avant-classical electronic composers such as Morton Subotnick.

  At this point, Cabaret Voltaire didn’t rese
mble a rock band in any respect. For starters, they didn’t have a drummer. “We didn’t want a rock guy showing off and doing drum solos,” says Kirk. “We wanted steady, mechanical repetition.” At a Sheffield music shop, “a dodgy-looking chap with a toupee” approached them and sold them a Farfisa drum machine he had at home. Guitar didn’t enter the picture until quite late. For a while they didn’t even have a proper synth, instead using tape loops and a primitive oscillator built by Watson. Kirk’s primary instrument was the clarinet, fed through effects to sound harshly processed and eerie, as on the psychotic-bucolic “Fuse Mountain,” which summons up the image of a circle of cross-legged hippies playing flutes on a mound of iron ore outside a derelict steel mill. Almost every sound source—the group’s voices, Mallinder’s bass, Watson’s organ, found sounds—was sent through ring modulators or a chain of effects devices, emerging warped and contaminated on the other side.

  In these first couple of years prior to punk, Cabaret Voltaire “never had any notion that we could ever make and release records,” says Kirk. “It was all done for our own amusement. We’d do mad stuff—drive around in a van with tape loops playing out the back, or go into pubs with a tape machine and play weird stuff—just trying to wind people up, really.” Provocation for its own sake was the name of the game. Cabaret Voltaire drew hard stares for the way they looked, too. They were fashion crazy, starting with the skinhead look in their early teens, progressing to glam, and finally developing a do-it-yourself style based around old clothes from charity thrift stores, which they’d customize with paint. Mallinder was the group’s ace stylist. “He had two rooms in his flat, one in which he lived and the other which served as his wardrobe,” recalls NME’s Sheffield correspondent Andy Gill (no relation to Gang of Four’s guitarist). As documented in the Sheffield zine Gun Rubber, a typical outfit for Mallinder might be gray pleated flannels, snakeskin shoes, a red Hawaiian shirt with the collar turned up, and a suede U.S. Air Force jacket. Looking as concertedly stylized as Mallinder did was a real statement at a time when most ordinary young men wore bell-bottom slacks and platforms while sporting sideburns and straggly shoulder-length hair.