The press release about the Wire/EMI split also announced an upcoming show at London’s Electric Ballroom in late February 1980. In a final impressive feat of perversity, instead of using this as a showcase to get another record deal, Wire decided to stage an absurdist extravaganza redolent of the dadaist cabaret revues of the early twentieth century. Each song in the virtually all-new set was accompanied by a daft spectacle. For “Everything’s Going to Be Nice,” two men tethered to an inflatable jet were dragged across the stage by a woman. Newman sang “We Meet Under Tables” dressed in a black knee-length veil. Lewis growled “Eels Sang Lino” accompanied and lit by an illuminated goose. During “Piano Tuner (Keep Strumming Those Guitars),” someone attacked a gas stove, while “Zegk Hoqp” featured twelve people with newspaper headdresses playing percussion. The audience, which contained a sizable contingent of people who still pined for Pink Flag–era punk ditties such as “12XU” and “Dot Dash,” were either baffled or chucked bottles at the stage. It was Wire’s last gig for five years. Without ever formally disbanding, the group dispersed. Newman pursued the melodic side of Wire across a series of solo albums. Meanwhile, Lewis and Gilbert unleashed a torrent of experimental albums and EPs under the names Dome, Cupol, and Gilbert/Lewis, their abstract sound paintings often paralleling Eno’s ambient series for the EG label.
SOME POSTPUNK AFICIONADOS consider Mission of Burma to be the American equivalent to Wire. Experimenting with song structure and sound texture with a similarly dry, methodical approach, the Boston band loved to play games with form and expectation. Unlike Wire or Talking Heads, MoB weren’t an art school band as such, but they were definitely arty (as songs such as “Max Ernst” and the Magritte-inspired “This Is Not a Photograph” indicate). Their conceptual bent came from a different kind of high-art background, classical music college.
In the midseventies, guitarist/vocalist Roger Miller had started a composition major at CalArts—“writing very complex piano scores and pieces for percussion trios,” he says—only to quit because “academia didn’t suit me.” By early 1978, Miller had moved to Boston, his plan being to do experimental work involving tape loops and prepared piano. Instead, he joined a New Wave band called Moving Parts. He hit it off with the group’s bassist Clint Conley, and the pair, keen to do more aggressive music, split off in 1979, recruiting drummer Peter Prescott, who’d previously played in the art rock band the Molls (in which the lead instrument was bassoon!), to form Mission of Burma.
When punk rock came along, Miller had been “just blown away by these people who could barely play guitar. I could play complex pieces by Schoenberg, but things like the Sex Pistols meant more to me than complexity.” But in Mission of Burma, the complexity slowly crept back in. “I think we’re just a closet prog-rock act that happened during punk,” laughs Conley. “We were attracted to the velocity and volume of punk, but at the same time Roger and I were both really attracted to composition.” As the raw blasting power of punk gave way to postpunk’s unlikely amalgams of minimalism and sophistication—Wire, Gang of Four, the No Wave movement, Pere Ubu, all admired by Mission of Burma—Miller’s training suddenly became relevant. The result was “avant-garde music you can shake your fist to,” as one critic famously put it. Live, Mission of Burma were an art attack, playing their music with dispassionate ferocity and at earsplitting volume.
Where Conley tended to write and sing the more melodic, shout-along tunes such as “Academy Fight Song” (MoB’s debut single) and “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” Miller’s tunes resembled partially dismantled anthems. The sheer noise assault of the MoB live experience seemed to signify rock, but their songs generally frustrated the simple rock-out impulse. This combination of visceral and cerebral meant that Mission of Burma were “sort of an acquired taste,” Conley told one interviewer. “We heard it over and over again throughout our career that people would see us the first time and it just wouldn’t make any sense at all. Listening to our live tapes, I know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it’s just like chewing gravel or a visit to the dentist’s office.” Miller recalls playing Danceteria in New York “with four hundred people in the room, and by the third song there’d be six left!” Says Conley, “I always felt like we were just interrupting people! They’d be dancing to the latest sounds from England, and we’d come on and make a big mess, and then they’d go back to their fun.”
After existing as a power trio for a brief period, Mission of Burma acquired a fourth member, an Eno-like figure named Martin Swope who intensified the group’s arty aura considerably. His role wasn’t to act as the group’s producer, though, but was closer to Eno’s position in early Roxy Music. Swope contributed tape treatments and phantom sound effects, both in the recording studio and at live shows, but he never appeared onstage with MoB, working instead at the venue’s mixing board. “What Martin did,” Prescott explained, “was tape something that was going on live, manipulate it, and send it back [into the sound system] as a sort of new instrument. You couldn’t predict exactly how it would sound, and that got to be the really fun thing.” Audience members would hear eerie sounds within the group’s onslaught of noise and be unable to work out which member of the visible trio was responsible. But other sound mirages were also being generated by the sheer volume at which the group played, and by Miller’s and Conley’s fondness for open tunings. “Just between the way Clint played bass, the wash of Pete’s cymbals, and my harmonics, you could hear new melodies in there,” says Miller.
In his classic book Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Joe Carducci wrote about how he “never felt MoB were truly a contemporary band,” that underneath the postpunk trappings, they were a throwback to psychedelia. Indeed, as a teenager at the end of the sixties, Miller had played with his brother in Sproton Layer, a band heavily influenced by Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd, while the early seventies saw him exploring free jazz and drumming in the post-psychedelic experimental band Destroy All Monsters. The collision of all these freak-rock influences with the more “dry” postpunk sensibility explains the conflicted quality of the Mission of Burma experience. The music invites the listener to lose himself in its headfuck noise, but this flip-your-wig impulse is checked by the Gang of Four/Wire–like qualities of tension and rigor.
Mission of Burma’s six-song EP Signals, Calls, and Marches, released in 1981, didn’t really capture the Rorschach rush of the band’s live fury. Thanks to its typically postpunk production (dry and clean), Signals came out “kind of arid, it just didn’t have the blood and guts of when we played live,” says Conley. The artwork exhibited significant postpunk damage, too. The cover was originally intended to be raw cardboard, the ultimate in minimalism, but for technical reasons, they used a photograph of cardboard, which actually made it even more conceptual. The lyric sheet took all the words used in the songs and arranged them in alphabetical order.
Mission of Burma made good on Signals’s sonic deficits with their first album, Vs., which was recorded live in the studio. “We’d do, like, short sets, five songs in a row, over and over, and gradually weeded out the best takes,” recalls Miller. It captured the overwhelming quality of Burma onstage, the clangor and barely controlled chaos. But although the album was critically acclaimed, Mission of Burma continued to have problems expanding their audience. Their noise deluge was mind-blowing, but the group didn’t traffic in the sort of period trappings (sonic or sartorial) that would make them fit the neopsychedelic scene. Their earlier singles had been well produced enough to become college radio favorites, but Vs. was too much of an assault. In 1983, they called it a day, mainly because of Miller’s worsening tinnitus condition, but also because they felt like they were banging their heads against a wall. Still, in their brief existence, MoB did establish an enduring following of brainiac postpunkers. This cult stature continued to accumulate after their demise to the point where, some twenty years after splitting up, the group re-formed and toured, playing to huge, fervent audiences that far surpassed anything they�
��d experienced the first time around, and as a result recorded a brand-new studio album, 2004’s ONoffON. At roughly the same time as MoB’s return to the stage, Wire (who’d already reunited once already, in 1985, to make a series of poppy albums) re-formed again and unleashed 2002’s Read & Burn. This Pink Flag–redux EP unloosed a scorching, almost vindictive blast of noise that made most of the neopunk then being made by kids thirty years Wire’s junior look hopelessly feeble.
CHAPTER 11
MESSTHETICS:
THE LONDON VANGUARD
YOU STEP INTO THE ROOM and immediately stumble against a typewriter lurking on the dingy brown carpet. A small tower of books perches precariously on top of the machine. Next to it lays a half-drunk mug of coffee, its surface coated with a film of green-gray mold. Jutting stacks of pamphlets, newspapers, and academic paperbacks sprawl across every available surface—TV, mantelpiece, even the top of the gas heater—while the bookshelves look close to collapsing. On the wall above the fireplace, poking through an overlapping foliage of gig flyers and activist leaflets, there’s a seven-inch single and a framed hammer and sickle with a used teabag dangling irreverently off the blade. And there’s…hang on a second. Jesus! What’s that dreadful smell in here?
On the front cover of Scritti Politti’s 1979 EP 4 A Sides, there’s a photograph of the living room at their squalid squat in Camden, North London. It’s a snapshot of a lifestyle: theory-addled, amphetamine-stoked conversations raging until the crack of dawn, fevered debates about the radical potentials and counterrevolutionary pitfalls of popular music, punctuated by visits to illegal reggae parties and postpunk gigs at the Cryptic One Club. The group’s home and headquarters at 1 Carol Street was the site of an outlandish experiment in rock. Scritti conceived of itself as an anonymous collective involving not just the three band members but also nonmusicians whose participation might be “all talk” but nonetheless counted as a vital contribution. The core band consisted of singer/guitarist Green, drummer Tom Morley, and bassist Nial Jinks, but the total membership of the collective, which regularly gathered for formal meetings, was as high as twenty. “The idea is that substantial decisions about what the group is doing are made by a larger number of people than actually pick up instruments at present,” Green told one fanzine. Scritti aren’t the only band as commune in rock history (other examples include Jefferson Airplane, Faust, Amon Düül, and U.K. anarchopunks Crass) but the idea of a group where players were outnumbered by nonmusicians was unique.
Growing up in Wales, fifteen-year-old Green (then still using his surname, Gartside) and his school friend Nial Jinks had tried to form a branch of the Young Communist League. A few years later, Green studied art at Leeds Polytechnic at a time when conceptualist approaches were in the ascendant. But this brand of conceptualism was starkly different from the playful, process-oriented art school sensibility that informed Wire and Talking Heads. Influenced, like his Leeds contemporaries Gang of Four and the Mekons, by Art and Language’s hard-core critical sensibility, Green would come to think of that style of post-Eno art punk as “formalism,” decadent and disengaged, arty for artiness’s sake. Scritti had a political motivation for messing with musical structures. They wanted to create revolutionary consciousness through the radicalization of form as much as through their politically radical lyrical content.
Soon after arriving at Leeds Poly, Green had stopped painting in favor of producing only writing. This was conceptualism’s next step, keeping the concepts and ditching the actual artistic practice, the idea being that before you created anything, you really ought to work out what was actually valid. Initially, Green had been attracted to Leeds Poly by its free-for-all spirit and performance art, but now he found this self-indulgent and lacking in theoretical grounding. Provocatively, he started a kind of countercurriculum within the art department, a popular lecture series involving talks from members of Art and Language. “I was encouraging all these people to come and basically say what was going on in our faculty was a crock of shit and everybody was wasting their time,” Green chuckles.
This kind of combative meta-awareness infused the whole Scritti project. Scritti latched on to theory as a crucial tool for navigating the quandaries of “after-punk.” What “ways of going on” (as Green liked to phrase it) are misguided or counterproductive? This is where the nonmusician members—who coalesced around the group after Scritti moved down to London—played their role, forming a buzzing theory hive that subjected “rock discourse” to rigorous scrutiny, interrogating all its assumptions and conventions.
Fans of traditional English music, Green and Jinks had dabbled with playing “jigs and reels,” the singer recalls, but after the “Damascene moment” of seeing 1977’s Anarchy Tour when it reached Leeds, Green persuaded Jinks to abandon his fiddle for an electric bass and convinced their friend Tom Morley to blow the rest of his student grant on a drum kit. Although it was the Anarchy Tour bands such as the Clash that had inspired Scritti’s formation, Green and his cohorts soon became disillusioned by what they saw as the failure of the first-wave punk groups. In Scritti’s debut single, “Skank Bloc Bologna,” there’s a brief, sardonic allusion to the Clash’s idea of themselves as the “Magnificent Seven.” Green told one fanzine about how he read an interview with the Clash in which they compared themselves to the posse of vigilante heroes in the famed Western, “a bunch of outlaws that would come into town to put everything to rights.” The last verse of “Skank Bloc Bologna,” he explained, punctured this “silly over-romanticized notion” of the rock group as “macho gunslingers, the Robin Hoods of today.” The sound of “Skank Bloc Bologna” is a long way from the guerrilla bluster of the Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope, also released in the fall of 1978. The loping, white-reggae groove of the bass and drums, overlaid by Green’s plangent guitar (closer to folk rock than punk rock), sounds dejected rather than martial.
As for the song’s mysterious title, the “Skank” refers to the dub reggae that was the constant soundtrack to life in the Scritti squat. The “Bloc” alludes to a concept invented by one of Scritti’s favorite neo-Marxist theorists, Gramsci, the notion of the “historic bloc,” an alliance of oppressed classes uniting to overturn the existing order and overhaul the dominant, “commonsense” worldview of what’s natural, ordained, even possible. Revolution, for Gramsci, meant creating a new reality.
The “Bologna” in the title is another story. It’s often said that in Italy 1968 never ended. Unlike in other countries, that year’s political unrest didn’t subside but continued spasmodically through the end of the seventies, with wildcat strikes and industrial sabotage. Students seized control of universities, squatters occupied buildings, and an anarcho-surrealist tribe called the Metropolitan Indians staged mass shoplifting raids at luxury stores. All this insurgency was aimed as much against Italy’s established political Left (at its peak, Italy’s Communist Party controlled many major cities in the industrial North) as it was against conservatives. In early 1977, Bologna’s Communist mayor lost control of the city to a riotous coalition of autonomists and counterculture radicals. This “Bloc” of squatters, feminists, gays, students, nonunionized workers, and the semiemployed developed an ad hoc form of postpolitical politics. Self-organized and carnivalesque, il Movimento—as it was dubbed—aimed not to seize power but to smash it altogether, leaving everybody and nobody in charge. The Bologna riots of 1977 were as much a form of cultural revolt as a political uprising, what Italy had in lieu of punk, some say. But the mayor denounced the rioters as bohemian nihilists and enemies of the true proletariat and after several weeks called in armored cars to crush the insurrection.
The title “Skank Bloc Bologna” seems to imagine the Scritti squat as an autonome cell, the germ of a future Movimento Inglesi. Yet the actual tone of the song is desolate. The verses zoom in on a girl adrift. The hapless, literally hopeless product of bad education and stifled imagination, she has no sense that change is even possible. Green sounds like he’s fighting his own desp
air. In sleepy London town, revolution seems a long way off. But even if the girl doesn’t know it, “Something in Italy/Is keeping us all alive.” Closer to home there’s “the magnificent six” (the number in the Scritti collective at that point). With their Carol Street schemes and dreams, “They’re working on a notion and they’re working on a hope/A Euro vision and a skanking scope.”
Inspired by the Desperate Bicycles, Scritti grubbed together the money to record “Skank” and two B-sides and, with financial help from Rough Trade, released it on their own St. Pancras label. On the photocopied sleeve they went one better than the Desps in the demystification stakes, itemizing the complete costs of recording, mastering, pressing, printing the labels, etc., and even listing contact numbers for companies who provided these services. Released in autumn of 1978, “Skank” sold out its first pressing of 2,500 quickly, thanks partly to the support of Radio One’s John Peel, and eventually moved around 15,000 copies. The melody’s off-kilter beauty and the plaintive melancholy of Green’s singing (indebted to the “English soul” of Robert Wyatt), along with the intrigue of the lyrics and that cryptic title, captured the imagination. Even the group’s name, a corruption of the title of a book by Gramsci, stood out for its sheer sound, “scrit-tee po-littee,” brittle and chiming, just like the upward-spiraling peals of lead guitar that pierce “Skank Bloc Bologna.” It didn’t hurt that Scritti looked good, too. Tom the drummer had blond dreadlocks (at that time a striking fashion statement) while pretty boy Green was the incarnation of intellectual glamour—thin and frail looking in an oversize sweater, with kohl pencil etched around his blazing eyes.
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