In America, attitudes toward synths were even more polarized. For many heavy-metal fans, keyboards were innately queer, their presence immediately signifying the ruination of “real” metal. For other Americans, being into “English haircut bands” and “art fag” music served as an empowering act of cultural treason. If you grew up feeling different in an American high school during the eighties, surrounded by Mötley Crüe fans, with the only homegrown underground being hardcore punk’s alterna-jock muscularity, then the sole alternative was to look toward England and to become a fan of groups such as Depeche Mode. Since David Bowie’s emergence, if not earlier, there was a real sense in which “English” connoted “gay” in the American rock imagination. This explains not just Anglophobia but Anglophilia, too. For those alienated by the overbearing masculinity of mainstream American rock, England beckons as an imaginary haven, a utopia of androgyny. In the early eighties, gay or sexually ambiguous boys, plus a good number of girls, were attracted to British electropop, not least because the bands were generally full of pretty boys wearing makeup.
Japan could have been the ultimate Anglo art fag nightmare as far as heartland rockers were concerned. Yet far from living in some paradise for dandy aesthetes and members of the third gender, Japan were rebelling against the mundane realities of urban Britain, which could be just as hostile to the art minded and androgynous as those of any blue-collar town in America. The son of a rat catcher, singer David Sylvian grew up in dreary Catford on the edge of southeast London. “It was disguise, a mask to hide behind,” Sylvian said of his white-makeup face and platinum-blond wedge-cut hair. “The music was a mask as well. It says nothing about how I was, other than I was hiding, trying desperately to be anything but myself. Just because I thought that was the only way I could survive.” Even the name Sylvian was masquerade, inspired by Syl Sylvain of the cross-dressing New York Dolls. The singer’s real surname, Batt, couldn’t have been less exotic or more pathetically English. His brother Steve, who played drums in Japan, called himself Steve Jansen, after Dolls singer David Johansen.
Japan arrived on the U.K. music scene just in time for punk, which transformed everything to their disadvantage. The music press ridiculed them as behind-the-curve glamsters and mocked Sylvian’s croon as second-rate Bryan Ferry. Gradually, Japan developed an arresting and distinctive post-Roxy sound built around exotic synth textures and Mick Karn’s languid fretless bass. Japan’s records sounded as exquisite as Sylvian and his bandmates looked. In performance, the singer mesmerized listeners with his excessive poise and composure, a statuesque quality that carried through to his ultrastylized vocals and the immaculately made-up blank white facade of his face. Simon Frith could have been talking about Sylvian when he wrote about Bowie’s “art of posing.” He “wasn’t sexy like most pop idols. His voice and body were aesthetic not sensual objects; he expressed semi-detached bedroom fantasies, boys’ arty dreams…an individual grace that showed up everyone else as clods.”
As expressed most thoroughly in the music and life of Bryan Ferry, the art rock dream is achieving an aristocratic existence, dedicated to beauty: collecting and cherishing antiques and objets d’art, visiting exotic places, feasting your eyes. There’s a hierarchic impulse underlying art rock’s obsession with distinction and perfection, and this often takes on an unnerving right-wing flavor. Following in Bowie’s dandy footsteps, Japan exhibited a fascination for the former Axis powers—in songs like “Suburban Berlin,” “Nightporter” (inspired by the Dirk Bogarde as Nazi-in-hiding movie), and the name Japan itself—and for other well-ordered societies. They wrote a song called “Communist China” and another called “Rhodesia,” surely the only pop tune ever written about this postcolonial white-power pariah of the civilized world!
Too refined for the crass self-mythologization of New Romanticism, Japan nonetheless benefited as pop culture began to shift in a neoglam direction. Almost overnight, they became incredibly hip. Critical praise began to accumulate around the “Art of Parties” single, turning into an avalanche for Tin Drum, a loose concept album about Mao’s China. “Ghosts,” an electronic ballad eerily shaded with flittering synths but devoid of a beat or bassline, went Top 10, setting up a compelling Top of the Pops appearance, with the still, pale Sylvian drawing the world into his hush.
“Too fragile to fuck” is how Paul Morley described Sylvian. Soft Cell’s Marc Almond was fragile, too, but in a different way: wonderfully uncool and hyperemotional. His vocal pitch wavered, the intonation was often excessive, but Almond’s all too human passion burst through. Like the League, Soft Cell had no truck with the we-are-robots shtick of first-wave electropop. Their songs nestled in the gap between glitzy dreams and squalid English realities. “I like to mix personal experiences with film images and then exaggerate them,” Almond declared.
Almond was studying art at Leeds Polytechnic when he met fellow student David Ball, initially enlisting him to provide the soundtrack for Almond’s cabaret-like art performances. Although Ball played Soft Cell’s synths, it was Almond who was the real scholar of electronic music. The duo’s music emerged from the collision of Almond’s electronic taste and Ball’s background as a fan of Northern soul and orchestrated sixties pop such as Burt Bacharach. Almond deejayed synthetic dance pop at the Leeds Warehouse nightclub, the epicenter of the Leeds branch of the Futurist/New Romantic scene. He particularly loved Suicide, especially the neon-twinkling textures of the duo’s second album, which was more lushly textured and synthetic than their classic lo-fi debut. Soft Cell essentially transposed Suicide’s glamorous and dirty New York vibe to provincial England. “Bedsitter,” the group’s second huge U.K. hit, documented Almond’s lifestyle, alternating between his cramped flat in Leeds’s red-light district and the hollow glitz of the New Romantic fantasy as enacted weekly at the Warehouse club. He told Sounds, “I used to wonder about these really glamorous people: what do they look like doing the dishes?” For their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Soft Cell voyaged to New York to soak up the scuzz, recording songs such as “Seedy Films” and “Sex Dwarf” in a studio near Times Square. If that first album played up the sleaze to an almost cartoonish degree, the 1983 follow-up, The Art of Falling Apart, deepened Almond’s obsession with beautiful losers into a harrowed empathy for the broken and discarded of this world.
Innocuous and innocent, Depeche Mode initially seemed like the antithesis of Soft Cell. Originally a guitar group made up of punk fans, they’d bought synths, built up a songbook of winsome and dinky-sounding electropop ditties, and shunned major-label offers in favor of a 50/50 profit-splitting deal with Mute Records. Their jaunty singles “New Life” and “Just Can’t Get Enough” raced up the charts and won them a teenybop following. Gradually, over the course of eighteen months or so, the music made by the pretty boys from the suburban town of Basildon started to sound more haunting. Martin Gore, the main songwriter, took to wearing a leather skirt and displayed a keen interest in all things transgressive. Depeche Mode also developed a burgeoning political consciousness that was unusual in the realm of synthpop.
The first sign of this newly committed Depeche came with the 1983 single “Everything Counts,” which combined hard electro beats, wisps of bleak melody, and clumsy if heartfelt anti-Thatcher sentiments: “The grabbing hands grab all they can…It’s a competitive world.” It was their biggest hit to date. The accompanying album, Construction Time Again, featured a hammer, symbolic of workers’ power, on its cover. Over the next year, Depeche Mode almost methodically worked their way through the big issues. “Love in Itself” was a Gang of Four–style critique of romantic love as distraction/consolation for life in an unjust world: “There was a time when all of my mind was love/Now I find that most of the time/Love’s not enough, in itself.” “People Are People,” another big hit in both the U.K. and America, dealt with racism, homophobia, and every other kind of bigotry and intolerance. Genuinely pained perplexity seared through the painful doggerel of “People are people so why shoul
d it be/You and I should get along so awfully?” “Blasphemous Rumours” lugubriously accused God of having “a sick sense of humor.” The pervy pop smash “Master and Servant” came adorned with metal-bashing noises (very chic thanks to the German outfit Einstürzende Neubauten). Gore had been exposed to Neubauten’s “steel symphonies” and power-tool performances during a sojourn in Berlin, where he’d explored the city’s seedy demimonde of S&M and bondage clubs—an inspiration for “Master and Servant.” But the song also contained a political resonance, in the sly line “forget all about equality.”
Depeche Mode had originally been attracted to Mute because of Daniel Miller’s roster of arty electronic weirdos such as Fad Gadget and the ultraintense German band Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (which translates as “German American Friendship”). Like Soft Cell, D.A.F. were art school boys with a kinky homoerotic image and a post-Moroder pulse-disco sound. Daniel Miller loved the fact that “they weren’t relying on past rock traditions at all, which is the criterion of what goes on Mute.” Renegades against what singer Gabi Delgado called “Anglo-American pop imperialism,” D.A.F.’s early sound was jagged and chaotic, a real electropunk assault. “They were part of a small but active Düsseldorf scene, little clubs and performance art things,” recalls Miller. “Robert Görl was an electronic musician’s dream of a drummer, because he was so minimal. The guttural way Gabi sang sounded very threatening.” The group moved to London and recorded a brilliant and sinister second album for Mute, Die Kleinen und die Bosen [The Small and the Evil]. After its release, the group shrank down to just Delgado and Görl, who stripped D.A.F.’s music down to a brutalist Eurodisco, signed to Virgin, and released a staggering trilogy of albums that made them critical darlings in the U.K. and actual pop stars in Germany.
The new streamlined D.A.F. espoused techno-primitivism. “Most bands get a synthesizer and their first idea is to tune it!” Görl told Melody Maker. “They want a clean normal sound. They don’t work with the power you get from a synthesizer…. We want to bring together this high technique with body power so you have the past time mixed with the future.” Delgado exalted disco as “body music” and rejected rock rhythms as “too boring and static….[D.A.F.’s] music is very mighty.” D.A.F.’s cult of muscularity strayed into that ambiguous zone where fascist-leaning futurism and communist-leaning constructivism collide in an aestheticization of physical perfection and physical force. “They were influenced by a group of artists known as Die Junge Wilden [the Young Wild],” says Chris Bohn, the NME journalist who championed D.A.F. and other early eighties German art punk groups such as Neubauten. “They were into deliberately taunting the German mediacracy by tackling Nazi and sex taboos head on, part of the confrontation being in the seemingly ambiguous use of Nazi imagery/references.” D.A.F. broached this dodgy terrain with songs such as “Der Mussolini” with its chorus of “Dance der Mussolini/Dance der Adolf Hitler.”
“Der Mussolini” and their first Virgin album, Alles Ist Gut [All Is Good], sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Germany in 1981, making D.A.F. the fifth-biggest German-speaking pop group in the country and the focus of much media controversy. Even Delgado’s sinister vocal style seemed too evocative of Germany’s recent past, as he himself acknowledged. “The singing isn’t like rock ’n’ roll or pop singing. It’s sometimes like in a Hitler speech, not a Nazi thing, but it’s in the German character, that crack! crack! crack! way of speaking.” For D.A.F., German’s precise speech rhythms fit better with their strict rhythmic regime of sequenced synth pulses. English sounded too relaxed.
Far from being fascists, though, D.A.F. were erotic renegades in the tradition of Genet, de Sade, and Bataille. They flirted with forbidden imagery only because they refused to recognize any taboos. Delgado was fascinated with sadomasochism and other forms of fetishistic sexuality deemed “perverse” because they’re unconnected to reproduction. “Lust is always non-productive,” he proclaimed. “If you go over the top in lovemaking it gets too much and you are no more able to work. And criminals are obviously anti-social. I’m really interested in these things that are not fulfilling economic functions.” Gold und Liebe [Gold and Love], the second Virgin album, touched on an alchemical theme, the notion that instead of chasing the profane gold of material wealth, the true quest is for gold of the spirit. It was D.A.F., not Spandau Ballet, who were the real New Romantics, from their un-American sound (they inspired a whole genre of music called Electronic Body Music) to their cult of youth, evident in lyrics such as “You are beautiful and young and strong/Run to waste your youth.”
The irony of Anglo-Euro synthpop is that for all its whiteness(D.A.F. loved disco, but prided themselves on not sounding black) it had a huge impact on black America. D.A.F. and their offshoot group Liaisons Dangereuses influenced the embryonic black electronic sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno, while Kraftwerk almost single-handedly inspired New York electro. “Whenever we did anything that moved toward mainstream American success, it was notable that it had close connections with the black music market,” says Bob Last. “Like Human League’s success with Dare in America, a crucial part of that was black radio stations in New York picking up on the record.”
Dare’s fat synth bass and crisp Linn drumbeats paralleled the electrofunk music played on New York stations like Kiss, where tracks were undergoing radical remixing and being montaged into seamless segues that lasted half an hour or longer. Already aware of remixing’s potential, Martin Rushent introduced a dublike spaciousness to records by the Human League and his other protégés, Altered Images. Now he suggested making an instrumental version of Dare, hoping to showcase his production skills to the hilt and establish a new benchmark for electronic dance pop.
Credited to the League Unlimited Orchestra—a cute nod to Barry White’s instrumental project, the Love Unlimited Orchestra—Love and Dancing was released in June 1982 at a special cheap price (the band didn’t want to rip off the fans). The back cover pointedly depicted the entire team behind the making of Dare, with photos of Rushent, studio engineer Dave Allen, even sleeve designer Ken Ansell, as well as the band members. “They had to have a picture of me, I did the whole thing on my own!” chuckles Rushent. “But I never got any writing royalties on it. In retrospect I should have.”
A masterpiece of mixing-board wizardry, Love and Dancing took thousands of man-hours to assemble. Rushent created complicated vocal stutter effects by hand, cutting up tiny bits of tape and then “gluing them together until you’d got that stuttering ‘t-t-t-t’ effect.” By the end of the process, the master tape of Love and Dancing contained so many splices—2,200 main edits, and around 400 further small edits—that it was dangerously close to disintegration. “You couldn’t fast-forward it or fast-rewind it, so the first thing I did was copy the album onto another tape before the original master fell apart.” Making Love and Dancing, says Rushent, “was the most creative experience I’ve ever had in my life, and something that’s been very difficult to top. That may be why I gave up record production not so long afterwards. It’s like those astronauts who go to the moon and come back and go a bit loopy. You’ve walked on the moon, what you gonna do now?”
The Human League, too, were on top of the world and feeling disoriented. “Almost the worst days of our lives have been when we’ve been told we’re number one,” says Oakey. “I remember smashing the phone after I was told ‘Don’t You Want Me’ had reached number one in America. It’s so much to live up to. And when you’re number one nobody really cares about you anymore. Everyone and their grandma knows about you, so no one wants to wear your badges anymore.”
By the end of 1982, the deluge of synthpop groups—Brits like Thomas Dolby, Eurythmics, Blancmange, Tears For Fears, Kajagoogoo, plus a few American outfits, too, such as Berlin and Our Daughter’s Wedding—had diluted the impact of electronics. Soft Cell’s David Ball correctly predicted an antisynth backlash in response to the surplus of weak electropop. In a weird twist, the only way forward for pione
ers such as Soft Cell and the Human League was to start incorporating traditional instruments into their sound. Accordingly, the Human League’s big post-Dare hit single, “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” discreetly featured some electric guitar, signaling the abandonment of the band’s synths-only policy. It was the end of an era.
CHAPTER 19
PLAY TO WIN:
THE PIONEERS OF NEW POP
POSTPUNK NEARLY KILLED GREEN. Or at least that’s what it felt like. “It was the whole ambulance with the sirens going to hospital thing,” Green recalls, queasily, of that night in early 1980 when he collapsed with what appeared to be a heart attack. Scritti Politti had played Brighton in support of Gang of Four. In a 1982 Sounds feature, Simon Dwyer, a journalist friend of Scritti’s, recalled the aftermath of the gig. “The group and I succumbed to heavy drink and heavy conversation and slept on a friend’s floor. All except for Green, who was still asking for pills of a dubious nature well into the morning. A few hours later, Green lay seriously ill in hospital.” It turned out not to be a coronary but a literally crippling anxiety attack, a psychosomatic paralysis that left him incapable of speech for a terrifying four hours.
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 44
