Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  Like B.E.F., ABC aimed to make music of quality and distinction. Lexicon was cunningly crafted to sound like no expense had been spared. It was widely assumed to be fully orchestrated, but in fact, strings were only used on four tracks. ABC also brought in appropriately deluxe sartorial signifiers such as tuxedos, bow ties, and gold lamé suits. “We wanted to look like we came from Vegas, so we went to Carnaby Street and hired this very camp tailor who used to make clothes for Marc Bolan,” recalls Fry. “It’s 1982, so he probably hadn’t been asked to make a gold lamé suit for nearly a decade.” For the cover photographs, ABC wanted the rich tones of “a Powell and Pressburger movie, where the color red is very red. Steve and Mark had decided that I should be like a character. ‘The album’s a movie and you’re the star.’”

  The front cover of the album depicted Martin Fry as the dashing hero of a crime melodrama, brandishing a revolver, a fainting damsel clasped in his other arm. Flip to the back of the record, and the mise-en-scène is revealed as staged. We see the backroom people behind the theatrical spectacle, as played by the other members of ABC: the prompter reading from a script, a fatigued stagehand with a cigarette tucked behind the ear, a flunky with a bouquet ready for the leading lady. It was all decidedly Brechtian.

  Indeed, for all the reinvocation of romance and Hollywood glamour, ABC deep down retained that signature postpunk wariness about love, love songs, and the unrealistic dreams propagated by pop. In a weird way, they, too, resembled Gang of Four. Tellingly, ABC’s manager Rob Warr was not only Bob Last’s partner, but had previously managed Gang of Four during the Entertainment! era. “Date Stamp,” at once the wittiest and most poignant song on Lexicon, recalled the imagery of “Damaged Goods,” as brokenhearted Fry is “looking for a girl that meets supply with demand.” In a world where “love has no guarantee,” he’s a discarded commodity whose sell-by date has expired. “All of My Heart,” ABC’s third Top 10 single in a row, sounded sickly sweet but its sentiments rivaled “Love Like Anthrax” in their bracing unsentimentality. “It surprises me when people pin a Valentino tag on the group when a lot of the songs were out to demolish the power of love,” Fry told The Face. “‘All of My Heart,’ for me, was saying, ‘Skip the hearts and flowers and wash your hands of the whole sentimental glop,’ you know?”

  Yet for all the clever cynicism, at the core of the record was the real pain of Martin Fry, disillusioned lover. His genuine bitterness was the reason Lexicon worked. “We wanted the songs to be romantic in the traditional sense, but there’s also a sinister edge,” says Fry. “‘Poison Arrow’ is about falling in love but also how it kicks you in the teeth.” And Fry had been kicked in the teeth. “Lexicon is all about Martin getting dumped by this specific girl,” says Horn. “All of the songs are about that anger and outrage he felt. And on ‘The Look of Love,’ when Martin sings, ‘When the girl has left you out on the table’ and then there’s a girl going, ‘Goodbye!,’ well, that’s the girl. It was my suggestion—‘Why don’t we get the actual girl that you’ve wrote these songs for in to do the vocal?’ It was very funny!”

  The triumph of Lexicon lay in the slight gap between Fry’s aspirations and his ability. Like Dexys’ Kevin Rowland, he wasn’t quite a natural singer. His range was limited, his falsetto slightly strained. Nor did Fry have the innate panache to fully play the debonair role he’d cast himself in. His moves weren’t slick, and his acne scars were visible through the makeup. Fry willed himself to be a star. “I am a punk, I always have been and I always will be,” he once said. “What Fry took from punk was the zeal,” says Paul Morley, ABC’s champion at NME. “ABC couldn’t have happened without punk because that gave people the possibility of creating their own master plans and manifestos.”

  ABC were also a brilliant example of music as “active criticism.” Fry had in fact started out as a fanzine writer. When he went to interview Vice Versa for his zine Modern Drugs, the group was so impressed that they offered him a position in the band. A few years later, ABC’s rhetoric would massively influence the music press’s shift to New Pop ideas. In a sense, ABC helped create the critical climate that would embrace them. They repaid the compliments, taking the title The Lexicon of Love from the headline of Ian Penman’s NME review of an ABC show, and giving Morley a cameo role in the Edwardian fantasia video for “The Look of Love.”

  At the end of 1982, ABC could look back on a year of grand achievements. The record of the summer, Lexicon was number one for a month and went platinum in the U.K. There’d been a huge showbiz-style tour. They were working on the first ABC movie, Mantrap, directed by Julien Temple of Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle fame. They’d even had a Top 20 hit in America. ABC had talked big, but, unlike New Pop fellow travelers B.E.F. and Scritti, they’d surpassed their own hype. In the process, ABC set the bar impossibly high for their peers.

  CHAPTER 20

  NEW GOLD DREAMS 81–82–83–84:

  NEW POP’S PEAK, THE SECOND BRITISH INVASION OF AMERICA, AND THE RISE OF MTV

  THE TRUE SIGN that you’re living through a golden age is the feeling that it’s never going to end. There’s no earthly reason why it should stop. It’s an illusion, of course, like the first swoony rush of falling in love, but that’s how it felt to be young, British, and besotted with pop music in 1982.

  No longer wishful thinking on the part of overexcited journalists, New Pop was reality, rampaging over the surfaces of everyday life in a way that would have seemed unthinkable a year earlier. The turning point came with the Human League’s Christmas 1981 number one hit, “Don’t You Want Me,” which later would top the American charts, too. Alongside Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and ABC’s “The Look of Love,” both big Billboard hits, “Don’t You Want Me” heralded a British invasion of America. In the United States, the New Pop groups took almost a year to establish a stranglehold on the mainstream, but in the U.K.—so much smaller and more concentrated in terms of radio, TV, and media—the regime change was instantaneous. In the early months of ’82, it felt as if an invisible switch had been pulled and the floodgates opened to irrigate the charts with a rejuvenating gush of color, exuberance, and optimism, a flood that washed away all the stodgy ’70s leftovers and installed in their places a host of fresh-faced pretenders: Altered Images, Haircut 100, the Associates, Depeche Mode, ABC, Bow Wow Wow, Japan, Fun Boy Three, New Order, and more.

  Of them all, the one group that epitomized the New Pop dream of a chart-busting music that combined pop’s flash with postpunk’s perplexity was the Associates. Fittingly, their all too brief reign as U.K. chart stars (lasting just nine months, February ’82 to September ’82) coincided with New Pop’s absolute zenith. At the start of 1982, they surely seemed like unlikely contenders. The gambit of releasing six singles in swift succession during 1981 earned them some nice critical notices, but not one of their indie releases dented the charts. Still, Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine had several aces up their sleeves, most notably an old song called “Party Fears Two,” which became their first single after signing a new deal with a major label, WEA.

  When the Associates appeared on Top of the Pops to lip-synch “Party Fears Two” in February 1982 they were totally unknown to most viewers. The song was enchanting, from the sunshafts-peeking-through-clouds intro to the blithe, bittersweet piano refrain to the cold smolder of Mackenzie’s voice, and the mysterious lyrics, seemingly fractured snapshots of a breakup in progress, were intriguing. But what really transfixed the ambushed TOTP viewers was the way Billy moved (at one point he sashayed backward!), the impossible panache of the man. “Party Fears” shot into the Top 10 the following week. A few months later the Associates scored another big hit with “Club Country,” all Chic-gone-Nordic rhythm guitar and nervous, scurrying disco bass. The song was a blistering rebuke to the poseurs of New Romanticism, its lyrics honing right in on the hollow heart of the in crowd: “If we stick around/We’re sure to be looked down upon.” In the TOTP appearance for “Club Country,” Rankine strummed a chocolate gu
itar (specially made by Harrods for six hundred pounds), which he fed to the studio audience during the song’s second verse.

  A similar spirit of lunatic extravagance suffused Sulk, the Associates’ second “proper” album, which was released in May 1982. Saturated with textures, overdubbed to the hilt, Sulk sounds sumptuous. “When I was younger I went into my mother’s sewing box, and beneath the balls of ordinary red or black or white thread, there’d be this thick, luxuriant embroidery thread,” recalls Rankine. “Purples, turquoises, lapis lazuli colors. That’s what I wanted sound-wise for Sulk, that vibrancy, that luxuriance of color.” Throughout the recording process, Mackenzie also implored producer Mike Hedges to “make it sound expensive.” This opulence carried through to the third Associates hit of 1982, “18 Carat Love Affair,” from its title to the picture on the single’s sleeve, in which Mackenzie, naked, lies facedown on a marble floor, while pearls and precious stones are poured over his body by a beautiful girl clad in a Burberry raincoat.

  Sulk was the Associates’ injecting all the voluptuous disorientation of psychedelic experience into pop. The album’s two standouts are “No”—a tormented ballad with a stately Russian melody and helium-high backing vocals oozing like a ghostly mist—and the anxiously euphoric “Skipping,” which contains Mackenzie’s most out-there vocal performance ever, as well as some of the duo’s daftest lyrics (“Ripping ropes from the Belgian wharf’s/Breathless beauxillous griffin once removed seemed dwarfed”). Like the Beatles circa “I Am the Walrus” or Brian Wilson during the Smile sessions, the group used all kinds of found sounds and scrap metal percussion. The snap-crackle-pop of John Murphy’s firework drums—played on a drum kit composed entirely of snares—threads the album. Mackenzie actually described the Sulk sound as “Abba on acid.” Says Rankine, “Bill was always out on a limb, telling the producer, Mike Hedges, to ‘make it sound like it’s inside a sarcophagus’ or, ‘make it sound like grass’”

  Sulk was hugely successful, but when “18 Carat Love Affair” came to a halt just outside the Top 20, it seemed that normality was reasserting itself. Something so freakish and excessive as the Associates was never meant to be allowed across pop’s threshold. At this point, a perverse, self-destructive instinct seemed to take hold of Mackenzie. On the eve of a major U.K. tour, he bailed out due to a combination of stage fright and the terror of being sucked into the rockbiz machine. Rankine, eager to break America, where huge sums were being offered by labels such as Sire, was furious, and quit the band in October. Snatching defeat from the jaws of triumph, the Associates became one of the great, tantalizing should-have-beens of British pop.

  Two other Scottish groups, Altered Images and Simple Minds, played a large role in New Pop’s wonder year. Altered Images’ “Happy Birthday,” produced by Human League hit maker Martin Rushent, sold like bottled sunshine in the winter of 1981. From its sparkly guitars, shimmering xylophone pulse, and tumbly drums, to Clare Grogan’s giddy glee, Altered Images’ music was as fizzy and irresistible as soda pop. Already known for her role as a Scottish schoolgirl in the cult movie Gregory’s Girl, Grogan captivated the New Pop nation with her charming blend of coquette and naïf, while rockist grumps found her bouncing and frisking the incarnation of everything frivolous and flimsy about New Pop.

  Like most of the New Pop bands, Altered Images had actually started out with proper postpunk credentials. They were protégés of Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose Steve Severin produced most of their debut album, including the single “Dead Pop Stars,” a sinister tune about cruelly fickle teenyboppers tearing down the posters of last year’s idols. Even after Rushent coated their music in a sleek sheen, the actual inner mechanisms of the music remained similar to Wire and Joy Division. The scratchy guitar figures and twinkling basslines on glorious hits such as “I Could Be Happy” and “See Those Eyes” have a sound remarkably close to Bernard Sumner’s and Peter Hook’s, making the songs candy-coated cousins to New Order’s own hits “Ceremony” and “Temptation.”

  Simple Minds were more unlikely participants in the New Pop explosion. In their early days, they came across as a confused mixture of art rocky New Wave and Eurodisco (brilliantly confused in the case of 1980’s panoramic/cinematic masterpiece Empires and Dance). More often than not, their attempts to fuse rock and dance sounded lumbering, all crashing drums and strident vocals. Simple Minds looked destined for arenas rather than discotheques. Then something changed. “Promised You a Miracle” was the first song Simple Minds intentionally created as a single, as opposed to an album track that then got selected as a single. As a result, their whole aesthetic mind-set changed from prog to pop. Guitars took a backseat to glinting synths. The music seemed to open up and breathe. “Promised” was a huge hit in the spring of 1982. During the song’s long, slow fade—nearly two minutes long, it’s like the glorious sunset to a perfect day—Jim Kerr’s repeated rejoicing cries that “everything is possible” capture the all-gates-open, anything-can-happen feeling of the New Pop moment, as did the accompanying album’s title: New Gold Dream (81–82–83–84).

  Watching their Scottish contemporaries, Altered Images and Simple Minds, romp onto the pop charts, Orange Juice seethed on the sidelines. Having made the major-label plunge in the hope of having hits, the group recorded a debut album, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, that polished their classic Postcard sound but was still nowhere near commercially competitive. Meanwhile, an English group called Haircut 100 had gotten big with a sound and look suspiciously close to Orange Juice’s. Haircut 100 had the same choppy pop-funk sound and the clean-cut, cuddly image. Fresh-faced front man Nick Heyward even sang a bit like Edwyn Collins. With his chipmunk smile peeking out between rosy cheeks, Heyward exuded innocuousness with just a twinkle of sauciness in the eyes. Song titles such as “Lemon Firebrigade,” “Love’s Got Me in Triangles,” and “Love Plus One” (a big hit in the United States) had something of OJ’s arch faux naïveté, but Haircut 100’s high-caliber musicianship—all snazzy-jazzy horns and rippling percussion—was a helluva lot slicker, closer to Steely Dan than Velvet Underground.

  Edwyn Collins decided it was time to get serious. He instigated a purge of the group’s members that he considered insufficiently professional, namely James Kirk and Steven Daly, and formed a new, “tight” Orange Juice with Zimbabwean Zeke Manyika on drums and guitarist Malcolm Ross (formerly of Josef K). The new hardheaded approach produced a big hit in the spring of 1983 with “Rip It Up.” The song’s squelchy janglefunk represented Collins’s new ideal, “a sophisticated amateurism” that wasn’t “sloppy, but won’t place slickness as the ultimate virtue.” The sophisticated part of the equation came through with the record’s state-of-the-art eighties dance groove, which pivoted around a slippery bassline created using the Roland 303, a brand new machine that later became famous as the signature sound of acid house. The “amateurism” survived in Collins’s charmingly fallible vocals and the song’s witty homage to the original DIY catalyst, Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch. Collins followed the couplet “You know the scene it’s very humdrum/And my favorite song’s entitled ‘Boredom’” with a two-note guitar riff that copied Pete Shelley’s solo on “Boredom.”

  To some observers, New Pop’s absence of blatant punk-style gestures of threat or protest and its “retreat” from postpunk’s overt experimentalism and agitprop made it merely escapist. Yet almost all the groups mentioned above, even Haircut 100, had some connection to punk. Most believed they were honoring or furthering some element of punk’s original mission, albeit in a much transformed context. The nod to Spiral Scratch in “Rip It Up” is a blatant example of this. Orange Juice meant the song as a metapop statement: The chorus, “Rip it up and start again,” in part expressed Collins’s growing disillusionment with New Pop.

  By early 1983 there was already a dawning suspicion that things had gone awry. The bright sparks, such as the Associates, who’d pioneered the whole new mood in pop were being gradually displaced by opportunists who weren’t as id
eas or ideals driven. Clones and careerists had latched on to the surface elements of New Pop—the playfully inventive videos, the deluxe production, the gender-bending and dressing up—and were taking over. This was especially the case internationally. In the United States, 1983 was really the year that New Pop broke: ABC, the Human League, Soft Cell, and Haircut 100 had all scored hits there early on, but it was the second wave of New Pop bands—Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Culture Club, Thompson Twins, and Wham!—who hit the jackpot, and they owed their success in large part to a recent invention called MTV.

  Music video was nothing new. The first examples dated back to the midsixties. They were typically made by bands such as the Beatles and the Stones who’d gotten so big that making promo films was the only way they could fulfill the demand from television shows across the world, as it was physically impossible for them to perform on so many TV stations. Apart from a few “artistic” forays, most of these early pop clips were rudimentary affairs depicting the bands lip-synching.

  The roots of video as we understand it today lie more in the musical sequences of films like A Hard Day’s Night and Help! in which the Beatles caper around and do goofy dances instead of singing. The Monkees’ TV series turned these antic interludes into a winning formula. So there’s a poetic aptness to the fact that it was Michael Nesmith, the most serious minded Monkee, who originally came up with the concept for MTV. Nesmith became enamored with the creative possibilities of the promo video in the seventies while pursuing his career as a solo singer-songwriter, and made a series of imaginative clips for his own singles, such as “Rio.” Although the videos were widely played around the world, Nesmith quickly discovered that there were hardly any outlets for them on American television. It was then that Nesmith came up with the concept for a program called Popclips. Eventually, the show was aired on Nickelodeon, a channel run by a cable TV division of Warner Brothers, to whom Nesmith also successfully pitched the idea of a video channel broadcasting pop promos around the clock. As the project developed into what eventually became MTV, it began to diverge from Nesmith’s more artistic conception of video. He ultimately dropped out and went off to make his own “video album,” Elephant Parts.