In the more reductive views of rock music’s half-century history, no era has been more maligned than the 1980s — that time of synthetic, Day-Glo superficiality regularly tagged as “the decade that taste forgot”. Sometimes the evidence seems only to harden the view. The release last year of the Live Aid DVD, for example, seemed less about a proud record of an iconic age than a set of hilarious reminders of a time best forgotten: Bono, with mullet and riding boots, delivering a spectacularly pious reading of U2’s
Sunday Bloody Sunday; Mick Jagger and David Bowie camply murdering the Motown standard
Dancing in the Street; such obsolescent names as Sade, Spandau Ballet and the much-missed Nik Kershaw.
As well as all the horror, however, at least a part of this period actually saw the creation of some of the boldest and most adventurous stuff that British musicians have created. To listen to the devotees of such music is to tap into the spirit of a golden age: “It was all one bright burst of excitement . . . There were so many records that you had to have that there was simply no earthly reason to investigate the past . . . the era certainly rivals the Sixties in terms of the sheer amount of great music, the spirit of adventure and idealism that infused it, and the way that the music seemed inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of the times.”
The words are taken from Rip It Up and Start Again, a wonderfully rich treatise on what might be termed “The Short Eighties” — stretching from 1978 to 1984 — written by Simon Reynolds. A former Melody Maker journalist, he sounds an increasingly rare voice in pop writing, grappling with music’s subtexts and hidden agendas, constantly noting that the best records ooze intellectual substance. In that sense, the years he groups under the term “postpunk” represent perfect subject matter, throwing forth so much intrigue that one almost feels that mere prose can’t quite contain it all.
For those who may be only distantly aware of what it was all about, the rough outlines of the story are as follows. In 1976 punk rock crash-landed in music’s midst, affecting to lay waste to the decadent residues of yawn-inducing “progressive” rock, the superstar pretensions of such musical aristocrats as Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones, the abiding sense that music had been shorn of its rough edges, and thus its remaining ties to the blighted creature known as The Kid on the Street.
By way of wreaking vengeance, the punks’ chosen weapon was a form that emphasised clipped arrangements, breakneck tempos, and disdain for any kind of musical complexity. The opening moments of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK set the tone — a shower of brutal chords, followed by John Lydon’s cackling announcement that he was happy to live only in the moment: “Rrrright! Now . . .”
The problem was, there would inevitably come a point when punk’s more adventurous minds began to rub up against the limits of such a stripped-back approach. One solution involved spurning punk’s disdain for the past, and embracing a kind of musical classicism — thus, the Clash broke through by embracing reggae and R&B, while the Jam tapped into the influence of both the classic English groups of the 1960s and black American soul. For others, however, the challenge was somehow to cling to punk’s shock-of-the-new while reviving the thinking parts of their brains.
The solution at least partly lay in melding rock with the iconoclastic affectations of all kinds of influences: by way of giving a flavour of the general idea, one paragraph in Reynolds’s book namechecks Dada, Bertolt Brecht, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Marcel Duchamp and Philip K. Dick. These were intellectually fertile times; whether one could find even a fraction of such depth in modern British rock is a moot point.
There was also a huge creative spark provided by the political climate. By comparison with these well-adjusted, economically stable times, the late 1970s and early 1980s — inner-city riots, Cold War paranoia, economic breakdown — were so blighted as to appear rather nightmarish; and in postpunk’s darker moments, that feeling was palpable. Its brittle, wilfully tinny sounds often seemed as threadbare as the cities from which many of the musicians hailed; to make things yet more cheery, there was the abiding idea of — in Reynolds’s words — “Armageddon as a real and imminent prospect”.
For anyone who simply heard the records, however, postpunk’s intellectual touchstones and political elements were less important than the fact that the music was so gloriously strange. Its unsettling oddness took on all kinds of forms: the rumbling experimentalism of John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols vehicle Public Image Limited; the icy, distinctly European ambience that surrounded the much-imitated northerners Joy Division; the scratchy, skittering music made by the Slits, an all-female group who made it their mission to subvert music’s male-dominated, “rockist” orthodoxy — thus creating a sound described by one critic as “geometric jerky quickstep”.
My favourite postpunkers, however, have long been the Fall, the 30-year project tyrannically commanded by the Mancunian autodidact MarkE. Smith, whose speciality remains what Reynolds terms “North of England Magic Realism”: lyrics that distort the workaday reality of industrial Britain into something both seductive and terrifying (not for nothing was one album entitled The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall), coupled with music that manages to be both eminently artful and loudly confrontational. In Reynolds’s view, Smith’s approach was founded on a diet of “literature, music and illegal substances”.
In addition, there were droves of groups who never made it much beyond their first steps, but whose brief stories speak volumes about the manic times in which they lived. Take the wonderfully named Pop Group, five teenage Bristolians so driven by the idea of breaking out of rock’s norms that the brief length of their career — if the word “career” fits — was hardly much of a surprise. Led by a freakishly tall singer named Mark Stewart, they fused together jazz, experimental rock, funk, reggae and dozens of influences besides. In Stewart’s estimation, they “started challenging everything, right down to the core of personal relationships, the things between the audience and the band”.
In the long run, however, such forward-thinking zeal would inevitably burn itself out. And so it proved: by 1985, postpunk had lost its momentum, the over-arching obsession with the 1960s that still suffuses a great deal of our rock music was beginning to make its mark. The jangling sound of the Byrds was in again, scratchy guitars were out. The iconoclastic spirit of the late Seventies and early Eighties was being squashed by a new superstar culture. Live Aid — “great for Ethiopians but terrible for pop music” — was postpunk’s antithesis, spectacularly reviving most of what the bands had groped towards replacing, and ensuring that their story would be confined to pop history’s footnotes.
Predictably enough, however, the requisite records were eventually dusted down and used as a crucial influence by a musical generation that has only just arrived. In Britain, Franz Ferdinand, British Sea Power and Bloc Party have conspired to replace the drab conformity that had arrived with the Nineties ubiquity of Oasis with something altogether more cerebral and spirited, though their older listeners will be only too aware of their underlying influences; we now live, it seems, in the unexpected era of post-postpunk.
Rip It Up and Start Again is published by Faber & Faber, £16.99; offer £13.59 from Books First on 0870 1608080
Best of postpunk
PUBLIC IMAGE LTD
Public Image (1978)
Postpunk’s starting point: John Lydon & co’s minting of an unsettling, forward-looking music that managed to make the Sex Pistols look like traditionalists.
JOY DIVISION
She’s Lost Control (1979)
The vastly influential sound of Mancunian art-rock. After the suicide of the singer Ian Curtis in 1980, the band reinvented themselves as New Order.
THE FALL
Totally Wired (1980)
A hymn to the creative uses of amphetamines from the band led by Mark E. Smith, who was once (deservedly) hailed as “rock’s answer to Wyndham Lewis”. They’re still going.
THE SLITS
Typical Girls (1979)
Reggae, tribal rhythms and instinctive feminism, John Lydon ended up marrying the singer’s mum.
A CERTAIN RATIO
Do the Du (1981)
Nearly 25 years old, though in the context of the postpunk revival it sounds unbelievably modern. These Mancunians essentially took Joy Division to the disco; it was an inspired move.
