When Jeremy Bentham came up with his utilitarian definition of happiness, he
neglected to take Schadenfreude into account. Bad mistake — Schadenfreude
gives the world a good 50 per cent of its pleasures. At the moment watching
the New York arch rockers the Bravery squirm is particularly pleasurable.
Before the home-town show that launched the band’s million-selling album,
someone had plastered Williamsburg with posters that compared the band to
prepackaged cartons of milk.
In an East Coast version of Blur v Oasis, the fellow Eighties revivalists the
Killers have laid into a group they see as bandwagon-jumping milksops. “I
can see the Strokes or Franz Ferdinand play and they’re real. I haven’t
gotten that from the Bravery. If you say, ‘My heart really belongs to what
I’m doing now,’ but you used to be in a ska band . . . How do you defend
that? ” cries the Killers frontman Brandon Flowers. And he suggests that the
Bravery would never have been signed if it wasn’t for the success of his own
band.
It wouldn’t sound so petty if the Killers didn’t look just as much like an
industry-concocted band with suits and the odd dab of mascara, recycling
Cure and Joy Division riffs.
Like its Britpop equivalent, this sparring is unusual in that both groups are
on the rise and don’t need to get involved. More typical is the spat between
the White Stripes (three million albums sold) and their former mates the Von
Bondies (three albums sold) that led to Jack White beating his jealous
rival’s face to a pulp, for which he incurred a $250 fine. Somehow you can’t
see the fey, cheekbone-suckers from the Bravery or the Killers taking such a
rebel stand.
In the olden days, bare-faced jealousy set such feuds in motion. New York in
the late Seventies witnessed a bitchy, rather one-sided scenario played out
by the “punk poet” Patti Smith and hot young thing Debbie Harry. Smith was
envious of the new girl in town. For a start, Blondie wrote tunes, quoted
the Ronettes rather than Rimbaud and had a startlingly attractive singer.
Their debut show was in front of Smith, members of Television and other New
York proto-punk scenesters. “We had a gig at CBGB,” Harry recalled, “and I
think the whole clique wanted to destroy us.” From the experience, the group
wrote their first classic, Rip Her to Shreds. Somehow it always seems
less West Side Story, more Grange Hill when British bands have
similar spats.
Before the Blur/Oasis class war, there was a minor Thames Valley skirmish
between the shoegazing success story Ride and the moddy wannabes 5.30. Both
bands were from Oxford, and 5.30 tried to score working-class points with
the press by claiming that they were from the Blackbird Leys estate. This
backfired somewhat as, to anyone outside the Greater Oxon area, Blackbird
Leys sounds rather like an A. A. Milne idyll.
Dodgy cover versions can also ignite a pop feud — not least when the Pet Shop
Boys’ camp 1991 adaptation of U2’s classic Where the Streets
Have No Name caused the Irish rockers to release a statement demanding:
“What have we done to deserve this?” Thankfully, peace was declared three
years ago when Neil Tennant and Bono buried the hatchet by jumping into
Elton John’s pool together.
When Justine Frischmann, the former girlfriend of Suede’s Brett Anderson,
started dating a rock rival in Damon Albarn, of Blur, Anderson took it
badly. Hearing that Blur were to record a duet with the chanteuse
Françoise Hardy, he jetted off to Paris and asked if she wouldn’t rather
make a record with Suede. Hardy would have nothing to do with such silliness
and, besides, Albarn reminded her of her husband Jacques Dutronc in his
youthful pomp. Beaten in one-upmanship at every turn, Anderson settled his
raging ego by persuading Jane Birkin to duet on Les yeux fermés
instead.
Things weren’t as cloak and dagger in the Sixties. The Dave Clark Five
attempted to counter the Mersey pop takeover by inventing their neanderthal
“Tottenham sound”. This noise, now beloved only of Crystal Palace fans,
ruled for roughly six weeks.
Cliff Richard was more overtly anti-Beatles. He may have recorded a Latin
version of Macca’s Things We Said Today, but when it came to
the Maharishi, Cliff opined: “They are searching along the wrong track.
There’s only one way to find God — that’s through Jesus Christ.” And Cliff
didn’t stop there. It transpired that John Lennon had told him, almost
certainly fat tongue in cheek, that he liked Ray Charles “until everyone
else started liking him”. Well, fumed Cliff, “I was shocked. I’m all in
favour of non-conformists, but I certainly don’t agree with people not
conforming just to be different.”
Such is the fine line between beloved hero and cube-headed bore.
Elvis, as ever, remains the King, even when it comes to pop rivalries. He
invited the Beatles to visit Graceland during a 1965 tour and, naturally
enough, the atmosphere was tense. “I’d describe Elvis on that showing as a
boring old fart,” the Beatles’ press officer Tony Barrow said afterwards,
“but Ringo enjoyed his game of pool.”
Elvis nodded, smiled, bided his time. Come 1970, when the Beatles had
self-destructed and he was once again the undisputed king of rock, Elvis
went to the FBI, where an agent reported that “he is of the opinion that the
Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with
young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music”.
The Killers probably don’t need to use such extreme tactics: the most damning
evidence against the Bravery has already been posted on the internet. Less
than two years ago four members of the band were in a ska band called Skabba
the Hut, playing high-speed tuneless stuff in the style of Rancid. They had
a brass section. They had dreadlocks. New Order and the Cure were a long way
from their thoughts. Clearly, they are fakers.
Nevertheless, in the depoliticised pop world of 2005 it hasn’t stopped the
Bravery from appearing on the front of NME. The Killers can fume, but
the kids still buy both bands’ records. This hot fuss will run until they
kiss and make up at an MTV awards do, with both groups teaming up to back
Britney, Kylie or Kate Moss. Authenticity doesn’t come into it when the
accountant is but a few yards away.
