Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (59 page)

It was not a tone applauded by those who dismissed The Smiths as ‘miserablists’. The categorization was understandable given lyrics such as those in ‘I Know It’s
Over’, ‘Asleep’ and ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’ that meditated upon doom and even suicide. Yet these dark sentiments were balanced by Morrissey’s
flashes of acerbic, Oscar Wilde-like wit and by Marr’s usually jaunty guitar tempo. Far from wallowing in unremitting gloom, few eighties albums spanned the complete emotional spectrum as
fully, or successfully, as The Smiths’ most celebrated work,
The Queen is Dead
. Nor did Morrissey’s introspection blunt his desire to sing about broader themes. The band’s
most successful single, ‘Panic’, with its incitement to string-up DJs, was inspired by the experience of listening to Radio 1 when its news report of the Chernobyl nuclear plant
explosion was followed by Wham’s bullishly trite ‘I’m Your Man’. ‘Panic’ made it on to the Radio 1 playlist only to fall foul of some music journalists: with an
imaginative leap,
Melody Maker
condemned it as the racist sentiments of a white ‘indie’ band disparaging black culture. Rarely quick to walk away from a confrontation, Morrissey
responded by suggesting that it was actually reggae, ‘the most racist music in the entire world’, that ought to be the target of those critical of glorifications of racial
supremacy.
¹⁵
Like John Lennon before him, his outspokenness kept him at the forefront of the music press, proffering comments that appeared to
justify the IRA’s murderous assault on the 1984 Conservative Party conference – ‘The sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Thatcher escaped unscathed’
¹⁶
– and even violence against all those, including high-street
butchers, who harmed animals. Seemingly untroubled by the paradox
of his support for violence against those he accused of violence, the aggressiveness of Morrissey’s outbursts was softened by the wistful, unprepossessing tone in which he expressed himself.
His indifference to mainstream opinion even led him to sneer at Band Aid, archly musing on the ‘absolutely tuneless’ single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’: ‘One
can have a great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it’s another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England.’
¹⁷
And
gullible, liberal-minded juries were the target of his lyrics in ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’.

It was a mixture of business and personal pressures that tore The Smiths apart. The band consisted of four members, only two of whose signatures appeared on the contracts. Rough Trade may have
been run like a collective, but that was not the model Morrissey and Marr adopted for their own group. Indeed, for all Morrissey’s and Marr’s disdain for Thatcherism, in matters of
labour law they practised its most ruthless aspects when defending their own business dealings and self-interest. They treated bass guitarist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce as if they were
session artists, to be hired and fired at will (as Rourke discovered when he was briefly sacked for succumbing to heroin addiction). Managers were also a disposable commodity, which meant that with
Morrissey increasingly failing to turn up for commitments if he did not feel like it, the burden fell on Marr, who, to make matters worse, was drinking heavily as a means of dealing with the
pressures of touring. Much of the irritation was taken out on Rough Trade and rumours that the band was scouting around for a new label caused Geoff Travis to take the precaution of a High Court
injunction to stop them breaching their contract. This delayed the release of
The Queen is Dead
and, despite increasing the group’s advance, Travis found himself rewarded by being
parodied on the rumbustious track ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’. Despairing of Travis’s continued funding of uncommercial bands, Marr felt Rough Trade had not adapted to the success of its
greatest signing, complaining: ‘We’ve grown to major status while the label is still stuck with the more negative aspects of the independent scene.’
¹⁸
In an act that diehard indie supporters judged a betrayal, The Smiths duly signed to the corporate giant EMI – only to find Travis unwilling to be bought off from
releasing their last Rough Trade studio album,
Strangeways, Here We Come
. As it was about to be released in August 1987, Marr decided he needed a break, a decision that, in the ensuing
acrimony, triggered his walking out on the band just as it appeared to be near the peak of its creative powers and acclaim. Thereafter, Morrissey and Marr did not speak to one another until at
least 1996, when they found themselves defending (in vain) in the High Court the paltry royalties they had assigned the two other band members. Marr performed with other bands and Morrissey
proceeded on to a successful solo career, but
neither proved individually capable of holding the popular and critical attention to which they had laid claim as The
Smiths.

The break-up of The Smiths coincided with the declining fortunes of many of the most important indie labels. Having enjoyed a 40 per cent share of the market at their eighties peak, the indies
now found themselves stretched to their limits and facing renewed competition from the majors, which, in the sincerest form of flattery, were setting up their own specialist labels. At Rough Trade,
the workers’ collective structure that Travis had developed broke down in 1987, to be replaced by a more businesslike, capitalist model. Four years later, the company mishandled its cash flow
and went into administration, taking others in its wake. Stiff Records had collapsed in debt in 1986, the same year in which Madness split up after having unsuccessfully opted to set up their own
label, Zarjazz. In 1989, Chris Blackwell sold Island Records to the music goliath PolyGram for $272 million. Though Blackwell continued to run his own Island A&R fiefdom within the corporation,
an age in which independent labels self-consciously held their own against, rather than as part of, the majors was passing, and those that promoted the ‘Britpop’ bands of the nineties
did so using commercial methods that were virtually indistinguishable from the way the majors operated. The defeat for those seeking an alternative way of producing music was also psychological.
Indie music had confronted but failed to topple the political as much as the business establishment. In the run-up to the 1987 general election, Paul Weller and Billy Bragg organized a series of
concerts by leading indie bands, supported by a troupe of alternative comedians, under the banner ‘Red Wedge’. The intention was to mobilize the youth vote to return Labour to power.
The sound and fury were considerable, but the general election result dealt a withering blow to pop as a medium of political protest. The eighties were drawing to a close and radical musicians had
failed to paint it red. Indie music duly went in search of a new focus and in doing so rediscovered hedonism and, in its wake, the embrace of some unrepentantly pro-free-market entrepreneurs.

Welcome to the Acid House

Dance music had survived the demise of seventies disco. Within the pop mainstream the genre was carried forward by The Pet Shop Boys, a duo consisting of Martin Lowe and Neil
Tennant, who ensured that the synth-pop of the first half of the eighties continued to resonate across dance floors in the second half. Enthused with Tennant’s essentially sad and wistful
lyrics – which he spoke rather than sang – the sensibilities of Ivor Novello and Noël Coward were duly brought to the world of Roland drum machines. Indeed, Tennant was a rare case
of a former pop music journalist who turned
out to be a better performer than critic. In the midst of the ‘yuppie’ boom of 1986 (though the song was actually
written three years previously), the intended irony of ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’ was lost on those who thought it the definitive anthem of the good times and the
track that embodied Thatcherism’s apex as satisfyingly as The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ had intoned its nadir five years earlier. While The Pet Shop Boys conjured up a version
of art-house pop whose lyrical subtleties went over the heads of City brokers and secretaries postprandially bopping to its jaunty tempo, elsewhere dance music was being taken in a different, more
rugged, direction. The centre for these developments was Manchester, an increasingly post-industrial city endeavouring to recast itself as a place for cultural renewal through its dance clubs; as
the home no longer of manufacturing production lines but of Factory Records, it was increasingly the destination for students and youthful pleasure-seekers, where jobs might be scarce by day but
where the night-time economy kept the city alive and vibrant.

The impresario of Manchester’s transformation through clubbing was Tony Wilson. Educated at a Salford Catholic grammar school and – as he was rarely slow to point out to those who
doubted his genius – Cambridge University, Wilson was twenty-eight when in 1978 he founded Factory Records. Such was his commitment to artistic freedom that he was happy to sign groups
without Factory securing any ownership rights over their music. Immediate success with Joy Division was cut short with the suicide of its lead, Ian Curtis, in 1980, but the band’s other
members stuck with Factory, promptly forming New Order and proceeding to innovate in dance music, fusing it with elements of electronic and alternative rock. Where the traditional 7-inch single had
constrained dance to a tight format designed for pop’s three- or four-minute formula, the growing popularity of 12-inch records perfectly suited longer musical explorations in which the
essence of a song could be remixed and extended, its complexities pared down and the prominence of the underlying bass line enhanced as the motor of the tune. In 1983, New Order released a landmark
dance track which laid claim to being the world’s biggest-selling 12-inch record. Its tone established by an opening beat reminiscent of the tapping of Morse code, ‘Blue Monday’
owed much to the group’s exposure to the sounds of the New York club scene. There, as well as in Detroit and Chicago, innovative DJs were experimenting with new dance rhythms in predominantly
gay and drug-fuelled clubs, creating a genre that became known as ‘house’ (after a Chicago club called the Warehouse). Much of New Order’s profits from ‘Blue Monday’
were duly channelled into Factory Records’ efforts to create a Chicago Warehouse-style club in Manchester. Established in a disused yacht showroom in a tired part of the city, its
‘industrial’ decor framed by its trademark yellow- and black-striped factory hazard warnings and the stains from a leaky
roof, the venture was named, somewhat
absurdly, The Haçienda. ‘For any real form of substantive youth culture to thrive in a city, there has to be a place to go, somewhere to meet,’ Wilson enthused. ‘The
Haçienda had to be built.’
¹⁹
With the racist comedian Bernard Manning hired to do some curtain-raising stand-up, there was certainly
nothing about its opening night in May 1982 to suggest the club would end up as one of the period’s most significant pop venues, and in its early days it was primarily a venue for live bands
rather than dance mixes. This began to change in 1984 when Mike Pickering became one of its resident DJs, drawing in a broader clientele by bringing together the city’s student and local
youth populations to an extent that had not previously been seen. Slowly gathering momentum (though still losing money), by 1987 the Haçienda had achieved primacy as Britain’s secular
cathedral of house music. It would soon have competition. That autumn, two DJs, Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling, took what proved to be an enlightening holiday to the Mediterranean party island
of Ibiza and brought its house anthems to London at their respective clubs, Spectrum and Shoom. By the spring of 1988, house had become the sound of Britain’s dance culture.

The pace of house music was set by a pumping bass line, typically at 120 beats per minute. Words were kept to a minimum and often consisted of no more than sampled out-takes from other
recordings, extracted from their original context and remixed to create new lyrics. As one of the Haçienda’s DJs, Dave Haslam, put it, house’s contribution to music was ‘to
reinvent the instrumental, stripping music to rhythms, electronic noise, samples. It was refreshing to escape the prosaic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-guitar solo formula of rock music and enter a
realm of noises, bleeps and electronic echoes from the ether.’
²⁰
This was never likely to appeal to those who continued to see music as a
formal song-writing craft and for whom these ‘noises, bleeps and electronic echoes’ resembled nothing more poignant than the interplay of competing burglar alarms. Furthermore, setting
pilfered outtakes of other artists’ material to a unifying rhythm was how Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers had conquered the singles charts, much to the derision and despair of the serious
music press. House played the same game while managing to retain an urgent, cutting-edge appeal that was wholly beyond the likes of Jive Bunny. Where the latter crammed as many 1950s tunes as
possible into four minutes of musical grand larceny – unintentionally proving that the flip side of Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum was equally true and that more was less – the
real master mixers showed that sampling could produce expansive rather than reductive results, weaving anthems to which clubbers could dance all night long.

The synth-pop pioneers of the early eighties had demonstrated how new technology made it possible for two people to front a group even though
they were devoid of musical
training and incapable of playing instruments that required the dexterity of more than one finger at a time. House took this approach to its ultimate conclusion since it could be made by one person
with a computer able to sample sounds, resulting in relatively cheap-to-produce 12-inch records rather than albums. This, in turn, saved on the expense of time-consuming hours in a studio assisted
by a platoon of producers, technicians and session musicians. Punk’s ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos lived on. Nor did the creative process end with a finished product booming out from a
sound system. Rather than just playing the discs to the assembled clubbers, DJs became live performers, extemporizing by scratching and mixing competing rhythms on two record turntables in a search
for musical fusion. In this way, house was not a pre-made and packaged commodity but a living entity, with its DJ interpreters becoming as famous – or more famous – than the names on
the label. It was the last great innovation in eighties popular music and, crucially, one that was still in vogue twenty years later.