Rip It Up and Start Again (49 page)

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 pioneers 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.

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.

Although the stresses of performing contributed (Green had always suffered from frightful stage nerves), the collapse mostly stemmed from chronic lifestyle dysfunction. “I was living without bothering to look after myself at all,” Green recalled. “Which seemed an appropriate thing to do at the time, but it creeps up on you without you noticing until you’re in a hospital bed with people leaning over asking you what you’ve eaten recently and you realize that you haven’t eaten anything recently. They ask you where you live and you realize it’s a shit-hole and they ask you when you last slept and you haven’t slept for ages. They asked if I had anything worrying me and
everything
was worrying me.”

A postpunk excess of drinking, thinking, and speeding brought Scritti as a whole, and Green in particular, to the brink of breakdown. “We were a sick group for some time,” Green recalled. “I used to read and write a lot, which was the only thing I did apart from being debauched and drinking too much.” In addition to the group’s debilitating lifestyle—“We partied very hard, as they say nowadays,” Green admits—there’s also a sense in which Scritti’s imperative to question everything turned toxic. “Finding minutiae overburdened with potential significance, this can contaminate your whole life to the point where you might describe it as mental illness,” Green notes wryly. “Not that I was actually bonkers, but…”

When Green’s estranged parents read about their son’s hospitalization in
NME,
they set him up in a South Wales cottage to recuperate. However, instead of resting his overtaxed brain, the singer embarked on a massive rethinking of the Scritti project. Shortly before his collapse there’d been tension in the band when Green broached the idea of moving in a more pop direction. He’d been listening to contemporary black dance pop such as Michael Jackson’s
Off the Wall
and investigating the history of soul music, from Aretha Franklin to Stax. Green had also been absorbing the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and other French post-Marxist theorists.

After the disillusionment of 1968, radical French thought had undergone a kind of implosion. It didn’t exactly become depoliticized, but certainly the lion’s share of its subversive energy was channeled into the academy. There, Derrida and his
confreres
beaverishly gnawed at the roots of Western thought, toppling ideas of progress, reason, truth, and the like. Absorbing the implications of the new French theories, Green gradually lost his faith in Marxism as a “science of history” that mapped the righteous path to a future society of justice and equality. Without the anchor of stable values, he found himself adrift in a world of uncertainty, where all meaning was provisional because nothing could be “proved” to be correct. It was scary, but exhilarating.

Derrida’s corrosive influence also eroded other concepts that underpinned the old Scritti Politti, such as the idea of the marginal versus the mainstream. Dissatisfied with the self-conscious “quirkiness and idiosyncrasy” of early Scritti, Green was determined to extricate his trapped pop sensibility from the thorny tangles of the Scritti sound. He hadn’t totally abandoned the idea of subversion, but his ideas of how that might work became more oblique and subtle. He envisioned a strategy of unsettling and undoing (deconstruction, the French called it) that took place inside the very language of pop. Instead of searching for some alternative zone of authentic purity and truth that supposedly existed outside the conventional forms, Green decided, it might be more productive to work within those structures. Rather than avoiding the love song altogether, it might be possible to locate and accentuate the internal contradictions and tautologies that already limned what Barthes called the “lover’s discourse.”

It says something about how old habits die hard that Green felt it necessary to generate copious amounts of text in order to convince his band of the righteousness of his new Scritti vision. One suspects that the exercise was as much for Green’s sake as for the others. “I sat down for months and months and wrote screeds of justification,” Green recalls. “There was that sense of having to have it understood, approved, and thought through by the group.” The band came down to Wales to read the book’s worth of cogitation and were ultimately swayed to Green’s new pop vision. By the end of 1980 Scritti had worked up a new sound based around old soul, new funk, and the soft, slick reggae style known as lover’s rock.

The first publicly aired work by the reborn Scritti was “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” which Green described as “a perversion and an extension of Lover’s Rock.” True to its title, the single was sweet enough to induce a diabetic coma. Green crooned soft and high like Gregory Isaacs mixed with Al Green, over a gently pulsing rhythm section of crisp drum machine and tender but steadfast bass. Green’s hero Robert Wyatt dusted the luscious confection with ethereal flickers of reggae-style keyboards. To fans of the DIY-era Scritti, the new sound was shocking, yet strangely logical. Now that Scritti’s anxious compulsion to avoid conventional structures was gone, Green’s melodic genius gushed forth in a flood of pure loveliness, but there was still a lingering undertone of the old Scritti’s harmonic eeriness to put a tang of bitter in the sweet.

“The ‘Sweetest Girl’” sounded like a hit record, and a hit was what Green had his heart set on. Lots of hits. If “the margin” was no longer a valid concept, then the mainstream was the place that pop meaning gets made and unmade (Derrida-style). In 1978, Green critiqued the competitive structure of the charts and the record industry, but now he wanted to be top of the pops.

In spring 1981, “‘The ‘Sweetest Girl’” got its public unveiling as the opening track of
C81,
a cassette compilation pulled together by Rough Trade and
NME
to celebrate five years of the label and, by extension, the first half decade of the independent-label revolution. An absolute bargain at one pound and fifty pence,
C81
’s lineup included such postpunk luminaries as Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, Subway Sect, and the Raincoats. Thirty thousand readers sent away for it. Yet
C81
was in many ways postpunk’s swan song. The epoch it defined was crumbling. Many of the featured artists, such as Postcard’s Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, had already broken with independent consensus. They sounded shiny, accessible, and ambitious. A few weeks before
C81
was announced,
NME
’s last issue of 1980 looked to the future with a Paul Morley feature that essentially constituted a manifesto for “New Pop,” a shared ambition and urgency he detected among emerging groups who believed it was both possible and imperative to take on the mainstream and beat it at its own game. Of the three bands covered, Sheffield’s ABC were the most stridently confident. Originally an electronic outfit in the mold of Cabaret Voltaire, they’d recently traded in their frigid synths and oscillators for funky rhythm guitars and real drums, and changed their name from Vice Versa to ABC. Guitarist Mark White talked about pursuing a “funk vision” and described disco as “an excellent vehicle.” Watching the independent charts become “saturated with rubbish,” ABC decided that the mainstream was where the action was.

Morley may have coined the term, but “New Pop” as a concept had multiple authors. Bob Last and the Human League, and Alan Horne and Orange Juice could all claim a role in hatching the idea. Liverpool’s Zoo label also talked of aiming for the charts and touted a bunch of bright, tuneful groups (such as the Teardrop Explodes) as an antidote to monochrome postpunk. As the sensibility took hold, New Pop defined itself through a set of overlapping values: health, cleanliness, mobility, ambition. Decrying the “unhealthy” state of independent rock in countless interviews, Green seemed to transpose his own physical ill-being during the squatland Scritti days onto postpunk as a whole. ABC’s singer Martin Fry talked of “cleaning up the whole idea of pop music.” As for mobility, postpunk culture was increasingly characterized by critics and musicians alike in terms of inertia, stagnation, and wallowing. Writing about 1981’s third Futurama festival, Morley recoiled aghast from groups that “twitched in the slime,” while Green lamented the independent sector’s degeneration into “a boggy ground, a wilderness.”

Green pointed to the homemade-cassette network as particularly lamentable. “Many people tried to sell ridiculous music, filled with irritating noises and failed attempts at music,” he told
Vinyl
. It was time for a return to quality control, the hierarchy of the gifted over the talentless. In August 1980,
NME
had started the regular news column “Garageland,” which covered the cassette scene and vinyl releases so small-scale they didn’t even have independent distribution but were sold through mail order. Just ten months later, “Garageland” was closed down. Across the board, critics abruptly lost patience with the sonic mannerisms that only recently indicated charming eccentricity or honorable amateurism. Now they signified only a chronic lack of ambition.

Scritti Politti started out championing the do-it-yourself movement, but now Green renounced it as a lost cause. Still, Scritti didn’t immediately embrace the “entryist” logic of signing to a major label in order to better infiltrate the mainstream. They stayed on Rough Trade, but they moved to distance themselves from DIY’s “squattage industry” (as Green put it) in the way that they presented their music. Scritti’s early DIY releases came wrapped in hand-folded sleeves made from smudged photocopies of litter and old bottle caps. The new Scritti singles copied the stylish packaging of deluxe commodities: Dunhill cigarettes with “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” Dior Eau Sauvage fragrance with its follow-up “Faithless,” and so forth. Green talked of admiring the “cheap classiness” of commonly available consumer disposables. “Our covers are now made in Turin by robots!” he boasted, a remark that had an odd aftertaste given Green’s once keen interest in Italian post-Communist politics. Were these perhaps the same sort of robots currently replacing the Fiat assembly line workers of Turin and other Northern Italian cities?

That sort of grim irony once would have tortured Green and probably inspired a song, but as a lapsed Marxist he’d shed the anxiety and guilt that fueled the early Scritti. “You grow up as a good, almost Catholic-leftist boy, and you learn to be scared of your sexuality, to be scared of your power,” Green recalled. Now he talked about developing an improvised form of “post-political politics,” based not on overarching ideology, but the pragmatic realization “that what you’ve got is needs, demands, and desires, and you go out and you fight for them.”

“Desire” was a big buzzword in 1981. Drifting into popular culture from the world of critical theory, it retained an electric tinge of subversion. By the late seventies, French thinkers of the sort Green had been devouring were flirting with the once unthinkable (for the Left) notion that American capitalism, despite its faults, offered a lot of space for doing it yourself and bending the law. Could it be that “desire” actually had a better time of it in pluralistic, free-market societies than in bureaucratic Euro-socialist states? This notion of America as actually more free than the Old World was naturally blasphemous within the British socialist tradition (to which Rough Trade and the independent scene broadly belonged). But then British socialism always had a puritanical streak, a disdainful suspicion of vulgar materialism and stylistic excess. Running against the grain of both independent culture and the British Left, Scritti’s celebration of consumer desire and commercial design was a heretical act.

In “Jacques Derrida,” the B-side to the new Scritti’s third single “Asylums in Jerusalem,” Green personifies desire as an insatiable she-monster. “Rap-acious, rap-acious,” he chants in a fey attempt at rapping, “Desire is so voracious/I want to eat your nation state.” The exaltation of desire as an unstoppable force that refuses to recognize any boundaries fits the tenor of the hip crit of the day, as found in journals like
Semiotexte
and
Tel Quel
. But it also sounds a lot like the way globalization works: flows of capital, goods, and culture that make nonsense of national borders.

Green recognized that utopian yearnings—for perfection, purity, the absolute—were encoded in consumerism. These same longings also expressed themselves in that form of secular mysticism known as “love.” In putting single quotes around the words “sweetest girl” in the song title “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” Green wanted to make it clear that he knew this dream was a mythic construct, an unrealistic hope, even as he was unable to stop wanting it or prevent himself from being seduced by songs exalting this heaven on Earth. Green wanted to be pop’s deconstructionist, the Derrida of the Top 40, unraveling the lore of the love song even as he reveled in the beauty generated by its dream-lies. “The weakest link in every chain/I always want to find it,” he crooned in “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’” “The strongest words in each belief/To find out what’s behind it.” The one mysticism he permitted himself was music itself, the endless mystery of melodic beauty. “Faithless now, just got soul,” he simultaneously lamented and rejoiced on “Faithless,” a gorgeous song about the impossibility of belief couched in the deep testifying certainty of gospel.