Rip It Up and Start Again (50 page)

Up-tempo reggae with a cloying, caramel-sweet melody, “Asylums in Jerusalem” received Rough Trade’s strongest push to date, but despite this, and some heavy support from radio, it ended up Scritti’s third not-quite-hit in a row. Although
Songs to Remember,
the debut album, reached number twelve on the U.K. album charts, Scritti hadn’t escaped the ghetto of being a cult group. Like Orange Juice a year earlier, Green underwent the public humiliation of having talked loudly about “pop” without having become popular. The problem lay partly with the music, which sounded underproduced, but mainly with the lyrics. This was heady stuff for pop music. Green’s frequent lyrical nods to his favorite philosophers like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, while cute, certainly decreased the likelihood of the songs’ words ever being reprinted in
Smash Hits,
the glossy new teenybop magazine, whose soaring circulation was eclipsing the dour old “inky” music papers like
NME
.

“What has meaning is what sells, and what sells is what has meaning,” Green had declared after his return from the Welsh wilderness. But not enough people were buying the new Scritti and for someone with a healthy ego like Green, this was crushing. In interviews he lashed out at Rough Trade, accusing them of frittering away their money on “silly groups with silly music,” meaning Pere Ubu and Red Crayola, instead of focusing their resources on getting Scritti into the charts. Eventually, Green made a final break with the independent ideal and started talking to major labels. He also streamlined Scritti into a solo vehicle in all but name. In interviews, Green nonchalantly renounced the pseudocollectivism of the days when Scritti were a twenty-strong music/theory think tank. “I remember we were absolutely shocked when it was suddenly announced that Green was going to be the leader of Scritti Politti,” says Gina Birch of the Raincoats, “that it was no longer a democracy.” Bassist Nial Jinks was the first to chafe against the new regime and quit. Organizer Matthew Kay soon followed suit. Although increasingly superseded by the use of drum machines, Tom Morley hung on until November 1982, a few months after
Songs to Remember
.

Having paid off his old comrades-in-amps for the rights to the Scritti Politti brand, Green and his new manager, Bob Last, secured a lucrative deal with Virgin Records and set up a publishing company for Green’s songs called Jouissance. Scritti was no longer a band but “a kind of production company,” said Green, with the singer as the pivotal constant surrounded by a floating pool of collaborators and producers. After too many false starts, Green was determined to make good on his manifest destiny: stardom.

THIS “PRODUCTION COMPANY”
model was the in-vogue notion of 1982. After Josef K, Paul Haig set up one called Rhythm of Life. He didn’t want to be in a traditional band or play live anymore, just to produce records aimed for the dance floor. In interviews, he dreamily imagined Rhythm of Life diversifying into “art and prints and video.” But the first New Pop folk to talk about replacing the rockist model of “the band” in favor of the dynamic and flexible “production company” were British Electric Foundation. Formed by ex–Human League members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, B.E.F. went one step beyond the entryist strategy of signing to a major label, instead styling itself as a minicorporation that negotiated with record companies as an equal. In a further innovation, B.E.F. included one nonmusical partner, their manager Bob Last.

It was Last who had actually engineered the breakup of the Human League in the first place, perceiving that the deadlocked group would be better off as two separate outfits. Shortly after the split, Last invited a devastated Ware to visit for a weekend in Scotland and pitched him the idea of the production company. PiL was an obvious precursor, along with Robert Fripp’s talk of “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent units” replacing the unwieldy prog-era megabands. With their permanent members on a steady wage, bands were expensive. Even if they got successful enough to pay off their record company debts, the profit pie ended up being divided into many pieces. But a production company could hire (and fire) session musicians and vocalists on a flat-fee, no-royalty basis. Increasingly, with advances in music technology, they could work with endlessly compliant, unpaid machines.

“We liked the idea of setting up this complicated corporate structure before a note had been played,” says Last. “It seemed like an amusing gesture. So there was literally a partnership of shareholdings, and I didn’t play a note on anything but I had a share in it. My role was what corporations today would call strategy director.” Other contemporary inspirations for B.E.F. included the black disco production company the Chic Organization and George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic strategy of signing endless recombinations of the same pool of musicians to separate deals with different record companies.

Although Ware and Marsh were still in debt to Virgin for their part in the two unsuccessful Human League albums, Last negotiated a new contract with the company for B.E.F. “It was a really unusual deal,” recalls Marsh. “We had to deliver one major act to Virgin every year, and each year we had to provide albums for every act signed in previous years.” Heaven 17, B.E.F.’s first major “act,” featured Ware, Marsh, and their old Meatwhistle friend Glenn Gregory, who was brought in to be the lead singer. Along with the major releases, B.E.F. were also free to deliver up to twelve minor album projects every year, which Virgin would be obliged to put out. “These were essentially art projects, instrumental works, like Eno’s Ambient series,” says Marsh.

The first B.E.F. art-i-fact was a cassette-only minialbum of instrumental music called
Music for Stowaways,
peppy synth music designed for Sony’s portable cassette player (then called Stowaway, later renamed Walkman), which had recently come on the market.
Stowaways
bore the clear imprint of Last, as it was essentially an electronic remake of the Fire Engines’
Lubricate Your Living Room
. According to Marsh, the idea was also inspired by “moving around London on the tube, going to meetings, working all over the place, and listening to music on these Stowaways. It made you feel like you were in a film all the time. Everyone takes that for granted now, but you can’t imagine how big an impact it had, almost on the level of something like virtual reality. So our concept for
Stowaways
was ‘a soundtrack for your life.’ We mixed it on headphones, not speakers, so that it would sound good on portable players. And it was a limited edition, ten thousand copies, cassette only.”

Styling themselves as a corporation was just part of B.E.F.’s antirockist polemic. They talked of abandoning the idea of music as a world-changing force and accepting it as “just a medium for enjoyment,” as Ware put it, something that enhanced your everyday life, like
Stowaways
. “That’s one of the biggest myths ever, that pop music changes the world,” Ware declared. “It’s just a confection.” Ironic, then, that the first release from Heaven 17 was the full-blown protest song “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,” written in the gap between Ronald Reagan’s election in November 1980 and his inauguration early in 1981. “Fascist Groove Thang” received a huge amount of press attention in the U.K. and its catchy-as-hell electronic ersatz of disco funk looked set to chart big, but the BBC grew nervous that the lines “Reagan’s president elect/Fascist guard in motion” were actually libelous and an unofficial Radio One ban effectively halted the single’s rise just short of the Top 40. Heaven 17’s next single, the brilliant “I’m Your Money,” was also something of a consciousness raiser, transposing the language of business onto love and marriage (“I’m offering you the post of wife”) à la Gang of Four’s “Contract.” The group may have seen music as “just entertainment,” but they seemed unable to refrain from slyly slipping some
Entertainment!
-like elements of subversion into their glossy-surfaced pop.

Heaven 17’s pop was superlatively shiny, almost intimidating in its precision-tooled panache. To differentiate themselves from the Human League, Ware and Marsh developed a pop funk that merged state-of-the-art electronics with real bass and guitar. For “Fascist Groove Thang” they wanted a jazzy, syncopated bassline similar to the bass break in Chic’s “I Want Your Love.” “We found this local Sheffield musician, John Wilson, a black guy who was only seventeen,” recalls Marsh. “We told him what we were after and he did it on the spot, almost first take.” Wilson’s bass and rhythm guitar ended up all over the “funky” side one of
Penthouse and Pavement,
Heaven 17’s debut album.

Penthouse
’s other secret weapon was the Linn Drum Computer, the same rhythm machine used by Martin Rushent to make the Human League competitive. “Literally within a fortnight of that technology coming into the country, it was all over our album,” says Ware, who did the rhythm programming. “I didn’t know how to play conventional drums, so I did whatever I liked the sound of.” What resulted were amazingly funky beats that didn’t resemble an acoustic drum kit at all. Also crucial to
Penthouse
’s crisp, in-your-face sound was the “dry” (meaning reverb-free) production. Without the “wetness” of sound reflections, the listener doesn’t get an aural picture of a band playing in a real acoustic space. But Marsh and Ware didn’t believe in rock’s pseudonaturalism. They preferred the pop artifice of constructing records in the studio. So they mixed
Penthouse
to sound good through the single mono speaker of a cheap transistor radio. The first, “funky” side of
Penthouse
“sounded fantastic on the radio,” says Ware. “It just punched out amongst everything else.”

Behind
Penthouse
’s sonic attack lay genuine aggression. After being kicked out of the Human League by his old friend Phil Oakey, Martyn Ware was hopping mad. He was also hopped up on creative energy.
Stowaways
and the bulk of
Penthouse
were recorded in a single burst in the weeks immediately following the split. The second side of
Penthouse
—which was more electronic, an extension of the original Human League—was done in just one week. “I was incandescent with anger,” says Ware. “And sometimes it just pours out of you, the ideas.” Along with competitive sparring with Oakey’s League to see which group would get on the charts first,
Penthouse
songs such as “Play to Win” were also driven by an urge to throw off the shackles of Northern working-class inverted snobbery, Sheffield’s traditional “begrudgery,” as Ware puts it, toward those who move down south to London to become big shots.

“Aspiration is the thread running through the entire album,” says Ware. “At its deepest psychological level,
Penthouse
is about breaking free from home, breaking free from the constrictions of a society and going out into the big wide world. Coming from the background that Ian, Glenn, and I did, it wasn’t a given that we’d ever get the opportunity. We could all have ended up working in a steelworks or some grim office job.” The title track, “Penthouse and Pavement,” concerns the paradoxes of middle-class people trying to be “street credible” and working-class people wanting to rise to the top. “That song is about social inequality, but also about the excitement of actually trying to make it. Not necessarily becoming rich, which is how it was interpreted wrongly by many people. I still get these ex–City of London finance traders telling me, ‘Oh yeah that song really inspired me when I was in the city.’” For these sons of socialist Sheffield (Ware even believed in nationalizing the banks), the ambivalence of their aspirational imagery was obvious. But to others, the distinction between Thatcherite values and what Heaven 17 were celebrating was not clear at all.

These ambiguities came to the fore with
Penthouse
’s witty cover image: a painting, based on a corporate advertisement Marsh found in
Newsweek,
depicting Heaven 17 as pin-striped executives discussing business plans and negotiating deals. On the front, the B.E.F. logo appears above the slogan “The New Partnership—That’s opening doors all over the world,” while the words “Sheffield. Edinburgh. London” were placed directly under the Heaven 17 brand name.

Posing as a multinational was simultaneously send-up, wish fulfillment, and an act of rock criticism. “We were debunking the mythology of the musician as this wandering minstrel who gets ripped off by the record company and gets paid to take drugs all the time,” says Ware. “A reality check. Bob Dylan may
think
he’s a rebel, but he’s actually a multinational asset. Anybody who signs to a major label is part of a huge business machine. The idea was, Let’s get rid of all this hypocrisy of ‘we’re artists, we don’t care about the money.’ Let’s strip the facade bare and have a look at what’s underneath: handshakes, signing contracts,
busy
-ness.” B.E.F. aimed to demolish other rock myths, too. They had no interest in performing live and limited the promotion of
Penthouse
to appearances in discotheques where they lip-synched to tapes. Says Marsh, “That whole set of ideas to do with expressivity, contact with the audience, community, I was against that right off the bat.”

Penthouse and Pavement
“sold over a hundred thousand copies, roughly ten times more than either
Reproduction
or
Travelogue,
” says Marsh. There were no hit singles, which pained Ware and Marsh as they watched the Human League’s runaway success. Still, earning their 1 percent off
Dare
’s sales of five million salved that wound a little. Besides, in the critical and hipster sense,
Penthouse
was a monstrous success.
“
That record was absolutely ubiquitous in a way that went far beyond its actual chart profile,” recalls Last.