Rip It Up and Start Again (9 page)

Meanwhile, the Slits drifted along, with Ari Up succumbing to a Rasta-infused mystic pantheism. “I just see the Creator in everything,” she told an interviewer. Proposing a kind of cosmology of rhythm, “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm” hymned all the pulsating patterns that structure reality: “…God is riddim…Riddim is roots and roots is riddim…SILENCE! Silence is a riddim too!” She and Neneh Cherry had encountered the early underground hip-hop scene on a trip to New York, and hearing rap for the first time inspired her percussive, chanted delivery on “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm.” “Every sound that you hear is rhythm,” the singer explained. “Fucking is rhythm and so is the earth going round and every footstep and every heartbeat. The way you go about your music is the way you go about your life…. Rhythm and life go together.”

As a sideline to the Slits, Ari Up formed New Age Steppers, a collaboration with dub producer Adrian Sherwood and his session musicians Creation Rebel. Another white reggae fanatic, Sherwood shared a squat in Battersea with Ari and Neneh. “Adrian was a hustler in a true sense,” Ari says. “He managed various reggae artists and toasters, distributed reggae records and sold them out of the back of his van, taught himself how to do studio engineering. We partnershipped and I came up with the name New Age Steppers. ‘Stepper’ as in dancing to reggae, and ‘New Age’ as in representing the new millennium.” Released in the first week of 1981, the group’s debut single, “Fade Away,” features one of Ari Up’s finest vocal performances, but its trust-in-Jah fatalism (the power-hungry and money-minded will all “fade away,” leaving the righteous meek to inherit the earth) seemed disconcertingly passive, suggesting a retreat into hippielike serenity.

One more Slits album,
Return of the Giant Slits,
saw the group abandon the independent scene for a major label, CBS, even bigger than Island. Influenced by African music, Sun Ra, and Don Cherry (Neneh’s father and a pioneer of ethnodelic jazz), the record’s diffuse, low-key experimentalism fell into a hostile marketplace. In songs like “Animal Space,” Ari Up’s pantheism took an ecomystical turn. “Earth-beat,” for instance, was a lament for a sorely mistreated Mother Earth (“Even the leaves are wheezing/Even the clouds are coughing”). After the band finally fell apart, the singer fled Babylon (aka the industrial First World) in search of any remaining havens of unspoiled Nature. Flitting from rural Jamaica to the jungles of Belize and Borneo (where she lived with tribal Indians), she became a real earth mother with a family. For others in the Slits/Pop Group milieu, getting into world music sufficed. Africa’s “rhythms of resistance” became the new roots reggae for a certain sort of postpunk.

The Pop Group splintered into multiple bands. Maximum Joy and Pigbag pursued slightly different versions of funk. Pigbag, helmed by Simon Underwood and still associated with Dick O’Dell’s Y label, became a
real
pop group, scoring a massive U.K. hit with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag.” Bruce Smith and Gareth Sager, the Pop Group’s most fervent free-jazzers, formed Rip Rig & Panic, named after an old Roland Kirk album. They peppered their interviews with beatnik patter like “cat,” “dig,” and “out there,” while the music capered and cavorted in antic whimsy. Rip Rig & Panic was basically the Pop Group minus the reggae input and the politics. “Yeah, it was
only
the music,” says Smith. “We didn’t even have a singer. Sager and our piano player Mark Springer would warble a bit into the mike now and then, but we didn’t really have vocals until Neneh joined later.” In one early interview, Sager obliquely dissed erstwhile comrade Stewart, arguing, “It’s definitely time to give the moaners the elbow. I like the cats who are complaining but they’re saying ‘yeah’ at the same time.”

Stewart, meanwhile, developed a relationship with Adrian Sherwood and the musicians surrounding the latter’s On-U label. He sang on the first New Age Steppers album, then made his solo debut in October 1982 with a fully realized version of the English hymn the Pop Group massacred at Trafalgar Square. Produced by Sherwood and marrying churchy organ swells to dub’s thunderquake bass, “Jerusalem” unites Blake’s vision of Albion as promised land with the Zion of Rasta’s dreaming. Its declaration, “I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/’Til we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land,” served as a mission statement for Stewart’s ongoing career as culture warrior. Amazingly, almost thirty years later he’s still shouting down Babylon.

IN BRITAIN, THE 1970S
felt like one long crisis. There were endless strikes, power cuts, runs on the supermarkets by hoarding housewives, rising crime, student protests, and riots triggered by racist policing. Fascism resurged on the streets of major cities, while the IRA’s terror campaign extended beyond Ulster to the mainland with pub bombings and assassinations. The kingdom was disunited, simmering with resentments. Some mourned the nation’s lost imperial role and recoiled from the multicultural reality of modern Britain. Others pushed for revolution, seeing every successful industrial action as a worker’s victory bringing the Glorious Day a little closer.

In the midseventies, the trade unions were at their absolute peak of power. Their rank and file understandably demanded pay raises to keep pace with runaway inflation, but this only made prices rise faster and the country feel even more out of control. Using their full arsenal of weapons—sympathy strikes, secondary picketing—the unions effectively brought down the Conservative government in 1974. During the period of Labour rule that followed, many felt the Trades Union Congress was effectively coregent with Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. An inevitable right-wing backlash gathered momentum. People speculated about coups being plotted by the military and whispered of private armies, led by retired brigadiers, training in English meadows under cover of darkness. Legitimate pressure groups emerged like the Middle Class Association and the National Association for Freedom, dedicated to taming the unions, resisting “declining standards,” and restoring the word “Great” to its proper place in front of “Britain.”

In this polarized context, the decision by a bunch of students at Leeds University to name their band Gang of Four was a provocative gesture. The name was a derogatory term for the four top leaders of China’s Cultural Revolution Group, who’d been running the country right up until shortly after Mao’s September 1976 death, when they were arrested by the People’s Republic’s new premier.

The 1965–68 Cultural Revolution—Maoism at its most radical and uncompromisingly antibourgeois—was fresh in the public memory. In 1977 you could still find Maoist groups active on many U.K. campuses. Gang of Four weren’t actually Maoists, or even card-carrying Communists, but they were definitely products of the left-wing university culture of the seventies, which even more than the previous decade was characterized by student militancy. At Leeds and elsewhere throughout the U.K., students swelled the ranks of Trotskyite groups like the International Marxist Group and the Socialist Workers Party and joined picket lines alongside striking miners and dockers.

While the committed activists spouted the textbook party line, a more diffuse left-wing academic culture existed based around an eclectic pick-and-mix approach to radical theory. This trendy-lefty autodidactism was fueled by secondhand paperbacks and beginner’s guides to the key thinkers of the twentieth century, including the neo-Marxist pantheon of Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, and Althusser.
Leaving the 20th Century,
a slim, green, attractive-looking anthology of situationist texts and graphics, was
the
radical-chic fetish object of its era. Blending often incompatible systems of thought, the resulting hodgepodge lacked rigor from the stern standpoint of academics and ideologues alike. In rock music, though, even a little bit of rigor is rather bracing and galvanizing. Too much is plain
rigid,
of course, but Gang of Four managed to hit just the right balance. In the grand tradition of British art rock, theory helped Gang of Four achieve the sort of conceptual breakthroughs that more organically evolving groups never reach.

Leeds University’s fine-arts department, which spawned Gang of Four and its sister groups the Mekons and Delta 5, encouraged this conceptual approach. Theory was considered inseparably intertwined with artistic practice. T. J. Clark, the department head, had been a member of the short-lived British chapter of the Situationist International. Terry Atkinson, the studio-painting tutor who wandered around discussing the students’ work, had once belonged to the ultra-rigorous movement Art and Language. Drawing on Marxism and hard-core aesthetic theory, Art and Language created works that combined visual material with text (political posters, philosophy, even musical scores) and for a while even abandoned art production altogether for criticism. The Mekons’ Tom Greenhalgh enjoyed Art and Language’s sarcastic, combative approach, the way they ripped into other critics for being “wooly-minded and promoting the mystique of Art.” Absorbing this sensibility, the Mekons and Gang of Four created a kind of metarock, radically self-critical and vigilant.

Leeds actually had an unusual density of art students. In addition to the university, says Greenhalgh, “Leeds Polytechnic had its own excellent art department, where a lot of work with performance and video was going on. And there was Leeds College of Art.” Factor in all the nonart students in Leeds, and you had the recipe for considerable town-versus-gown tension. “It was a Northern working-class city with a bunch of students dumped in the middle, most of them not from Yorkshire,” says Hugo Burnham, Gang of Four’s drummer. “‘Fookin’ students!’ was an expression you heard rather frequently!”

The tension was heightened by the not entirely unfounded perception that the students bummed around doing “fook all” courtesy of the government’s undergraduate grants, getting drunk every night on dirt cheap subsidized beer in their college bars. Meanwhile, ordinary people either worked hard or, increasingly, subsisted on meager unemployment benefits. In the industrial parts of Yorkshire, the jobless figures more than doubled between 1973 and 1978 as the traditional heavy industries declined. As prospects for youth narrowed, the far Right prospered. Leeds became the Northern stronghold for the crypto-fascist National Front, while explicitly neo-Nazi organizations like the British Movement and the League of St. George were also active in the area. “Our very first gig, skinheads came looking for a fight,” recalls Burnham. “There was real tension. The skins were taunting Andy Gill and then he smacked one of them in the face with his guitar.” Ironically, the crop-headed Burnham often got mistaken for a skinhead himself. “They’d see me with my short hair, Doc Martens boots, and braces, and approach me and ask if I was a fan of Skrew-driver, the Oi! group.”

Burnham was actually studying drama at Leeds, oscillating between trying to set up a radical theater group and playing rugby, a game that suited his stocky physique. “I gravitated toward this fine-arts drinking crowd, they seemed like the most interesting people around.” The center of the scene was a pub called the Fenton, which was strategically located midway between the university and the polytechnic. A long-established hangout for radicals and nonconformists, its patrons mixed several generations of bohemians: bearded sixties relics, gays, anarchists, and “the new breed” in their leather coats and Doc Martens boots. “It was totally crowded, people squashed together and just raving it up,” recalls Greenhalgh. As much as Leeds’ fine-arts department, it was the Fenton’s beery ferment of argument that shaped Gang of Four and the Mekons.

Gang of Four thrived on friction. “Andy had really mastered the art of the put-down,” says Burnham. “He would bait you. You get that sense from his guitar playing, it’s very prickly.” Drawing on the jagged, choppy rhythm-as-lead style developed by Wilko Johnson of pub rock trailblazers Dr. Feelgood, Gill chipped out flinty harmonics and splintered funk, making the listener flinch from the shards shooting out of the speakers.

Love of Dr. Feelgood—the stripped-down sound, the aura of barely contained violence—united Gill, Burnham, and singer Jon King. But somewhere between their first gig in May 1977 and their first record, October 1978’s
Damaged Goods
EP, a drastic transformation took place. Recruited via an ad that described the group in Feelgood-like terms as a “fast rivvum & blues band,” bassist Dave Allen pushed the group firmly into the punk-funk zone. An accomplished player who’d done session work, Allen had been looking to make music “like Stevie Wonder but heavy” before he met Gang of Four. In turn, the Gang trained their bassist to play more sparsely, using just “a quarter of the number of notes he was actually capable of playing,” according to Burnham. Gang of Four kept their music stark and severe. Andy Gill shunned sound-thickening effects like fuzz and distortion, while Burnham eschewed splashy cymbals. Avoidances defined the band’s style as much as positive choices. “Instead of guitar solos, we had anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole,” says Gill. The very fabric of the band’s sound was abrasively different. Valve amplifiers were verboten, says Gill. “Valves are what every guitarist today wants—they’re the prerequisite for a ‘fat’ rock tone, the ‘warmth’ that people talk about. I had transistorized amps—a more brittle, cleaner sound, and colder. Gang of Four were against warmth.”

Gang of Four also shunned the heat of rock spontaneity, the intuitive looseness of letting songs emerge “organically” out of jams. “No jamming—that was the
J
-word,” says Gill. “Everything was thought out in advance.” Burnham worked out unusual drum parts that inverted or frustrated the usual rock modes of rhythmic motion, like the mechanistic drum loop of “Love Like Anthrax,” and what Burnham calls the “continuous falling-down-the-stairs flow” of “Guns Before Butter.” Instead of stacking the instruments for a layered wall of sound, Gang of Four gave each of them room to breathe. Guitar, bass, and drums existed on more or less equal footing. In their most thrilling songs—the taut, geometrical paroxysm of “Natural’s Not In It,” for instance—
everything
worked as rhythm, just like in James Brown’s funk.

This egalitarian balance between players embodied the group’s collectivist beliefs. “It’s democratic music, where we don’t have a ‘star’ thing,” Jon King declared. Dave Allen insisted, “Gang of Four doesn’t believe in the individual, and we believe that whatever you do is ‘political’ with a small
p
.” These ideals permeated every aspect of the group’s existence, from the way the music was jointly composed to the four-way split of publishing rights to the constant, fiery debates about internal affairs and external issues. And every member of the group and its entourage got paid the same wage (thirty pounds), except for the roadies, who got
double
during tours.

In the early days, the Mekons were an extension of this sprawling collective. “Without actually having headed notepaper to prove it, Gang of Four and Mekons were virtually a cooperative, sharing equipment and a rehearsal space,” says Burnham. “We did gigs together, taking turns to headline.” The Mekons’ version of democratized rock differed from Gang of Four’s, though. It was less disciplined and clenched, more shambolic and sloppy. Guitarist Kevin Lycett listed the group’s founding principles: “that anybody could do it; that we didn’t want to be stars; that there was no set group as such, anybody could get up and join in and instruments would be swapped around; that there’d be no distance between the audience and the band; that we were nobody special.” Founding member Mark White had never played bass before and at their first jam used a door key to pick the strings. Lycett played a battered secondhand guitar that cost ten pounds. Exuberantly mixing informality with ineptitude, early Mekons gigs were “complete art noise chaos,” recalls Burnham. “They opened for Gang of Four at our second show ever and they had a sofa onstage representing a spaceship. It had the word ‘spaceship’ painted on it. It was genius and hilarious.” Lyrics, read off a piece of paper, devolved into improvised gabble. Friends wandered on and offstage. At another gig, the set disintegrated because the set list had been inadvertently written out in a completely different order for every band member.

Taking the punk ideal of “anyone can do it” even more seriously than Swell Maps, the Mekons ought to have gone nowhere. Amazingly, they had a record deal by their second show. They were supporting Scottish pop-punk outfit the Rezillos at the F-Club, Leeds’s leading New Wave club. Bob Last was in the audience and decided that the Mekons would be the perfect group to kick-start his still productless Fast Product. Slightly put out at being so swiftly overtaken by their seemingly less serious brethren, Gang of Four were mollified when they soon got signed to Fast Product, too.

A stumbling juggernaut of crude guitar and caveman drums, “Never Been in a Riot,” the Mekons’ debut, was a sonic argument in support of the proposition that rock, in the words of
Melody Maker
’s Mary Harron, “is the only form of music which can actually be done
better
by people who can’t play their instruments than by people who can.” Not everybody bought the argument initially. Rough Trade
literally
didn’t buy it, refusing to take any copies of the single, saying it was just too incompetent. “Shortly thereafter, though, it was made Single of the Week in
NME,
” recalls Last. “And
everybody
wanted it, including Rough Trade.”

NME
’s seal of approval was all the more significant because it came courtesy of the paper’s resident punk rocker Tony Parsons, who took the lyrics of “Never Been in a Riot” as an inspired lampoon of the Clash’s street-fighting-man posturing (“White Riot,” the allusion to “sten guns in Knightsbridge” in “1977,” etc.). According to Greenhalgh, the song is closer to an admission of vulnerability. “That you might be in a riot and be scared. Being open about that kind of weakness rather than trying to put on a front.” This was all part of the Mekons’ self-effacing and humanizing project—a refusal to be larger than life. Later in 1978, Tony Parsons interviewed the group as part of an
NME
special feature on the Leeds scene. In keeping with their ideals, the Mekons insisted on “no photographs, no surnames. We don’t want to push ourselves as
individual personalities
!” Says Greenhalgh, “We didn’t want to be photographed for
NME,
so we made this puppet creature and put a guitar around it.” Photographer Steve Dixon sneaked a snapshot of them anyway.