Discussion:U.S. Retrace

ALLMUSIC ANCIENNE BIO.Carlier2 (discuter) 15 octobre 2016 à 01:32 (CEST)

ALLMUSIC ANCIENNE BIO.Carlier2 (discuter) 15 octobre 2016 à 01:32 (CEST)

mick mercer music historian stated that they were not g. http://thequietus.com/articles/01436-the-thirty-best-goth-records-of-all-time

removed some of the description of the Bromley contingent as it did not relate to article subject and has its own article if interested

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RECORD MIRROR THE MAGIC OF TRANCE Mark Cooper 07/03/81 The fetish speaks - part one. MARK COOPER goes ghost walking in the enchanted, perverted world of Siouxsie and the Banshees. 1. A fetish is any natural object believed to possess magical or spiritual power. "Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance we are entranced" (‘Spellbound’ Siouxsie and the Banshees). SIOUXSIE moves across the stage at the Manchester Apollo like a siren possessed. The lights follow her as she moves back and forth, her hands stretching out and then returning to her sides. She’s dressed in black except for a glittering sash that surrounds her waist and she’s lit up like Cleopatra, an Egyptian priestess commanding her slaves, her subjects. She puts one foot upon a monitor and gazes into the front few rows... the only ones she can see. "I stand to one side so that I can see into the audience. Usually all you can see is the 20 at the front. When we put the lights on the audience, there’s suddenly 2000 more people out there. It makes you feel very good to know that there’s all those people out there, but it always comes as a bit of a shock. "I try to move around a bit to let them know that I’m there," John McGeoch, the Banshees’ guitarist. "We don’t want to be manufactured and I don’t think we are. At the same time, we take a lot of care with what we do. When we play now, it’s a show and not a gig. The lights now are brilliant; the guy who does it has been with the band a long time and when we change the order of the songs he gets a little nervous because the whole order of the lighting arrangement has to change." Budgie, the Banshees’ drummer. "A beautiful mask in plaster cast" (from ‘Headcut’ on ‘Juju’). Siouxsie in the lights is perfectly framed. Her face commands the audience who stare up, transfixed. This is live, magic, and yet a ritual. The crowd shakes to the music which rises and drones like an Indian raga and the faces are enchanted, sucked into the music and the show, the live world of Siouxsie and the Banshees. This is a spectacle and a sense of awe descends on the crowds like a mist. Siouxsie commands and she almost terrifies, the music sucks you in and yet there’s unease in the songs, a sense of disturbance, of a rising panic drowned in the notes but rising as the music marches forward. 2. A fetish is any object or person that comes to be regarded with total belief, with a kind of devotion. "To be quite honest, I don’t really have any specific idea as to why we do anything... there’s a load of groups who can sum themselves up and package themselves with some kind of slogan. It’s real neat.

"We’ve never been able to do that and it’s a problem sometimes in interviews. But that’s what’s special about this group." Siouxsie, singer. "I think there’s an interest in our work that goes right back to ‘Join Hands’ and it’s an interest in devotion. There’s a song we have called ‘Icon’ that was inspired by Dervishes getting themselves into such a state that they could put needles through their heads. Our interest in that state is a theme that runs through our work. "And that’s because playing on stage can sometimes bring me into that state and we’re trying to share that because it’s really good. "A song like ‘Jigsaw’ when we play it well can put me into a trance and that’s something we’re trying to project into an audience. ‘Juju’ explores that a bit more coherently. But our interest in religious magic comes naturally, it’s nothing as crass as Talking Heads getting books out of the library and swotting it up, giving you a bibliography of African music and religion." Steve Severin, bass guitar.

AFTER the show, the band come out into the foyer and sit behind a desk for half an hour and sign autographs. A good 50 fans are waiting to meet them, clutching programmes to be signed, many of them punks, many of them dressed in Banshees’ style.

"The gap between the entertainer and the audience is something we try to narrow onstage without going out and singing ’No More Heroes’ or anything as obvious as that. At the same time, some of our music requires a certain distance - a song like ‘Nightshift’ has to be massive.

"That’s why we’re doing these autograph sessions but sometimes they upset Siouxsie because people just freeze up." Steve gives a nod over at Siouxsie, sitting at a bed in a hotel room in Manchester, a few hours after the show. Siouxsie is disturbed by the autograph session.

First we’ve talked about repetition, about the difficulty of a long tour, of shows that follow, one after the other. "You can go self-conscious. You remember that you walked over to this side of the stage the night before. Sometimes when I feel this is happening too much I just go to pieces at night and I do things like turn the bed upside down. It’s probably healthy that I do react.

"I suppose these feeling come when we do a gig and it feels like a ’show’ with all the worst connotations of that word.

"I don’t think for one moment that what we’re doing now is like the Pink Floyd or something really boring. We don’t need the lights because there’s no movement or anything else happening onstage. But the people who put this together have been with us a long time and we’ve worked toward this together. It’s a very natural meeting of music and lighting.

"Music has to be real and not just a show. ("But there has to be theatre in it," Steve adds.) There’s a thin, intangible line between good and bad, and if it works, if it’s good, you don’t sit down and wonder - was it acting? I know it’s good when I’m transfixed in what I’m doing but not looking at what I’m doing. Very involved and very intense, but not noticing myself."

THE autographs force Siouxsie to notice as the fans notice her, watch her and wait for her. Close up, much closer than on the stage. Close enough to frighten with the nature and the form of their interest.

"I do want to have contact with the people who come to see us and an autograph session is an excuse for that but I’d rather they were interested in saying something or asking about a song or something rather than having a flimsy excuse like a piece of paper to sign or hoping maybe that you’ll look up at them."

A flimsy kind of contact. "There’s nobody’s autograph I’d value. Oh, there’s a few people it’d be nice to happen to bump into and find something in common with but I’d never force myself into that situation.

"When they do treasure a signature or a piece of paper it upsets me."

And the look-alikes, the women who dress like Siouxsie, the punks in uniform, Crass badges complete?

"It’s the opposite of how I think. I’ve never once wanted to get someone else’s autograph or try to look like them. It’s not that you feel superior, you start to wonder why wasn’t I like that?"

3. Psychologists explain a fetish as any object or part of the body that is fixed upon, separated from the rest, regarded as an exclusive source of attraction, of pleasure.

And the image that they see?

"They see you right but they only see part of you, they take that part for the whole in a possessive kind of way."

Wait a minute, back to that autograph session. And Siouxsie talking: "It’s the only opportunity in which the right people can take the initiative and actually come up and talk to us but the fans make it into a session situation. Sometimes. And people at the front of the stage try to touch you."

Siouxsie shrinks back on the bed.

"Standing in the light I never wanted to be right. Now I’m attracted by the light and blinded by the sight." (from ’Into The Light’.)

"This is all happening more on this tour, more because this is the first tour they’ve really come to see us and us alone."

While Steve continues: "The fact that we’ve placed ourselves in a popular market means that all this has got more exaggerated. Now it’s our audience and nobody else comes; they’re virtually all fans of ours before they come to the gigs. Before John joined they were all different factions and so playing was more of a fight."

Siouxsie agrees: "This is the first time we’re not fighting something in the audience and it’s an odd twist that we should end up fighting the adulation. Elements of what we’ve just said, when they do creep in (and it’s not every night by any means), scare me.

"I know that people strive to get to the kind of position we’re just beginning to reach. But when it’s the kind of situation we’re describing, I don’t like it."

"Sit back and enjoy the real McCoy, our new air of authority, our sentinel of misery." (from ’Monitor’.)

SIOUXSIE and the Banshees now play shows before large audiences. They have hit singles and albums and Siouxsie stares out of a lot of photographs composed, made up, her hair a shock, her face graven in a permanent punk pallor.

Is this a long way from 1976? Steve says no. "We always wanted to be accessible. After that first gig at the 100 Club we didn’t perform again for six months. We used to sit around every day and discuss what we wanted the band to be. We’ve always known what was valid to achieve those aims and what wasn’t."

And so to the show, to Siouxsie the witch and Voodoo Dolly. And Siouxsie the cat? For Siouxsie a way of being herself and, sometimes, autograph sessions and elsewhere, a way of succumbing, of fear, a way of becoming the audience’s creature. A star. An icon. Their fetish.

But the Banshees have no doubt that what they do is best realised here with these lights, with this music.

They beam out: "The total opposite of our show is PIL playing behind a video in New York. When I was younger and I went to a show I loved it when I was presented with a total experience."

This is Steve explaining and Siouxsie continues. Both of them seem often to return to their childhoods, to growing up, to explain why they do as they do.

"I think it’s to do with something really basic like rubbing your scent all over the place. You want to say: ’This is me and you’re going to have to spend a lot of time washing the place down after we’ve left’.

"It’s a away of making that place your own so there’s no way anyone will be thinking of any other band or any other memory from the past."

Siouxsie and the Banshees insist upon their style and their show. Enter the Apollo and you’ve entered totally into the Banshees’ world, so totally that you can lose yourself in it, lose yourself so that you can be amazed or terrified, swamped or released.

And Siouxsie is your leader, a siren to be feared, perhaps. And perhaps even a suitable object of surrender. The music invites, invited. Let’s go, churches and dance.

LAST WEEK Siouxsie and the Banshees discussed how to reach a trance state in their music and then convey that state to their audience.

And we saw how Siouxsie - as star and image - is always in danger of being turned into a fetish by her fans and into a commodity by the business in which she works.

Fans create stars and stars create fans.

"Idols are the works of man’s own hands - they are things and man bows down and worships things, worships that which he has created himself. In doing so, he transforms himself into a thing." (Eric Fromm).

‘Juju’ is a celebration, but it is also a warning.

Siouxsie explains the old show: "On the ’Join Hands’ tour we had stained glass windows and black drapes. It was like taking your own miniature church with you. And that’s carried on. We take our own set and show into a theatre and make it our own."

Steve continues: "The idea we had for taking the stainless windows with us was almost like our little joke that those people have come to worship us."

Now hold on. Isn’t this a bit total? Siouxsie and the Banshees play fearful devotional music and compose their show and suck you in. Who’s controlling who here? And who’s the fetish? And is there room to breathe?

I plead occasional claustrophobia in the world of the Banshees, its colours so black, its dance so unrelenting, so constantly, droningly black.

"We have got a very definite style and that’s something we’re criticised for but it’s not something we conjure up, it’s what comes out. The whole base of rock and roll is people with very definite styles, people who manufacture those styles into myths, hideous people like Bruce Springsteen."

Ah yes, the million dollar question. Don’t the Banshees manufacture a myth, from the perfect lighting to Siouxsie’s staring face, to the rushing black tones of McGeoch’s choppy guitar? A total complete, made-up world, perhaps even a fetish?

"No," says Steve. "Maybe," says Siouxsie.

"We want to put on a show and we do but we don’t want to be manufactured," says Budgie.

But Siouxsie explains: "You see we’re not really conscious in that way onstage. The consciousness is of what you can do when you’re not playing, things like the lights, but the gig itself isn’t choreographed, it’s real, live."

"Some people think it’s hammed up, that ’Juju’ is an exploitation of magic, of ideas that are used to impress, to sound impressive, heavy maaaan. We knew people would react to the album by saying: ’Boogie, boogie, it’s the boogie man’," Siouxsie puts on her most sarcastic voice.

Steve explains: "We tried to play the artwork down, not to be crass and obvious. We tried to play down the black magic side of things and make it as relevant to what we are actually saying as possible. I can just visualise how Toyah or Jimmy Pursey would have done it.

"We avoided all the sword and sorcery stuff, the Roger Dean side of it."

THEY succeeded. ’Juju’ is a dark world, a complete atmosphere and the whole record works as a style, a form of hypnosis. And as an examination of control, of the power of performance when the band transfixes the audience and themselves and works a dance-dark magic. A magic in which the audience becomes the band’s puppet and sometimes the band belongs to the audience, becomes their puppet. A great metaphor for the band’s hypnotism.

And for the more sinister side of things when the mixture overbalances and instead of devotion and religious union, the entertained turn the entertainer into a puppet on a string, spellbound.

"When you think your toys have gone berserk, it’s an illusion you cannot shirk. You hear laughter cracking through the walls, it sends you spinning, you have no choice." (from ‘Spellbound’).

Siouxsie and the Banshees explore this dark world with a devotion and relentlessness that makes some find them narrow, claustrophobic, one-sided. But the truth is that this is their commitment and the source of their dark strength.

Steve explains the commitment: "I’m always intrigued by those things that you really have to delve into... if you got totally into black magic or something you’d have to become a totally different person; you couldn’t live the same way. You’d just have to cut yourself off and maybe it’s because you have to have such commitment that people consider you evil.

"I’m interested in discovering whether those things actually are evil or whether it’s the fact that you have to isolate yourself from society and the normal way of doing things that people consider it evil."

And get punished as being evil for their difference, for the depth of their commitment? Who are more committed to their way of seeing than rock musicians living out a style of life that seems like magic, like freedom to those trapped in the everyday of the nine-to-five or the dole?

Siouxsie follows up what Steve has already said: "It’s like going back to the Dark Ages; witches were the ones who kept themselves to themselves apart, nothing to do with anything, being a bit eccentric. It’s just their character wasn’t as bland and open as everyone else’s and so they were branded as something unsavoury and punished for it.

"And people are punished now for being different - but in subtler ways."

There’s two kinds of difference and both are sinister. The first is when you lose touch with the world, lose the devotion and become separate, outside the music.

Steve explains his song ’Halloween’ on ’Juju’. "My source for that is something that happened to me when I was very young, understanding reality for the first time, if that doesn’t sound too... (pause) I suddenly realised when I was about six that I was a separate person. Suddenly I knew I was around instead of just being a part of things. And once that happens you realise that you’ve lost something like an innocence."

The other kind of difference is the difference of trying to be yourself and being stopped. Siouxsie has always tried and always felt resisted, and she fights back: "Society tries to make people live out a clichéd existence, to conform. If you’ve got a Hotpoint washing machine then you’re alright because you’re like the others.

"People are pressured to live out lives of conformity and I want to live my life differently and to have the freedom to be able to do it in front of others without being stopped."

Siouxsie has always fought for control, to speak it and live it as she sees it. Take it back to when she was growing up at home: "A lot of children do hate their parents and that relationship is a very powerful influence. I used to really hate may mother, both my parents, sometimes I used to really despise them. Sometimes I used to want to kill them or kill myself just to teach them a lesson. Now I’ve done a complete turnaround since I’ve left home. Now I don’t see my parents so much and we get on very well.

"I remember admitting this to a few girls at school and they thought I was a monster or something but I always felt they were holding out in not admitting to having that feeling.

"When you’re an adolescent you always think what a misfit you are and you try to stifle those kind of things. I always found it very hard to stifle myself. I’d blurt them out and people would think I was weird."

WE discuss Phil Oakey and his changes of costume, going the whole hog and dressing as Brian Eno and, later, Lou Reed, and later still (now) as himself. We all admire his commitment; as Steve says, he admires those who take a total change: "It was really different before because you knew if you did it, you were completely on your own whereas these girls who come to see Siouxsie, they know there’ll be at least twenty others like them there."

And Siouxsie leans forward, the Juju priestess who made her followers "so... unaware" and delivers her creed: "I think what’s vital is people with character. There’s something about certain people, it’s just in there character, they have something that’s theirs.

"Maybe it’s something to do with their humour, but they have something that’s theirs, even when they’re trying to find themselves, they’re trying to find themselves rather than just being a bit lazy and just getting lost."

And there you have it. It’s four o’clock in the morning and the three of us decide it’s time to go off and sleep. Siouxsie and the Banshees are a big band now, surrounded by lights and equipment and a host of fans. As far as they’re concerned their show and their way of acting is the way they need to act.

"I don’t think you can do something and try to cater for other people’s tastes, you just have to do what you want."

No, they’re not breaking up but this is their last major British tour in this style for the near future: "We want to stay in control, we’ve held onto it this far and we want to continue to do so. People always think there’s some huge story in it when you make an announcement like that.

"But this show is a precedent and we’re very proud of it. We just don’t want to repeat ourselves."

So there’ll be a new single, an EP made by Siouxsie on voice and Budgie on drums and the tour will continue round much of the world. Meanwhile, listen to ’Juju’. The record transfixes, enchants, hypnotises, scares. Leaves you spellbound.

And it’s also the best examination of what happens when that magic goes wrong, turns black out on the sinister night shift and the performer/magician becomes a doll in the grasp of her fans.

I remember Siouxsie after an autograph session, looking so worried at the fans dressed like her, as if she’d been cloned...

"then the victim stared up, looked strangely at the screen as if her pain was our fault, but that’s entertainment, what we crave for inside." (from ’Monitor’)

It’s a devil’s bargain, brothers and sisters, careful how you crave.

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from the times joy division Joy Division’s unsettling combination of the visceral and the ethereal has hooked generation after generation of listeners. New Order, the more commercially palatable and dance-oriented (yet still angst-tinged) outfit that the band became after Mr. Curtis’s death, has helped maintain Joy Division’s profile. As with the Velvet Underground, Joy Division’s name has been kept alive by the vastly more successful groups it influenced, like U2 and the Cure, which have paid it public tribute.

Joy Division helped spawn the Goth movement (countless sepulchral singers have copied Mr. Curtis’s doomy baritone drone), and you can spot its stray chromosomes popping up everywhere from emo to the more melancholy strains of metal. Most recently, Joy Division-indebted outfits like Interpol, Bloc Party and Editors have refocused attention on post-punk, that late 1970s, early ’80s era of musical experimentalism and lyrical innovation in which Joy Division assumed a central role.

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INDEPENDENTS DAY

post-punk 1979-81

by Simon Reynolds

this is the director's cut of the piece in the December 2001 Uncut.... and a taster for my book on post-punk, due late 2003

For five years now, people have been trying to kickstart "the Eighties revival", and wondering why it still hasn't kicked off yet. And what "Eighties" refers to, of course, is eyeliner boys playing cheap synths, daft New Romantic haircuts, the clumsy, charming pretensiousness of early pop video. All stuff that's easy to look back on with amused affection (especially as it was so informed by irony and camp in the first place).

But what about the moment just before this "Eighties"--the post-punk years of 1981, 1980, 1979. Who's really up to confronting the intellectual ardour and political passion of groups like Pop Group, Gang of Four, This Heat, Cabaret Voltaire, the early pre-pop Scritti Politti? Our irony-enfeebled constitutions would surely collapse on contact with the sheer solemn seriousness of it all.

Perhaps this very earnestness is the reason that the post-punk era has suffered serious neglect from retro culture, which has pillaged damn-near everything else. But there are signs, finally, of a resurgence of interest: Chicks On Speed covering songs by The Normal, Malaria, and Delta 5; compilations of avant-funk such as 9 O'Clock Drop, In The Beginning There Was Rhythm, Disco Not Disco, and Anti-New York, as well as reissues of records by ESG, Cabaret Voltaire, This Heat, ,,, The Native Hipsters, and 23 Skidoo; the NYC post-punk documentary film Downtown 81; Messthetics, a series of bootleg CD compilations of long-lost UK D.I.Y singles; the emergence of post-punk influenced bands like Life Without Buildings, Lightning Bolt, Erase Errata, Playgroup; Joy Division and PiL echoes in Kid A.... Not forgetting the timely Rough Trade Shops--25 Years, a 4 CD celebration of the record store that spawned both the legendary label and the distribution network that was British independent music's spine for 15 years. Maybe now is the time to re-open the memory banks....

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Punk seemed to be "over" almost before it got started. For many early participants, the death knell came in late 1977 with Never Mind the Bollocks--however incendiary its contents, ultimately just a hard rock album. "It sounded like a tombstone," says England's Dreaming author Jon Savage, who reviewed Bollocks for Sounds. " Airless. No spaces in the music." Early the next year came the Pistols's bloody disintegration after a failed stab at conquering America, and The Clash's Give 'Em Enough Rope--like Bollocks, its drably conventional rock production signaling CBS's long-term goal of breaking the band in the USA. As 1977's speed-rush anticipation gave way to 1978's crashing despair, the record business was not only intact, it was positively rejuvenated, ready to do big business with a tamed version of punk called New Wave.

If you wanted to locate the beginnings of post-punk, you could go back even earlier than Bollocks, though--to Johnny Rotten's show on Capital Radio, which aired in the summer of 1977 and during which he played records by Beefheart, Peter Hammill, Can, and contemporary Jamaican dub and "deejay" artists like Dr. Alimantado. This was the lead Pistol blowing his carefully constructed thug/monster image and revealing himself as a hipster, much to Malcolm McLaren's horror. "That was pathetic", Rotten recalled a year later, "[because] I couldn't be half as ignorant, moronic, violent, destructive ... as they wanted to promote me". Capital Radio began the process of persona-demolition that culminated in "Public Image" the song and Public Image Limited the band.

A repudiation of Bollocks's straight down the line mod/NY Dolls/glam sound, PiL was what Lydon had always wanted the Pistols to sound like: an anti-rockist non-band influenced by Krautrock, tortured art-rockers like Hammill, and dub. "After the Pistols, John wanted to play in a band where the bass was LOUD," Jah Wobble has said. "We used to experiment with graphic equalizers and customised bassbins, putting rock records through the system to see how far you could take the low end."

Other important punk figures echoed Lydon's anti-rock rhetoric. In Subway Sect's "Rock and Roll, Even," Vic Godard sang "We oppose all rock and roll / It's held you for so long / You can't refuse, it's too much to lose... Afraid to take the stroll / Off the course of twenty years / And out of rock and roll". In interviews, Godard denounced punk for ultimately perpetuating rock as an empty posture of pseudo-rebellion. The Clash rapidly became every post-punker's whipping boys--for their relapse into rock'n'roll rebel iconography and Americana, for becoming peons of a major label (Mark Perry declared that punk had died the day The Clash signed to CBS). PiL guitarist Keith Levene pointedly dissed the band he'd once briefly belonged to, declaring "we don't want to be another Clash, making old-fashioned, twelve-bar rock & roll."

Another icon endlessly namechecked by post-punkers as the epitome of what to avoid was Chuck Berry. Cabaret Voltaire told NME that "rock'n'roll is not about regurgitating Chuck Berry riffs". And Young Marble Giants's Stuart Moxham once retaliated to a heckler's demand to "play rock 'n'roll" by regurgitating a Berry riff smack dab in the middle of one of YMG's ultra-quiet tunes, then shouting "Look, anyone can do that. They're doing it all over town. But we want to do this." Maybe post-punk's Berry-phobia can be traced all the way back to Lydon's groans of protest during the early Pistols's demo session documented on The Great Rock'nRoll Swindle, when Jones/Matlock/Cook jammed "Johnny B. Goode" and Rotten whines "oh fuck, it's awful... AAARRGH!!!!!....stop it, I fucking hate it."

In a sense, Lydon's Capital Radio show offered a kind of listening-list for a post-punk universe, a program for the completion of punk's failed musical revolution. At the end of 1977, Sounds two-part feature "New Musick" heralded the first wave of post-punk bands that used Lydon-style influences like dub and Krautrock as springboards into the future. Other inputs included the Velvets, Eno/Bowie, Kraftwerk, the new cheaper synthesisers, and disco. "Punk had become a cliche and we wanted to continue that sense of newness, of discovery and total science fiction alienation," says Savage, one of the "New Musick" writers. " I was obsessed with Pere Ubu and Devo ... that white synthesiser noise and dark psychedelia. "

The two UK groups quickest to respond to the post-punk challenge were Alternative TV and The Pop Group. "I was disappointed by the lack of musical progress," says Mark Perry. "Punk had brought in the DIY ethos but it didn't take it far enough." In many ways, Perry had the edge on Lydon: from its title The Image Is Cracked to its reggae inputs and use of synth, Alternative TV's May 1978 debut album preempted Public Image Limited. The follow-up, Vibing Up The Senile Man, released early 1979, upped the stakes hugely. "It still shocks me how we had the bollocks to do that album," Perry laughs. "There's free jazz influences--I was into the Art Ensemble of Chicago."

The modus operandi was like PiL's Flowers of Romance two years too soon: untutored musicians using all kinds of non-rock acoustic instruments to create raw sonic material, then messing about with it using the studio-as-instrument. "I'd moved into this house that had this amazing music room, pianos, clarinets... and we were always picking up stuff from junk shops. Vibing's not a rock album, there's hardly any guitar. ". Vibing was a kamikaze mission to destroy rock, and the main casualty was Perry's prospects of punk stardom: "ATV had become a bloody good rock band, but here I was, chucking away my career for all this weird twang-crash-bang-wallop. People thought I'd flipped my lid!"

The Pop Group approached this kind of sonic action-painting, but their funk base gave listeners something to grip onto amidst the maelstrom. "Just before punk, we were like the Bristol funk army," says singer Mark Stewart. "We'd go to clubs and dance to import records by T-Connection, BT Express, Fatback Band, this heavy bassline funk. I was fourteen in 1975 but could get into clubs 'cos I'm so tall--six foot seven. Later I discovered that in cities all over the UK, there had been similar kids who were into funk and wearing Fifties clothes like brothel creepers, kind of a reaction against prog rock, and that most of these funk kids--in Bristol, we called them 'kit chaps'--later gravitated towards punk when it arrived."

As well as funk's groove power, the Pop Group brought in dub's disorientating FX and out-jazz's freeform firework displays. Intellectual influences included Wilhelm Reich's creed of libidinous liberation, Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty, John Cage's Zen-scented spirituality, Situationism's raging politics of boredom, and Beat poets like Ginsberg and Kerouac The result was Dionysian protest music, a conflagration of infernal sound and imagistic words that dissolved the divisions between politics, poetry, mysticism, and eroticism. One of the band's stand-out songs, "Thief Of Fire" was a twist on the Prometheus myth, "finding out about stuff that's forbidden knowledge," says Stewart, while "We Are Time" was about "not wanting to just be alive, but to really live... This Romantic idea of going through nihilism and coming out the other side with something really positive."

The Pop Group became the epicentre of the Bristol scene, and a cause celebre for the music papers. Signing with major label offshoot Radar, the Pop Group debuted with the single "'She Is Beyond Good And Evil," an exhilarating mess of disco-style walking bass, slashing punk-funk rhythm guitar and Stewart's lovestricken caterwaul. "It was a very young attempt to mix up poetic, existensialist stuff with political yearnings," says Stewart, "The idea of love as a revolutionary force--the way it kind of switches on a light, makes you hope for a better world." The line "Western values mean nothing to her", like the spear-wielding tribal warriors in loincloths that adorned the debut album Y, captured The Pop Group's cult of all things primal. Stewart called the band "experimental primitives": they yearned for an authenticity and instinctual potency lost through civilisation's debilitating influence.

"We like to think of ourselves as intellects tempered by instinct--a reversal of the conventional idiom," guitarist John Waddington told ZigZag. Journalist Vivien Goldman dated Mark Stewart at the time and remembers the Pop Group doing "a video where they danced naked around the fire in the forest. Well, it was very cold, so maybe they weren't literally naked -- but they were naked in spirit! It was part of their whole bohemian-political-pagan thing." Undergo rigorous deconditioning and wild, limitless creativity would be unleashed: drummer Bruce Smith told NME, "we want people to question... all the rules, conceptions, everything. ... It's a question of setting yourself free and not worrying about inhibitions."

Sensing a kindred spirit in Mark Perry, the Pop Group, flush with Radar's money, invited Alternative TV to tour the UK in a post-punk package alongside dub-poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. "We were going to practise what we preached on Vibing," says Perry. "No rehearsing, just this freeform spontaneous thing." Punk orthodoxy was challenged on all fronts: they enlisted a guitarist to play drums and toy xylophone, and "a pregnant hippy singer" (Anno from Here and Now, a Hawkwind-like band big on the free festival circuit; ATV had recently joined Here and Now in an ultra-idealistic tour of the UK, with punters being charged no admission fee).

Expectations frustrated, audiences reacted violently to the freeform ATV. "The crowd in Portsmouth wanted to kill us! I can laugh now, but back then I was so passionate about it, I got furious with the crowd--they just wanted punk orthodoxy". The crisis point came in Derby when a hurled bottle knocked Perry unconscious. Bitterly disillusioned, he decided the only way out of the deadlock was the "truth in advertising" maneuver of changing the band's name, so that audiences would know they weren't going to get ATV's Greatest Hits. "After we became The Good Missionaries, the gigs were fantastic. Pop Group jammed with us onstage, and for the encore, we'd do a total Ornette Coleman freakout. And the audience response wasn't 'fuck off!', it was 'YEAH!!!'."

Like The Pop Group, Perry's mob "were actually saying something through the music: this is how we believed people should conduct themselves. 'Let's break down barriers!'. Punk had become a straitjacket and the way forward was total freedom."

• * * * *

Total freedom meant dealing with another aspect of punk's stillborn revolution: the need for artist-driven independent labels and an alternative distribution network. Perry ran Step Forward, an indie bankrolled by Miles Copeland that put out the Fall's early records."Just think what powerful repercussions there'd have been if The Clash had gone the indie route, rather than signed to CBS," Perry sighs wistfully.

"The disappointing thing for me was the Pistols and Clash signing to majors," concurs Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade. Like many indie labels then and now, Rough Trade began as a record shop. Located in Ladbroke Grove, the original Rough Trade opened for business in February 1976 and became a magnet for the local bohemian community. "We had comfy chairs, huge reggae speakers pumping out music incredibly loud, and all the pre-releases. And because the 101'ers rehearsed around the corner, we made a connection with punk really early."

In many ways, though, Rough Trade bridged the gap between the old hippie culture and punk. The business was run as a co-operative: everyone had equal say and equal pay. Tony Fletcher, teenage editor of Jamming fanzine, used to hang out at Rough Trade after school (still wearing his uniform!), and remembers they "actually had a rota, with everyone taking turns to do the sweeping up.". These sort of communal values were still part of mid-Seventies radical culture: Time Out, for instance, operated as a co-op and had no hierarchy or pay differentials. "Liberation, this French left-wing newspaper, was run as a collective," says Travis. "And growing up Jewish, I'd had first hand experience of kibbutz life in Israel, that mix of utopianism and pragmatism."

Like other shops-turned-labels, Rough Trade's retail sense of what was selling developed into an A&R instinct. The label debuted in early 1978 with Metal Urbain's "Paris Maquis". "We'd imported loads of their first single, and thought they were the French Sex Pistols." It was ROUGH 3 that really tapped the emergent post-punk Zeitgeist: Cabaret Voltaire's Extended Play EP. The same egalitarian idealism that informed the running of Rough Trade governed the deals with artists: contracts were for one record at a time, profits split 50/50 after recording and promotion costs (fronted by Rough Trade) were made back.

Rough Trade was just one of the first-wave of post-punk indies, alongside Industrial, Small Wonder, Fast Product, New Hormones, Industrial, Cherry Red, and more. But it became the movement's unofficial leader, the universal enabler: encouraging other people to set up labels, advancing them money, even providing a base of operations. "I was really close to Rough Trade", says Daniel Miller, founder of Mute. "I didn't have an office, so they let me have the records delivered to their premises, do my mail-outs from there...." Even more vital was Rough Trade's efforts to build a independent distribution network in alliance with regional retail/label/distribution outfits like Probe, Revolver, and Red Rhino. Without effective distribution, the do-it-yourself ethos was just shouting into the void. Nationwide independent distribution held out the possibility of genuine communication: reaching a scattered audience of likeminds, recouping your costs, carrying on.

Do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself was the next stage on from indie labels. DIY pioneers The Desperate Bicycles were its most fervent evangelists--chanting "it was easy, it was cheap--go and do it" at the end of their 1977 debut single "Smokescreen" and, just to ram the point home, after every verse of the follow-up "The Medium Was Tedium". A scrappy legion of Spiral Scratch/Swell Maps-type groups responded to their call to arms "no more time for spectating". Inspired by the Desps, Scritti Politti went one step further and printed their production costs on the sleeve of their first single "Skank Bloc Bologna," which was self-released on their own St. Pancras Records and distributed by Rough Trade. The Scrits also circulated addresses and contact information for affordable recording studios, and companies that handled mastering, electro-plating, pressing, labels, et al. Demystification was the slogan of the day. "It was self-empowerment through not letting yourself be bamboozled any more," says Travis. "People exert control through mystification, they like to make you think it's all over your head. Engineers can be like that in the studio. I'd got no studio background at all, but I produced 'Nag Nag Nag' by Cabaret Voltaire; Mayo Thompson and I co-produced the Raincoats, Stiff Little Fingers, the Fall. We didn't really know what we were doing, but at that point in history, you had the confidence to just go ahead."

Another post-punk player inspired by The Desperate Bicycles was Daniel Miller. "I don't know if I ever heard their records, I just got infected by the energy they put across in this Melody Maker article about how easy it was to make a record." Buying a second-hand Korg 700S synthesizer, Miller recorded "T.V.O.D." and "Warm Leatherette", the two sides of his debut single as The Normal. With its J.G. Ballard-influenced, proto-Cronenbourg lyrics, and harsh all-electronic sounds (Miller believed the best synth players were non-musicians), the single upped the stakes in post-punk's assault on rock'n'roll. "It's hard to imagine now, with electronic music everywhere in dance and pop," Miller recalls, "But back then people hated synthesizers with a vengeance."

"Non-reliance on past rock traditions" became Mute's hallmark, its A&R criterion. The label began almost unintentionally: Miller had put his address on the back of "T.V.O.D", demo tapes started turning up in the mail. "The first one that really grabbed me was Fad Gadget. Before I knew it I was running a record company. The thing that united us--me, Rough Trade, Factory--was that none of us knew what we were doing, but we were huge music enthusiasts. I had no business grounding whatsoever. Punk encouraged a lot of people like me and Tony Wilson, not obvious record company people, to get involved and make their dreams come true."

The idea of the independent movement was so new and exciting then, says Travis, "that people would rush out and buy anything that was part of it. This is what people forget: back then, the records used to sell. Anything half-way decent sold from six to ten thousand." Delta 5's "Mind Your Own Business," sold 20,000 copies; The Normal single shifted over thirty thousand. It wasn't just records either: there was a massive interest in fanzines, which Rough Trade also distributed nationally. By 1980, Rough Trade was receiving an average of 12 new zines per week. Rough Trade's Ladbroke Grove neighbour Better Badges was run by an idealistic Frenchman called Joli , who offered fanzines a print-now/pay-later service. "Joli was a classic post-punk character," recalls Tony Fletcher. "Still a complete hippie, never cut his hair, madly into reggae. Better Badges became the clearing houses for zines in 1980-81, but Joli being Joli, he never made a penny out of it."

• * * * * *

"Leave The Capitol," exhorted a track on Slates, the Fall's 1981 10-inch mini-LP. Fellow Mancunians The Passage sneered "too many peacocks in one part/they must be very dull in London". Post-punk was a time when the provinces rose up against the metropolitan monopoly over music culture. Any week's indie chart back then invariably featured a couple of regional compilations: the Manchester Music Collective's Unzipping The Abstract, Rockburgh's Hicks From the Sticks, Glasgow's Second City Statik, Sheffield's Bouquet of Steel....

In the Sounds New Musick spread, Savage had heralded ""fresh energy from regional centres"; it had been Savage who'd tipped off Geoff Travis about Cabaret Voltaire. "I was very excited at that point, going around the UK, unearthing all these weirdos and bedroom cases. If I want to hark back to that time and place, Cabaret Voltaire's "The Set Up" really does it. Don't forget how awful the urban landscape was at that point. Sheffield seemed like the end of the earth, still a bombsite 30 years after the War's end."

The Cabs were pure DIY: they had no manager, controlled the means of production (their own 8 track studio, Western Works) and released music copiously and frequently enough to be able to live on the proceeds. The group--Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson--had started as a pre-punk experimentalist outfit using tape loops and had triggered a Suicide-style riot with their first gig at a Sheffield University disco in 1975. Ironically, their sound gradually got more disco-like and hypnotically rhythmic, while never exactly amounting to party fuel. Kirk's heavily processed guitars sounded anorexic and wraith-like, and Mallinder's bass lurked like an abject, pulsing thing. Dub permeated the mix but the echo was curiously dry and dead; this was Rasta's dread without the dream of Zion, a cold, cavernous sound fissured with uncanny reverb-chambers and chasms. The mood was clammy-palmed paranoia straight out of Burroughs, Ballard, and Alan Pakula movies like The Parallax View and Klute: the feeling of being constantly in the cross-hairs of Control's surveillance.

Along with their fellow Sheffield outfits Clock DVA and Comsat Angels, Cabaret Voltaire helped create the stereotype of post-punk as bleak and grey---qualities that seemed to seep into the records from Sheffield's barren post-industrial landscape. Environmentally and musically, Manchester gave the run-down steeltown a run for its money in the "grim oop North" stakes. Joy Division's story is thrice-told and over-familiar, but there was more to Manchester (and indeed to Factory Records: Durutti Column, Section 25, Crispy Ambulance) than Ian Curtis's band of merry men.

There was the Fall, obviously, with a sound Mark E. Smith dubbed "country'n'Northern" that on tracks like "Fiery Jack" and "Rowche Rumble" resembled rockabilly sluiced through White Light White Heat; sulphate-snarled lyrics as vivid and impenetrable as hieroglyphs, the singer's tone of contrarian scorn unmistakable, its hate-objects more often than not unclear. Seemingly permanently ensconced in the Independent charts with albums like Pindrop, The Passage was a vehicle for classically-trained Dick Witt's doomily grandiose arrangements and lofty polemics about torture ("Do The Bastinado"), religion ("Devils and Angels"), and other Important Themes. Other key Manc post-punk players included Ludus (a group started by the charismatic Linder, immortalized by bosom pal Morrissey in the Smiths divine early B-side "Wonderful Woman"), Manicured Noise, Section 25, and The Blue Orchids (the Fall offshoot whose classic The Greatest Hit LP was an ahead-of-its-time acid-mystic protest against Thatcherism's "climb the money mountain" culture).

Of all the Manchester groups of that era, perhaps the most intriguing was A Certain Ratio--as much for the idea of ACR as for the music itself, which was only realized in flashes (the single "Flight", the live side of the cassette-only The Graveyard & The Ballroom, a few other moments). The concept was disco noir, and even more than the Pop Group and the Cabs, ACR inspired the genre of avant-funk (23 Skidoo, 400 Blows, Hula, Chakk, etc). In ACR's case, though, the concept was given fatback force and febrile flesh by astounding drummer Donald Johnson, who almost singlehandedly prevented ACR's wan vocals, dank synth vapours, and sub-Miles trumpet-in-fog from wafting off into a nebulous, anaemic void.

"ACR were part of what I always think of as a dope and Red Stripe crowd, shebeen heads," says Dave Haslam, author of Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City. "They had a bizarre sense of fashion-- close cropped hair, baggy khaki shorts. I think this was their extreme way of putting distance between themselves and any contemporaries; reacting against hippy untidiness or punk anarchy and instead going for a neat, mod sensibility." This colonial, British Empire image lent itself to being misinterpreted as flirting-with-fascism, as did the name A Certain Ratio (a reference to the "blood percentage" that the Nazis measured to establish racial ancestry--specifically Jewishness). But the presence of a black man behind the drum kit helped to counter this dodgy aura.

Up in Scotland, another bunch of post-punk groups were deploying discipline to fight rockist slackness. Edinburgh's Josef K wore sharp monochrome suits from Oxfam. "We were quite puritanical," guitarist Malcom Ross has said. "We didn't like sexism or laddishness. I was quite interested in the original mod movement, and that was one of the influences in wearing suits.... It was a reaction to the whole dirty, long-haired thing that punk reacted to... but punks were just as dirty. I wanted some kind of dignity." Following the Subway Sect model of guitarpop stripped of rock'n'roll cliches, Josef K refused to indulge the audience with stage banter, encores, or autograph signing. "The whole anti-rock thing was a healthy reaction to the mouldy old shoe," says singer Paul Haig, who cites Tom Verlaine, Lou Reed, and David Byrne as influences on Josef K's clean, spiky guitar sound.

Anti-rockism was very much in the air, north of the border: The Associates's Billy Mackenzie declared "I've always hated the rock thing" and pledged his allegiance to disco and film soundtracks. Fire Engines played 15 minute sets and released a mini-album of "background music for action people" called Lubricate Your Living Room. Orange Juice fused Velvet Underground with Chic and projected an image of fey naivete ("worldliness keep away from me", sang Edwyn Collins). "Alan Horne had a vision for Orange Juice all along, to turn them into a great pop band," says Haig. "He never liked Josef K. We were far too abrasive and dark, but he wanted us on Postcard to add some cred. The cockcroach became too fat on a diet of Kafka and press clipppings, though!."

The concept of "rockism" was coined by Pete Wylie, which was ironic because Wah! Heat were one of the most traditional and rocking outfits of the post-punk era. This was typical of the Liverpool scene: with the exception of the dub-and-disco influenced Pink Military, there was little experimentalism. Wah!, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Teardrop Explodes shared a taste for the epic and pronounced retro leanings, prompting journalists to reach tentatively for the word "psychedelic"-- still a dubious concept, given its proximity to hippiedom. Wylie, Ian McCulloch, and Julian Cope were also the most brazenly rockstar in demeanour, making no secret of their ambition. McCulloch distanced himself from Lydon-style anti-rockist rhetoric, telling NME "People ask us what sort of band we are, and I always say 'we're a rock band'. Because I'm proud of that..." Yet in many ways the Bunnymen were an exemplary post-punk band---their sound, monochrome and minimal on the first two albums, was rooted in the blues-less blueprint laid down by Television; the emotional palette largely restricted to various shades of angsty grey. The Bunnymen were synonomous with the same sombre audience mobilized by Joy Division: overcoat-clad "young men/the world on their shoulders" (as Ian Curtis sang it).

• * * * *

All through 1979-81, the weekly music papers competed to discover new city-based scenes--the next Leeds, the next Sheffield. Strange and wonderful records were emerging from all over the country though. "You'd get records sent in by these stroppy lads from tiny towns in Lincolnshire, places you had to look up in the map," says John Peel, whose late night Radio One show gave national exposure for DIY's culture's inspired one-offs. "I'm a great sucker for cheerful amateurism. Another thing I liked was that a lot of these bands were almost entirely without ambition. Their goal was often just put out the one single, or do a session with us."

"John Peel band" was almost the name of a genre back then--home studio eccentrics who caught the DJ's ear and for a brief reign of glory got the late night Radio One equivalent of being playlisted; groups like Family Fodder, The Cravats, The Tiller Boys, Spizzenergi, Furious Pig. (And The) Native Hipsters's 1980 single "There Goes Concorde Again"--a captivating collision of twee whimsy and genuinely alien oddness, like the Residents if they'd come from Scunthorpe--got to Number 5 in the indie charts largely thanks to Peel's efforts. "That was one of those records, where you put it on and thought 'this will be fantastically irritating in a fortnight, but until then let's play it to death'," chuckles Peel. Another late-night fave was Fatal Microbes's 1979 single "Violence Grows" featuring the baleful tones of punk starlet Honey Bane, PiL circa "Poptones" guitardrones, and morally blank lyrics about the rising blood-flecked tide of street aggro.

It's almost impossible to overstate John Peel's importance in the post-punk era. "If you knew that one of your favorite bands was doing a session on Peel, that was as important as going to a gig," says Tony Fletcher. You could detect Peel's stature and influence at the station in the playlists of early evening DJs like Mike Read and Kid Jensen. A few "John Peel records" even trickled down as far as the daytime shows, eventually becoming unlikely pop hits--Laurie Anderson's "O Superman", Number 2 in the winter of 1981; "Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag" by Pop Group offshoot Pigbag, which pierced the Top 3 in the spring of 1982. Peel's role was all the more crucial because it was the only way many people had access to post-punk. Radio had not been deregulated yet; pop programming on TV was scarce and staid. Apart from Peel, the only other nationally accessible media by which you could find out about post-punk was the weekly music press.

Today it's hard to grasp just how powerful the music papers were in the years following punk. For most of the 1978-81 period, the NME sold over 200 thousand copies, and at its height reached 270 thousand; the combined circulation of NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker was in excess of 500, 000, its actual readership three times that. There were hardly any rival sources of information--no monthlies or style mags, scant coverage in the quality newspapers. Punk had mobilized a huge audience who were looking for the way forward. The inkies had enormous influence, and individual writers had a prestige and power barely imaginable today.

In another sense, bands and journalists were in the same business. Post-punk was nothing if not a critique of rock'n'roll, a meta-music. Songs were often mini-manifestos addressing punk's failure or meaning: TV Personalities's "Part Time Punks," Scritti Politti's "Messthetics," The Prefects's "Going Through The Motions" and "Faults", The Fall's "Repetition".

The Leeds scene--Gang of Four, the Mekons, Delta 5-- took this self-reflexive and critical approach to rock further than most. Gang of Four's debut single "Love Like Anthrax" interrogated the pop institution of the love song, while the title of their debut album Entertainment! was an implicit question and spur to thought. The group's Jon King and Andy Gill and The Mekons's Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh were contemporaries studying Fine Art at Leeds University. "I gravitated towards this Fine Arts drinking crowd, cos they seemed the most interesting people around" says Gang of Four drummer Hugo Burnham, himself a drama student. "Gang of Four and Mekons were virtually a co-operative, sharing equipment and rehearsal space, doing gigs together--without actually having headed notepaper to prove it! Our second show ever, the Mekons opened for us--this total art-noise chaos with a sofa onstage representing a spaceship. "

The other crucial Leeds group, Delta 5, was equally closeknit with the Mekons/Go4 cluster. Ros Allen was on the Fine Arts course while Bethan Peters and Julz Sale were both "Mekons girlfriends". Another mixed-gender band, Birmingham's Au Pairs quickly became friends with the Leeds groups, sharing their agit-funk sound and lyrics that probed "personal politics". "Socialist feminist or rad fem... its easy to forget just how militantly pre-Loaded this culture was," recalls Penman. "You went out with girls who wore little scissors insignia earrings"--signifying castration---"and they meant it!". In post-punk terms this translated into lopping off the cock in cock-rock ("Andy never uses the guitar as a phallus... [onstage] we certainly reject the stereotyped macho poses" said Gang of Four's Jon King, defensively), and critiquing the masculinist biases of punk. For although it had encouraged un-typical girls to get up and do it, punk had quickly "become very blokeish," says Savage. "I HATED the bully boy aspect of Punk which began to emerge in later 1977... Being a lad was not what Punk was initially about."

One result of post-punk's belief that "the personal is political" is was what certain folk nowadays denigrate as "political correctness". Rough Trade refused to distribute the first Nurse With Wound album because they felt the S/M imagery on the cover was degrading and sexist; a group called Raped was ordered to change its name or not have its records stocked (the group complied). "Rough Trade would actually tell fanzine editors, 'we will read your zine and if there's anything racist or sexist in it, we'll return it'", recalls Tony Fletcher. "I suppose it could verge on the puritanical at times. Post-punk was part of that whole shift to the Left that took place, the trendy-lefty lifestyle politics stuff that created problems for the Labour party in the Eighties. "

"There was a politicisation element to relationships, definitely," recalls Hugo Burnham. "The women amongst our social circle were much healthier in terms of the male/female power dynamic. We were definitely into reexamining how you conducted your life, the things you took for granted. At the same time, it didn't mean we didn't try to get laid at every opportunity. There was nothing puritanical about Gang of Four!"

Gang of Four's innovation was creating the template for a new rock that was aggressive but not oppressively macho. "It was bringing together the hardness of guitar music with the groove of black music," says guitarist Andy Gill. One bond that united the group's members was, surprisingly, a love of Free's supple blues-rock. "Free was very rhythmic and stripped down. I loved it but was completely aware of the idiocy of the lyrics, Paul Rodgers singing about his woman done him wrong. Free was an influence on Go4, but being post-punk, it was a question of taking the bits you loved and leaving behind the rest. Or even deliberately doing the opposite--taking those rock'n'roll cliches and turning them inside out."

Some cliches were sonic. "Instead of guitar solos, we had anti-solos--gaps," says Gill. Certain traditional guitar effects (wah-wah, fuzz-tone, distortion) were eliminated or reined in. Gill belonged to a post-punk pantheon of angular, glassy-sounding guitarists brimming in modernist confidence that it was unnecessary to repeat the past, that you could make music without precedent: Bruce Gilbert, Keith Levene, Bernard Sumner, John McGeoch, Alan Rankine. Gang of Four also shunned rock's intuitive composition methods. "No jamming, everything thought out in advance, plotted". The band's very sound was abrasively different. "Valve amplifiers were forbidden," says Gill, "Valves is what every guitarist today wants, 'cos you get that fat, 'warm' tone. Mine were transistor amps, for a brittle, cleaner sound. We were against warmth." Entertainment!, their self-produced debut, "was very dry, in the technical sound-engineer sense of no reverb, drums that didn't ring," says Burnham. "It didn't sound like a live band at all."

Entertainment! was cold and dry in the emotional sense, too, with Gang of Four wielding the scalpel of Marxist theory to slice through the mystifications of love, "capitalist democracy", and rock'n'roll itself. The songs depicted relationships and situations diagrammatically, with its human actors seemingly buffeted by the play of impersonal socioeconomic forces. "Damaged Goods" and "Contract' used the language of commerce to analyse affairs of the heart. "Love Like Anthrax" still shocks with the unsentimental imagery of heartbreak as feeling "like a beetle on its back." While King sang the lover's blues through one speaker, Gill recited a statement through the other that questioning why love was a privileged subject in rock anyway: a sort of stereophonic Brecht effect.

What made the agit-funkers attempts at consciousness-raising more than merely academic exercises, though, was the surrounding political context. An economically depressed industrial town, Leeds was a stronghold for the resurgent Far Right: the National Front, the British Movement, the League of St. George, were all active in the area. Friction between the post-punk vanguard and the Oi!-punk loving skinheads was aggravated by that typical town versus gown mutual antipathy. "Skinheads would turn up to the gigs and start fights," says Gills. "Our favorite pub, The Fenton, was where all the commies and artists and fags hung out, and one night about twenty NF thugs came in and smashed the place up. It was like a Wild West saloon, chairs flying everywhere. Other times gangs of skins would come marauding round the campus and there'd be the occasional pitched battle." Delta 5's unisex line-up seemed particularly offensive to the goon squad's notion of proper gender relations: Ros was denounced as a "communist witch" at one gig.

Down the road from Leeds University was the polytechnic, in whose art department an embryonic version of Scritti Politti was gestating. Initially inspired by the Pistols's Anarchy Tour and The Clash, Scritti Politti started as standard-issue punk band before experiencing the inevitable post-punk epiphany and realizing they didn't want to be like The Clash.

By the time they moved down to London, Scritti had developed Gang of Four's interrogation of rock form, content, and procedures, into a rigorous regime of self-scrutiny, influenced by Marxist thinkers like Gramsci and Althusser, and the intensely theory-driven American journal Art/Language. One of Art/Language's associates was Mayo Thompson, leader of Red Krayola and a floating musician/producer/guru in the milieu around Rough Trade--which became Scritti's distributor and eventually the group's label. "Green and Mayo had this macho two bulls in a chinashop mutual distrust I'm-more-cerebral-than-you thing going on which was hilarious to behold," recalls Ian Penman.

Art/Language texts were "signed" as a collective, and Scritti similarly styled themselves as a sort of music/theory commune. Surrounding the musical core of the group--singer/guitarist Green Gartside, drummer Tom Morley, and bassist Niall Jinks, who lived together with their manager Matthew in a Camden squat--was a floating pool of associates numbering from fifteen to forty, whose precise roles and contributions were unclear. Penman was a member of what Green called the "odd conglomerate", hanging out at the squat at 1, Carol Street, composing a Scritti Politti communique, participating in the odd interview, sometimes even performing onstage with them. "Occasionally with Scritti I would get up, and, well, rap, I guess you would have to call it these days!," he recalls. "Cut up a Lenin text and cross-reference it with Lee Perry's '"Bafflin' Smoke Signals'. ... You have to understand, we took a LOT of speed back then."

There's a photo of the squat's filthy front room on the cover of first-phase Scritti's finest record, 1979's 4 A Sides EP: a Hammer and Sickle, framed, hangs above the gas fire, with a used teabag hanging irreverently off the sickle; every available surface is strewn with books, pamphlets, beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, half-drunk cups of instant coffee;. You can almost smell the lifestyle---theory-addled, sulphate-fueled conversations going on until the crack of dawn, punctuated by visits to blues (illegal reggae parties) or five-groups-on-the-bill post-punk gigs at the Lyceum. Ooh, the intensity! According to Penman, that's pretty much what it was like. "A lot of the excitement was less in the vinyl", he admits, more in "the pub talk and speed talk and book swapping. New records would be seized upon and reviewed en masse, gigs attended and feverishly discussed for days and days afterwards."

Named after a Gramsci book, Scritti were heavily influenced by his concept of "hegemony": the notion that the ruling class maintains its thrall over the rest of society through "common sense" notions of what is natural, crystallised in sayings like "a fair profit" or "some are born to lead and others born to follow". "Question everything" was already a mantra/motto for post-punk groups; Scritti took it to the limit. Even the word "rock" was ideologically suspect: Green preferred the term "beat music." Musically, the result was brittle, self-deconstructing songs like "OPEC-Imac" and Bibbly-O-Tek", whose fractures couldn't conceal Green's melodic genius and his high, plaintive, honey-sweet voice. Robert Wyatt's "English soul" was an immediately audible influence. According to Penman, "a post pub singalong chez Scrits" would involve "LOTS of Robert Wyatt," along with other Canterbury scene groups like Hatfield and the North, the Residents, Beefheart, dub, warped jazz chanteuse Annette Peacock, and folk-rocker Martin Carthy and his group The Albion Band. (Some observers claim to hear the influence of Martin Carthy's electric guitar playing for Steeleye Span in Scritti's debut single "Skank Bloc Bologna").

At the extreme, Scritti's impulse to interrogate and problematize every aspect of "the rock process" resembled a Maoist self-criticism tribunal, where party members accused themselves of counter-revolutionary, crypto-bourgeois tendencies. "It was all tunneled through Green's absolutely monomaniacal insistence on what was CORRECT," says Penman. "He spent most of his time disapproving of things, like an unwashed Pope". Whispers would reach Penman that Green wasn't happy with his blue suede shoes or Robert De Niro posters. "I remember having a serious confrontation with Green about tidiness... I couldn't understand how anyone could conceive, let alone organise, a new society from the squalor that was 1 Carol St... And he mounted a massive ideological justification for UNtidiness: 'cleanliness is next to bourgeois hegemony'". A regular visitor to the Scritti squat after interviewing them for Jamming, Tony Fletcher's clean-cut mod sensibilities were affronted by "the utter chaos of the place--pots of tea gathering must and mold in the sink, the cat tray hadn't been emptied. There was always this dreadful smell in that sort of squat. Scritti were your classic DIY anarchist neo-hippie types. But there was always interesting, really intense conversations going on."

One of the most heated debates took place in a local pub where the Scritti crew got into a mighty row with some Camden neighbours--the London Musicians Collective, a gaggle of improvisers and experimentalists that included Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, David Toop, and Steve Beresford. For Green, the LMC were guilty of "formalism" (art for art's sake). By 1979, the scope of what was musically acceptable had widened so much that a fragile alliance had formed between the post-punk fringe and the avant-garde. In this climate, Flying Lizards--the group that Beresford and Toop played in--even had a post-punk novelty hit with a deconstructed cover version of "Money". Vivien Goldman wrote a couple of Flying Lizards songs and remembers the LMC trademark as "toy instruments... It expressed the spirit of the times, which was fun." After the disintegration of ATV, Mark Perry joined an outfit called The Door and The Window, who were LMC regulars. "Bendell from the Door and the Window did a solo set, playing the radiators! The whole idea was 'to make music you don't need to have a musical instrument'.'"

Operating in this same post-punk/avant-garde interzone, This Heat also "collected piles of broken instruments, damaged toy pianos, half-functioning speaking dolls," recalls the band's Charles Hayward. "Anything was potentially a source of music for us". Formed before punk, This Heat spent 1974-76 developing their sound; Hayward lived in a squat in Deptford, subsisting on five quid a week and a diet of porridge. "We were listening to the angry free jazz from the Sixties and musique concrete too--we did stuff with tape-loops that was like sampling long before it existed." Suddenly 1977 provided This Heat with a climate in which their "desire to commit violence to accepted notions of music" made perfect sense. "There was a wellspring of punk possibility that accepted and nurtured us, even though we weren't part of it".

This Heat got access to a studio called Cold Storage, a former meat fridge in a disused Brixton pie factory. Taking Can's studio Inner Space as a model, they got into intense experiments with tape editing, splicing together lo-fi live recordings with 24 track stereo tracks recorded at a the plusher Workhouse studio. "The engineers gave us no resistance at all, they were really into it because they had all these amazing skills they never normally got to use--George Martin type stuff." Using a device called the Harmoniser, This Heat created eerie tuned percussion timbres that sound like Indonesian gamelan music or the pitchshifted and processed drums in early jungle circa 1993.

This Heat's music wasn't "formalist" noise-for-noise's-sake, though, but a kind of abstract protest music. "Sleep" from 1981's Deceit--virtually a concept album about nuclear destruction--imagines Power lulling people into apathy: "a life cocooned in a routine of food... softness is a thing called comfort." This Heat wanted to WAKE UP the listener into a painfully sharp consciousness of the world's evils. "That's why our music wasn't psychedelic and drifty, why it was so hard-edged and angular--we had no interest in making people stoned with our sounds." This fierce sobriety was projected through the group's image---Deceit's back cover shows the band dressed in ties and jackets, with short, neat haircuts and stern frowns on their faces. "We liked going to jumble sales--I had a lot of bus conductor jackets, and I bought handfuls of ties for 20p. It was a look related to the idea of pulling yourself together, so that you could fight back against these bastards who were ruining the world."

• * * * *

It's hard to recapture the atmosphere in 1979/1980. There was a tremendous sense of dread. Thatcher's election, the resurgence of fascist street violence (following the National Front's failure to achieve much impact via legitimate parliamentary politics), mass unemployment--there was a feeling that something appalling was about to happen. The Cold War had reached a renewed pitch of frostiness, and Britain was increasingly perceived as little more than a launching pad for American missiles. NME ran a regular column about nuclear weapons and nuclear power called Plutonium Blondes; Kate Bush and UB40 had hits with singles about World War Three, "Breathing" and "The Earth Dies Screaming" respectively; Young Marble Giants's Peel favorite "Final Day" was a chilling evocation of nuclear doomsday.

Roots reggae provided post-punk artists with a ready-made language of armagideon, sufferation, and dread to express their sense of internal exile in Babylon UK. Recalls Vivien Goldman, "Rasta provided this cosmology that meshed the political, the spiritual, and the apocalyptic, and it helped you define your enemies. We did feel like we were on the frontline of Babylon."

"We" referred specifically to a cluster of loosely allied bands that Goldman fraternized with--The Pop Group, The Slits, PiL, the Raincoats. There were contradictions in being "white Rasta"; Old Testament moralism clashed with Western liberalism. "With the roots worldview, the logic was often questionable, but going to reggae sound systems, the feeling of spiritual uplift there was undeniable," says Mark Stewart. "That yearning for a better world, and questioning of the system, it made your hairs stand up on end".

Some went further into the white natty dread trip than others. Ari Up of The Slits talked in patois with a jarring German accent, and ended up becoming a full-fledged Rasta and having babies with a Jamaican man. In the Pop Group/Slits milieu, there was a cult of all things anti-Western, from "natural rhythm" ("In the Beginning There Was Rhythm", The Slits's split single with Pop Group) to "tribal consciousness" (a somewhat naive and condescending belief that African tribal societies contain no alienation or repression). Again, it was Ari Up who took this nostalgie de la boue the furthest: "in the Eighties she went through this phase of living in jungles throughout the world, just to get away from Babylon," says Goldman. For others, getting into world music was enough---for many post-punkers in the Eighties, African music became the new reggae. WOMAD was the brainchild of a group of people in the post-Pop Group Bristol scene; Goldman moved to Paris for the city's African music scene, and returned to work on the TV show Big World Cafe.

The spiritual center of post-punk's "white rasta" faction was, appropriately enough, one of London's most Caribbean neighbourhoods: Ladbroke Grove. Rough Trade, Better Badges, and the venue Acklam Hall (now Subterrania) were all there: The Raincoats's Gina Birch lived near Westbourne Grove. Vivien Goldman owned a house on Ladbroke Grove itself, where Geoff Travis lived as her flatmate for a while. "It really was a scene where you'd run into everybody on Portobello Road on a Saturday afternoon without fail, whether you wanted to or not," she remembers fondly. Ladbroke Grove was a lot different than it is today. "It was a real bohemia. Lots of squats, and the rents were very cheap too. It was pretty scuzzy, but there really wasn't that much violence. There was about half a dozen places within walking distance where you could go and rave all night--shebeens, blues dances. You'd pay a quid on the door, get a Red Stripe and a spliff, and dance all night to dub and lover's rock."

If post-punk London had a twin city, it was New York. You could even twin it more precisely to specific bohemian neighbourhoods: Ladbroke Grove and the East Village. Between 1978-82, New York was almost an outpost of UK post-punk, a colony. By the late Eighties, fanzines like Forced Exposure and groups like Sonic Youth had cultivated Anglophobia as a trendy attitude, in part a fair response to the non-rocking feebleness of much UK guitar music. But back in the early Eighties Kim Gordon was a rabid Anglophile and a regular at Tier 3, the poky Manhattan venue where the Raincoats and ACR played.

What was slightly odd about the New York scene was the relative lack of independent labels. The closest thing to Rough Trade was 99 Records, which, in classic indie fashion, had started life as an offshoot of a record store. ""I took 'Launderette' to 99, and it was like a cargo cult" recalls Vivien Goldman. "Before they'd even finished playing the single, they were like, 'yes, we're signing you! You came over as an emissary from that scene--London, and specifically Ladbroke Grove--and it was like they mad keen to partake of that volcanic wellspring of energy."

In punk's immediate aftermath, New York musicians had been just as desperate to destroy rock'n'roll as their British cousins. The result was No Wave: Pol Pot-style culturecide that treated 1977 as Year Zero. Gradually No Wave's sado-masochistic white-noise nihilism opened up again to body-rhythms, black influences, the possibilities of pleasure. Two bands were especially influential in New York's drift towards the dancefloor: James Chance and the Contortions and the Talking Heads. "Chance was just doing James Brown funk through a punk filter," recalls Richard McGuire of Liquid Liquid. "He did get a lot of press because fists would fly at those shows. Out of the blue he would just punch someone in the front row". David Byrne, meanwhile, was arguing that "black dance production techniques represent a bigger revolution than punk" and talking up African music as the ultimate ritual trance-dance to help us escape Western neurosis.

99 Records's roster of Liquid Liquid, Bush Tetras and ESG were poised somwhere on this cusp between No Wave and the later "mutant disco" of Ze artists like Was (Not Was)---a funk noir zone similar to UK label Fetish and its "sex, sweat and blood" slogan. The mostly female Bush Tetra's played "rhythm'n'paranoia--terse, assertive punk-funk typified by the song "Too Many Creeps"; Liquid Liquid's sound was percussion-heavy and foreboding; ESG were deservedly hailed as as a cross between PiL and the Supremes. Not on 99 but also purveying a scorching punk-funk-jazz sound was guitarist James Blood Ulmer, who took his mentor Ornette Coleman's harmolodic sound into post-punk clubs like Hurrah and Danceteria; his Are You Glad To Be In America? LP was picked up by Rough Trade. Then there was Defunkt, formed by James Chance's estranged horn section and conceived by leader Joe Bowie as a revolt against disco's escapism: "We've got to wake up again and Defunkt are part of that resurgence of thought." Mostly, though, New York post-punk was less politicized than its UK equivalent. As with punk-era artists like Patti Smith and Richard Hell, its worldview was bohemian, its angst more existensial than social. Lyrics emphasized transgression, taboo, the dark side of human nature, rather than subversion, resistance, fighting the power.

Apart from New York, Cleveland (home of Pere Ubu, a crucial Rough Trade band) and San Francisco (the Ralph Records family of Residents, Tuxedemoon, Chrome), American's interpretation of punk was less expansive than Britain's: a renewal of rock rather than its dismantling. And it was far less overtly politicized. For most British post-punks, "America" remained the enemy--politically, culturally, and musically. Instead, UK post-punk culture felt the pull of Europe. Mute Records led the way. Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft was Miller's first European signing. "DAF were part of a small but active scene coming out Dusseldorf, little clubs and labels and performance art things. Robert Gorl was an electronic musician's dream of a drummer, 'cos he was so minimal. The guitar was played with a vibrator, spurts of pure white noise, and the guttural way Gabi Delgado sang sounded very threatening."

As with New York's art school funk noir, there was a lot of cross-town traffic between Germany's post-punk and the avant-garde. "DAF were influenced by a group of artists known as Die Junge Wilden," says Chris Bohn, then the NME's expert on all things European, "They were into deliberately taunting the 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." DAF broached this risky territory in songs like "Der Mussolini", with its chorus "dance der Mussolini/dance der Adolf Hitler."

• * * * *

The post-punk era peaked in the last four months of 1979. Events like September's first Futurama Festival, a two-day event held in Leeds, showcased the impressive unity-in-diversity of the UK post-punk spectrum. The music was cresting, its fusion of experimental reach with relative accessiblity securing an unprecedented consensus from critics and punters alike. In the NME's end-of-year writer's poll, the Top Five included Fear of Music, Metal Box, Unknown Pleasures, and Entertainment!, while albums by The Slits, Raincoats, This Heat, Swell Maps, The Fall, Pere Ubu, and Wire featured prominently.

By definition, peaks precede plummets; in a sense, they engineer their own downfall. Albums like Unknown Pleasures and Metal Box, by their very overpowering originality, ensured a rash of copyists. From psychedelia to punk to My Bloody Valentine, every radicalism eventually becomes an orthodoxy.

The post-punk visionaries themselves faced the same quandary: how to take their sound further. Released in November 1979, Metal Box "blew everything into a cocked hat," says Penman. "It allowed one to see what was crucially MISSING from Scritti Politti and a lot of the lesser little groups that struggled in their wake: this massive and ominous feeling of dread and THE SUBLIME." The record's packaging--a metal canister containing three 12 inch singles--was PiL's one major feat of anti-rockism, successfully deconstructing "the album" and encouraging the listener to listen to tracks in any order; the 12 inch's improved sound quality plunged listeners into the spacious, bass-intensified aesthetics of dub and disco.

The problem of following up this post-punk landmark paralysed PiL. "Keith Levene had this thing, 'I'm not going to play anything that's ever been played before'", recalls Vivien Goldman. "Talk about hubris, man!" Metal Box had seen Levene dabbling increasingly with synths and soon he was talking about abandoning guitar altogether. Reviewing PiL's Paris Au Printemps (that most rockist of things, a live album stop-gap release), Goldman alluded to PiL's "severe birth pangs/constipation," but optimistically talked up the group as having "broken another sound barrier" with the partially recorded follow-up, inventing "a new kind of rhythm, a definite dance-able rhythm not based on bass and drums". (Necessity being the mother of invention here, as Wobble had left the group in a cloud of acrimony).

Although the yawning gap between what PiL talked about (not being a band but a communications corporation, with grand plans to do movie soundtracks, video albums, design musical equipment) and what they achieved (fuck all, really) was becoming apparent, they remained the media's sacred cow, and when Flowers of Romance finally came out in April 1981, it was routinely hailed as another revolution. "Nothing was written beforehand," boasted Lydon to Rolling Stone. "No tune is played, there is no melody going through any song. We just piled a load of instruments in the corner of the studio and thought what can we do with this?." Sound-sources included ukelele, saxphone, banjo, amplified wristwatch. ""All it amounts to is that we don't like any music at the moment," added Levene, ominously.

"Flowers of Romance" the single, was astonishing, and resulted in a genuinely voodoo-scary Top of the Pops performance: Lydon dressed as a vicar, sawing dementedly on a fiddle. The album itself was a mess, alternately underdone and self-indulgent. "Losing the groundedness of Wobble didn't help the alchemy," diagnoses Ian Penman, one of the few journalists to pan the album at the time. Drugs played their part in PiL's downfall, he says: "I spent a fair bit of time in the Lydon bunker at that time and it really was Last Days of Berlin stuff... shadowy unnamed geezers wrapping up parcels of speed the size of DeLillo's Underworld."

• * * * *

The great dissensions that convulsed UK rock culture all through the 1979-1981 period (post-punk vanguard versus Oi!, Two Tone versus mod) represented a struggle over what to do with the demographic spoils of punk: the vast reservoirs of idealism and energy mobilized during 1976-77.

In 1981, as the PiL-style vanguard got more abstruse and inaccessible, "real punk" resurged massively. It came in several flavors: Oi!, anarcho, US hardcore, the proto-Goth style later named "positive punk". The indie charts were flooded with new names like Vice Squad, Zounds, GBH, Discharge, Anti-Pasti, Chron-Gen, Flux of Pink Indians...

If the "punk's not dead" resurgence horrified most music journalists (the exception being Sounds's Oi!-demagogue Garry Bushell), equally depressing was the emergence of a post-PiL/Joy Divison/Banshees orthodoxy of doom'n'gloom: groups like Killing Joke, Bauhaus, The Cure. By 1980, Futurama was being perceived as a sort of angst-rock Castle Donington, its flocks of overcoat-clad, grim-faced boys as uniform as the denim hordes that followed Iron Maiden. And when John Peel's Festive Fifty of 1981 saw the Top 20 flooded with seven Joy Division songs (and one from New Order), critics started to complain about the return of progressive rock.

In January, 1981, Rough Trade and NME teamed up to celebrate the first five years of the indie revolution with the cassette compilation C81, an absolute snip at 1-50 for 24 tracks and a lineup including Pere Ubu, DAF, Cabaret Voltaire, Subway Sect, Raincoats, and Robert Wyatt. Thirty thousand people sent off for it, resulting in terrible mail-out delays.

Yet despite this success, C81 was in many ways post-punk's swan-song. Several of the featured artists were already breaking ranks and talking up "pop" as the way ahead. Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, and Josef K represented Postcard, whose abrasive founder Alan Horne had been ranting in NME about the "hippie attitude" of the "brown rice independents" and declaring that "music should always aim for the widest possible market". C81 opened with the gorgeous lover's rock of "The 'Sweetest Girl'" by Scritti Politti, trading in their ultra-cerebral difficulty for the "New Pop" creed of accessibility, ambition, and shiny surfaces.

By the end of 1981, the UK rock Zeitgeist decisively shifted towards "New Pop" and the strategy of "entryism"---using the major label system, rather than building an alternative. This was one of the great transvaluations in British rock history, in some ways even more drastic than the revolution of 1977 (which was at least partly couched in terms of a return to lost rock'n'roll values). You can see the onset of the new Zeitgeist by the words that started to creep into the discourse, voiced by musicians and critics alike: "preaching to the converted", "dull and worthy", "the new complacency", relentless imagery of stagnation, defeatism, impotence, wallowing in mud. Sonic mannerisms that had seemed charmingly scrappy or quirky now seemed to indicate a fatalistic dearth of ambition. Within a year, independent "purity" (the Pop Group quitting Radar because of its ownership by the arms-dealing Kinney corporation) signified "puritanical".

You can almost trace this discursive all-change to a handful of influential and industrious figures: NME's Paul Morley and Sounds's Dave McCullough (both indie kingmakers turned New Pop evangelists), Green from Scritti and ABC's Martin Fry. Green couched his conversion to pop in terms of a return to health. On tour with Gang of Four, Green collapsed (accounts vary--a life-threatening heart condition? Or just an acute panic attack?) and was completely paralyzed for several hours. Spending most of 1980 recuperating in Wales, he wrote a book's worth of notes to the band theorizing a new soul-funk direction for their music, and re-emerged bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with songs like "Faithless."

In the innumerable magazine interviews that followed, Green stridently repudiated Scritti's collectivist ideals and gradually disclosed that it was he who'd run the show musically from the off. "All the old claims to this pseudo-collectivism... I remember we posed for a photograph, 40 people standing in a kitchen making tea-- in retrospect... it was a lot of hot air," he told Melody Maker in 1982. To Jamming he complained that like a Soviet bureaucracy, the old Scritti didn't give him " the freedom... to write a song and take it to the others--there had to be a board meeting first!."

Green also renounced the DIY ethos as "a lost cause," singling out the homemade cassette movement (the quirked-out and lo-fi offerings of groups like Arm Pit Juices, The Night the Goldfish Died, and Anthrax for the People) as particularly "ridiculous." And he publicly criticized his label Rough Trade for frittering their money on "silly music" (meaning Pere Ubu and Red Krayola) instead of focusing their efforts on getting Scritti into the charts where they belonged. Other artists and critics agreed with Green that it was a time for a return to quality control, the hierarchy of the gifted over the talentless. If "ambition" was now a virtue and the solidarity of the alternative just an illusion, there was nothing to stop artists embracing the major labels and the star system. Scritti, Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire, even Throbbing Gristle (now called Psychic TV) all signed with major labels. This in turn forced Rough Trade to adopt major-style management structures and promotion strategies, or risk losing its groups (as it did with Scritti and Aztec Camera).

For those who chose to stick to the old independent ethos, there was bitterness. Charles Hayward says he was depressed by Rough Trade's attempts to play at being a hitmaker. "I don't see why they couldn't have trimmed the roster a bit, and just carried on much as before." But he also concedes that the post-punk vanguard had gone too far in a "super intellectual, super ideological" direction. "Some of the music around had lost any musical feel. There started to be this dour Russian Social Realist propaganda-like quality to the lyrics. Red Krayola, they'd just make backing tracks and just stick lyrics that had been independently constructed on top. Lyrics have got to have some cadence--if you defy that it sounds ugly as hell. And music has got to have some beauty--even if it's a convulsive beauty."

The Pop Group was one group that were accused of lapsing into soapbox ranting. Abandoning the debut album's imagistic rage-to-live, the single "We Are All Prostitutes" railed about "consumer fascism" and "department stores" as "our new cathedrals", while 1980's For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder was criticised widely as a self-flagellating guilt-trip. Gareth Sager told the NME that Pop Group thought it was frivolous to waste interview time "talking about music or production. We want to talk about external things"--meaning famine and war. Alluding to his influences at the time such as the Last Poets and Linton Kwesi Johnson--neither of whom minced their words--Mark Stewart defends the Pop Group's turn towards more blunt speaking-out: " I never felt that politics was this dreary thing. It was a fiery time, you felt something was about to kick off. When we were ranting, it was all from the heart.".

Perhaps, by 1981, people just got tired of hearing the bad news. There was an inevitable swing back to glamour, escapism, fun. Both New Pop and the proto-Goth tendency of Bauhaus represented a return to mystique, romance, Romanticism. Greil Marcus approvingly noted the Delta 5/Gang of Four/Au Pairs's "overwhelming sobriety: a sobriety that excludes not laughter but romanticism." But post-punk's refusal to swoon or risk intoxication quickly became oppressive and self-dessicating. And demystification kinda took the mystery out of everything. Whether it was ABC's ambivalent embrace of love's lexicon, or the positive punks's patchouli and Crowley, 1982 saw the return of that old (black) magic again.

"The big shock for me, the moment I realized it had all changed completely, was going into Club for Heroes," remembers Vivien Goldman of her first visit to the New Romantic club. "Our clubs had been grotty holes. Suddenly it was all suave and spacious, with proper carpeting on the floor! Heroes was like stumbling into a parallel universe. And that was really was post punk, in the sense that it had totally turned its back on punk and forged a new Eighties identity based around glamour, luxury, a jet-set vibe. I just felt that Thatcherism was now in full effect--the ideals we'd been galvanized by were no longer dominant. That was something we used to talk about--how long would it be before those values came back around again?"

Post-punk, says Penman, was "post everything, really...except, oddly, sincerity. Everyone was brittle with it". New Romanticism, New Pop, and Goth abandoned this core quest for the authentic, and revived glam's dream of self-reinvention. Along with the belief in authenticity, another casualty was post-punk's modernist confidence that you could make an absolute break with the past. With huge swathes of potential influence strictly off-limits (almost all of the Sixties and early Seventies), post-punk groups constructed distinctive sounds for themselves out of what was left: Velvets, Beefheart, Krautrock, contemporary sounds like disco and dub, the new electronics. New Pop, by contrast, was properly postmodern, jumbling up Sixties Motown, Seventies glam, and Eighties synthpop. And then came the deluge of retro culture and "record collection rock" that holds sway to this day, and which propagated the cancers of irony, referentiality, a knowingness that unavoidably belittles everything.

When trying to pinpoint out exactly what was so almost painfully exciting about this three-year phase of British music, 1979/80/81, I always circle back to the idea that as great as the music sounded, what really counted was that pop wasn't this compartmentalized category set off from the rest of reality and/or culture; music was about more than other music. Post-punk bands had their influences, alright, but knowing that, say, PiL loved Can doesn't tell you that much about them, either sonically or in terms of their "spirit". Is this because the post-punk groups simply had so much else on their minds--inputs and obsessions, from politics to other areas of culture?

Sometimes, of course, that meant that the intensity was as embedded not so much in the music itself as the surrounding conversation that it catalyzed, the discourse. This might be post-punk's cardinal flaw, the reason for its "failure"--the "all mouth, no trousers" syndrome echoed by such inheritors of post-punk's excessive ambition as Huggy Bear and Manic Street Preachers.

Nowadays, though, you mostly have the opposite problem: bands where the sonic substance might be pretty undeniable, the musical taste informing it impeccable, but there's no Great Idea behind the enterprise. And without that, what is it really worth? (There's more than enough "good music" out there to listen to, stockpiled in the megastores). Post-punk was a time when there was so much electricity in the air that even the era's unrealised experiments and failed pretentiousness seem more suggestive, and more cherishable, than the present's perfected product.