To begin, most people will likely think that the book is at least a partial response to the huge upsurge in post-punk over the last five years, most notable in the shape of Wire, Mission of Burma, Radio 4/Gang of Four tours, and new crops of bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture, Mars Volta, and many others. Yet, what do you think these bands really echo from the past and do and do not mimic from the vintage years you cover, 1978-1984, since you did note that “it’s thrilling and enjoyably disorienting to hear the sound of my youth resurrected”?
I started thinking about postpunk as something worth writing about at length towards the end of 2000, and embarked on a long article for Uncut magazine about it it ended up much longer than what they were able to print.
But at the point, end of 2000, early 2001, it was really the earliest stirrings of the neo-postpunk thing. There was some reissuing going on, but bands wise there was Erase Errata and Life Without Buildings, and things like Chicks On Speeds doing covers of songs by The Normal and Delta 5. I don’t think The Rapture were around yet, or at least they were but hadn’t fallen into DFA’s clutches.
The band that really made me think about postpunk again for the first time in a long while, though, was actually a few years earlier, this UK outfit Position Normal who had a fabulous record called Stop Your Nonsense in 1999. And they were plugged into a side of postpunk that none of the current postpunk influenced bands really tap into the whimsy and ethereality, the kind of quirky “bedsit” one-off singles that John Peel used to play on his show, people like the Native Hipsters and Family Fodder. The Position Normal record was made out of samples from odd sources, what sounded like old reel-to-reel tapes bought at charity shops, plus it had this dreamy guitar like Durutti Column and a real quality of eccentric Englishness that again recalled the late 70s and John Peel.
So it highlighted a whole side of postpunk that the current bands don’t seem aware of, or at least, they’re not attracted to it. The current wave has honed in on the angularity, the punk funk/discopunk aspect. So it’s the side that’s more bound up with the “punk” in postpunk, and being an aggressive, exciting live band as opposed to home-studio experimentalism or electronics.
And it’s this side of postpunk I’m going to concentrate on with the Rip It Up And Start Again compilation that V2 are putting out in early 2006. We have tracks by Durutti Column, Thomas Leer, Fatal Microbes, Young Marble Giants, John Cooper Clarke a lot of ethereal, dream-drifty music, downtempo and subdued. So of the current wave of retro-postpunk, I would say they tend to have a somewhat limited conception of what postpunk is the coordinates are very much Wire, Gang of Four, maybe A Certain Ratio and Joy Division.
The other thing missing is the political commitment Radio Four tried with their last record, but it didn’t really work, it came across like Midnight Oil. It seems like it’s hard to “do” the music + politics equation these days. That may just be because postpunk’s social and political context is unrecoverable, a unique set of circumstances existed then.
And a lot of belief in the power of music to change things has been beaten out of us in the ensuing decades. People are more realistic, perhaps, although it’s arguably a form of “cynical realism”. Perhaps it’s better to be idealistic and deluded!
It certainly enabled the postpunk groups to leave behind this amazing legacy of music that still burns your ears with its urgency.
I think the book does an excellent job balancing between the raw analysis of a genre and the passionate, even breathy, quality of “been there, done that,” but at times I do worry about some interesting turns. For instance, do you really believe the Ramones were redundant and basically creatively exhausted after their second album?
Now, what is compelling is the bravado of the statement, which I have also personally heard from Tony Kinman of the Dils and Ian MacKaye of Fugazi in similar sorts of ways, but when interviewing Tom Greenhalgh from the Mekons, he actually said he admired (at the time) the new record by AC/DC because it was, to paraphrase, sort of pure and somewhat ingenius. Now, does that surprise you that one of the founders of the post-punk soundscape would say that, and could not the same be said of the Ramones?
I like the Ramones just fine, but I don’t think anyone could claim they were a band that progressed musically.
I don’t know their Eighties output very well but I’d be surprised if there was an all-synth record or one where they incorporated a horn section! Of the stuff I know well the only slight swerve I can think of is End of the Century, which might be my favourite, and that’s actually a retro-move, with Phil Spector producing. So, I think there’s a real sense in which if you’ve heard one Ramones album you’ve heard ‘em all.
That’s what makes them punk where Talking Heads are postpunk. It’s funny you mention AC/DC, I once reviewed a bunch of AC/DC reissues and made just that comparison asking why AC/DC were not as respected as the Ramones, when they were just as minimalist, and especially early on, quite angry-kids-kicking-out-at-the-world oriented. I think their roots in early 70s British blues rock makes AC/DC more traditional and less seminal than the Ramones.
But that just makes AC/DC’s records more enjoyable to me than the Ramones, they actually swing.
Another area that makes me ponder is that when describing a genre that was in part iconoclastic, inventive, and all about creating a clean slate and having a clean break from the past, including the romanticism of rock’n’roll, you actually muse heavily about the style of singing and the death of Ian from Joy Division: “Was this how Ian Curtis was beginning to see himself, as a star sending out a signal, a beacon in the darkness? Could he possibly have known that pulsars belong to a distinct class of heavenly bodies known as misanthropic or isolated neutron stars?
Was he somehow able to channel a latent form of this electrical disorder of the nervous system and transform it into his personal signature.” Do you worry at all that these writerly conjectures might come off as myth-making itself?
I don’t think you can understand Joy Division as both a phenomenon and in terms of their music without factoring in the tremendous power and importance of myth, mystique, and mystery.
And as much as most postpunk groups were anti-Romantic, I don’t think that’s quite the case with Joy Division.
See, it’s clear from reading things like Deborah Curtis’ memoir that Ian always had this idea of dying young in the back of his mind; he really loved Jim Morrison and the Doors and
I think this idea of becoming myth was alluring to him. There’s some text on their first EP An Ideal For Living that declares “this is not a concept EP, it is an enigma”.
It’s clear Ian cultivated that aspect of mystique. Not saying too much in interviews, for instance, not breaking the spell. He was into the arty end of glam rock, Bowie and Iggy and the Velvets, and the group did have an interest in image and projecting an aura.
I also think there’s a real sense of irreducible mystery about Joy Division’s music, there’s something going in there that resists being captured. The only people who’ve got close are writers like Paul Morley, who was their big champion at the time at NME, who wrote about them in a really abstract way it’s as though the only appropriate response to Joy Division is to come up with your own poetry to match and parallel the group’s “poem.” Writing about Joy Division’s music was probably the only thing I felt intimidated about when doing the book.
Partly because it has been written about so much, so there’s a sense of a well-told story. It’s also been written about often so well (it’s the kind of music that makes rock critics raise their game). But also because… how do you write about the darkness etc, etc, and not risk being hokey or melodramatic?
But again, just the fact that Joy Division, a band who sold a fraction of the number of records that say Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd did, are about to have a second movie made about them, shows that there’s a dramatic, rockmythical element that can’t be suppressed, it’s totally integral to whatever they were.
The epilepsy thing is a genuine mystery, the fact that he was dancing in that twitchy way onstage before he developed the illness. I never saw them live but saw Joy Division doing ‘Transmission’ on TV and it was pretty eerie to see, especially as I was unprepared, I didn’t know that was his performance “style”.
Since we’re on the topic of Ian, I have heard from at least in one source that he was listening to a Lou Reed record at the time of his death, and from another, to the live album by the Stooges, “Metallic KO.
” Why do you think we feel this need to know what he was listening to, and according to his wife in the April, 11th 2005 Guardian Unlimited, “Ian taught me that if you put a piece of music on you sit down and listen to it…You don t get up and do the washing-up or anything. You listen to it.”
And I’m sure I read in other places it was the Doors first album (ending with “The End”!
). I don’t know why there’s this hunger for specifics. Sometimes I think that all these facts get in the way of “truth”, if you get me.
That there’s such a thing as too much knowledge. At the same time Rip It Up is informationally rich, with a lot of stuff I found out through 125 interviews that I’ve not seen elsewhere, or dredged up from really obscure magazines from the era. And there’ll be even more data when I put up the footnotes on the Rip It Up website.
But there’ll also be more ideas, connections, theories, speculations, and conjectures too. You have to get the balance right.
Have you had the chance to see New Order revisit some songs for the first time in 20 years during the recent spate of shows over the last five years, or the reunited Gang of Four, Wire, Mission of Burma, or others?
Does it remind you of a whole new kind of dinosaur rock, or do you think that is still remains vital and forward-looking?
I haven’t seen New Order do that. I saw Mission of Burma and Gang of Four, both exciting for me as I never saw them back in the day.
With groups like that, you kinda feel they deserve a second crack at it and a chance to reap some rewards and some adulation, because maybe they didn’t get what they deserved at the time. It’s not forward-looking, how could it be? It’s easy to get disgusted, or just amused, by the number of bands from all eras of rock’s history still treading the boards.
The idea of the Pixies reforming is just befuddling to me, as I was one of the journalists hyping them the first time around. But then again, what are rock bands supposed to do with themselves for the rest of their lives? The turnover in the music industry is really cruel, most get three or four years before trends move on.
So you might be 26… and that’s it? I can’t blame them for keeping on keeping on. Or coming back.
One of the things that remains a paradox to me is that while the post-punk bands were trying, not unlike the IWW, to create “a new world within the old,” they still had all kinds of attachments to that shell of a world they were trying to remake. For instance, there were record contracts (even if just spoken), publicists or at least press releases even for the likes of Throbbing Gristle, and there was always a fetish for documentation, all of which smacks of consumer society. Granted, some labels like Factory toyed with and inverted meanings, like creating catalog numbers for mere ideas etc.
, but do you think that no matter how hard they tried to break the umbilical cord to the society of the spectacle, they were cocooned in it?
TG probably had some fun with operating like a professional record company, given the nature of what they were doing! But more generally, there’s an intrinsic contradiction with any form of counter-culture that chooses to express itself through the market, through selling cultural commodities and putting on paid-admission performances.
As you say, that’s the spectacular-commodity society recreated right there. People used to complain that the hippies had just generated a kind of “alternative capitalism” and labels like Rough Trade could be seen as perpetuating that, or at least remaining ensnared by that contradiction. Rough Trade tried to operate as a collective, with decisions made communally and everybody paid the same.
But underneath this cooperative-like front, they were actually a privately owned company and eventually, in order to survive in the more competitive, reduced-market of the Eighties, they adopted managerial structures or made explicit and official the kind of power structures that had been informally in operation from the start. They got caught up in a logic of entryism they believed in the music they were putting out, wanted it to reach the largest number of people, and so tried to compete with the majors and took on major label-like strategies (hiring radio pluggers, for instance). A classic case of becoming like your enemy.
In a sense they fell victim to the mainstream’s definition of success as “hits”. Whereas earlier Rough Trade would have questioned what a “hit” was, the competitive structure enshrined in the institution of a chart, and wondered why did music have to enter into a system where there were few winners and many “losers”.
It’s possible to do stuff outside the exchange economy there was and still is to some degree a free festival circuit in the UK that began with the hippies in the early Seventies and had a renaissance in the early 90s when it hooked up with rave culture, so you had all these free raves in the English countryside or warehouses and abandoned government buildings in the cities. You could see the kind of energy that gathered around the Grateful Dead, especially the tape-trading thing, and the fact that the band allowed people to tape the shows, as a kind of residue of that countercultural thing.
Another thing I’ve long found really inspiring is the pirate radio culture, which is essentially giving away music for free. There’s some minimal advertising on the pirate shows but they only cover the costs of replacing transmitters and such; the DJs actually pay a subscription fee to the station owner for the privilege of having a show. In postpunk days and today, there are circuits where people swap cassettes of their own music, so it’s less producer/consumer oriented and more free agents trading their own cultural artifacts.
You could even see the Libertines’ thing of having gigs in people’s living rooms as subversive, a democratizing of culture, breaking the barrier between band and audience. And blogs today are an example of a renaissance of amateur, DIY culture.
You reveal, for the first time that I can vividly remember, some of the real reactionary trends of the New York punk and post-punk explosion, whether it’s the return to narrative form of the New Cinema, the anti-liberalism or James Chance, the celebration of all things Caucasian and bubblegum and 1950s from the Ramones, and the rejection by Legs McNeil of disco, white negroes, not to forget his adage, “Fuck the black experience.
” This happened almost during the same time that Bo Diddley was touring with the Clash in America, Mikey Dread was jamming with the Clash, and Don Letts was still very active, and Chicano punk in LA in the form of the Zeros and the Plugz was about to thrive. Why do think that New York especially (certainly not East Coast in general, because several later DC punk bands were mixed racially) was so, in a sense, anti-black, anti-liberal, when punk pioneers the MC5 practically prayed at the church of Sun Ra, soul, and politics? (Though, we should note, Blondie was very in tune with black music.
)
It’s almost too big a topic to deal with in an interview.
In many ways the Lester Bangs article ‘The White Noise Supremacists’ says it all. By the mid-Seventies there was a sense of fatigue about liberal ideas, you started to get the beginning of the backlash that would eventually push Reagan to power. That was coming from the heartland, but at the same time the new breed of hipsters like Legs McNeil were reacting against the preceding hipster generation’s set of Sixties values.
Being hard-hearted as opposed to bleeding-heart, cynical instead of idealistic, deliberately philistine (that whole Dictators thing of being into pulp, the trash aesthetic, the B-movie/Mondo thing) as opposed to searching out the edifying and elevating. They didn’t talk about PC versus un-PC back then, but there was that impulse around to embrace the politically-incorrect epithets and use them for their shock effect. The justification being that the Sixties liberation movements had created sanctimony and piousness.
Let’s talk about psycho-geography, how place, terrain, and home shape the ambitions, soul, and style of bands. I think you make some excellent observations and nail down what I think is really important: most great music is not made in the City of Angels, Gotham City, or even Blake’s London. It is the outer periphery, whether in the form of Sheffield or Akron, which supplies much of the needed talent and vision.
Do you think that in some way, punk and post-punk challenged the hegemony of large cities, with their pretensions and peer mongering, and in essence, the story of great music is the story of outsiders, in every sense?
That’s certainly what’s going on in the UK during this period: the North rises up, and in turn Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh, each have their moment in the spotlight. With the exception of Cleveland-Akron, though, which didn’t last too long anyway, I didn’t get so much of a sense of that cultural decentralization going on with the US scene.
New York and San Francisco seemed like the two postpunk capitals, acting as magnets for bohemians and misfits from all over the US like they always have. So for instance, MX80 moved to SF, right? And the Athens, Georgia, bands really had impact when they started playing a lot in New York.
Obviously there are college towns that have vital scenes, like Boston, and strange little records coming from all over the place. But I don’t get the sense that America generated counter-capitals to NYC and San Francisco, places that were eclipsing those cities as hubs of activity.
Los Angeles is a different story the most interesting music, to my ears, came out of what could be thought of a periphery to LA, the SST scene in Hermosa Beach: what I call in the UK version of the book, which has an SST chapter not included in the American edition (yeah, go figure) “progressive punk”.
But then LA is a city that’s all peripheries, really. I’m pretty underwhelmed by the first-wave Hollywood punk scene, it seems like a real “you had to be there” moment. And after that imploded, the LA alternative music scene goes really retro, although there seems to have been a way-way underground postpunk scene, of sorts, in LA.
But when you put its recorded legacy next to what came out of SF and NYC, there’s no comparison.
Chicago, I think, its “postpunk” moment occurred in the mid-Eighties, after my cut-off point. That’s when you got Big Black on the one hand and Wax Trax on the other, both suffering significant Anglophile damage (Steve Albini’s early stuff was very Wire/Killing Joke influenced apparently and you can hear Gang of Four all the way through the Big Black recordings, while we all know about Al Jourgensen’s early Ministry career as MTV eyeliner-and-synth boy, don’t we?
).
I want to talk about David Thomas for a moment, whose interview we are running alongside this one. When I pressed him about this statement he once made, “Punk rock was something that businessmen really loved because it was a victory for Madison Avenue right at the point that rock music was preparing to deliver William Faulkner, Henry James, and Herman Melville,” he responded this way:
I don’t know how old you are or even if you remember back then, but every major single group in one way or another was working, and by major I don’t necessarily mean commercial, I mean groups that shaped things, was working on establishing the poetic voice of sound, the sound of musical activity as opposed to…Well, the sound of the musical activity becoming a distinctly different thing than the musical activity itself.
If you think about the groups that were influential back then, Can, some of the Germanic groups, Eno’s early stuff, Roxy Music’s early stuff, Cale, clearly what Rocket was engaged in and later Pere Ubu, the Residents, all that early pre-1975 stuff, whatever, so much of it was based around the rise of the analog synthesizer.
Now that you have studied the period so intensely, would you agree or disagree with Thomas about the poetic voice of sound and the rise of the synth as a major force within art and even post-punk?
Yeah.
It was a really important tool, and in a paradoxical way allowed the postpunk groups both to resume the expansive experimentalism of pre-punk progressive music culture while also making a clear differentiation between themselves and a certain kind of prog-rock megaband. The latter tended to use synths as keyboards, in a pianistic or organ-like way lots of bombast and frilly arpeggios. But they could also be used (as Eno had done, and a few others, especially in Germany) as a source of abstract noise.
Or rhythmically, to create these very precise pulse-grooves. (Which the prog rock megabands didn’t do, they had live drummers and their music had lots of disjointed time signatures and tempo changes, they weren’t into a hypnotic, motorik form of propulsion. Cos it didn’t suit their versality-showcasing, exhibitionistic ethos).
Lastly, before we get to the next part, I would like to hear your input about the link between the radical body politics of punk and porn. For instance, you do remind readers that one member of Devo worked at a porn shop and the group in general loved mass marketed porn (you quote Mothersbaugh as saying, “Porn is important to the lower economic levels”), Tutti from Throbbing Gristle was in at least 40 porn magazine layouts, and I have noted in essays that Wendy O Williams had bit roles in two porn films, the Plugz did soundtracks for three porn films, and Lydia Lunch had a gun placed in her vagina in the Richard Kern film “Fingered.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Why do you think there was such a cross-over between the two?
There’s a number of things going on here. Obviously, there was this avant-garde tradition of pornography (Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay about this, differentiating between “the pornographies”), going back to de Sade, and taking in Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, and most crucially for the postpunkers like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle William S.
Burroughs and J.G. Ballard.
This wasn’t porn as titillation, porn for prurient stimulation, porn as wank-fodder, but as a mode of perception perhaps, or a route to certain kinds of avant-garde literary effects. And obviously transgression. There’s also a sense that would have been around that modern world had a pornographic aspect things like that famous image of the Vietnamese girl screaming and naked because she’s torn her napalm-soaked clothes off, or the equally horrible one of the Vietnamese man being executed with a revolver to the head.
Groups like Throbbing Gristle would have plugged into that aspect: the pornography of the Final Solution, the gruesome accounts that were being published of serial killers’ exploits, or the book Beyond Belief about the child-murderers Ian Brady (a de Sade fan, actually) and Myra Hindley.
Porn would also relate to what we were talking about before re. the anti-liberal backlash of people like Legs McNeil.
Feminists, by the mid-Seventies, were anti-porn, and so if being anti-liberal was your shtick (or genuine creed) then being pro-porn would fit. And as it happens Legs McNeil followed up his punk oral history Please Kill Me with an, er, oral history of the porn movie industry!
Devo, I reckon, were just sexually starved, that’s why they were fans of Hustler! Hustler, though, sounds like quite an interesting magazine, this writer Laura Kipnis wrote a fascinating and provocative article about it in Village Voice, talking about this element of class rage and scurrilous baiting of theestablishment in it e.g.
their printing of a nude photo surreptitiously taken of Jackie Onassis. With people like Lydia Lunch, the porn impulse relates to the idea of pushing boundaries of expression, the “emotional nudism” of her lyrics, her love of the literary avant-garde, and maybe back to radical theater and Sixties stuff like the Living Theater. It’s complicated, because there would have been a Sixties impulse towards libidinal liberation, breaking taboos, building a culture of
Eros vs Thanatos, and the feminists at that point would have been right in the thick of that (as would the gay liberation movement porn, I think, has a much less negative status in gay culture than straight).
That late Sixties, early Seventies stage of women’s liberation was called “radical feminism”, it was much more like women claiming the freedoms of men and attacking things like Miss World for their sanitized view of what women were like. You look at a figure like Germaine Greer, she was into female wildness and female libertinism, sleeping with whoever you liked, she was into the whole Sixties rock’n’roll dope and fucking in the street trip, etc. So while that generation of feminists might have criticized a magazine like Screw for chauvinist attitudes, there’s an extent I think that they’d have regarded it as a fellow-traveller in cultural liberation.
Then by the mid-to-late Seventies, what was called “cultural feminism” took over figures like Andrea Dworkin, the focus shifting more to things like rape, wife abuse, porn as pernicious and oppressive. Lunch, then, is perhaps more in the Greer mold. (Later doing her spoken-world stuff she’s more anti-patriarchal and Dworkin-like perhaps in her all men are rapists mode of rhetoric).
Funny thing: Richard Kern’s son Fletcher used to go to the same East Village pre-school as my son Kieran, we see them in the neighbourhood regularly!
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