Are we not Devo?

It’s 30 years today since Bauhaus released their seminal single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead. I ought to talk about Bauhaus. But I’ll save it for another day. For today, I’d rather talk about Devo, who, 31 years ago, released their first album, Are We Not Men? We Are Devo. Now, I liked Devo. They divided opinions like no other American band of the time. They were too intellectual. They were insensitive. They were ahead of their time. They were young. They were old. They were wierdos. Their message was nonsensical or dangerous. Was it really possible then, never mind now, to open the eyes of the world with song titles like Mongoloid and Jocko Homo? They were championed by David Bowie and Brian Eno, who produced their first album. Did Devo invent that snare drum sound that Bowie nicked for his Low LP? Stiff Records took them on board in the UK. There must have been something there, so why didn’t Devo ever crack it? At Knebworth in 1978, in the very month they released their debut LP, they experienced the same fate as U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds had at Reading in 1976. Canned off for being too different, in the wrong place, with the wrong audience. But was there ever a right audience for Devo? Poor Virgin Records. First U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds. Then The Sex Pistols imploded. Then there was Devo. Virgin had only ever had success with Mike Oldfield’s tubular balls. But now they wanted to be a rebel brand who only took on the challenging, so what did they expect? And Virgin wasn’t to get any mainstream success again until David Sylvian’s Japan – and then only briefly, before he, too, walked away from the limelight. (True, Virgin did bring Human League from the margins into the mainstream.) But that’s another story. Back to Devo. Trouble is, nobody ever really knew how to take Devo. In a time of simplistic, cut-through Punk, Devo wanted you to think about this idea they had whose name nobody could quite remember, never mind grasp. I was one of the only one among my peer group who engaged with the de-evolution idea, which went something like this…Forget evolution, think of the opposite. De-evolution. Instead of evolving, humankind is actually going backwards. Just look at all the social dysfunction and mass mentalism of the so-called most developed countries. Especially America. Although bizarre, it was quite refreshing for an American band to avoid flying the flag and all that sentimental chest-beating. It didn’t last. Devo had their 15 minutes in 1978. Are We not Men? We Are Devo flopped and America began to embrace Born To Run whereas Britain eventually turned to U2. But, since Devo, those of us who remember what it was all about have always been able to point at elements of society – from Big Brother to Facebook - and say, We are Devo.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Naked Hippies in Teepees

33 years on, I still can’t get my head around August 21st, 1976. On the day, it seemed quite simple. Wake up in a tent in a Hertfordshire field, your first night away from home with mates, aged 17. Following a magical evening of camp fires, acoustic guitars, joss sticks, awe and wonder. (One of the Plonker People - as we called the naked hippies in the teepee - sold Corf what turned out to be a soggy cigar butt for 10 pence.) Hoards of hairy, kaftan-wearing youths, all here for one purpose. To see the one and only Rolling Stones headline the Knebworth Festival. Some of us had even paid the extraordinary sum of £4.50 for our ticket – nine houses on my Saturday window-cleaning round. For this was also to be one of the last live performances from 10CC at the time of their biggest hit single, I’m Not In Love. And, little did we know, but this was also one of the last gigs by the complete line-up of Lynyrd Skynyrd, before the crash that killed half the band. Then there was Todd Rundgren and Hot Tuna. And instead of the few tens of thousands expected, over 200,000 more gatecrashed the event. Like ants and locusts, they climbed the fences and overwhelmed the turnstiles. So large was the crowd that those at the back heard reggae, off-beat versions of the bands, as the speaker banks at each corner of the massive event struggled to synchronise. We loved it – Buffalo Johnson, Corf, Pubic and me. We didn’t know it was the end of an era. Or that what was about to change that era was actually happening that very same day at another festival in France, at Mont De Marsan, where Nick Lowe, Pink Fairies, Eddie And The Hot Rods, Tyla Gang, Little Bob Story, Count Bishops, The Boys and The Damned, were featuring at a famous Punk Festival. It was the day where Ray Burns actually got his Captain Sensible moniker. But we were oblivious. We read about these upstarts in the paper the following week. We even saw Eddie And The Hot Rods as the Reading Festival the next weekend. But this was yet another festival from the old school, featuring the likes of Rory Gallagher, Camel, Black Oak Arkansas and Ted Nugent. The change was under way. Some people may well have seen The Sex Pistols perform at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 76 and had their world changed overnight. But this never happened to the majority of the people in the sticks where we came from. So, for us, August 21st, 1976 was a seminal day. And we didn’t even know it. We just enjoyed it for what it was. By the way, I’ve still got the packet of joss sticks I bought the previous evening. I wonder what happened to the Iron Cross I put round my neck. And that red and green, harlequin-patterned Knebworth ticket hanging up on our toilet wall today is fading somewhat now…

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Night 18340 (the Insomniac mix)

To my hoards of readers, thanks for waiting. For weeks, I’ve been immersed in the world of Electronic music, considering the role of the sublime in art, defoliating my blight-ridden tomatoes, amid a host of other blog-smothering activities. Last time I was here in front of you all, I was wondering about the Electronic influences of Southwold painter, Marc Brown. I’d discovered The Field and Murcof and bemused myself at the starry array of sub-genres within the Electronic fold, of which Techno is but one sliver. Now, I can say I’m more experienced. The Quinq has been places in his mind he didn’t know existed. And, sitting on the patio of my long lost friend, Rog, in Nottingham last Saturday evening, I was minded to describe my new found love for the winning Electronic genre of our times, Dubstep, sometimes known as Electronic Dub. I’ve found that you can tell someone you like Electronic, but, although they may be a fellow devotee, they may not have heard of the artists you can name. There are as many artists as there are sub-genres. I had to step back in time to pull up 70s Dub Reggae as the continuum here. Had King Tubby, Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo had this technology at their disposal, what might they have achieved? For me, with the eclipse of Reggae in the 80s at the hands of Rap and Hip-Hop, and with the impenetrable ugliness of most Dancehall, it’s a joyful relief to hear the re-emergence of Dub, albeit in a darker guise as a sub-genre of Electronic. No longer a purely black music preserve, Dub is, in its new Electronic form, susceptible to the influence of many formats, from Ambient to House and even Nu-Jazz. Now, I get to combine best of three worlds I’ve loved – Dub, Electronic and the dark night noise that characterised some of the Post-Punk era, including A Certain Ratio and Joy Division. And nary a guitar in earshot. Dubstep has been a long time coming. When XTC tried dubbing their music with a freebie inclusion to their second album, Go2+, nobody picked up on the excellence. Andy Partridge himself hated it and moved on to become the hippy he really wanted to be. But it’s all collected together in the wonderfully titled Explode Together – The Dub Experiments 1978-80. A step up from German bands like Can, 23 Skidoo championed an anarchic ambient noise that I hear in Dubstep way back in the early 80s. Check out their Seven Songs LP from 1982. Everything was moving away from Reggae and towards Rap and Rave. Apart, that is, from New Order, whose own dub experiments were a world apart (but, then, as a band, they were a world apart in the 80s). But now it’s time for Dubstep. The Garage, 2-Step and Grime influences of Dubstep seem to have passed me by, but the new sound has caught me by the hairs on the back of my neck. Oh, I can’t follow any of the 140 beats per minute technicality of it all. But I do know it incorporates elements of music I like, including Dub – if not the Reggae beat, then the sound effects. One of these days, I will discover Lee Scratch Perry up to no good in the thick of it. Dubstep may well be a technique, but it’s an atmosphere, a layered sound collage that induces a feeling, moving from the spaced-out to the edgy. I even hear it in the 80s German film music of Nikos Mamangakis, particularly Die Zweite Heimat. Whether it’s Burial, Skream, Pinch, Distance, Starkey, DJ T or 2562, it seems there’s a time for listening to Dubstep – a few minutes either side of 3 o’clock in the morning. Dubstep is your inner soundtrack, your personal sonic dreamscape, the sound your memories make. Dubstep is a surprise encounter with a recollection, just around the corner from your heartbeat. Dubstep is a pause in the sentence you use to describe your life. Dubstep is an echo of something you meant to say. Dubstep is your shadow demanding to be heard. Dubstep is a tacit understanding between an insomniac and a nightwalker. Dubstep is a crepuscular exchange at the edge of your world. Dubstep is reaching out to something just beyond your fingertips. Quite alien at first, Dubstep can sound very familiar after just a couple of listenings. But then, the Quinq is close to any form of expression that’s just below the pavement. When I listen to this kind of music I can sense people walking overhead on the world of surface. And, like the track from DJ T’s perfectly entitled album, The Inner Jukebox, I feel I’m Lit From Within. So that the imagery I see is on the back of my eyelids. Yes, as much as I like The Field and Gui Boratto and the lighter side of electronic, in Dubstep I think I’ve found what I was looking for. With my limited exposure to date, I’m assuming that Burial has truly defined Dubstep in his two albums. It is a dark mood, a Dickensian fog enshrouding the Thames, but very definitely a backdrop for humanity. All breathy heartbeats and footsteps, voices in puddles, one song seeping into the next. Amplified for every glitch, the background becomes the foreground - what I used to hear in the ante-room of The Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Joy Division, Pet Shop Boys and even Neil Young. Personally, I don’t care whether Murcof fails to make the list of Dubsteppers. The album from this Mexican, Martes, evokes the same mood in me as Untrue by Burial. It doesn’t matter that Amon Tobin and Craig Taborn cannot make the Dubsteppin cut, because their albums Bricolage and Junk Magic give me the same feed as Underwater Dancehall by Pinch or My Demons by Distance. Dubstep only really works as a thematic collection of songs – which is why some albums, like Skream! by Skream, don’t cut it as an entirety and are less than the sum of their parts. But since you asked for a sample of Dubstep, The Quinq is only too happy to oblige with 10 up…

Burial Near Dark from Untrue album
Distance My Demons from My Demons album
DJ T Lit From Within from The Inner Jukebox album
Ezekiel Honig Broken Marching Band from Surfaces Of A Broken Marching Band album
Modeselektor The White Flash feat. Thom Yorke from Happy Birthday! album
Pinch Widescreen from Underwater Dancehall album
Skream Kut-Off from Skream! album
Starkey Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits album
Swayzak Distress And Calling from Some Other Country album
2562 Techno Dread from Aerial album

Quite clearly, in order to get a handle on the future of Dubstep, I’m going to have to walk backwards into Grime, 2-Step and Garage, its forbears. Watch and hear this space.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk