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

Nopane in my brain

Lester Bullock, more famously known as Dillinger, is 56 today. How did I get to Dillinger and why is he still running around my brain? We can all post-rationalise and say we were into reggae in the lead-up to Punk. Truer to say that some of us were into Bob Marley, the first reggae ‘crossover’ artist. I first noticed Bob Marley on my Sunday morning paper round. At the age of 15, I was delivering two heavy, Sunday paper bag loads for 50 pence, to bulk up the 75 pence I got for my five-nightly, five-mile evening paper round. While I was baiting a dog and jamming several newspaper supplements through a rusty letterbox one cool November morning, a front page caught my eye. It was taken up entirely with the front cover to Natty Dread, the newly released LP from Bob Marley & The Wailers. It was the most beautiful LP cover I had ever seen. Buying the LP would have been beyond the pale (and cost over two weeks’ ‘wages’). I wasn’t yet that experimental. My meagre record collection contained albums by David Bowie, Status Quo, T Rex and Elton John. Disco, soul or black music of any kind was not for me. I lived in a quiet, traditional, mostly white Midlands county town in which it was normal to poke fun at people with dark skins. I hadn’t realised that Eric Clapton’s hit, I Shot The Sheriff, was a Marley cover. There had been Ken Boothe. But, even when Everything I Own reached number one in 1974, solitary reggae artists still seemed like novelty acts on Top Of The Pops in the early 70s. A few weeks after I saw the Natty Dread cover, however, we had Rupie Edwards’ Ire Feelings at the top of the charts. Something was stirring in me, but local conditioning and peer pressure kept it down. But not for long. By 1975, I was actually attending gigs and literally feeling the bass sound run right through me. Now, the whole world was talking about Bob Marley. I didn’t get down to London to see Bob Marley and the Wailers live at the Lyceum in the summer (my big trip was Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court instead), but I was aware of it and rushed out to buy Live! when it emerged in December. A few months later, even The Rolling Stones had included a reggae cover version on their LP, Black and Blue. Reggae was officially OK if they said so. Then, the fledgling Virgin record company made what seemed a brave decision at the time to release The Front Line, a promotional LP of various reggae acts, including U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds, pushing these bands into appearing at the Reading Rock Festival in August. At the time, I remember thinking this was a bad idea. I attended the three days of this festival with Buffalo Johnson and a couple of other mates. The two reggae acts were literally canned off by heavy metal fans who had come to see Rory Gallagher, Ted Nugent and Black Oak Arkansas. I wanted them off, too. It was the right time, but wrong audience, wrong place. Punk was around the corner. John Peel was playing dub reggae. The old order, exemplified by the Southern Man Lynyrd Skynyrd brigade, was slipping away. I was faced with a choice that took me several months to make. The fact that I chose Punk meant that I brought reggae with me. The tie-up between Punk and Reggae was certainly odd. Even Bob Marley thought it strange at first, though he ended up releasing Punky Reggae Party as the B-side of Jamming in 1977. He could never understand why Punks desecrated themselves with safety pins and ripped clothes. In Jamaica, people were striving to get away from such things. It was only when he made the rebel connection that congruence became possible. Punk and Reggae were anti-establishment. Both were resistance movements in the heart of Babylon. Dope and weed were associated with hippies and the old order, but their prevalence in the Rasta-related reggae world meant that it was OK for Punks to indulge in an underground way. Which they did. Especially at the Roxy Club in London’s Covent Garden, the major showcase for Punk acts in the first six months on 1977, when they were banned from playing most everywhere else. The music press regularly reported the goings on at this den of iniquity. For us, in the provinces, it was our vicarious taste of the action. We would be told the playlist of host DJ Don Letts – in between the acts of adrenalin aggression from the likes of Wire, Buzzcocks and Adverts, Letts would play all the latest Jamaican 45s. In our remote Midlands hideout, we’d hear of acts like Big Youth, Culture, Lee Perry and Junior Murvin, the latter with his Police And Thieves. And, naturally, we wanted to hear what was happening. John Peel played more of it. Then The Clash finally emerged on vinyl and championed it, with their cover version of Police And Thieves. Marley was touring again and about to launch his best and most popular LP, Exodus. I’m hardly likely to forget it, as it was released on 3rd June, 1977, my 18th birthday. The Sex Pistols were number one in our hearts with God Save The Queen during Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. I was in the middle of my A level exams. My parents were splitting up. The first love of my life was not responding. I was exploding. I spent some of the summer of 77 recording whatever dub reggae John Peel played. And this I took with me to Bradford University at the end of September, thinking that I would be the only white person in this new universe to like Punk and Reggae. I was wrong. I very quickly met Martin, Graham and Alan, who liked both. Martin had Live! He’d played No Woman, No Cry on the mornings of his A level exams. Graham loved dub. Alan had Virgin’s Front Line LP. And, right at that very time, there emerged a single by a Jamaican artist called Dillinger, called Cokane In My Brain. Martin bought the single. He was the only one who had a record player. That’s how I got to Dillinger. Cokane In My Brain/Buckingham Palace/Ratnam Pizer. And after that, we didn’t need no fertilizer. A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork...

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk