1981 – A FALSE DAWN?
3 October 2006

Global climate change means that the Sahara is growing by so many grains of sand per second; the once-proud Masai warriors are having to sell off their cattle and move to shanty towns; half of Bangladesh is under threat of flooding. Meteorologists are predicting the worst hurricane season yet down in the Gulf of Mexico and I’m sitting out on the ledge enjoying another evening in the Indian summer that the south of England has been basking in yet again.

Some months ago I put together a list of topics that I wanted this book to cover. One thread in this was to consist of a number of stages in my own musical evolution that has brought me to this point, where I now view the urge to make recorded music as a redundant and creative dead end; where I expect the sheer availability and ubiquity of music will inspire music-makers to explore different ways of making music, away from something that can be captured on a CD, downloaded from the Internet, consumed on an MP3 player; and that the making of recorded music will seem an entirely two-dimensional 20th century aspiration to creative music-makers in the next few decades.

I will probably want to use embroidered versions of the last few sentences again at the end of the book. But I felt the need to restate it now, this evening, before I try and put on paper the next two of the topics on my list: 1981 and Pete Waterman. But first I should let you know the ginger tom is out on his high wall and the sycamore is standing silent, secure in the knowledge that he knows all that is worth knowing.

When punk happened it was great for all the many reasons well documented by 100s of writers about music. But by its very nature punk had to be a back-to-basics thing, the downside of this was that all its aspirations were so retro and conservative. Punk wanted to re-establish a conformity of what a band is and does. It wanted to bring rock music and the rock band back to a form that had been defined almost 15 years earlier. A drummer, a bass player, a guitarist or two and a singer trying to tell the world how shitty everything was or how much in love he is in some vague hope that some part of society will be shocked, or at least stop what they are doing for a few minutes and take notice. When The Who sang My Generation and smashed up their equipment live on stage in 1966 nothing had ever sounded or looked like it before. When the Pistols, Clash and Damned took to the highways of the land a decade later it was great fun for all involved at the time and made entertaining copy for the music papers. But with any sort of overview it looked and sounded very dull and as musically interesting as the trad jazz revival of the 1950s.

What was far more interesting within the sphere of popular music was what Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, The Residents and a few other odd bods were doing. I’m not going to describe what these three plus the other odd bods were making, it’s enough to tell you and remind myself that they started to make records that ditched the whole notion that pop records needed guitar, drums, bass players and all that boring old-fashioned stuff. Pop records could be made using synthesisers, drum machines and computers. Records could be made that didn’t hark back to Buddy Holly or rooted in some way to the American R&B traditions of the 1950s. The theory was that with a few bits of cheap gear and a four-track tape recorder great pop records could be made that were far more forward looking than that any of the punk bands could do.

But Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and The Residents all came from distant shores. There was no way we felt we had the wherewithal to make records as modern and future sounding like that in Liverpool. Even with our Lori And The Chameleons records we were relying on guitars and real drums and 1960s-sounding keyboards.

I want to clamber back in through the window and check Google to find out exactly when Being Boiled by The Human League and Warm Leatherette by The Normal came out but I can’t be arsed. But those two records were the first I heard by British music makers after the supposed watershed of punk in 1976/77 that sounded like they were made by people who wanted music to have nothing to do with all the guitar-driven retro pop/rock that had been going on for almost 20 years.

By the time these two records had made their impact in my head, Dave Balfe and I were too committed to the careers of Echo And The Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes to be ditching everything to follow some electro dream. And our Lori And The Chameleons thing had failed so on my part any thought of making music myself was shelved forever. Or that’s what I thought then.

While managing the Teardrops and Bunnymen I tried to ignore how boringly traditional they were in so many ways, and concentrate on what was great about them. In fact, while managing the Bunnymen I was able to convince myself once again that the rock band as a form was still, and maybe would always be, the greatest medium for an artist. But I was doing it as a manager, not as a mere member of the band. What we attempted to do with the Bunnymen I have written about in a story called From The Shores Of Lake Placid that was published in the book 45.

But all my reinvigorated belief in the rock band came apart at the seams on the night of 4 June 1981 in New York City. I was staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel, so I suppose I was over there trying to make something happen for Echo And The Bunnymen in the States. Also staying in the hotel were The Clash. As I have written earlier, watching and hearing The Clash play in Eric’s in Liverpool on the evening of 5 May in 1977 was a pivotal moment in my musical life. Did I say before that it was seeing The Clash that night that had restored my belief that the rock band was possibly the most powerful medium going?

Yeah, I know this runs contrary to what I was saying about how retro and therefore worthless those punk bands were, but if you can’t hold at least half-a-dozen contradictory theories at any one time, you are probably not flesh and blood.

Back to The Clash. They were managed by this bloke called Bernie Rhodes. He was almost up there with Malcolm McLaren as an English punk mentor figure. It was supposedly him who politicised The Clash and got them wearing those clothes with stencilled slogans on them.

It was while down in Rockfield Studios in Wales mixing some track that I first met up with Bernie Rhodes. He was there working on a record by a new protégé of his called Johnny Britain. This lad had a quiff and a young Cliff Richard vibe about him, it all seemed a bit Larry Parnes to me. At the time Bernie was temporarily in retirement as The Clash’s manager. He had pissed them off or something. Bernie was a motormouth and at the Gramercy he was back in his position as The Clash’s manager. He was full of plans of how they were going to tear America apart and start a revolution. Or at least that was the implication. His room in the Gramercy was an open forum for debate. The walls and floor of it were covered in roughs of ideas for posters, all heavily borrowing on Latin American revolutionary chic.

The Clash were playing a series of dates at this massive old ballroom called Bonds in Manhattan. The place held 3000 but because of fire regulations they could only sell 1300 tickets a night. They did at least a dozen shows there, all of them sold out. The Clash were about to go stadium.

I didn’t get to know The Clash themselves in any particular depth. They always seemed to be totally stoned on grass while Bernie was going on about revolution. They did little more than nod their heads to whatever he was going on about while lounging about in Clash-like poses. My take on it was they seemed to be more interested in behaving like traditional rock stars, more than happy to pull the clichéd rock ‘n’ roll rebel poses than ever entertaining any real revolutionary thinking or action.

I know this was all four years after the height of the anti-hippy punk puritanism of 1977, but on a surface level The Clash just seemed like a bunch of dope-smoking Ladbroke Grove hippies, but with short haircuts. Not that I felt particularly let down by them in this sense, just surprised.

Bernie gave me tickets for the show on 4 June. I went not knowing what to expect. What I got was the dullest, most rambling rock performance I had ever experienced in my life. Much of the audience just lay around on the floor as if they were at a free festival. It was hard to believe this was the same band that had played at Eric’s on 5 May 1977.

Later that same evening I was asked to go to a club with a bloke called Roger Aimes who was one of the A&R men at Phonogram records who The Teardrops were signed to. Roger and I were to be the guests of Kid Creole and a couple of his Coconuts. I don’t know what the connection between Creole and Aimes was but they seemed to know each other well. Kid Creole was dressed in the full get-up that he was famous for.

The club was down some dingy backstreet by the docks. From the outside it was not what I was expecting. Kid Creole’s image was all late 1940s Cuban glamour, cocktails and Latin Rhythms, not this. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to witness inside the club. The place was rammed. The clientele were almost all black, and other than the two female Coconuts, all male and very gay.

The club was made up of numerous rooms. It was impossible to get any idea of how big the place actually was as it was so chock-full and difficult to get around. There were a number of these fake classical pedestals around the place. On them were huge vases of white lilies. These vases of lilies were picked out by small spotlights. On the bar top was a massive glass bowl of quartered oranges.

This was like no nightclub that I had ever been in before. The energy in the place was everything The Clash at Bonds was not. The unseen sound system was pumping out tune after tune of which I had never heard the like before. Mainly they were stripped-back extended mixes of shuddering electro tracks with soul diva’s voices on top, they almost made the Giorgio Moroder records I knew sound like kid’s stuff. Track after track, all seamlessly segueing into each other. Never a drop in energy level. If there was a DJ somewhere in this club who was responsible for this he must have been a genius. Up until then I had thought of a DJ as someone who put records on, did a bit of chat in between and hoped to get a job on local radio. This was something else altogether. It was literally an ocean away from cheesy Euro disco or the soul boy sounds that dance clubs would have been playing in the UK.

Then this woman took to a small and cramped stage. She had a cleavage that heaved and a mountain of hair. She was handed a mic, she opened her mouth and out came the most beautiful, scary, sexy, rich, heart-stopping voice. It sounded even better than that of Betty Wright when I saw her sing at Shades nightclub in Coventry in 1975. I knew immediately it to be the voice of Chaka Khan of Rufus fame. She only did three songs but the place went wild. But what I couldn’t understand was why she was just singing to a backing track. There was no band backing her up. This was something I had never seen before. Theoretically I thought I should have felt cheated – only three songs and no live band – but it felt like one of the best events I had been to in my life.

I left the club immediately, not even bothering to find Aimes, Kid Creole or his Coconuts to say thanks and bye. On leaving the place I noticed it was called The Paradise Garage and have since learnt it was touted as one of the seminal dance clubs that many since have tried to copy. Since I have rarely been to any sort of clubs, I wouldn’t know.

It was a mile or so back to the Gramercy Hotel. On that walk back people could have been shot and mugged all around me, planes could have been flying into the World Trade Centre and King Kong could have been climbing the Empire State building, I would not have noticed a thing. Inside my head it was all going off, all being worked out. A summary of it was that rock music, in whatever sub genre it preferred to wallow in, was over. Dead. The whole thing was a charade. A worthless one at that. Peopled by pathetic white boys and men pretending to be what they weren’t. And what is worse, it was dull, boring, backward-looking, smug and used up. All electric guitars, bass guitars, drum kits, Marshall stacks, Fender twin reverbs, wah-wah pedals, effects pedals of any kind, plectrums, spare strings, Vox AC30s and especially any 1959 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top Deluxe should all be gathered together and burnt and their ashes dumped unceremoniously in the Hudson River.

Then a line of thinking developed. Not so much a theory, more just some questions and maybe the answer is obvious to you, or if not you, to some academic who knows about these things. This is it: how come the makers of modern western popular music of the past few decades who are white are always looking back for a golden age? Even in My Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll it was a skiffle band. The skiffle craze in Britain of the mid 1950s was trying to mimic something from prewar America, as was the trad jazz boom of the same era.

In the 1960s the vast majority of British rock bands, and subsequently American rock bands, looked back to the black bluesmen of the 1950s or earlier as the greats or the rock ‘n’ roll ‘founding fathers’. Then there were all the various folk revivals. By the time we get to punk we get bands drawing their influences from bands who 10 or 15 years earlier in turn had looked back to the aforementioned bluesmen.

Every corner of modern popular music-making done by white people seems to suffer from this. But none of this is the case with American black music-makers. They seem to abhor the past. The 1920s jazz of Louis Armstrong was the most modern thing on the planet. Come the 1930s it was replaced by the big bands, Bassie and Ellington defining what was modern and Louis Armstrong was left for white folks. Then, with the birth of ‘cool’ in 1948 and Charlie Parker and the bebop revolution made Bassie and Ellington old fashioned and irrelevant.

And on through the decades with soul, funk, hip hop, modern r&b. Always and forever it seems the black music makers of the USA are never interested in looking back, only in looking forward to what is next. For them there never was a golden age. Or if there is one it is always yet to come.

You would never have got young black musicians in the 1950s wanting to form trad jazz bands like the young white musicians in 1950s’ Britain were doing. They would have all been too busy discovering what noises you could get out of the electric guitar or exploring the furthest reaches of bebop. We got Aker Bilk and Kenny Ball, they got Miles Davis and Sun Ra.

Once the electric guitar was invented how many black musicians would have bothered with the acoustic guitar? As for the banjo, I bet a black American musician hasn’t touched one since 1929. Every time since 1970 I have seen black American musicians play they have always used the latest equipment. None of that searching out pre-CBS Fender Stratocasters when you can be playing the latest Japanese import guitars. Each genre of black music that evolves completely eclipses and makes redundant what has gone before. The only black men that sing the blues today are very old and the only people who pay to watch them are white.

The only creators of black music to take an interest in the past music are hip hop DJs, on the lookout for breaks, beats and samples to use in the music they are making now. And they would be totally insulted if anyone thought that the music they were making was trying in any way to mimic or honour or revive music from past decades.

White music makers look to the past or to black music to give integrity to what they do. Black music-makers only ever look to the future for integrity and no black musician has ever looked to white-made music for any sort of inspiration.

Why? Maybe it’s a slavery thing. The black man has very little he wants to look back at. The best is always yet to come. But that is another whole thing and I would be way out of my depth to comment on it. The only black man you would see with an afro in this day and age (2006) I would wager hangs out with a lot of white liberals. It is impossible for a black man to be postmodern. He just keeps being more modern than those that thought themselves modern yesterday.

Look, I know there is a lot of bollocks in what I am spouting but in the early hours of 5 June 1981 as I lurched along the sidewalks of New York between the Paradise Garage and the Gramercy Park Hotel it all made sense.

On arriving back at the hotel a couple of members of The Clash were turning up with their entourage. I wanted to beat the shit out of them for being such fakers. Of course I didn’t. I went to bed and had a wank instead. It was Chaka Khan’s cleavage that did it for me.

The next morning I remembered I was still the manager of Echo And The Bunnymen and whatever theories I may have about music had to be kept in check while I got on with the job in hand.

Back in Britain I got the sense that what I was feeling was a bit of a zeitgeist thing, that I was not the only person with these thoughts about the redundancy of the rock band. More and more music-makers seemed to be rising up across the country, getting signed to record labels, having hits. Just Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode, Tainted Love by Soft Cell, not a guitar or sweaty drummer in sight. But it was the makers of 1978’s Being Boiled that delivered what I believe was the defining moment of the revolution that was beginning to happen all around – Don’t You Want Me Baby by The Human League and every other song on their album, Dare, for me was the clarion call that was needed.

Dare by The Human League was future-looking in every way. It didn’t borrow from black American culture or the past, it was totally confident in what it was about. It was a celebration of now. And it was incredibly successful around the world. It was everything I thought modern music should be.

Of course The Human League, or any of the others, couldn’t keep it up. 1981 was a false dawn. Rock ‘n’ roll did not die the death I wanted it to die, and on a personal level, my own love for rock ‘n’ roll would still flare up from time to time like some recurring medical disorder.