“Well, for a start, they’re oh-ohs, not whoa-whoas,” Pete Shelley once said. Touring the US, he’d hear the audience botch the singalong parts. A few times he’d cut short a number to let them know. “It’s not whoa-whoa. I’m not rounding up cattle or trying to stop my horse.”
“This is oh-oh. As in, it hurts.”
By “Love You More,” the fourth Buzzcocks single, “we’d mastered the oh-ohs,” Steve Diggle wrote in his memoir. “On nearly all of those early hits there’s an oh-oh in there somewhere. It’s not a Buzzcocks record without an oh-oh.” The bitter, longing oh-ohhhh-ohhhs of “What Do I Get?” The expectant OH-OH-ohhhs of “Love You More”; their spent-out successors in “Promises”: OH-oh-OH!!-oh-OH. The yodeling desperation of get on our OH-oh-OH-oh-OH-oh-OH-oh-OH-oh-OHn.
The phonemics of Buzzcocks tracks: glottals, burrs, whines. Guitar lines as electrified chatter. The nasal aggression in the peak bass notes on “Why Can’t I Touch It”: dun-nun-nun-nun! On “Love Is Lies,” the bridge dissolves into ah-wha-wha-wha-wha-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bum-bum-bum-bum. The descending hook of “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” is a bell chime on strings: ding–ding–ding–ding. “Fiction Romance” began with Shelley fixating on a one-note dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, to which Diggle retorted with two higher notes: dun! dun!
Even vocals were percussive. On “Boredom,” Howard Devoto chops the song’s title into a drum fill: b’dum b’dum.
The Stairs That Go Nowhere
Buzzcocks at the Electric Circus, Manchester, late 1976: what early punk audiences actually looked like (Manchester Digital Music Archive)
Between January 1977 and September 1979, Buzzcocks released an EP, nine singles, most of which charted in the UK, and three albums (a fourth collected the singles).
These were records of frustration, discordant sex, inertia, loneliness, contrition, self-doubt, anger, delusive sex, noise, the comfort of insecurity, the inability of reality to validate even the cheapest of dreams, the ever-broken promise of tomorrow, and the cut-rate past of mementos and regret (lipstick traces, breakup letters).
Pete Shelley sang most of them. He sang, archly and tenderly, with a smirk or a deadpan stare, a set of queer Cubist romances in which the birth and death of a relationship happen simultaneously. “I write in the first person and keep it general by not giving too much detail,” he said. “So that the listener can imagine themselves into the situation. It’s not about me: it’s about the listener.”
In Buzzcocks songs, progress is an illusion (so is love, and life for that matter). On “ESP” the main guitar riff never alters—the same notes, played at the same tempo—while the chords move in a loop beneath it. At the close of the second side of Another Music in a Different Kitchen, “as the [guitar] notes get higher, the notes from the bass come in as well, an octave below, so it’s two scales overlapping,” Shelley said. “It sounds like it’s getting higher and higher but it never actually gets any higher because by the time it’s doing the high thing, that’s fading out and the low [notes] come in, so your ear follows that.”
“It’s an auditory illusion, like an M.C. Escher print, where you follow the stairs that never take you anywhere.”
Buzzcocks I (Maher, Diggle, Devoto, Shelley); Manchester, 1976 (Phil Mason)
These songs are greatly the product of Buzzcocks II (1977-1981), the group who got played on the radio and did TV appearances: “Buzzcocks” of common memory. Some consider this second edition of the group to be an afterword.
For them, the only group that matters is Buzzcocks I (1976-Jan. 1977), the Howard Devoto Buzzcocks, which existed for roughly seven months, played fewer than a dozen shows, and made a single EP, which the group financed and released themselves, upon which Devoto, their lead singer and co-composer, quit.
Idea, execution, oblivion in under a year—the punk aesthetic perfected.
These partisans include most of Wire. As Graham Lewis told Paul Lester: “Buzzcocks were probably the band that we felt in England we had most in common with…Colin always used to say it was the best thing that ever happened to Wire, Howard [Devoto] leaving Buzzcocks, because after he left they just became a sort of pop band. [Devoto] was smart, intelligent, but not pretentious; or at least, it was pretentious in a good way. It was trying to advance good ideas.”
To Colin Newman, Buzzcocks’ first edition was “way ahead of anything else. It was stark and minimalist, very hard to understand or decode.” But “when Devoto left the Buzzcocks, I thought, ‘We’ve got the field to ourselves.’ The Pistols were just a rock band, in the end. By 1977, it was time to go on to the next thing.”
Reformations
This is…not nostalgia. This is not even off the cuff, but up our sleeve.
Howard Devoto, introducing “I Can’t Control Myself,” 1978
Three times since he left Buzzcocks, Devoto has joined them on stage. On 21 July 1978, in a performance filmed at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall for a Granada TV documentary, Buzzcocks and Devoto did “I Can’t Control Myself,” a Troggs song they had played from their earliest days together. A subsequent, and final, reunion came in May 2012 at the Manchester Apollo and Brixton Academy, where the original Buzzcocks played every song they had released, along with “I Can’t Control Myself.”
Each time, the band reset to its original positions—Devoto as frontman, Shelley on guitar and backing vocal, Diggle on bass, John Maher on drums. It was as if the group had been pickled in limbo until Devoto’s next return. With Shelley reduced to accompanist and Diggle and Maher to backline, Devoto was again the band’s charismatic, their ranter dramatist. Yet his Buzzcocks, recalled into being, had no future. They were held to a small circle of time, only existing in the songs of 1976.
For the Manchester reunion in 2012, Diggle sat on the drum riser, played bass like a guitarist, and appeared fairly drunk. “Come see the real band next time!” he reportedly yelled at the crowd at the end of the night.
Trafford and McNeish
The amazing thing about Peter and Howard was that they both had an urgent sense of purpose.
Steve Diggle
Sometime around November 1975, Howard Trafford, a student at the Bolton Institute of Technology, pinned a card to a cork-board in a recreation lounge “to see what would happen,” he later said. His notice read something like “Wanted—People to form a group to do a version of ‘Sister Ray’.”
Another student, Peter McNeish, replied. He’d met Trafford some months before when, while visiting friends, he’d heard strange music coming from a neighbor’s apartment. Curious, McNeish knocked and Trafford answered (he was playing a King Crimson record). They became acquaintances. Trafford was looking for electronic music to use in a video project, and McNeish had recorded some (a few pieces were released in 1980 as Sky Yen), but nothing came of it.
Connecting again, the two rehearsed at Trafford’s flat on Lower Broughton Road in Salford. This was, as described by Diggle, a typical arty student flat of the period: “sanded floors and tables, the smell of recently-boiled brown rice, and that day’s Guardian.” Shelves of paperbacks, with copies of Playboy and Penthouse filed between William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard novels. A pet monitor lizard kept in a fish tank.
Occasionally recruiting a bassist (almost never drummers, who “were like gold dust”), Trafford and McNeish ran through Troggs, Stooges, Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart and Eno songs, and worked up a few of their own pieces. In Manchester of the mid-Seventies there was nowhere for fledgling or experimental groups to play live: all you could do was make noise in your room.
“We had no name for the band. We didn’t know what we were doing. There was nothing to aim for,” Trafford later said. “Nobody was interested in being, or at least pretending convincingly to be, a bit dangerous.”
Trafford ca. 1974
Trafford, born in 1952, had gone to Leeds Grammar School. There, with his friend Richard Boon, he’d been in a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band-esque group called the Ernest Band (named after the headmaster). He played piano and sang, “sort of folky mumblings” as Boon recalled. Trafford was also half of a folk duo, after “seeing David Bowie with an acoustic guitar made me aware there was something left in the instrument.” By autumn 1972 he was at Bolton Institute, studying psychology and humanities and occasionally delving into the student art scene.
“Such a shitty period in my life,” he remembered. “The pre-Pistols sterility period.” He pared down his record collection and at times could only abide the Stooges, as “they were the only records that made sense to me. I found it so glorious to wallow in the hyper-negativity of that music. All the fatigue and boredom of the Stooges really made a profound mark on my consciousness. Then suddenly one day all it just clicked…[I thought] ‘I’m sure I could find a guitarist to play like that, and I’d sing.’ Soon afterwards, I met Peter.”
McNeish was born in 1955, a child of Pop. The Beatles were his first love (“you knew who everyone was: they had their own cartoon personalities”). By his mid-teens he was a T. Rex fan and kept a ring binder of articles clipped from the NME and Melody Maker. “I had the front page of Melody Maker on my bedroom wall, the one where Bowie was saying he was bisexual, and my father disapproved, so that was great. It was perfect, packaged rebellion.”
In 1973, at Leigh Grammar School, McNeish formed Jets of Air (a phrase he’d heard in a physics course) with some classmates, including Garth Davies. The repertoire was greatly Bowie, Roxy Music and the VU, but McNeish was also writing songs, some of which would become Buzzcocks tracks as well as the core of his early Eighties solo years (“Homosapien” and “Telephone Operator” hail from this era).
“My practical application of philosophy,” as he described his early bands to the Daily Express in 1978. “I liked writing songs and making music and thought it would be the key to opportunities.”
On Thursday, 19 February 1976, Trafford and McNeish were leafing through the latest NME, a weekly ritual of theirs. A review caught Trafford’s eye: a short piece on a new act called the Sex Pistols. The reviewer, Neil Spencer, noted that the group, “spiky teenage misfits from the wrong end of various London roads,” had a Stooges number in their set at the Marquee and quoted a band member as saying “we’re not into music, we’re into chaos.”
Intrigued (someone else was doing Stooges songs?), they borrowed a car and went to London on the weekend to see the band. Once in town, they bought a copy of Time Out to see where the Pistols were playing. They found no notices but did read a review of Rock Follies, which mentioned a catchphrase from the show: “it’s the buzz, cock.”
Most likely the issue that gave Buzzcocks their name
They phoned the NME, who told them to ask around at the Sex boutique on King’s Road, Sex Pistols’ headquarters. Malcolm McLaren was behind the counter. They were in luck: the group had two shows that weekend. Upon learning they were university boys with ties to a student union, McLaren was effusive when they proposed arranging a date in Manchester for the Pistols. He’d wanted to expand the band’s territory. If they could pull it off, he said, McNeish and Trafford’s (non-existent) group could open.
On Friday night, at the Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education in High Wycombe, and the following night, at Mid-Herts College of Further Education in Welwyn Garden City, McNeish and Trafford saw the Sex Pistols. It thundered them. The Pistols were “a blueprint for what we were trying to do,” Trafford said. “A living, breathing example of it.” He’d never seen a singer like Johnny Rotten, who abandoned the stage to “be sick in the toilets,” who blew his nose during a guitar break, who made “no attempt to Americanize what he was doing….There was a lot of aggression, there wasn’t anything like a slow song, and no love songs.” He taped a few songs so he and McNeish could “study them in depth and suss them out.”
After London, a multiple christening. A band name, from Rock Follies: Buzzcocks (never given a definite article). Peter McNeish became Pete Shelley, honoring the poet and Pete’s name had he been born a girl. Howard Trafford became Howard Devoto, whose surname he took from, depending on the recollection, a Cambridge bus driver (as recounted by a lecturer in a philosophy class) or his landlord’s friend.
Buzzcocks at the Ranch, 12 August 1976 (Manchester Music Archive)
On April Fools’ Day 1976, a first-draft Buzzcocks (Devoto, Shelley, Garth Davies, who wore a tuxedo to the gig, and the drummer Mick Singleton, on loan from another band) played a Bolton Institute student show. It was a shambling performance that opened with “an incredibly slow” version of “Diamond Dogs.” After a few more songs, including “I Can’t Control Myself,” the concert organizers pulled the plug. Davies soon bailed. He thought the songs Shelley did in Jets of Air were better than those he and Devoto were now writing. Hearing a new piece, “Oh Shit!,” Davies thought “this is not the kind of song that’s going to entertain the masses.”
Buzzcocks as the joint-stock dream of Shelley and Devoto, at a time when the two were as close they would ever be. They wore “punk” clothes (mostly distressed charity shop outfits), dyed their hair various shades of blonde, and now lived near each other in Salford—Shelley had a windowless basement room down the street from Devoto.
Their friendship was one of circumstance, in the way two high school loners will pair up out of necessity, if only to be mirrors to each other.
They were better suited as contrasts, as a choice of personalities, as captured in how they were filmed for the 1978 Granada documentary B’dum B’dum. Shelley is interviewed in a Woolworths cafeteria, barely audible over spoonclacks and mumbles; he looks bleary and mildly amused, as if he’s been singled out at random and is airing his thoughts as they come. Devoto is interviewed sitting in a luxury box at the National Theatre. Clad in scarlet, he looks like a Pierrot, or a tightrope walker after hours. He parries questions, regards the camera as a conspirator.
They had seen the Sex Pistols: how to put it to use? “We were working within what we perceived as the punk template,” Devoto said. But “at the beginning of punk rock there was no set lyrical style. There wasn’t that much of an idiom.” For songs, “the words were going to be tough,” he realized. “If you were going to say anything you had to say it in an angry thrusting way.” No slow songs, no love songs. A breakthrough came when he and Shelley thought: why not write about being bored? “It felt like a theme.”
“Boredom” is the Stooges drained of sexuality (“who are you tryna arouse???” Devoto squawks. “Get your hand out of my trousers!!“) and macho aggression. It’s being bored as the curse of being alive, when you’re given a lead part in the world’s dullest movie. Devoto takes a perverse delight in being empty; he feasts on inertia. There’s nothing that’s uh-be-hind me! I’m already a has-been! Shelley plays a two-note police siren of a guitar solo.
“It had the stop in it,” Devoto told Sound on Sound in 2015. “Up to that point, in my mind, punk songs, they started and they ended. That was my contribution, which was to have this dynamic stop.”
Songwriting for Devoto and Shelley meant illuminating each other’s sketches more than doing full collaborations, though they both seized control of Diggle’s “Fast Cars” to write the lyric. Shelley had the opening “for kicks/ habit that sticks” line and the chords for “Orgasm Addict”; Devoto piled in the epic masturbatory details. “Boredom” was a Shelley chorus that Devoto built a frame around, while Shelley wrote the music for Devoto’s “Love Battery.” “I think Howard must have been very frustrated sexually,” Shelley once said. “All his songs are either about people pissing him off or about him being fit to explode.”
They still lacked a rhythm section, so at the first Pistols show in Manchester, on 4 June 1976, Shelley sold tickets and Devoto worked the lights. They’d boosted the concert like characters “in those teen movies of the Fifties,” Devoto said—printing flyers, running newspaper ads, booking the “Lesser” theater above the Free Trade Hall. They hired the room for £32, sold 42 tickets.
Everyone in the room, who allegedly included Steven Morrissey, Mark E. Smith, Mick Hucknall, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner and Tony Wilson, was watching each other as much as the Pistols. Many became “nodding acquaintances.” “It was the gig that condensed the Manchester scene,” Shelley said.
Malcolm McLaren stood outside the Free Trade Hall like a carnival barker, hustling in a few more faces for the audience. He saw a young man circling around, who told McLaren he was meeting with someone he’d spoken with on the phone about starting a band. Recalling that Devoto said he had a prospect to play bass, McLaren assumed this was the candidate. He brought him inside and introduced him to Shelley at the ticket desk: “Here’s your new bassist.” And Pete Shelley met Steve Diggle.
It was a case of mistaken identity. Diggle should have met another musician (one, it turned out, who envisioned doing comedy sketches between numbers) and Devoto had been expecting someone else. But Diggle sat in the back of the hall with Shelley, watched the Sex Pistols, and agreed to meet at Devoto’s flat. He owned a bass, and was willing to play it. As a guitarist friend once told me, “it’s only got four strings, after all.”
Rumble and Flutter
Buzzcocks outside their St Boniface rehearsal room, August 1976 (Manchester Digital Music Archive)
Steve Diggle, born in 1955, called his generational subset “the chosen kids of the atomic age….We’d never known a world where rock ‘n’ roll didn’t exist. It was all ours to inherit.”
He left school at fifteen, in 1970, the same year that “the bastards razed the Manchester of my youth…streets knocked down, people forcibly relocated to council estates in Hulme.” The Diggles had to move from East Manchester to an estate in Moston, “a lawless shithole chock-a-block with unemployed alkies, manic depressives and heroin addicts.” He escaped by listening to records in his room and became a later-edition Mod, owning a Lambretta scooter. He got a guitar, learned to pick out tunes by ear along a single string.
A friend’s death in a car accident shook him up. He felt the need to commit to something, as life could be revoked on a whim. On the dole, Diggle began reading in earnest, giving himself the education which school hadn’t cared to, and devoted more time to guitar. He didn’t want to be a “good” guitarist, he said, only wanted to learn “how it worked and how to use it—to me, it was just a piece of wood with strings that made noise.” And he started writing songs. By 1974, he had some of “Fast Cars” and “Autonomy,” the riff of “Promises.”
Diggle saw Yes at the Manchester Palace in April 1975. When keyboardist Patrick Moraz played a solo on Alpine horn, Diggle snapped. “Fucking hell! Something’s got to change,” he recalled thinking. There were no Manchester bands, only bands that came to Manchester (and played the Alpine horn).
A year later, by sheer chance, he found Shelley and Devoto. Now he was in Salford, having had to make two bus connections while lugging a bass guitar in a “black bin liner,” and learning to play “Breakdown” with the mike and guitars all plugged into the same amp.
Second night of the 100 Club Punk Festival, September 1976
John Maher, age sixteen, had been playing drums for about six weeks when he joined Buzzcocks.
He’d started on guitar, but upon seeing so many “drummer wanted” notices in the music papers, he figured drumming had greater prospects. Getting a kit, he pounded along to records in his parents’ front room in Old Trafford until the neighbors revolted. He wanted to join a band greatly because it meant access to a rehearsal space.
Maher saw a Melody Maker ad calling for “novice musicians” in Manchester and replied, as did Devoto. The woman who placed the ad became a go-between. Unable to meet with either of them, she passed on Maher’s contact information to Devoto.
With the second Sex Pistols date at the Lesser Free Trade Hall approaching (the still-theoretical Buzzcocks had an opening slot), Devoto was so desperate that he recruited Maher on sight. The latter was about to bike off for his chemistry O level when Devoto rang his doorbell, asked him to join his group, gave him his address, and then “jumped over the garden gate and ran down the street at high speed. I remember thinking that was a bit odd,” Maher said.
At the next rehearsal, Diggle was taken aback to see what looked like a tall child, wearing a Laurel and Hardy t-shirt, sitting behind a drum kit. In his memoir, he recalled thinking Christ, Howard, is this best we can do? “Then he started playing along with us. It was effortless. He had a very simple kit set-up but he could make less sound more.”
Barry Adamson, who played with Buzzcocks in 1977, said of Maher that “his playing is unlike that of anyone I’ve ever played with in my life—it’s a blur of sticks, but at the same time it’s a technical feat, because it’s beyond what you should be able to do at that speed. It’s staggering.”
Maher treated his snare like a ride or crash cymbal; he’d do a tom fill whenever he found a fraction of empty space. Another drummer might have given listeners something to steady them during the vocal and guitar assaults. Instead Maher, often positioned just ahead of the beat, became another source of urgency. Yet he was never sloppy, with one of the best kick drums in UK punk.
All that remained was to get his parents’ approval. Devoto went back to Old Trafford to reassure the Mahers that, although their teenage son was joining a group called Buzzcocks, it wouldn’t involve him in anything disreputable.
Second Night
When the Sex Pistols returned to Manchester, on 20 July 1976, Buzzcocks, at last, existed. They played for about fifteen minutes: “Breakdown,” “Oh Shit!,” “Time’s Up,” “I Can’t Control Myself,” Captain Beefheart’s “I Love You, You Big Dummy” (Devoto’s concession to romance.)
“All that anger and frustration I’d built up for 21 years,” Diggle said. “All those years of waiting, of being on the dole, the few terrible jobs I’d had, getting belted by teachers, leaving school under a black cloud…my entire life flashing before my eyes in this intense rush of noise and movement. Stood on that stage, I finally knew who I was and what I was.”
The performance ended with Devoto and Shelley wrestling with his guitar, Maher leaping over his drum kit and running into the street, and Diggle making a beeline to the bar, where he downed a pint in seconds. Devoto had cut his hand while yanking on guitar strings. He stood offstage with his fingers bleeding, looking down a stairwell, “feeling completely blank.”
The Pistols entourage included some London music journalists, who wrote up the show as the birth of Manchester punk rock. Sounds‘ Jonh Ingham, in what’s likely the first notice Buzzcocks got in the press, chronicled their stage debut:
Howard, wearing sneakers, pencil thin Levis, t-shirt and baggy blue jacket, is singing love songs, the strangest love songs you’ve ever heard..It’s the Boston Strangler singing the dance of romance, his face getting redder, eyes popping, kicking and punching the air. At first they are rhythmic to the point of rigidity, Shelley—who is wearing tight salmon pink Levis, sleeveless “Buzzcocks” t-shirt, shades and short hair—not even bothering with the concept of a middle-eight, let alone a solo…. The climax came with a wild feedback solo, Shelley throwing his axe at the amp. When he went on a little too long, Devoto came out of the wings and pulled the guitar from him. He pulled it back. Devoto grabbed all six strings and yanked ripping them asunder. Shelley propped the now screaming guitar against the speaker and left via the audience. Thus finished the set. Apart from gigs, the only thing the Buzzcocks need is a hell of a lot more volume.
Buzzcocks on the road, autumn 1976 (Linder Sterling)
They had been so long in gestation that, upon finally getting on stage, there was a question as to what to do next. Everything felt provisional. In the summer of 1976, punk still only existed in newspapers, rumors, in a few small venues scattered throughout England.
As a favor for their rehearsal space’s owner, Buzzcocks played St. Boniface’s Church Youth Club, altering “Oh Shit!” to “Oh Spit!,” debuting “Fast Cars” to an audience mostly of children, who danced and slid around the floor in their socks. In August, they played Manchester’s The Ranch, a small room adjacent to a drag theater, and were so loud they were banned. At the Commercial Hotel in Stalybridge, they were booed off stage, allegedly because some in the crowd took offense at Devoto’s green fluorescent socks and red slippers.
In London, Buzzcocks were punk’s Northern representatives, the odd provincials, playing with the Pistols and The Clash at Screen on the Green in Islington (“rougher than a bear’s ass,” was Sounds‘ verdict this time) and at the legendary Punk Special at the 100 Club, though playing on the non-legendary second night of the festival, the night after the Pistols, The Clash and the debuts of Subway Sect and Siouxsie & the Banshees.
They would never fit in the increasingly fashionable London punk scene. In Pete Frame’s family tree of punk, done for Sounds in 1978, Frame traced the roots of the Pistols and Clash, the Damned and Adverts and Siouxsie and The Slits. Buzzcocks are nowhere to be seen, not even in the margins.
“We weren’t cool in any shape or form,” Diggle wrote in his memoir. “John was a gangly schoolboy, little Pete in his pink jeans and half his guitar missing, me still wearing waistcoats thinking I’m a Mod, and Howard up front convinced he’s in Waiting for Godot.” Morrissey once described early Buzzcocks as looking like “60s schoolteachers…it seemed like this punk thing might save [Devoto] from being a science lecturer.” (See Linder Sterling’s photograph above, which could have been taken in 1964.)
They now played a ten- or eleven-song sprint, as captured in the demos they cut in October 1976 (Devoto thought the band needed to keep quiet between numbers because the tape was still rolling; the engineer humored him, Shelley said) and in an audience tape of a performance at Band on the Wall in Manchester, on 8 November 1976.
They got mixed notices (Sounds, continuing to sour on them, called Buzzcocks “a second-rate, provincial Pistols copy. The lead singer was only honestly interested in performing his eyebrow massage tableau. They’re the facade of the new wave with none of its substance”) and as the year ended, they stayed closer to home, playing a few shows at Manchester’s Electric Circus, a former heavy-metal venue.
On 9 December 1976, Buzzcocks supported the Sex Pistols again, as part of the ill-fated Anarchy tour (the Electric Circus was one of few venues that didn’t cancel on the band after the post-Bill Grundy tabloid controversy). Some in the audience thought Devoto seemed distracted, tetchy, bothered, even beyond typical punk frontman attitudes. “He hates being on stage,” Caroline Coon wrote of him. It would be his last show as a member of the band.
Product Rollout
No label would come to Manchester and sign a group. So Buzzcocks would make a record themselves.
“It was a madcap thing to do,” Shelley said. “In those days no one did it. Record companies made records, not bands. But we found out you could get factories that made the records to make your record as well. We just wanted to make a record to show our friends.”
Student entrepreneurs at heart, they ran the numbers. It was roughly £600 to book a studio, mix a single, press a thousand copies. Sell copies at £1 a piece. If you move half of them, you’ve nearly covered the costs. If you manage to sell all of them, you’ve made enough to buy new gear.
Shelley’s father put up half of the money; Richard Boon’s friends chipped in the rest. “The future was very uncertain. We just thought: we need to document this—let’s make a record,” Boon said. “There wasn’t a company, there was just an intervention in popular culture.” Their label would be called New Hormones, a Devoto suggestion; the EP’s catalog number was ORG-1, a reference to Wilhelm Reich’s “orgones.”
They found a sixteen-track studio on Gartside Street, Indigo Sound, and an eccentric producer, Martin Hannett, who Diggle recalled “playing around with the mixing desk like it was a fucking abacus.”
Selections were democratic: each member of the quartet chose one song to record. “Boredom,” “Time’s Up,” and “Breakdown,” highlights of their live set, were easy picks. “Friends of Mine,” where Devoto has to winch his overstuffed verses into a breakneck melody, got the nod over “Orgasm Addict,” “You Tear Me Up,” “Oh Shit!” and “Love Battery.”
The EP’s back cover listed recording details (Buzzcocks prided themselves on accountability; they once gave a list of tour expenses to their fanzine). All but one track had needed a single take, and that was only because “Breakdown,” the first track cut, was used to set the levels and be sure everyone was miked properly.
The only overdubs were Shelley’s guitar breaks. On the demos and on stage, Shelley had to solo while trying to keep the rhythm pattern going, so the group figured “if he could just dub on the guitar solos, that would probably be an improvement,” Devoto said. Shelley’s cousin recalled Shelley’s father fretting in the studio, as “Pete kept cocking up the guitar solo in “Boredom”—I mean, how could you cock it up? It’s just two notes! Time was ticking and Uncle Johnny was going mad because he was worried about the money.”
The band was positioned across the studio’s two rooms, with Devoto and Shelley singing over buzz guitar, subway-rumble bass (Diggle’s amp had to be moved to a corridor), and maniacal drums. Because of budget constraints, they had only rented the two-inch tape. Not long after the EP’s release, an engineer erased Spiral Scratch, likely taping over it a performance by the comedians Syd Little and Eddie Large, who were Indigo regulars.
Marc Bolan endorses local band (Kevin Cummins; taken in Manchester, 23 August 1977, weeks before Bolan’s death)
A few days into 1977, Buzzcocks met up in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester and stood against Robert Peel’s statue. Boon took a Polaroid of them, askew and crammed together. That was the cover. The sleeves were printed in Manchester, the discs pressed in London. The band assembled all thousand copies of Spiral Scratch in Devoto’s living room: folding, gluing, sorting. “It was like working in a biscuit factory,” Diggle said.
Released at the end of January, to raves in the music press, Spiral Scratch‘s first pressing was gone in a month; by September 1977, about 15,000 copies were in circulation. In the US, imports were selling for $100. Reissued in 1979, the EP charted higher than the then-new Buzzcocks album, A Different Kind of Tension.
Spiral Scratch—its sharp, needling thinness, owed to Shelley’s cheap red Starway guitar, with its broken-off headpiece and “dirty sound”; its sense of propulsion, like a rickety car being driven to its death on a highway—was something new. The punk singles issued to date, “Anarchy in the UK” and “New Rose” and, at a stretch, The Vibrators’ “We Vibrate” and The Saints’ “(I’m) Stranded,” had been heavy, thick, packing a wallop. Spiral Scratch skitters and rattles. Devoto whips through songs, his phrasings a run of snarls and delighted mockeries. On “Time’s Up,” Shelley sounds like a parrot bent on antagonizing Devoto (“cash up! stick up!”) while Maher brutalizes his crash cymbal.
Compare the Scratch tracks to their demos and the latter sound lethargic. It’s as though Buzzcocks that afternoon at Indigo had vowed to play as fast as they could, as if they had to cram all four tracks onto a single side, going so hard they’re on the verge of shattering, yet somehow they come through.
“The punk record,” Jon Savage called Spiral Scratch. “More modern sounding than ‘Anarchy’—the idea of doing first takes and one-overdub simplicity…the complete integrated package.”
Scratch (/)
A few days before, or a few days after, Spiral Scratch was released (no one agrees on the precise date), Howard Devoto quit.
“I’ve achieved everything I want to do,” he said at a band rehearsal. “I’ve made a record. So I’m leaving.” In a press statement, released on 21 February 1977, Devoto said, “I don’t like music. I don’t like movements. I am not confident of Buzzcocks’s intention to get out of the dry land of new waveness to a place from which these things could be said. What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat.”
Over the years Devoto expanded upon why he left, and never once regretted it. He felt that punk, as it grew in notoriety, had become another media fad, one increasingly populated by violent thugs who’d spit at you and throw things at you. That punk had become a prescribed set of actions and dress, no different from Teds or hippies, quite possibly worse.
“I was getting fed up with the music,” Devoto said in 1979. As early as the 100 Club show, he was telling reporters he was only “temporarily” in the band. There was nowhere he could move, he said. Buzzcocks had sounded like no one else. Now “there were loads of bands suddenly doing the same thing.” He got bored easily, and considered his boredom “a catalyst for me to suddenly conceive and execute a new vocation. Negative drive was always what I thought the punk ethic was about.”
So he’d strike against rock ‘n’ roll careerism. What more was left to do? Get signed by a major, hire a publicist, make a “proper” album, work the charts? Buzzcocks, an improbable group, had flashed into life and made a perfect statement on disc that no one, manager nor producer nor label, had interfered with. Their legacy would be that they stopped. Devoto would go back to school, finish his degree, get on with his life.
Devoto “said he didn’t think he could commit himself to something in the long term because he changed all the time,” Shelley told Sounds in autumn 1977. “When he started the group he just wanted to know what it was like being a rock star and once he’d found out there was nothing in it for him anymore.”
When Devoto said he was leaving, Shelley was silent for a moment, then said he’d keep the band going. Diggle backed him, as did Maher. Buzzcocks became a sequel.
Devoto was a restraining bolt on his partner. There were the songs Shelley had written years before, waiting to be heard. Now he could sing them, could arrange them how he wanted. Add hooks, add two-guitar harmonies, do the oh-ohs, use Krautrock beats. The future swung open. For purists, Devoto leaving was the end. For Shelley, Devoto leaving ended a prologue.
The Boyle family, in Mark Boyle’s Journey to the Surface of the Earth (1978)
Scottish artist, 1934-2005.
Mark Boyle was a guest lecturer at Watford College of Art during Colin Newman‘s time there in the mid-Seventies. Boyle was something of a hippie-era art celebrity, having helped invent “psychedelic” light shows in Britain with his partner, Joan Hills. Their productions at the UFO nightclub in the mid-Sixties were the lysergic backdrop to performances by Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. Boyle and Hills became friends with the latter band, touring the US with them and Jimi Hendrix in 1968.
Boyle was from Glasgow; in 1957, when he met Hills, he was mostly a poet. She urged him to start painting and they worked on canvases together—a fully collaborative unit whose works, until the Seventies, were sold, cataloged, and displayed under the singular name of Mark Boyle, as the British avant-garde found the concept of a woman artist off-putting (the Boyles later said they had “tak[en] the view that if the art world wanted to believe in obsessed, lone male artists starving in their studios, they could present their work in a way that would fit.”) They were known as the Boyle Family once Hills and Boyle were joined by their two children, Georgia and Sebastian.
He once said of his and Hills’ work that it “was to do with not being exclusive. We’re not going to exclude anything from what we make, whatever form it takes. There is no experience, no sensation, no aspect of reality we would eliminate.” They crafted pieces made from found objects, such as a mess of paint tins, lids, and brushes that had gotten stuck to a piece of hardboard, and devoted much of their post-Sixties ventures to “random earth” assemblages: replicas of patches of ground they had come across.
In their London Series, Boyle and Hills tacked up a map of London, threw darts at it, and made an earthwork of each location that a dart struck. This broadened into the World Series—a world map, more darts. “Wherever the darts fell, that area—whether land or sea, motorway or piece of scrubland—was to be the subject of a work,” Andrew Wilson wrote in his obituary for Boyle. At the time of his death in 2005, “Boyle had still not found a means of replicating water.” Hills died last year.
BOYS, THE.
UK rock band, 1976-1982, 1999-present.
Wire opened for The Boys at The Roxy in March 1977, when The Boys were among the more commercially promising of the “punk” acts on the London club circuit. They had just signed an album deal with NEMS, the descendant of Brian Epstein’s old label (revived for reissues of Black Sabbath albums, NEMS put a few chips on punk, signing The Boys and, later, The Damned and the UK Subs, with no luck).
The Boys formed in late 1975 when singer and guitarist Matt Dangerfield left London SS (Mick Jones’ early band; sadly not the last “ironic” Nazi name of the era) joined up with keyboardist Casino Steel, and, a bit later, Dangerfield’s art college friend Honest John Plain. With such top-grade rock ‘n’ roll names, all that remained was to get a rhythm section: Kid Reid and Jack Black, whose names were as sufficient as their playing. The Boys debuted at the Hope and Anchor in October 1976, at a time when any punk-related show was a gathering of forces: Jones, Billy Idol, Joe Strummer, and Tony James were among those in the crowd.
They hung their songs on teenage strife and bubblegum hooks—The New York Dolls and The Ramones, rather than the Sex Pistols, were their foundation. With Steel’s prominent keyboards and an open taste for rock oldies (on their debut LP, they covered The Beatles’ “I Call Your Name,” rewrote “Wake Up Little Susie” on “Tumble,” while even the anti-rock ‘n’ roll “I Don’t Care” has Chuck Berry guitar breaks), they formed part of punk’s traditionalist wing. Their best tracks are on their debut: “Sick on You” (attraction, vomit), “Kiss Like a Nun” (possibly a good thing; the singer’s conflicted) and “First Time,” a losing-virginity song of exploitative empathy.
Titling their second LP Alternative Chartbusters was a knowing move—The Boys were sentenced to the “power pop” universe of hits that never were, singles that NEMS could do nothing with. The group moved to Safari Records, then broke up early in the Thatcher years.
BRADFORD, UNIVERSITY OF.
Public research university, Bradford, UK. Wire performance at the Communal Building, 25 October 1978, released in 2010 in the Legal Bootleg Series.
The Communal Building, aka “The Commie,” opened in February 1976 at the University of Bradford in West Yorkshire. A campus newsletter of the period noted “the social facilities available [that] are not only extensive but come at a time when we are faced with a period of austerity.” (Not for the last time.) There was a student disco, a social bar (of which the newsletter said “the main feature…is the ventilation pipes in the far corner”), a “quiet bar” (good for parent/spouse visits; see above photo), and rooms for hobbies and indoor sports.
As University of Bradford librarian Alison Cullingford wrote of the Commie, “it unfortunately illustrated the worst features of 1970s building design [see period photo, very Soviet]. In dingy concrete, flat-roofed, with multiple confusing entrances and hidden staircases, the building lacked focus, was hard to understand and hard to love.” (At the time Cullingford wrote this in 2010, the Commie was being upgraded into a new facility, Student Central.)
In the fall semester of 1978, the Gang of Four, appropriately, played the Commie, as did Wire, roughly a month later. Bradford was one of two shows in that leg of Wire’s “Chairs Missing” UK tour to have been taped (the other, at the Canterbury Odeon earlier in October, circulates as a fragment). Decades later, the Bradford tape was issued to kick off Wire’s Legal Bootleg Series. (Of these tapes, Colin Newman later said “I just found them really, really difficult to listen to. The voices are all out of tune. They’re classic board recordings where the voice is really loud and the band is really quiet, because a lot of the band sound is coming from the stage.”)
The Bradford soundboard is an invaluable snapshot of Wire, with the band introducing a fair amount of material they would record or demo for 154 in the following months—Bradford has either the first or second extant live performances of “The Other Window” (its frantic first edition; all but unrecognizable from its ominous studio version), “I Should Have Known Better,” “A Mutual Friend,” “Former Airline,” “Stepping Off Too Quick,” “Indirect Enquiries” and “On Returning.”
Of the older songs, “Lowdown” is taken at an amble; “Reuters” is a heavy roll. Chairs Missing songs are dispatched with fire. “Another the Letter” is supersonic; “I Feel Mysterious Today” dances on a tightrope; Graham Lewis sings “Sand in My Joints” as if ripping holes in the song, answering Newman’s similar attack on “Mercy.” Wire at full youthful strength, bolting into the future, fearless.
BRAZIL.
Wire, 1977 (Annette Green)
[Text: Lewis; Song: Newman; Music: Wire.] Master recording: 12 September-ca. 7 October 1977, Advision. First release: 28 November 1977, Pink Flag. Live recordings: 1 & 2 April 1977, The Roxy; 17 February 1978, West Runton Pavilion, Cromer.
Alterations in tempo. “Brazil,” when Wire debuted it on stage at the Roxy in April 1977, had a groove—there’s a weight, a density, in the guitars and bassline: a torpor of sorts. Colin Newman has to strive against it as he sings, while Robert Grey shifts hard into gear for the “left!-right! left!-right!” section.
On its studio take, “Brazil” goes faster, centered on Grey’s drums, the guitars now a snarl overhead in the mix. This lets Newman’s loopy phrasing soar—he sings a few lines as if dotting “i”s in a letter. Atomic age romance shorthand for a verse, nihilistic punk for a refrain/bridge, parade-ground outro: it cuts off in under forty seconds.
Alterations in phrasing. At the Roxy, to close the song, Newman and Graham Lewis yell “SA-LUTE!!” in unison, stepping on the last syllable—it gives “Brazil” an end credit. On Pink Flag, Newman mutters “salute” in the margins, sounding as if he’s pulling away from the mike, already onto the next song.
There was a band that existed called Wire in the latter part of 1976, but that was somebody else’s band. It wasn’t until we kicked that person out of his own band that what you would think of [as] Wire was born.
Colin Newman, 2017.
The sacking of George Gill, the band’s founder and lead guitarist, was the dawn of Wire. Bands need a foundational myth or two, and the blood sacrifice is a vivid one. It says: We were this before, but then we killed one of our own. Now we are who we were meant to be.
Pete Best in The Beatles is a quintessential example. He was in the band from early on and was with them right up to the boiling point. Sitting in Abbey Road with Lennon and McCartney and George Martin, cutting a single for EMI Parlophone. And then he was cast aside, left to spend his life seeing The Beatles on television, their photographs staring at him from newsstands—a demotion to a bystander, to a life as a semi-celebrity. The Beatle Who Wasn’t.
A proper blood sacrifice has specifications. The person should be there at an early, formative stage of the band, sometimes playing an important role (e.g., Best’s mother, Mona, was an early booker of Beatles gigs, and Best was the band’s heartthrob). Their leaving should not be of their own making: their friends have to fire them. And the firing must happen around the time when the band breaks through, to make the wound sting.
The blood sacrifice unsettles. While I imagine there are people who fantasize about being on stage, posing for LP cover photos and so on, I would venture that there are more of us who see ourselves in the faces of the discarded, in the ones who didn’t make the cut, who lost out, whose playing wasn’t fast or inspired enough, whose laugh irritated someone. They are the counterfactual conditional: they would have been, if not for.
Other notable examples:
Ian Stewart. Fired from the Stones for being too homely and because a sextet Stones was too cumbersome a unit, Stewart settled into a role of session musician/road manager/Friend of the Band until his death in 1985. “Stu” was the only reflection the band would allow themselves to see—they wrote and played with him in mind. Would Stu think this one swings enough? Would he roll his eyes, mutter ‘well, that’s a lively one’ and start talking about golf? (He lived long enough to have thoughts on “Too Much Blood” and Jagger’s She’s The Boss.)
Elbridge “Al” Bryant. Founding member of The Temptations (1960-1963). Bryant grew unhappy about the group’s early lack of success on Motown, and was a hard drinker—he struck his fellow Temptation Paul Williams with a beer bottle backstage and, upon another on-stage altercation at the 1963 Motown Christmas party, he got the chop. He was replaced by David Ruffin, and The Temptations got their first hit, “The Way You Do the Things You Do” within months. Bryant died of liver cirrhosis in 1975.
Doug Sandom. Drummer for The Who (1962-1964), fired due to ageism (he was in his early thirties) after the group failed an audition, to be replaced by Keith Moon. Upon Sandom’s death, Pete Townshend wrote: “If you have read my book Who I Am you will know how kind Doug was to me, and how clumsily I dealt with his leaving the band… A bricklayer by trade, Doug was an excellent drummer but was considered by our first record label to be too old for us. It was his age and his wisdom that made him important to me. He never sneered at my aspirations the way some of my peers tended to do (I was a bit of an egoistic handful sometimes). Doug took a while to forgive me, but did so in the end.”
Warwick “Wally” Nightingale. Co-founder and guitarist of the ur-Sex Pistols (“The Strand”) with Steve Jones and Paul Cook; fired in 1974 allegedly for not attending rehearsals, replaced by Glen Matlock. Nightingale doesn’t quite fit the formula (nor does Matlock), but it’s key to the Pistols narrative that their two lead actors, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, came later in the story: a pair of usurpers.
Henry Padovani. Lead guitarist for The Police, January-August 1977. The firing of Padovani, the group’s madcap French guitarist, to be replaced by the pedigreed 35-year-old muso Andy Summers marked the end of The Police’s aspirational “punk” stage: we don’t get a “Tea in the Sahara” with Henry.
Dale Hibbert. Bassist for The Smiths (1982). Fired and replaced by Andy Rourke some months before the group cut “This Charming Man.” Hibbert was more interested in being a sound engineer than in playing bass, and him calling Morrissey “Steve” didn’t help matters. He later told the Lancashire Telegraph: “I have a problem with the perception that my life ended when I was kicked out of The Smiths. Some imagine I have never recovered and will spend my later days sitting in a rocking chair listening to Smiths songs while ruing on what could have been…[but] I opened the first internet café in Manchester. I owned a nightclub. I ‘retired’ at 40 and went to live in Sydney. I have been homeless. I have been penniless. I am not the sum of those six months with The Smiths…I was doing lots of other things at the time. I didn’t really give it much attention which is a shame because if I’d have kept a lot of the stuff—the lyrics, etc.—I could have been eBaying them now and I wouldn’t have to work.”
Annette Zilinskas, bassist for The Bangles (1981-1983). As with Nightingale, she doesn’t quite fit the formula, as Zilinskas left rather than being pushed out. But her replacement by the ultra-cool ex-Runaway Michael Steele, months before the band cut All Over The Place, is a top-tier “baseball trade” move by a rock group.
Jason Everman. Guitarist for Nirvana (1989) and bassist for Soundgarden (1989-1990), fired before the groups cut Nevermind and Badmotorfinger, respectively. The New York Times: “He wasn’t just Pete Best…He was Pete Best twice.” Fated to symbolize the end of the Nineties, Everman joined the US Special Forces and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
BLUR.
UK rock band, 1989-2005, 2009-2015, 2023-present.
Wire had two prominent inheritors in the Britpop era, and we’ll get to Elastica soon enough. In 1991, during its trio “Wir” period (see PART THREE: SEND), Wire opened for Blur at the Kilburn National and got their usual mixed-to-antagonistic audience reaction. “It was pretty difficult stuff and the audience was telling them to go away,” Graham Coxon recalled (seeAUDIENCE).
Backstage, Damon Albarn approached Colin Newman and said “We’re all ’60s now, but we’re going to be ’70s soon—we’re listening to a lot of your stuff.” Sure enough, Blur’s records of the mid-Nineties would be in part shaped by Harvest-era Wire. Blur had Mike Thorne produce some tracks, riffed on the chorus of “I Am the Fly” for “Girls and Boys,” and made a “Song 2” to Wire’s “Song 1.” They resembled a Wire recast for broader public consumption in the millennium, from “pop singer” leader to arty guitarist to no-fuss drummer.
BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, THE.
Novel by Milan Kundera. First published as “Le livre du rire et d’oubli” (France, 1979); English ed. (t. Michael Henry Heim), p. 1980; Czech ed., “Kniha smíchu a zapomnění,” p. Canada, 1981.
Some of Annette Green‘s photographs taken for Wire’s Chairs Missing evoke the opening pages of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which wasn’t published in English translation until two years after the album’s release.
Graham Lewis later picked up on the odd coincidence. “The inner sleeve [photo] was an outtake. It reminds me of the Kundera story about the photographer of the Czech Communist Party,” he told Sean Eden. “All the members of the Politburo are standing on the balcony of the school where Kafka went to as a kid. But once one of them had been thrown out of the party, instead of taking a new photograph all they did was airbrush him out…this guy had kind of disappeared. It’s the same kind of effect in this way. You see people leaving, but they are not posed.”
Karel Hájek, a renowned Czech photographer, had taken shots of the Czech communist leader Klement Gottwald speaking to a crowd in Prague on a winter day in 1948. Next to Gottwald stood his Foreign Minister, the Slovak Vladimír Clementis. Within a year, Gottwald began dispatching opponents and rivals, and in 1950 Clementis was forced to resign. He was arrested and charged with being a “bourgeois nationalist” and conspirator.
The Czechoslovakian Interior Ministry raided Hájek’s apartment, seized hundreds of thousands of his negatives and loaded them into a truck, where they were shipped to the Interior Ministry’s propaganda department. By the time Clementis was hung for treason in December 1952, his ashes scattered on a road near Prague, he had been vanished from all state photographs. Hájek’s image of that 1948 winter day had become Klement minus Clementis.
Similar retouchings were made to photographs of Stalin and purged Inner Party members and no doubt are a regular occurrence in North Korea, et al. It’s the totalitarian dream to conquer time—the Party and the leader control the present, have a hard grip on the future, and they will own the past as well. The dream has been further refined in the decades since: generative AI photo and video manipulation offer a set of exciting new opportunities in devising falsehoods.
Green’s photos of Wire for Chairs Missing depict the band as a Mod cabal. Sitting at a long table, side by side and facing the viewer, they’re dwarfed by the backdrop: servants of some vast apparatus of power and decorum. They could be a set of austere ice-skating judges, or the group of men who sentence you to twenty years of Siberian exile.
The “Kundera” photograph of Bruce Gilbert abruptly leaving the group, looking as though he’s being lassoed out of the frame, anticipates Gilbert’s ultimate end with Wire and the band’s fractious attempts to clarify/revise its past in the following decades (see COMPOSITION CREDIT).
BOWIE, DAVID.
Musician, artisan (UK; later ‘global’), 1947-2016.
When Wire toured West Berlin in 1978, the soundtrack for the trip was David Bowie’s Low and “Heroes” on repeat. “I remember the interminable drives with Bowie and Eno blasting out through the cassette player at distorted volumes,” their road manager Bryan Grant recalled. “We had a trip down to the Wall playing Low, getting the Cold War vibe,” Colin Newman enthused.
One of Bowie’s gifts was knowing when to disappear. Most notably, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, where he resumed his mystique via silence rather than putting out records with Win Butler guest vocals. And while his “Berlin” period was a fecund one, recording-wise, Bowie was also notably absent from the London scene—he was rarely there between his spring 1976 and summer 1978 tours, and so missed the rise and fall of UK punk.
Instead, he was a correspondent posted at the Iron Curtain, sending home strange communiques every six months. “That dark European vibe was really fashionable, and it certainly informed what we did, although you saw that with a tongue-in-cheek perspective from our point-of-view, in our songs,” Newman said. (Wire would, eventually, record at Hansa By the Wall (see PART TWO: MUTE).
Bowie went to a Wire gig or two in the 1977-78 period. “I don’t think much ever went past Bowie in those days. He was always extremely sharp when it came to spotting new things and important developments,” Newman said. “All these people went, ‘Fuck, what’s that? Have you heard what they’re doing? That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? It’s like the song stops when the words run out!'”
The influence of Low on Pink Flag is an open one—a barrage of short songs, some of which sound as if they’ve been cut off before they’ve hardly begun. Chairs Missing was once described by its producer, Mike Thorne, as Wire doing a version of Low/”Heroes” in which the “short song” side was blended into the “instrumental” one: the tracks hold both forms within them. And Nick Kent praised 154 for being the album Bowie and Eno had really wanted to make with Lodger but had fumbled; now the students had surpassed the professor.
Wire and Bowie met only once, at a Wire show in New York in 2000. Bruce Gilbert recalled Bowie drifting in backstage and being “very pleasant. He seemed to know everything we’d done. But he was very disappointed we weren’t playing more from Chairs Missing, very disappointed. He didn’t come back afterwards, probably because he was terribly disappointed.”
The closing paragraphs of Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle,” (Baltimore Saturday Visiter, 19 Oct 1833).
[Text, song: Newman; Music: Wire.] Demo recording: 14 April 1978, Riverside Studios. Master recording: ca. 10-30 May 1978, Advision. First release: 22 September 1978, Chairs Missing. Live recordings: 5 October 1978, Odeon, Canterbury [partial recording]; 25 October 1978, Bradford University; 10 & 12 November 1978, SO36, West Berlin, Germany; 14 February 1979, Rockpalast, WDR Studio L, Köln, Germany; 4 March 1979, Grugahalle, Essen, Germany; 17 September 1979, Notre Dame Hall, London.
Chairs Missing is Wire’s sea album, with its unwilling sailors (“Marooned”), shipwreck evacuees (“Men 2nd”), daughters of King Canute (“Sand in My Joints”), and the shark-infested vortex song “Being Sucked In Again.” Though the latter’s primary composer, Colin Newman, said he’d been “inspired by the legend of the succubus” (also, that the lyric “is quite inexplicable, really”).
“A curious number which begins slowly, speeds up to mid-tempo, then wanders away,” as the NME‘s Andy Gill described an early airing of the song at the Limit Club in Sheffield, a few weeks before Wire recorded it. On Chairs Missing, it was sequenced as the penultimate track on Side One, closing the run of seasongs, and chilling the air to prepare the listener for “Heartbeat.”
Its structure is similar to a Bowie-Eno composition on Low—a song that’s bookended by eerie instrumental pieces given equal importance. See the slow build of the intro, in which, as per Newman, “the synth chords ping in like a child miming a bullet (the result of a poor drop-in), [then] the bass pedal and heavily ‘mutronned’ guitar crashes prefigure the arrival of the guitar riff and drums, when the whole thing shifts up a gear.”
Three concise verses, each in a different key; three punchy refrains, all in the same key. Newman’s phrasings that delight in consonance (“dorsal fin…salted meat…sullen relapse“) and take pleasure in jarring sounds: the stomach-punch of “sucked” met by the hinge-sway of “in-ah-gain.” In the outro, the arrangement disintegrates until all that remains is a synthesized whistle, hanging high in the mix for nearly ten seconds. (The synths, played by Mike Thorne, were a Yamaha String Synth (most likely the SS-30) and the RMI Electrapiano.)
On stage, Graham Lewis would howl and moan his response vocals (“OH BEING SUCKED!!…urrrh being suuuucked”): a lurid sexuality that’s absent from the studio take, on which Lewis’ voice is as controlled and modulated as Robert Grey’s hi-hat figures.
BETHNAL.
UK rock group, 1972-1980.
The quartet Bethnal had been around since the heyday of T. Rex and, like many of their counterparts, they leapt to exploit the UK punk boom. “We weren’t desperate, but we wanted to make it,” its lead singer George Csapo told Melody Maker in early 1979. “Until punk, there was no chance. Then everyone was signing bands left, right and center. So we’re thankful to the punks.”
Bethnal opened for Wire on some late 1977 dates, as well as for Buzzcocks and Slaughter & the Dogs. Upon their first LP’s release in early 1978 (on Vertigo, Black Sabbath’s label), they became a contemporary headliner with Wire at clubs like the Marquee.
The band was all Londoners (their name came from Bethnal Green; one member was trying to impress a girl who lived there) and was a vivid act on stage—Csapo would sing while dramatically bowing an electric violin (“I’m trying to make it fashionable…make it more of an aggressive instrument…the band is worked round the violin rather than the other way round”), while their bassist Everton Williams, one of the few Black musicians in the UK punk-adjacent scene at the time, kept in perpetual motion.
A rock act pitched at a higher level of intensity than, say, Status Quo, but offering no hard break from the past (they cut reverent covers of “Baba O’Riley” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” on their debut), they were the kind of group that Joe Strummer dismissed when he sang, “if you’ve been tryin’ for years, we already heard your song.”
On their records, they feel time-stranded. Too tight for pub rock, too earnest for punk, Bethnal was developing a spacious Eighties rock sound in 1978, sounding at times like a premonition of The Alarm, even an artier Loverboy (they have a song titled “Bartok” whose chorus is “all right! gonna make it tonight! if you feel right! you gotta be my little lady, lady love!”). Their Old Grey Whistle Test spot documents them at their peak.
By 1979, Bethnal were established as a regional live act, but felt unappreciated by the press and were going nowhere on the charts. Pete Townshend had consulted on their second LP, listening to demos, telling the group where to develop a song or when “the vocals should be louder there.” But the album, Crash Landing, fulfilled its title: it would be Bethnal’s last release.
“We’re not a punk band, we’re not a heavy metal band, we’re not a pop band, we’re not a funky band,” Csapo said at the time. “They say we haven’t got an image….We are what we are, that’s our fucking image.” He noted to Melody Maker‘s Colin Irwin that “we’re doing alright. The gigs are good, we’re not complaining. Don’t say we’re self-pitying.” They broke up the following year, never to reform.
BITCH.
[Words: Gill; music: Gill? Wire?] Rehearsal demo, recorded August 1976, Watford. Unreleased.
A piece of bloodletting from Wire’s first demo tape, described by Colin Newman as “entirely formless, chugging around on two chords. It was mainly George [Gill] shouting ‘it’s a bitch’ and then losing it.”
BLESSED STATE.
Earth, as seen from space, New Year’s Day 1979
[Text, song: Gilbert; Music: Wire]. Demo recording: 14 December 1978, Riverside Studios. Master recording: ca. April-May 1979, Advision. First release: 24 September 1979, 154. Live recordings: 12 November 1978, SO36, West Berlin; 14 February 1979, Rockpalast, WDR Studio L, Köln; 4 March 1979, Grugahalle, Essen; 3 July 1979, Tiffany’s, Hull; 17 September 1979, Notre Dame Hall, London; 10 November 1979, Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, London.
Listeners, by mishap or design, will take a line from a song’s chorus, maybe pull one from a verse, and use these to hear the song as its opposite. Or they’ll just take the title literally and go from there—the world of pop music is a collective act of mishearing. So “The One I Love” is played at weddings (“a simple prop to occupy my time!” as the bride goes down the aisle). “Fortunate Son” and “Born in the USA” are blasted at Republican political rallies, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” at Democratic ones. “Running on Empty,” Jackson Browne on the moral and political failure of his generation, becomes a song about jogging.
For decades, I heard Wire’s “Blessed State” as about achieving a state of calm, of spying the world from a distance and seeing it whole: a perfect globe, one cleansed of countries, politicians, religion, history—a beautiful nude. “Oh what a pearl,” as Graham Lewis sings in his rich baritone, his phrasing a series of calm stresses. “What a well…made world…Sacred sphere, so glad…I’m here.” It’s there in my mind whenever I’m looking out of an airplane window, along with another Wire song (to come later in this series).
But “Blessed State” is one of Bruce Gilbert‘s sharpest ironies, starting with its title—it’s about a couple engaged in psychological torture (“loved in the flesh, but butchered in the mind”) and the singer’s realization that this is happening with other couples, elsewhere and everywhere in the world, all at once and forever.
“It’s about self-disgust and lying,” as Gilbert described “Blessed State” to Sean Eden, while he told Wilson Neate the lyric concerned “the horror of existence.” (“That realization at some point in your life when you realize that all your relationships are bound to fail in some way or other…another ‘the world is fucked’ song,” was his note on the track for a 2018 reissue of 154.)
Gilbert was moving along frets on his guitar and “found this cyclic thing that didn’t really change but had parts that made you feel like the structure was changing.” This was a four-chord sequence, going from A major (“closing”) to E major (“doors”) to F-sharp major (“opens”) to close on G major (“eyes”)—a progression through the A major key, peaking on a flatted VII chord, then going back home, to repeat again. It suited his lyrical frame of people being trapped in life on earth, fated to move in circles. “It’s why we’re in the pub, to get away from it for a few hours and forget what it’s like to be alive in a dysfunctional world. I think it’s the threat of the A-bomb again.”
Yet the cage that Gilbert and Wire built was so gorgeous an object! Its rich layers of chorus-pedalled guitars, played by Gilbert and Newman, who cycle through three-note patterns, answered by two-note replies, until they make a thicket of birdsong. The sumptuous blankness of Lewis’ singing. Or Robert Grey’s metronomic drum pattern, with its extra snare beat on every fourth bar and its tiny moment of elation with the fill at the end of the “solo” section (@ 2:22).
Gilbert may be one of few who regarded the song in the utterly bleak way he’d intended it to be heard (Jon Savage caught the tone in his 154 review, calling the song “sarcastic [and] sincerely crude. Such nice boys.”) Maybe no one really listens to song lyrics. Or if they do, they follow a line from The Band: take what they need and leave the rest.
Colin Newman, Graham Lewis, and Bruce Gilbert, at their respective art colleges, lived in a world that was formed by Basic Design, a pedagogical movement which, by the mid-Sixties, had altered the practice of teaching art in Britain.
As Elena Crippa and Beth Williamson wrote, in a Tate Gallery survey of the practice, “in the art schools of the 1950s in Britain, Basic Design emerged as a radical new artistic training. It…was the first attempt to create a formalised system of knowledge based on an anti-Romanticist, intuitive approach to art teaching.” That said, “what actually constituted Basic Design was disputed at the time and continues to be debated now” (seeART + LANGUAGE).
The roots of Basic Design lie in the Bauhaus movement of the Twenties (after the war, only Weimar-era concepts were safe Germanic territory to explore) and its Vorkursfoundational course, which proposed that the art student, along with learning to manipulate essential materials (paint, ink, clay, etc.), should work to sharpen their sensory impressions of the world outside of school.
William Johnstone, who led the Camberwell School of Art and later the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, was applying Bauhaus-influenced concepts to British art instruction in the war years. By the late Forties, at the Central School, Johnstone had begun hiring young working artists as part-time teachers, encouraging them to experiment in their instructional techniques—among these were Richard Hamilton (whose pupils would include Roy Ascott and Bryan Ferry) and Eduardo Paolozzi, who was a guest lecturer at Watford Art College around the time Newman was there (and who would design the gatefold of Wings’ Red Rose Speedway).
Typically, an art student, to achieve a National Diploma of Design, would take general courses to get an Intermediate Certificate in Arts and Crafts, then choose to specialize in a particular subject: pottery, leatherwork, lithography, sculpture, and so on. Their instructors would be practitioners of the chosen art form, adhering to a rigid syllabus and expecting the student to demonstrate mastery of a set of skills.
Basic Design proposed a more open, experimental, subjective approach to specialization: putting far greater emphasis on process rather than centering instruction on having the student achieve a list of measurable results. Another byproduct: art students now often had more charismatic, freewheeling instructors—professional artists who used the classroom as an extension of work they were doing in their studios.
Still from Tom Hudson’s “The Colour Experiment,” Cardiff College of Art, 1968
As Crippa and Williamson wrote, “rather than imparting knowledge on how to reproduce the appearance of nature, a [Basic Design] course offered knowledge of the causes by which these effects are produced…This constituted a revolutionary approach to art teaching, whereby students were expected to formulate their own objective bases for these principles, rather than finding them in nature and replicating them….The point was to destroy habitual practices, make any preconceived solutions impossible, and encourage a creative response.”
One of the movement’s prominent theorists was Maurice de Sausmarez, whose Basic Design: The Dynamics of Visual Form (1964) argued for an art education that would encourage the student to develop as emotionally as they did intellectually. “Out of it all might ultimately come a new art academy, preeminently fitted to educate and express the consciousness of the age,” de Sausmarez wrote. Or, at the least, a group like Wire.
BEARS, THE.
UK rock band, 1977-1980.
Upon leaving Wire, George Gill joined another Watford band, The Bears. Though apparently his time with Wire and The Bears briefly overlapped—the latter band is said to have formed around Christmas 1976.
Originally called Smarter And the Average Bear, the group consisted of Gill on guitar, Mick North on vocals, Ron West on bass guitar (said to have had so “straight” an appearance that “The Ron West look” was coined to describe a certain type of well-groomed boy in Watford), Cally Callomon on drums, and Kris Kershaw on saxophone. According to a Sounds 1978 profile, Kershaw was also “ex-Wire” but there’s no other evidence of this.
Once Gill and Wire had split, The Bears were playing regularly by spring-summer 1977, including dates at The Roxy and the Supper Club in Hemel Hempstead. Then North and a friend were killed in a motorcycle accident that September. After a time, The Bears reemerged with a new singer, John Entrails, formerly of the band Paper Doilies.
“They know how to please an audience,” Sounds wrote of The Bears in March 1978, saying that the death of North had made the band more “serious in their approach…Songs like ‘Wacky Scout,’ ‘Bear on Drugs’ and ‘Motoron’ have the same catchy riffs that have made the premier punk groups popular. “
This era of The Bears is captured on the live album Farewell to the Roxy, taped on New Year’s Eve 1977 and the first two days of 1978—The Bears’ contribution is “Fun Fun Fun,” an ode to urban life (“I’m gonna go down to the shop/get some flour and some eggs/take ’em up to the top of the flats/throw them on your head!“). Their first single, issued on Waldos Records in summer 1978 (an indie started by an ex-Watford student), was the straight-ahead rocker “On Me,” cut live in the studio. The B-side, “Wot’s Up Mate,” is looser and shabbier, with a lyric by the late North; the saxophone is a blurred force set against Gill’s guitar.
The group commemorated this release by breaking up. In August 1978, West and Callomon split to form The Tea Set, with Gill reportedly “unlikely to continue playing music.” Yet Gill and Entrails kept on as The Bears, getting Tim Brockett on bass and Phil Howstan on drums, and releasing their greatest recording, the double-A-side single “Insane”/”Decsisions (sic).”
Recorded in Belfast in October 1978 for the Northern Irish label Good Vibrations, “Insane” is a tremendous piece of gutter psychedelia, built on a twitching nerve of a bassline; a multi-tracked Gill snarls throughout. The elbows-out “Decsisions” sounds like it was recorded underwater.
That was as far as they could carry it. As per Howstan, “in 1979 we tried to move into a more blues orientated sound and even experimented with some brass but it did not work and we eventually split in 1980.” As did Gill’s former colleagues.
BEATLES, THE.
Beatles and Yoko in London, July 1968 (Don McCullin; one photo in this set was used for the Red & Blue albums)
Multi-media enterprise (UK), 1962-1970.
The rise of the first British punk generation happened just when The Beatles were more uncool than they would ever be again.
Among punks, openly liking The Beatles was suspect, in the way that reading Trotsky would have been in Stalin’s USSR. The Sex Pistols sacked their bassist and main songwriter Glen Matlock in part for counter-revolutionary Beatles fandom. John Lydon later complained about Matlock’s love of “fancy fucking Beatles chords” while Steve Jones was practical in his dislike. “The rest of us hate the Beatles,” Jones said. “Glen came up with all these Beatles-influenced chords and melodies that I couldn’t play.” (Early Buzzcocks were a hard split between Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle, who had bonded over which Beatles records they loved, and Howard Devoto, who had no use for the group.)
Three-fourths of Wire regarded The Beatles as being overrated, irrelevant to contemporary music. “Rather old-fashioned…too many notes,” was Bruce Gilbert’s assessment of Sgt. Pepper. Graham Lewis said he was indifferent to the group, as did Robert Grey (he preferred Cream, who “were heavier, and that got through to me”).
This left Colin Newman, not for the first time, as the group’s outlier—he’d been a Beatles fan since age seven, “younger than the intended audience, but it worked its magic.” He loved The Beatles for establishing a “melodic arc” in British pop, and for offering a break from early US rock ‘n’ roll, which he disliked (Newman had always hated Elvis Presley). “Beatles-esque” gets applied to Newman-dominated songs like “Outdoor Miner,” mostly as a shorthand for “melodic” or “hooky” or somesuch.
By the late Seventies, John Lennon was in retirement, Paul McCartney made pothead dad music, George Harrison was singing about Formula One racing, and Ringo Starr seemed ready to appear on Hollywood Squares. There was a sense that The Beatles would become as stolid, distant, and toothless as the monarchy, a feeling heightened by two films of 1978—the kitsch disaster of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a rat-poisoning of the Beatles oeuvre. And the merciless satire The Rutles (quietly approved and supervised by Harrison), which made the group’s antics, from playing Shea Stadium to embracing the Maharishi to the rooftop concert, look like indulged follies: scribbles from a bygone age. Instead, The Beatles would lay siege to the future.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
CD compilation: released ca. 8 May 1995 (UK & Europe only).
Released during a Wire hiatus (see PART THREE: SEND), Behind The Curtain allowed fans to buy tracks which had been only found on bootlegs (e.g., the “unofficial” demo collection Not About To Die). The release also took advantage of an uptick in the band’s popularity. As The Guardian‘s review began, “Suddenly Wire are slightly fashionable and obscurely hip again, largely thanks to Elastica’s unabashed plagiarising of them” (see ELASTICA).
Behind the Curtain compiles a few performances taped at the 1 April 1977 Roxy show (marking the official debuts of “Mary Is a Dyke,” “TV,” “Too True,” “Just Don’t Care,” “New York City” and their “After Midnight” cover) but it’s mostly a set of demos that the band had made at Riverside Studios for their three Harvest albums, spanning from their first EMI demo session of April 1977 (“Pink Flag”) to the masterful collection of songs recorded in December 1978 in anticipation of 154 (“40 Versions” to “Former Airline”).
Designed by Jon Wozencraft (with “concept” by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis; the title is from “Another The Letter”), it had liner notes by Jon Savage: “Behind the Curtain reveals their rougher side, unhinged, loose-leaf. Like Joy Division, Wire’s recorded output was quite unlike their live sound—each of them candles burning at both ends, and vulnerable to blackout.” As all of its tracks appeared on later reissues (authorized editions of the Roxy ’77 live album and Not About to Die; Harvest-era deluxe repackages), Behind the Curtain became obsolete, falling out of print, likely never to resurface.
Crowd at Clash show at the Rainbow Theatre, 1977 (Chris Moorhouse)
Playing at The Roxy, in early April 1977, Wire slam each number shut and are met with silence. Between songs, you hear mutters and jeers from what sounds like a minuscule crowd (which, as per Wire, it was).
Enthusiasm was suspect in early punk shows. Don’t clap. What, did someone do a pole vault? If they’re good enough, dance to them. If they’re middling, talk through them. If they piss you off, yell at the stage or throw a beer can, try to nail the singer in the face. The Roxy in particular could be merciless—as Jon Savage described it, a band playing the club faced “a difficult audience composed of their peers and competitors.”
Wire inspired something more like wary inertia. To ZigZag in March 1978, Colin Newman said, “when we first started, the general reaction of audiences was almost absolute blank nothingness. They wouldn’t react, didn’t know how to react. Silence, like on the Roxy [live ’77] album.” (Because of this, it was rumored at the time that Wire had cut their performance in the studio.) To biographer Paul Lester, Newman recalled “a semi-circle of people pinned up against the back of the wall, and they would just be staring at us. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what to make of us. They certainly didn’t really like us that much.”
Did Wire want audiences to like them? Did they want people to clap, sing along, dance? They admitted that they enjoyed frustrating attempts to pogo, playing so fast that the song ended just as the dancers got going.
Wire’s life on stage, from the Roxy in 1977 to the Electric Ballroom in 1980, can appear to be a series of actions taken to estrange and antagonize audiences, or, at least, to present a refusal to accommodate them. A Wire set of the time greatly consisted of songs that the band hadn’t recorded yet, with their released material treated like yesterday’s papers.
“If they like a particular track, they can go home and play it 40 or 50 times, until they’ve had enough,” Graham Lewis said. (On stage, he was the band’s deadpan enforcer. “We don’t take requests,” Lewis says, with complete sangfroid, during Wire’s performance on Rockpalast in 1979).
“The idea that we’re short-changing an audience” by not playing the “hits” was antithetical to Wire, Newman said. Instead, “you’re short-changing them by not doing your best…The idea of four geezers trotting out a jukebox isn’t my idea of what I’d like to see.”
Wire had a fundamental ambivalence to performance, questioning the relationship between those on the stage and those watching them. It was never clear, perhaps not even to them, what the group wanted from its crowds. Only that the standard rock ‘n’ roll interchange, the barter of panders for cheers, was corrupt, was broken.
“This thing about getting the audience, that you have not Gone Down Well unless they’re waving their scarves in the air and doing things audiences are supposed to…I mean, if I was in that audience I just would not do that,” Newman said. “I’d feel like an idiot.”
“I just refuse to put audiences through that rubbish. But if they want to, they can.”
The Damned at the Roxy, 1977 (Derek Ridgers)
Punk rock had to invent its audience. Andy Czezowski, who co-founded The Roxy and, for about two months, managed Wire, said it was born as an act of division.
At the first Sex Pistols show at St. Martins College of Art, in November 1975, “we all stood at the front…[while] from the safety of the bar, the students started shouting and complaining,” Czezowksi wrote. “We liked the sense of separation, new versus old. The feeling of Us and Them, and the band’s resolute stance that they weren’t there simply to entertain the Thursday night student dance.” (Newman recalled seeing the Sex Pistols at Middlesex Polytechnic in a crowd of mostly “pissed-up rugby types who hated them.”)
The writer Jonh (sic) Ingham said that one of Malcolm McLaren’s designs for the Pistols was “creating an audience that was specifically for the band.” Not some pub rock group on the hustle, looking to win over the next crowd of drinkers by catering to them, but an act who demanded that its audience bear half of the weight of a performance.
In the early months, this audience was some roughly one hundred people, mostly Londoners: a set of art school malcontents, employees and peripheral types in the McLaren/Vivienne Westwood Sex boutique scene, fashionable suburban refugees (the “Bromley Set,” which included Siouxsie Sioux), ex-hippies looking for the next thing (like Czezowski), ex-glam rockers in the same position, and aspiring punk musicians.
Some of those drawn to the Sex Pistols and The Damned, the polestars of early UK punk, used the shows as a means to design themselves, to shape inchoate notions of the person they’d wanted to be into something like reality. At a punk show, the floor was another stage: venue within the venue. As John Lydon told Julien Temple, in The Filth and the Fury:
The Sex Pistols definitely created new environments. It was [an] incredible good to see the audience being individual. There were absolutely stunning original people out there. Soo Catwoman: that woman required a lot of skill, style, and bravery to look like a cat! There was a couple of years there where it was stunning. People that had no self-respect suddenly started to view themselves as beautiful, in not being beautiful. Women started to appreciate themselves as not second-class citizens. Punk made that clear. I’ve always talked to the audience in one way after gigs. Where d’you live? What’s life like for you? Absolute basics.
Wherever the Pistols went, they planted new bands. One week they’d play High Wycombe and “see some faces there, guys with long hair,” Steve Jones said. “And a week later we’d be playing at the Nashville [in London] and I’d see the same people with their hair cut short and wearing the ripped-up t-shirt. Every gig you’d see a few more and a few more and a few more: people who just got converted.” The hot summer of 1976 drove people out of their flats and houses, into the clubs and recreation halls. “People thought they were alone in their rooms with their obsessions,” said Richard Boon, who managed the Buzzcocks. “They began to meet. A pocket-sized community formed.”
Wire’s Bruce Gilbert, recalling the Punk Festival at the 100 Club in September 1976, described the room as being like “a laboratory. The audience brings as much as the artists, are filmed and photographed as much as the artists…people experimenting with themselves, in their behavior, appearance, clothes.”
Ramones and audience at Eric’s, Liverpool, 1977 (Ian Dickson)
Any dream of punk rock as being a radical reincarnation of the Arts Labs of the Sixties was soon dispersed.
Some blamed the Sex Pistols’ shambles of an appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today, in December 1976, which landed the group in the tabloids and brought in a wave of dumb, violent young men who saw a punk show as an appealing opportunity to spit on people and beat them up. (A Wire show in Newcastle ended when “this bloke walked through the crowd, chose someone indiscriminately, hit him and the whole place went up,” Graham Lewis said. “150 people beating the shit out of each other. We stopped—there was nothing to play to anymore.”)
Then there were the trendoids, the conformists. Punk was no longer a space where you created yourself; it became a set of rules to follow. There was a break “from something artistic and almost intellectual in weird clothes,” Marco Pirroni said. “Suddenly there were these fools with dog collars on and ‘punk’ written on their shirts in biro.” The influx of Television Personalities’ “Part Time Punks“: “They pogo in their bedroom…In front of the mirror/ But only when their mum’s gone out!…they got £2.50/ to go and see The Clash.”
Others blamed The Roxy, which worsened punk’s hierarchies and hipster snob tendencies, while TV Smith of The Adverts blamed The Vortex, which replaced The Roxy. “At The Roxy, people didn’t have to look like a punk. They could do whatever they wanted,” he told Jon Savage. “After The Vortex opened there was this feeling that you should like this and you shouldn’t like that.”
Maybe it was the punk groups being signed by major labels and the story becoming one of chart positions and units shifted. The growth of heroin use, the ever-relentless press coverage, the cross-Atlantic invasion of ex-MainMan “celebrities” like Jayne County, Leee Black Childers and Cherry Vanilla, now severed from David Bowie and looking to exploit a fresh scene. Plenty of villains to go around.
The Jam’s audience trashes the Rainbow, 1977 (Chris Moorhouse)
In the midst of this, Wire stood apart, a group mistrusted by its peers and its audiences. Jane Suck, reviewing a summer 1977 show at the Marquee, wrote that Wire was “an example of [having] absolute faith in oneself” while having “undisguised contempt for the audience, the spikey refusal to open up their rock ‘n’ roll heart to anyone.”
On stage, the four of them said little, apart from song intros, and would barely look up from their instruments. Gilbert stood rooted in a corner, his body bent as if bracing for a gust of wind. Robert Grey played with a frantic precision. Newman thrashed about, his neck contorting, his body all but levitating, but he kept these movements restricted, as though he was magnetized to his microphone stand. Lewis moved upstage and downstage, shifting position with each bassline: he was the group’s restless legs, its reconnaissance unit.
After playing eighteen or twenty songs, they murmured thanks and walked off in silence. It was as though they’d been hired to work for a union-negotiated time period. “They have a healthy indifference to the audience,” wrote Sounds‘ Dave Fuller, in one of Wire’s first concert reviews.
One of those at The Roxy in April 1977 was Savage, who described Wire as “short-circuiting the audience totally…[they] don’t know when one [song] has finished and another is beginning. I like the band for that.” He also approved of Lewis, in his posh baritone, telling a heckler to fuck off (you can hear this on Live at the Roxy).
“They thought we were weirdos,” Newman recalled. “We didn’t adhere to any of the punk conventions, I think they found us quite intimidating, because we made a big noise and I did a lot of shouting. They were trying to work out what they’d done wrong—like, ‘Why is that band shouting at me?’”
Lewis, to the New York Rocker in 1978, said that while audiences were “sometimes as much the show as the band, we’d rather have more distance between us. You can use distance and space to create a tension.”
Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Vortex (Ray Stevenson)
“You’re not supposed to enjoy Wire, are you?”
Giovanni Dadomo, recalling a colleague’s quip, in Sounds, 1979
In distance, space, and tension, Wire began to accumulate fans. “There was a small band of people who used to come to hear us and quite enjoyed it,” Gilbert said. “But to be honest, I think we alienated at least 80 per cent of the audience. We attracted serious loners.” (As Grey said, “it wasn’t a respectful audience. But I don’t think it was malicious.”)
They hired a lights operator with a background in theater and told him the only thing he couldn’t do was “rock and roll lighting….all that flash, because it’s so fucking boring and inevitably you get into the same rut where it means that everybody has to run around like loonies in order to make it look exciting,” Lewis said. “The change of lighting should be sufficient to make even small movements look noticeable.”
Wire would perform tightly-contained acts of precision and intensity on stage, and the people in the room with them would need to take what they wanted from the performances, could react in whichever way they wanted to (including throwing a bottle), but they should not expect any guidance, any catering, any condescension from the band.
“It is detachment in a way, but it also puts the onus more on the audience,” Lewis said. “It’s more respectful to them.” In another interview, he was more explicit. “We’ve always hoped that the person listening, or the person that comes to see us, feels that there is room enough after the process to be able to still feel that they can respond individually to it, rather than be cast as one of the mass or mob who a record is directed at, directly, shall we say, in a marketing way.”
Wire’s perceived coldness on stage was because “we play to individuals,” Newman said. “I prefer an honest reaction, and I think that that is very un-cynical, very naive in fact.”
After a show at The Venue in 1978, which the press and the band agreed was a dismal performance, Newman said the core problem was that people had “gone to see a rock and roll show which [they] didn’t get, which was a perfectly valid point,” he told Melody Maker. “I mean, we don’t present a rock and roll show, so if people want to see or get off on a rock and roll show, they’d better not come and see us. Plenty of other bands can do that.”
“At our worst,” he added, “we are efficient, and at our best we can produce something that is….I don’t know what it is.”
Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, September 1976 (Barry Plummer)
Wire opened for Roxy Music in the European leg of Roxy’s comeback tour, in March 1979. Booked in the largest venues that Wire had played to date, the tour had some of the most abusive audiences that the group would ever face.
Their road manager, Bryan Grant, told Wilson Neate that 1979 Roxy Music “audiences were attuned to Bryan Ferry and nice suits—the fashion-oriented side of it—and the music had become very mainstream.” Wire, playing at the peak of their austere power, with a set greatly consisting of then-unrecorded 154 songs, disturbed them. Each night they booed, screamed at the band, told them to get off the stage, to fuck off and die.
“When those little herberts got on stage, the audience just hated it,” Grant said. “Usually the reaction to a support band is one of boredom or people just go to the bar. What I found interesting was this violent, visceral reaction. I thought, fuck! Why is it so violent? What is this about?”
Gilbert found the reaction to be “a good thing for us—it was testing,” while Lewis said Wire was driven into “creative-survival mode…we thought, we are going to have fun with this. If they fuck with us, we’re not going to lie down.” A set of forty-five minutes was compressed to thirty—Wire played each song faster and faster with each night, with a murderous spirit, hurling their songs into the crowd. Then they’d close with a slow version of “Heartbeat,” flaying open the song, working to “destroy all the energy,” Lewis said (a performance from Montreux is on Document & Eyewitness).
“We left the stage, one at a time, walking slowly, very deliberately…What we did was to suck all the oxygen out of the room, taking all the adrenaline with us.” The support act as termites.
The Roxy, early 1977 (Sheila Rock)
The Roxy Music debacle convinced them that “rock and roll” performance no longer made sense to attempt. The last shows of the band’s first incarnation would be structured as art exhibits, as, in Lewis’ words, “a total performance.”
The first of these designs was People In A Room, which Wire performed at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre over four evenings in November 1979. Attendees were captured by videocamera as they walked into the foyer, their images screened in the auditorium. Each member of Wire did a fifteen-minute “performance art” piece, followed by the band playing together, doing a set which, as usual, was about 40 percent current songs and 60 percent new, unrecorded ones.
The People In a Room shows were crafted as sealed boxes of experience. “A small theatre, a very nice theatre—very well equipped—which held about 350 seated each night,” Lewis said of the shows. “There was no bar. There was no smoking…the whole thing was very self-contained, as we felt that the way we previously approached things, we haven’t been altogether successful being a rock and roll band, because we aren’t a rock and roll band.”
The Electric Ballroom show, done four months later, was a more anarchic, sloppier, wilder revision of the concept. Here Wire, for the moment, reached the limit of what they felt they could achieve by standing on a stage in front of strangers.
Gilbert found it enjoyable that “the angrier the audience got, the funnier and funnier it became. There was a lot of shouting—the really clever ones shouted out requests. I’ve been told by a couple of people who were in the audience that it was right on the edge of turning into something very nasty.”
“It was pretty brutal, although we found it horribly funny,” Lewis recalled, decades later. “We just wound the audience up. It was good and it was also very depressing at the same time.”
BAD NIGHT AT THE LION (BAD NIGHT)
The Damned at the Hope and Anchor, January 1977
[Words: Gill? Newman?; music: Wire] Rehearsal demo, recorded August 1976, Watford. Unreleased.
George Gill, Wire’s founder and lead guitarist, was truculent on stage and off. At one of Wire’s first shows, at the Nashville Rooms, he broke a string and, while tuning, scowled at the audience: “What the fuck do you think you’re looking at? Get back to your beer!” (“The whole thing had an air of belligerence,” Colin Newman recalled. “And we were terrible.”)
“Bad Night at the Lion” (aka “Bad Night”), cut by Wire on an August 1976 rehearsal demo, was inspired by “a pub rock singer to whom Gill took a dislike,” the group told their biographer Wilson Neate (that said, Newman once claimed it as “one of my songs”).
A few chords hammered together, with early Wire’s three-guitars-plugged-into-one-amp buzzing smear of sound, “Bad Night” opens with a “one-two-fuck-you!,” soon ported to another composition. Verses are incomprehensible (likely for the best); choruses are a cheery promise of violence, something like “one-two-three-four! gonna come through the door! Three-four-five! Gonna take you (her?) alive!”
Another bad night came at a pub in Kilburn, around February 1977. Gill was drunk and heckling a band. He determined that the band was so terrible they had to be prevented from playing further gigs—he would steal their amplifiers. Staggering down a flight of stairs while carrying an amp, he fell and shattered his leg. The rest of his band kept rehearsing while he was on the mend. “We took out his guitar solos and it suddenly sounded a lot more efficient,” Newman said (see BEARS, THE; BLOOD SACRIFICE; GILL, GEORGE).
Previous: ART; Next: BASIC DESIGN—BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Map to Not Indicate (Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, 1967)
Conceptual art “organization,” ca. 1967-late 20th C.
In so far as this essay offers a form of narrative, it is one deformed by the dislocations of theory and practice and unbalanced by the asymmetries of intellectual generalization and existential detail.
Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language
Not quite a think tank, not quite an art movement, not quite a rock band, and not quite a political party, Art & Language is an internally contested and outwardly perplexing organization that has reconfigured itself countless times during an ongoing history spanning nearly half a century.
Robert Bailey, Art & Language and the Politics of Art Worlds, 1969-1977
In England, sometime around 1965 or 1966, four teachers and students at the Coventry College of Art—Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, and Harold Hurrell—began using “language” in their work.
They made paintings, sculptures, and sketches which incorporated words and numbers: e.g., Atkinson and Baldwin’s Map Not To Indicate (1967), above, a mostly-blank map of Canada and the United States which lists underneath the image what isn’t depicted. The quartet soon went the whole hog, making “works of purportedly visual art that exist[ed] entirely as texts or require[d] texts to approach and access them,” wrote Robert Bailey, whose 2012 dissertation on Art & Language has been of great help in this entry.
As Charles Harrison, one of Art & Language‘s prominent ambassadors and chroniclers, wrote:
Art & Language’s attempt to carry artistic practice into the territory of language was a form of insurgency….to bombard the Modernist practice of art with the materials of its own contingency, to reflect back—as the materials of art—both the entrenched terms and conceptualizations of the beholder’s discourse, and representations of the actual powers and interests which those terms concealed.
Art & Language regarded Modernist art as a closed system, one dedicated to the “suppression of the beholder.” The Modern Artist created the work, which was displayed in prominent, state-funded galleries and which was owned by capitalist princes. The beholder was encouraged to stand in silence before the work for a time, perhaps read some boilerplate curator description of the Pollock or de Kooning painting being concerned with “man’s struggle” or “individuality” or “chaos” or what have you, and then move on to the next work, in the way a consumer walks from store to store in a mall.
As Bailey summarizes Harrison: by contrast, “in conceptual art, making and doing come to the fore in a manner without precedent as themselves subject to artistic shaping, and the act of working, or even the act of working on the act of working, eclipses the completed results of work to become the prime locus of art and its site of greatest interest.” Or, as Harrison summarized: “The substantial aim was not simply to displace paintings and sculptures with texts or ‘proceedings,’ but rather to occupy the space of beholding with questions and paraphrases, to supplant ‘experience’ with a reading, and in that reading to reflect back the very tendencies and mechanisms by means of which experience is dignified as artistic.” [All italics mine.]
The Coventry group launched an Art Theory Programme (taught by Atkinson, Baldwin, and Bainbridge) in 1969 and founded a journal that year—its title, Art-Language, was retroactively applied to works the group had done over the past few years. The movement soon was trans-Atlantic. In New York, Joseph Kosuth agreed to be the journal’s American editor. A colleague of Atkinson’s, Kosuth had been toiling in a similar vein to the UK Art & Language group for some time: see his photostat work Title (Art as idea as idea) from 1967:
Kosuth’s friends Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden became journal contributors, and the three of them founded the New York branch of Art & Language.
The New York branch was, from inception, more politically-minded, more “active” and “public,” more interested in having conversations and arguments (one of the branch’s favorite theaters of operation was the Greenwich Village bar The Local, owned by the same man who owned Max’s Kansas City). The UK wing would remain hermetic and more theoretical: the Second Foundation. The two Art & Language houses would become estranged and, somewhat, adversaries. The NY branch created a rival journal, The Fox, which the UK branch scathingly reviewed in Art + Language (“Utopian Prayers and Infantile Marxism.”)
In 1970, Burn and Ramsden created (INDEX ( MODEL (…))), in which a text was broken into numbered passages, each of which was pasted onto roughly a hundred index cards in a Rolodex. One card read “any description of ‘the art-world’ is a description of a possible art-world”; another: “one doesn’t deal with art-works but art-worlds.”
Another Burn and Ramsden work of the period was Comparative Models (aka The Annotations). Here they separated each page of the December 1971 issue of Artforum and arranged the pages in sequential order along a gallery wall, juxtaposed with typewritten texts that criticized various Artforum pages. One example:
The network of relations, constructs, work, objects, etc., which may be said to constitute the ARTFORUM Model can be seen to be the consequence of the passive acceptance of reification. This ‘spell’ enraptures most forms of public life in our society. Of the ways that Capitalism limits the kinds of art produced and the relation of art to the rest of society…the social and economic system, through the division of labor, deprives the artist of a real response to his work and, through the objective relations of the market, turns his meanings into commodities.
The UK branch, which was now perceived by university administrators as introducing an unwelcome amount of barmy-seeming “radicalism” into arts education, was under duress. In 1971, Coventry College of Art cancelled the group’s Art Theory course (Mark Dennis: “ostensibly for the reason that there was a lack of ‘tangible visual art objects’ being produced by the students”); Coventry fired Bainbridge and Baldwin for good measure, though Bainbridge “had effectively disassociated himself from Art & Language” by this point. Atkinson would leave Coventry in 1973.
There was a regrouping, particularly once Charles Harrison became Art-Language‘s editor in 1971. Going forward, like news articles in The Economist, works produced by Art & Language members would be credited to the group as a whole: even transcripts of group meetings wouldn’t indicate who was speaking.
The great project of the period was A Survey by the Art & Language Institute at Documenta 5 (aka Index 01). First displayed in Kassel, Germany, in 1972, Index 01 was eight filing cabinets and 48 photostats, with the cabinets set atop four pedestals arranged in a square, looking like monoliths, while the photostats were on the walls in a grid formation. Inside each filing cabinet were Art & Language texts, in alphabetical and numerical order; the photostats were of charts “that trace[d] relations of compatibility, incompatibility, and non-relation between the texts.”
One aim was to encourage concatenation—for readers “to develop new insights out of old work in much the same way that the index to a book enables the making of connections within the book to which it is an index that might not occur otherwise by gathering proximally information…dispersed throughout a text or body of texts,” as Bailey wrote.
In Index 01: “In one sense, no new work is presented, only a reorganization of past work. But in another sense, the new work is the reorganization of past work.” Index 01 “oscillates between these two states,” Bailey wrote, “leaving audiences free to treat it either as an opportunity to investigate old work by Art & Language that they may not have seen or as a chance to consider the elaborate organizational scheme Art & Language employed—or some combination of the two…Art & Language functioned as their own curators.”
For the UK branch, Index 01 would be a map of the territory ahead. “Indexing itself became the main course for Art & Language activity from this point forward,” Bailey wrote. “In England, the formal and logical aspects of concatenating material took precedence and became increasingly elaborate.”
Ernie Wise, Art & Language, Dialectical Materialism (detail; 1975).
Around 1973, Charles Harrison began teaching at Watford College of Art [see WATFORD]. As one of his former students, David Batchelor, wrote upon Harrison’s death in 2009: “He was, without doubt, the most influential, inspiring and demanding teacher I have ever met; a number of students quickly gravitated towards him. At about the same time (and just as quickly), the management of the college became alarmed by many of the ideas, the art and the artists that Charles had begun to introduce us to. They came to regret his appointment at least as much as we benefited from it.”
Another of Harrison’s students at Watford, ca. 1975, was Colin Newman.
“I was really the only person in the class who understood half of the stuff he was talking about,” Newman claimed to Wilson Neate. “It was shocking to be in art school with a bunch of people who didn’t know anything about art.”
While it’s too broad of a stretch to find anything of the analytic rigor or the theoretical density of peak Art & Language in Wire’s songs, there’s an Art & Language sensibility lurking within their work. Few bands devoted as much attention to, and played as many games with, song and album titles as Wire did. Songs are named ironically or obliquely; their titles often reference something standing outside of the song. The “text” of a Wire song is, at times, is given as much importance as the track itself.
“There were conscious principles behind all of [Pink Flag‘s] songs,” as Newman wrote in The Independent in 2006. See “Ex Lion Tamer,” named so because Graham Lewis, upon revising the lyric, removed some lines about a lion tamer. Or “106 Beats That,” whose lyric began as an attempt by Lewis to write a set of lines capped at 100 syllables. He wound up with 106, which beats 100 (Lewis: “That doesn’t matter, because you’ve created a process.”) Songs that imply accompanying visuals (“‘Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” “Dot Dash”) or which refer to unknown organizing systems (“The 15th,” 154; see also Newman’s A-Z and the track titles of Dome (see PART TWO: MUTE)).
ART ATTACKS.
UK punk band, 1977-1978 (aka Artattacks, Art Attax).
Before committing to Wire, Robert “Gotobed” Grey briefly drummed with Art Attacks, a band founded in early 1977 by two Royal College of Art students: Edwin Pouncey (later known as the cartoonist Savage Pencil) and Steve Spear. Grey plays on “Chicken in Funland” and “Rat City,” demos that the band cut at Pathway Studios; “Rat City” was later the B-side of their last (and posthumous) single, “Punk Rock Stars.”
Art Attacks began when Spear, learning that his school was putting on a talent show, thought it would be fun to form a punk band. A friend said he should ask “Edwin from graphics” to sing. For a drummer, they got Ricky Slaughter (later of The Motors) and on bass, Marion Fudger, whom Spear knew from the Stockwell squatting scene. She had played with the Trotskyist band The Derelicts and was in the Spare Rib collective. (“She was a bit embarrassed,” Spear recalled to Stewart Home in 1996. “She went out under the name of M. S., so that no one knew it was her. Marion wanted to be a serious musician.”)
They wrote two songs for the talent show: “Subway Train” (Spear: “it just got faster and faster until it exploded at the end”) and “Rat City” (Pouncey: “about a middle-aged guy on a treadmill”—the title was a nickname for London). It was a solid punk debut; at one point, Spear jumped off stage and had the requisite fight with a guy in the audience. Art Attacks were asked to play the Wimbledon College of Art. Soon enough they had a manager, regular gigs, and were cutting demos. For the latter, as the group was between drummers at the time, they used Grey—the connection was Rob Smith, who had played bass with Art Attacks for a few shows before they recruited Fudger; Smith and Grey had been in a group together (see SNAKES, THE). Grey was also a squatter in Stockwell, where he’d known Fudger.
“Chicken in Funland” came from a headline in The Sun—an expose of animal cruelty in which an arcade owner had been forcing chickens to play piano for his customers (Spear: “it was a gambling thing, where you won if the chicken hit a certain key”).
Art Attacks, 1977
Art Attacks was signed by Albatross, one of the sketchiest British indie labels of the period. As per Pouncey and Spear, the label, run out of a Kensington Market basement, was owned by a hippie who had a burlesque stripper girlfriend and “this other guy who always wore a suit…he used to come up with these really stupid ideas, like they were going to advertise our single on all the buses in London.”
The debut single, issued in May 1978, was “I Am a Dalek.” Pouncey took a memory of having to wear a Dalek costume for a department store job and fleshed it out, making it a screed about how “you felt like your identity had been taken away from you and had been replaced by this robotic one. And all of the sudden, the robot inside started rebelling.” The B-side was “Neutron Bomb,” a call to wipe out everything in your life and start over. It sold about seven thousand copies.
Any prospect of subsequent releases died after Albatross’ distributor saw an Art Attacks show at which Pouncey crawled into the drum kit and refused to come out. At another gig, Pouncey handed the mike over to a “tramp who lumbered on stage…the new vocalist was this derelict screaming rubbish.”
The group played the punk circuit, opening for Generation X. Their set routinely entailed Art Attacks “taking the piss out of Billy Idol,” much to the anger of Generation X fans and road crew. The latter, for revenge, switched off the Art Attacks’ amps and mikes in the middle of a show. Art Attacks opened for 999 and The Motors; Squeeze once opened for them at the Marquee. Keith Moon was a fan. The ultra-hip punk club The Vortex, whose owners Pouncey and Spear would ridicule while on stage there, kept asking them back.
But they were done by the end of 1978. Pouncey, while he enjoyed playing with Spear and Fudger, wanted to complete his degree and saw that the punk scene had devolved into grubby commercialism and nihilist conformity—the rise of Sid Vicious, punk’s junkie killer cartoon, was a sign of how things had gone sour.
“Art Attacks was a project, like an art project in a way,” he said in 2010. “For me anyway, in my mind. There were people with aspirations for it to be a proper rock band, and go on and have a proper rock & roll career and everything, but I just found myself getting more and more dissatisfied with the whole idea of playing the gigs.” He wanted to write stories and poems, comics and illustrations (he’d already become a contributor to Sounds). “I wasn’t interested in yelling on about policemen, how horrible society is or any rubbish like that.”
Looking back, Pouncey felt most affinity with the grub-tier of UK punk groups, the bands that had one single or only managed to cut a demo, who opened for Eater or Sham 69 a few times, who only survive in small print on faded club listings or as names in the comments of 45cat single entries. “The bands that were substrata, that weren’t looking for huge amounts of money from EMI, they were just soldiering on,” Pouncey said. “They were excited by the idea of being able to do it, and did it, and then faded away. On to the next project.”
ART ROCK.
Is art rock at last losing its pretentiousness? But if it fades, what remains? (Baltimore Sun, 23 July 1982)
Musical genre name, ca. 1967-present.
The nearest thing to classic awful English art-rock since Genesis discovered funk.
Robert Christgau, review of The Who’s It’s Hard (1982).
Whenever Wire is assigned a musical genre, it’s typically “post-punk” (see upcoming) or “art rock.”
So what is art rock? A band classified as “ska,” say, or “heavy metal” will share some easily definable attributes with others in the genre. Whereas “art rock” can mean, and has meant, many things under the sun.
The earliest use of the term that I’ve found in US and UK newspapers is in the Tampa Bay Times of 9 February 1967, which notes a local performer’s “new Psychedelic Art-Rock Folk Sound.” Later that year, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Peter Blake/ Jann Haworth cover; lyrics printed on LP sleeve; mustaches), Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” (Bach; marijuana), and the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (poetry; Mellotron) fully inaugurated the genre, at least in the press.
By February 1968, “art rock” is being compared with “shock rock” and rockabilly by the Manchester Evening News; a year later, “art rock” has assumed one of its primary roles—as a way for critics to pit “sophisticated” artists against rock ‘n’ roll teenage dance product. In a review of Jack Bruce’s Song for a Tailor, Tony Palmer in The Observer claimed that “art-rock, as it was known, is no longer rock or even art.”
Palmer wouldn’t be alone in being wary about “art rock,” regarding it as an aspirational type of highbrow popular music that was in truth neither, but rather some ungainly, flopping hybrid that irritated both highbrows and rock ‘n’ roll fans. The writer Dave Marsh would rail against art rock for decades. In his The Heart of Rock and Soul, he made a cogent point about which artists were allowed to be “art rock” and which weren’t, often due to class and race. On ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears”:
Had R.E.M. or The Cure recorded it, “96 Tears” would be heralded as pure art-rock. But “96 Tears” was recorded by a quartet of Tex-Mex migrant workers, and without art school credentials, all that Rudy Martinez gets credit for is creating a “garage band” classic. History will doubtless provide equity, since “96 Tears” will be remembered long after “post-modernist” spats recede into the mists that spawned them.
See also Robert Christgau, who only last year laid into “art-rock, which actively rejects both the catchy hooks and the compelling groove of the rock and roll aesthetic I’ve championed for most of my life.”
Again, the vagueness of the term leads one to ask—who are we really complaining about here? Radiohead? The Decemberists?
In the early- to mid-Seventies, “art rock” and “progressive rock” are used interchangeably in reviews: Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, The Strawbs, Family are all called “art rock” at some point; King Crimson is “tentatively balanced on the high wire of art rock” (Harrow Observer). Yet the same was true for punk or punk-adjacent acts: Metro is “art rock,” as is Devo and Deaf School (“art school rock”) and XTC (“art rock new wavers”).
In September 1977, the Valley Advocate (from my near-hometown of Amherst, MA), attempted to create an art-rock canon:
To speak in generalities (hey, it’s the art rock entry; I’m not sure how you can speak otherwise), an act labeled “art rock” has some of these attributes:
Band or artist is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being “smart,” or at least “clever” (usually “overly”). The act’s just as often called “pretentious,” an adjective whose definition is so foggy that it could close an airport.
Band or artist devotes a heap of time and attention to record sleeve photos and design (and, later, videos) and, equally important, to the maintenance and upgrades of their own look.
Artist, or at least someone in the band, paints or makes sculptures, etc.: something aesthetically extraneous to making rock music. T-shirt design does not qualify.
Song lyrics refer to other media (paintings, plays, books, movies, etc.) and the musician at least fakes that they’re familiar with such things.
The musician doesn’t need to have gone to a university, but it helps. You can also be in the vicinity of one (see R.E.M.) or lie about attending one.
Yet this doesn’t quite cover it. Steely Dan ticks most of these boxes, but few would call them “art rock.” Dylan and John Mellencamp paint, but they don’t make art rock. A number of Black artists also qualify, and, surprise, they aren’t called “art rock” either: see Grace Jones, Nona Hendryx, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band/ Kid Creole & the Coconuts, Public Enemy, The Coup. In the Valley Advocate list above, you’ll note, among the usual suspects, Kansas and Meat Loaf, who would likely be deemed too uncool to qualify for a similar list today.
Does an art rock act need to be cool, though? As this is one of the dorkiest music genres in existence?
There are a few undeniable art rock acts; most are impeccably cool. David Bowie, who painted and sketched and made SF home movies, who wrote songs about Andy Warhol, Chris Burden, and the architect Philip Johnson, and who nicked lines from Hans Richter’s Dada: Art and Anti-Art for “Up the Hill Backwards.” Kate Bush, whose debut single is about a Bronte novel and who wrote songs quoting Ulysses and referencing Wilhelm Reich. Laurie Anderson, whose debut single was released by an art gallery. Arthur Russell, quintessential rock/dance aesthete.
Roxy Music, headed by two art school graduates, whose first single was based on a Bryan Ferry painting and who looked like they’d argued about Late Modernism while in the studio. (Ferry owned the term in a 1975 interview: “Roxy…could play things which were very experimental and forward-looking, and trying to break ground in a sort of art-rock way.”)
The Velvet Underground, sponsored by a painter who also did their debut LP sleeve, and whose members included a Syracuse grad who’d studied with Delmore Schwartz (the Manchester Evening News, of 14 December 1976, credits Lou Reed as “the originator of the New York art rock sound”) and a Goldsmiths College alum who had performed Erik Satie pieces and wrote “Graham Greene” and “Hedda Gabler.”
And Talking Heads, the majority of whom went to the Rhode Island School of Design, who were originally called The Artistics and had a song called “Artists Only,” and who had Johnny Ramone shaking with rage when, while touring with The Ramones, they went to museums and worse, talked about what they had seen; Tina Weymouth even spoke French on occasion. (That said, David Byrne hated the term “art rock.”)
So, sure, Wire, a group whose members included an art school alum who knew Art & Language veterans, and Peter Schmidt and Eno, and various British and German painters (Colin Newman), a fashion designer (Graham Lewis), and an experimental music nerd who worked in an art school library (Bruce Gilbert)—a group who had songs called “French Film Blurred” and “Midnight Bahnhof Café” and had chosen their name in part for its visual qualities—is about as “art rock” as one can get.
But as Newman told Simon Reynolds, in the latter’s Rip It Up and Start Again, Wire’s music “wasn’t ‘arty,’ we were doing fucking art. Punk was art. It was all art.”
ART SCHOOL.
Brian Eno and Roy Ascott at Ipswich, ca. 1966-67
British educational institution, 1768-present.
Any taste that you feel is right Wear any clothes just as long as they’re bright
The Jam, “Art School” (1977)
I gotta get a job, I gotta get some pay My son’s gotta go to art school, he’s leaving in three days
They Might Be Giants, “Alienation’s for the Rich” (1986)
“A lot of people from the music papers balk at the mention of art school,” said Colin Newman in one of Wire’s first interviews, with the NME in 1977. “Because there’s a thing called art school rock.”
In 1768, the first British art school—the Royal Academy of Arts—was founded after a few leading architects and society painters of the time had petitioned the crown; the RA was intended for the education of similar craftsmen. Two centuries later, Newman, Bruce Gilbert, and Graham Lewis were among the tens of thousands of students in a constellation of art schools scattered across Britain.
Shaken up by reforms in art education in the years after the war (see BASIC DESIGN) and a growing radicalism in course instruction (see ART + LANGUAGE), and having a level of government financial support that, from today’s perspective, seems fantastical, the British art school, by 1970, offered an alternate path to bright students who had struggled with traditional education. It was a place for provincial weirdos to find like-minded weirdos. And it gave a means of support until you could establish yourself as an artist, or, in the case of Malcolm McLaren, as an arts-entrepreneur.
Punk, for all of its street-fighting front, was as much an art school movement. Apart from a few clubs in London, Liverpool and Manchester, art schools formed much of the circuit for the early punk bands—the first-ever Sex Pistols show was at St. Martin’s School of Art, and many of their early performances were at art schools, from Chelsea School of Art to Watford College to Hertfordshire College of Art.
It was a natural fit. Art schools had the performance spaces and PA equipment, the funds to pay bands semi-decently, and “these guys sound weird, let’s book them” was the ethos of many a student union social secretary (like Hornsey College’s Graham Lewis).
You’re all from art school backgrounds? Why the move from art to music?
Newman: Because they don’t have rock ‘n’ roll schools.
Lewis: We were all doing what we had been trained to do so the time came when it was an easy decision to change, but obviously our past influences are still there.
Record Mirror interview of Wire, 7 October 1978
Colin Newman was of the generation who went to art school because that’s where you trained to be a pop star.
“My idea was that I’d go to art school because that was a good way to get into a band,” he told Wilson Neate. “I subscribed to that myth 100%. All the musicians who excited me had been to art school. You needed to be where there was a creative environment.”
By 1975, the lineage was well established. Founders of the tradition included John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe (Liverpool College of Art), Ray Davies (Hornsey College of Art), Keith Richards and a few of the Pretty Things (Sidcup Art College), Roy Wood (Mosely College of Art), Jimmy Page (Sutton Art College), Syd Barrett (Camberwell College of Arts) and Freddie Mercury (Ealing Art College). Three-fourths of The Clash were art school kids—before they settled on a “working class rebel” look, they wore Jackson Pollock-esque paint-splashed gear, much like the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock (St. Martin’s).
The most archetypal art school rockers were Pete Townshend, who studied under Roy Ascott at Ealing, took the idea for guitar demolition from the artist Gustav Metzger, and who once called The Who a “form of Pop Art.” Even today, as per his ex-drummer Zak Starkey, “there’s nothing normal about [The Who]. These are the most crazy…you’ve got an abstract, conceptualist artist who thinks the band is an art installation.”
And of course, Brian Eno (Ipswich, 1966; Winchester College of Art, 1969), who appears to have been willed into being by the collective mind of the British art schools. One of the undying myths about David Bowie is that he went to art school—he didn’t, unlike many of his peers, but it’s as if we demand that he must have.
Wire at Watford College, ca. January 1977
Newman first attended Winchester, then transferred to Watford College of Art, where he concentrated in illustration (“I could not only be in the band but design the album covers as well”).
At Watford, Newman discovered a lively group of art educators and theorists: instructors during his time included Charles Harrison (see ART + LANGUAGE), Peter Schmidt and, critically for Newman, Hansjörg Mayer, who became his second-year tutor and who saw his role as keeping the university administration off Newman’s back so that Newman could devote his time to getting a band together.
“He enabled me to just get on with stuff,” Newman recalled. Mayer, Schmidt, and Eno, who was a regular visitor to Watford, “encouraged what we called intuitive orienteering, a way of saying ‘there are no boundaries and you’ll only discover something new by trying new things.’ It wasn’t airy fairy do-what-you-like-and-discover-yourself; it was hard line and quite strict.”
Watford provided Newman with the space and time he needed to help invent Wire, and he credits the likes of Mayer for not “treating me like some stupid student…there’s a process by which individuals go from being just a general person to being someone who can inhabit the kind of life you need to if you’re an artist. I went through that process there.”
“I managed to convince some people that I might do something one day,” he said in 2006. “Which is what I think art school is supposed to be about.”
Are the students in art schools less straight than those in the universities? “That’s probably true,” Lewis replied. And Newman added, “Less conventional. You’re not likely in an art school to meet more than two or three people you see eye to eye with. But in a university you might not meet any.”
New York Rocker interview of Wire, July 1978.
The sole member of Wire who completed his art school degree was Graham Lewis, which caused some resentment when the band was first forming (Lewis: “There was hostility because I was ex-Hornsey. I was in London and I was doing well”).
Hornsey College of Art was a punk generator: in the early to mid-Seventies, Lewis, Viv Albertine, Adam Ant, The Raincoats’ Gina Birch and Ana da Silva, and The Specials’ Jerry Dammers were all there. Lewis had wound up at Hornsey after doing a foundation course at Lanchester Polytechnic, where “the friends I had in the painting and sculpture department all seemed incredibly unhappy…and were doing stuff that was a real reaction to what was going on.”
At Hornsey, Lewis first concentrated in textiles, pursuing “textile printing on a rather more abstract fashion than what they considered commercial,” he told Kevin Eden. “I was interested in pop images and how things are repeated over and over. They suggested that I go to the Fashion department and learn how to make things out of what I produced.” This appealed to him, and he got a degree in Fashion Design.
Bruce Gilbert’s time in art education was spottier. He originally wanted to do a two-year course at St Albans School of Art but didn’t get in, so he went to Leicester Polytechnic, first studying graphics (“totally unsuitable”), then fine arts (“I failed miserably”). “I decided I couldn’t see myself as a graphic designer, so in 1971 I left and started painting seriously,” he said. A few years later, he got a job as a media specialist in the library at Watford, which he described as “the end of a very golden period…a typical small provincial art school with lots of interesting people working there.”
The outlier was Robert Grey, who spent two terms studying humanities at Thames Polytechnic, hated it, and left. “I seriously went on my own path and decided not to be influenced by anyone else,” he later said.
[Words: Lewis; music: Wire.] “Personal demo” recording, guitar sounds as if all of its strings are ready to snap: January 1979, Cadaqués, Catalonia (Spain). Live recordings: 3 July 1979, Tiffany’s, Hull; 19 July 1979, Notre Dame Ballroom, London (Notre Dame has a slight edge over Hull as the song’s definitive performance—Newman howling, backed by a wall of tanks); 10 November 1979, Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, London (faster, somehow more agitated). [See Part Four: AFTER.]
A well-placed mole, whose intel has been of great value to the corporation these past few years, gets a dispatch: a note folded to the size of a moth, tucked in a bouquet of flowers left at his door. Dogger Viking Moray Forth Orkney. He uses the small notebook to decode. Cover Blown. Network Compromised. Incommunicado.
He sits at the kitchen table and considers options, as if dealing cards in solitaire. The borders are closed. His contact in the mountains is away. Troops are on the roads at night. The newswire correspondents have been rounded up. The television airs talent show performances from a decade ago. He concludes that the only action left is to sit still. By luck, his pantry is full. He triple-locks the door, draws the blinds, returns to the table. He checks the gun and waits for the knock.
AND THEN…CODA.
[Words, music: Gilbert, Lewis.] Live recording: 29 February 1980, Electric Ballroom, London. First rel.: July 1981, Document & Eyewitness. Two separate tracks on original LP; conjoined on CD issues and streaming sites]. [See PART TWO: MUTE.]
Wire’s performance at the Electric Ballroom in London, on leap year day February 1980, would be their last time together on stage for five years. It was Wire as art irritants, playing mostly new songs, employing the loose structure of a Dadaist cabaret (stage directions included “woman enters pulling two tethered men and an inflatable jet”) to an audience of the surly (Newman: “unsavory skinheads and oi! creatures, shouting and spitting”) and the baffled.
“We wrote the material a week before the performance and basically it was done on a prayer,” Graham Lewis told Wire biographer Paul Lester. “It was a self-financed and self-governed thing. We were outside of EMI [by this point], we weren’t contracted to anybody, so it was put together very, very, very quickly…There was a certain amount of wind-up involved, and we knew it was going to be potential trouble, basically.”
The closing number of the Electric Ballroom show was “And Then.” There’s a snapping, chirping, abrasive guitar; its counterpart plays a serpentine line that could have fit on Eno’s Another Green World. Lewis sings, at first sounding like he’s parodying Iggy Pop. “The heads of priests say their prayers…wave their charms…save their souls, sell their fears….and then we try to make UP our minds!” He pulls out a loaf of Mother’s Pride bread, devours slice after slice like a rat, then spits chunks of bread into the crowd. “Keeps shoving those double-thick slices….down my throat!!!” The delirium lessens to a drum and shaker pattern, which segues to an instrumental coda. A figure repeats for four minutes. A guitar honks in response, pushing against the repeating line, echoing it, futilely trying to drown it out, until it’s defeated.
“It was confusion at the end,” Gilbert recalled. “We’d all walked off stage and Colin was still playing off the stage for about five minutes. So it was empty.” Wire’s PA company repossessed half of the band’s gear right after the show—because of unpaid bills, not, as far as we know, as criticism.
ANOTHER THE LETTER.
The Oberheim Eight Voice (1977), used on “Another the Letter.”
[W: Gilbert; M: Newman.] Demo recording: 14 April 1978, Riverside Studios. Master recording: ca. 10-30 May 1978, Advision. First release: 22 September 1978, Chairs Missing. Live recordings: 25 October 1978, Bradford University; 14 February 1979, Rockpalast, WDR Studio L, Köln, Germany; 4 March 1979, Grugahalle, Essen, Germany.
The late Ian MacDonald, in his cultural obituary/rant of an introduction to Revolution in the Head, claimed that the sequencer’s “factory ethic” had “corporatised” song structures. Abetted by the drum machine’s “mass production regularity,” the sequencer had spawned music whose “vitality was digitalised to death and buried in multilayered syntheticism, [making] pop little more than a soundtrack for physical jerks.”
Further attacks came in his essays “Pulse of the Machine” and “The People’s Music.” In the latter, the sequencer is the handmaid of “the business side of the industry,” which has welcomed the chance to purge irregularity from pop records. “Pulse of the Machine” turns its sights on musicians, who have crumbled into mediocrity, corrupted by tech:
As a glorified digital-electronic player-piano roll, the sequencer mechanises the regulation of musical information (pitch, duration, tempo, volume, attack, etc.), recording this data and…playing it back as sound…anyone can quickly graph out masses of modular musical information in matrix form…The sequencer is the ultimate musical democratiser: no talent is required, just enough awareness to spot and cure a discord or fix a rhythm glitch. In the absence of talent, everything created this way will tend to sound much the same.
An alternate perspective on the early art of sequencing: Wire’s use of the Oberheim Eight Voice (EVS) on “Another The Letter.”
Making Chairs Missing in spring 1978, the band wanted to break from the hyper-fast punk sound of Pink Flag. So they discarded some promising demos cut a few months prior because this material now sounded passé, while the over-and-out songs which did make the cut needed to be transformed.
“Another The Letter” was a case in point. It was three short verses by Bruce Gilbert, inspired by a painting of his that depicted a hand passing a letter to another hand (the painting was titled The Letter, hence the song was Another The Letter).* Colin Newman wrote the music; the piece was about a minute long.
Over a day at Advision, the band worked to “find a satisfactory way to nail the song, [which was] initially presented with a heavy punk accent. Lots of crashing and bashing,” Mike Thorne recalled (its April 1978 demo documents the song’s early shape). Newman said early takes of “Another The Letter” were “all distorted guitar chords” but Gilbert was growing weary of distortion. The group realized the song needed to be as precise as it was fast: to become a rapid conveyor belt of words, riffs, rhythms.
Thorne suggested using the Oberheim EVS to arpeggiate what had been guitar chords, then to use this arpeggiated sequence to set the tempo of the song. “The only unchanged personality was Robert, whose drums were thrown into a totally strange space by our laying the whole punky thing over a sequence playing out of my Oberheim analog synthesizer,” Thorne recalled in 2000. “The basic tempo did get faster and faster: easy when the tempo control is a small knob rather than a sweaty drummer.”
The result was a track arranged like cars smoothly merging onto a highway. Two bars of Gilbert’s solitary guitar, playing a twitch of a riff; joined by Graham Lewis thrumming on the two lowest strings of his bass; followed, two bars later, by the Oberheim sequence. Newman’s phrasing is another set of rhythm patterns: passed-to-a-hand be-hind the curtain…like a series of shocks series of shocks series of shocks series of shocks….life SIZE life SIZE life SIZE life SIZE. Guitars break into dialogue; the Oberheim steams over them. The song builds to Newman’s final repetition, a glossolalia: YELLOWBULBLIGHT YELLOWBULBLIGHT YELLOWBULBLIGHT YELLOWBULBLIGHT YELLOWBULBLIGHT. Newman reveals that the letter has told of a suicide; the track cuts off as if a switch is flipped.
*It’s unclear whether this painting was actually made, or remained conceptual; details vary.
Wire (Robert Grey, Colin Newman, Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis), 1978 (Annette Green)
No blind spots in leopard’s eyes resistance is futilebelieve sea-burnt nurses in a black and white life there’s a column of smoke are you a man-made island? B5 A5 B5-B5-B5 [dant-de-dant-dant-DANT] it’s all in the art of stoppingclear a path Jonah “call that a song?” yelled out the bloke behind me no safety-nettled plan despite schooldays it made no sense baby kills Mary and Joseph nobody is going to say, “Well done chaps.” What do you expect? We’re not in it to get medals, to get the silver and the glory. We’re going to get a lead one, probably! I always hated half-time calls fueled by the Finnish Rude-Boy Engineering Front 0:12 Enter mid song, this is the main figure: A|—2—2-2–2–2–4-5-7–|–7-7-7—7-7-6-6-5-5-4-4—–| I don’t need to go to the Arctic to know it’s cold I get anonymous phone bills from a pope I’ve never met Pay attention! This is a commerciallandscape, canal, canard, water coloured Strikers luck pitch backs heap tips pit slacks Tim Roth, Tiger Moth, altar cloth, dot-com frothThe nicest thing that ever happens on stage is when you get people singing the la-las, because sometimes you feel it could be about a certain person in the audience. “They don’t know me but maybe I’ve done something” the course of creation is often quite strange Her-her-her-her-her-her There was an avalanche of creativity. Suddenly we could rely on our inadequacies NO NO NO NO NO NO MIS TER SUIT I saw Colin was playing the JC 120 back in 2013. Any bonehead with a dirt pedal should be able to get that tonesailing under a false flag I’m waiting for the divergent wasp Lester Bangs wrote an incomprehensible review in the Village Voice and basically you got the general information that the LP wasn’t much good Michael’s nervous and the lights are bright If he had a room, he’d paint it white Captain Flash won’t give it back They mentioned five titles from the album, including its name, and got three of them wrongthere’s no space for a future Afghan ace There was more to life than punk’s ground zero, or whatever it was supposed to be. How many great punk records are there? First Ramones album? You know what I mean batten down the hatches tie down the cargoStarting with an ABC
PART ONE: HARVEST (starts below) PART TWO: MUTE (later) PART THREE: SEND (even later) PART FOUR: AFTER (later still)
Wire and The Adverts formed around the same time and appear, in sequence, on the same live album, The Roxy London WC2, though not taped on the same night.
But where The Roxy, issued in June 1977, is Wire’s debut on record, by its release The Adverts had a single out and another ready to go, “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,” which would crack the Top 20 and land them on Top of the Pops. Wire were a slow build; The Adverts burned quickly.
They were from Devon. Tim “TV” Smith, a poet and songwriter who worked in a sweets factory, and art school graduate Gaye Black, soon to be Gaye Advert. They imagined a future together, shoring it on correspondence, rumor, and artifacts—clips from music weeklies, records ordered in the mail. After Smith was laid off, he and Black, who was looking for a graphic designer job that didn’t exist in Devon, moved to London in spring 1976.
Having read about the Sex Pistols in the NME, they thought to form a band, found a guitarist (the agreeable slasher Howard “Pickup” Boak) and through him, a rehearsal space and a drummer: the never-played-drums-before Laurie “Driver” Muscat.
Being in the audience was part of their rehearsals. Black and Smith were a striking-looking couple with art school kids’ sense of style, and they would size up acts, seeing how they worked the stage. Black was enough of a regular at Stranglers shows that she was on the guest list, which inspired her stage name (“I said my name was Gaye and they wrote down my name and said it was an advert for identification purposes”) and, ultimately, her band’s name.
One of the first songs that Smith wrote for The Adverts was “We Who Wait” (“who wait in the cafe and magazine/ who wait for morning or fag machine”). By the Punk Festival at the 100 Club in September 1976 (the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned headlined; Smith and Black stood in the same crowd as most of Wire), they had waited long enough.
“It became not just going to gigs, but ‘we are going to do one,'” Black said, while Smith described the feeling as an “urgency, because we wanted to do it; even if no one else was going to do it, we were.”
The Roxy, the first punk-devoted club in the city, opened in Covent Garden in December 1976. The club was so provisional an enterprise that it would let nearly anyone on stage, and punk had yet to congeal into a prescribed look and sound. There was unclaimed space. The Adverts debuted at the Roxy on 15 January 1977, opening for Generation X. “The first time I saw them they were terrible,” The Damned’s Brian James said. “Gaye looked great and TV had presence, but they couldn’t play. But because of the Roxy, they got the chance to improve.”
Within two months, The Adverts were on a label; in less than a year, they put out four singles and an album, all of which were phenomenal. “When you’re young, time goes slowly,” Black said, looking back.
from Caroline Coon’s 1988: The New Wave Punk Explosion (1983)
The Adverts were in the second wave of UK punk bands—the kids caught in the initial blast radius. Jon Savage: “The surge of groups like the Adverts tapped into the collective unconsciousness for the first few months of 1977 as the possibilities that had been built into the Sex Pistols were acted upon.”
Performance, for Smith, meant “thrashing at the demons as soon as you hit the stage…the demons of living within yourself…struggling with your own personality.” He sang as if throwing punches—see the verses of “Bored Teenagers”: our mouths are DRY we TALK in HOPE to HIT on SOMETHING NEW—and would contort himself at the mike. Record Mirror once called him “Quasimodo.” Black was his counterpart. She stood stock-still, a figure of absolute coolness. Her look was vampire-biker—a glam sister of The Ramones and Motorhead.
The Adverts’ great subject was the spectacle of their performing selves: desperate amateurs who had become weird pop stars by refusing to accept embarrassment, finding strength in their failings. Their debut “One Chord Wonders” shoves at the listener: we can’t play, but we’re playing anyway. And this is what it sounds like: we don’t give a damn!
Its B-side, “Quickstep,” is a history of a group who had managed to make “One Chord Wonders” (“I’ll sing the words until I can’t keep the band together no more”). In its opening bars, Pickup buzzes on the high frets of his guitar, then Black and Driver come in, pounding the same line, trying to get the skipped note right, a bit tentative, as if urging each other to take the lead. Just when the track sounds like it will fray to pieces, the three of them snap together.
Smith sang as if he was alone in his room back in Devon, the words and melodies jolting through him; the group was his amplified imagination. Pickup hammered Smith’s constructions into resemblances of rock songs: he’d cap a long, ranting line with a jab of a riff, divide verses from choruses by playing a fresh hook. Black laced together eighth-note patterns on bass while Driver, unable to alternate kick and snare beats, pounded everything at once, one! two! three! four! at highway speed, playing fills as if trying to break into a conversation. He and Black were a force when they held together, but they often jarred: a schism that widened when Black started using speed while Driver “had a little heroin phase,” as per Smith.
The labels and the press made Gaye Advert the star of the group. It began when Stiff, the band’s first label, used a close-up of her face as the sleeve of “One Chord Wonders.” Smith, to Jon Savage: “It suddenly hit home—we’ve got a good-looking girl in the group, and that’s what’s going to happen…it cheapened it for all of us, that people would find a gimmick in what was hoped would avoid all gimmicks.” For Black, this meant a performing life of being objectified and condescended to. Her photo would be used to sell newspaper concert reviews that chided her for looking at her hands too much when she played.
“Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,” an EC Comics-style horror story about a patient being gifted the eyeballs of a killer, was an outlier in Smith’s compositions but it became The Adverts’ hit, peaking at No. 18. “Suddenly everyone liked us, we were on television,” Smith said. “The only trouble was, it then froze: that was what people wanted from us…We’d only just started and a band that should have developed into something extraordinary was hampered by public expectation.”
When their follow-up single, “Safety in Numbers,” didn’t chart, “suddenly we were one-hit wonders. It’s a terrible feeling to think that the public perceived the band as having peaked, when you’d just started.”
Wire, signed by EMI around the time that “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” hit, tried to hedge against this. EMI wanted them to concentrate on singles, to put out something like “Fragile” and see if it would land, but the group demanded to be considered an album act. For Bruce Gilbert, getting a hit single off the bat meant that “you’re never going to be taken seriously again….We’d seen what happened to other people—being stuck forever with their single and that was it, the blueprint for the rest of their lives. It’s like a coffin of your own making.”
G. Advert, prizefighter (Record Mirror, Feb 1978)
The original Adverts held together until February 1978, when their LP Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts was issued. On it, their singles were sequenced with some of the strangest compositions of the early punk years: the JG Ballard-inspired “Drowning Men”; the grotesque theatrical “Bombsite Boy”; “On Wheels,” a take on how society regards “the disabled.” And The Adverts’ prophetic masterpiece, “Great British Mistake,” where Smith levies a curse on his home, soaring like a bird over cities and motorways, scrying half a century into the future:
The genie’s out of the bottle, call in the magician They didn’t mean to free him, devil behind them Devil in the mirror, chained to their right hands… They’ll have to come to terms now, they’ll take it out somehow They’ll blame it all on something The British mistake: when will it be over?
Crossing the Red Sea had poor promotion and spotty distribution. Their label, Anchor, about to be shuttered, had shifted them to a new subsidiary, Bright, which was also soon shuttered. The album seemed destined to survive only in the appendices of punk rock histories; it wouldn’t be issued in the US until the 2010s.
The group splintered. Driver was dumped while in hospital for hepatitis in Ireland. They got a replacement drummer, then replaced him. A keyboard player and arranger, Tim Cross, joined. Pickup didn’t show up one day and never returned. The Adverts moved to RCA who, after their label debut single “Television’s Over” died, wrote off the group, barely giving them enough money to make an album. They had to piece it together in the cheapest, grungiest rooms they could find—in the intro of “I Surrender,” you hear a rat running through a basement echo chamber (“you don’t get that with digital,” Smith said.)
Smith wanted to move forward, to get out of punk, but he lacked any strong collaborator (Cross could give him synth lines and intricate vocal arrangements, which smothered the songs) and he struggled: some of the later Adverts tracks sound frozen halfway through their making.
Black was frustrated as well. “Tim writes most of the lyrics and I have ideas but I don’t even try to get them accepted by the rest of the band,” she told Rosalind Russell in early 1978. “Tim’s got lots of new ideas, but they’re all Tim’s songs.”
Cast of Thousands finally appeared at the end of 1979. Its title track was intended as an “epic about the desire in the media to satisfy our fascination for the sick and the trivial in the world,” Smith said, with a guitar sped up to resemble a mandolin and a choir of twenty double-tracked voices. The LP was originally going to have a photograph of a burning monk on its cover; it was issued with a photo of the group looking like a “punk” act on Quincy.
Tracks included an ironic band theme song (“living like The Adverts/ things could be worse”), “I Surrender” and the morning-after “I Will Walk You Home.” The Adverts were out of money, their label was done with them, and they were regarded as yesterday’s papers—a remnant. Black put down her bass after the band’s last gig, at Slough College in October 1979, and never played in public again, becoming a homecare manager and a visual artist.
There will never be another Adverts; no reunions, promises TV Smith. “I could never do that. I’d never reform The Adverts ’cause I’m not like that. It was a first stage, once I’m finished with something, that’s it.”
Sounds, 17 November 1979.
The Adverts were punk as scripted—flare, blaze, ashes. In defiance, Smith has kept at it for half a century. Forming bands, making records, watching some of them get barely or never released, publishing tour diaries, playing thousands of shows. He’ll get on a train with his guitar, show up in Leeds or Amsterdam, plug in, play to a few dozen or few hundred people, head out for the next gig. He released an album, Handwriting, last year.
One could read the story of Wire’s late Seventies as a fight to avoid the fate of The Adverts, the Pistols, of all the punk casualties. It meant a struggle with the press, with their audiences, with their label: a band making knight’s moves across the board. But at the time, it seemed for naught. When Wire ceased operations in spring 1980, they had lasted only a few months longer than The Adverts.
ADVISION STUDIOS.
Advision, 1975
Recording studio, 82-83 New Bond Street (1956-1969); 23 Gosfield Street, Fitzrovia, London (1969-1993).
Every studio recording that Wire released in the Seventies was made in a large room in central London.
Advision Sound Studios is as much a part of this period as Bruce Gilbert’s guitar tone, Colin Newman’s phrasings, and Annette Green’s band photographs. “When I listen to those albums now, the loudest thing I hear is the room at Advision,” Newman said in the late 2000s.
It was far from being some grimy, four-track “punk rock” studio (not that most punk records were made in such places—The Adverts cut their first LP at Abbey Road). Studio One, 45 feet by 35 feet, could hold an orchestra. Wire went exploring and found that a previous user had stowed dozens of guitars behind a screen in a corner of the room. Yes, Gentle Giant, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer all loved the space. (A few months before Wire cut Pink Flag, Rush mixed their latest album at Advision, mostly because they wanted to see the room where Brain Salad Surgery and Close to the Edge were born).
To Wilson Neate, Robert Grey recalled his first impression of Advision: “It was incredibly large and full of strange things… an expensive, purpose-built studio.” And an intimidating one. Grey was racked by doubt, fearing that his band hadn’t rehearsed enough, that the room would show them up as amateurs.
Advision, 1970
Advision began in 1956 as a basement studio on New Bond Street, specializing in jingles and voiceovers for the newly-launched ITV (hence its name, “Ad[vert] Vision”). By the late Sixties, Advision was considered one of the best places in London to cut rock music—even its staff would be immortalized (The Yardbirds’ Roger the Engineer; ELP’s “Are You Ready, Eddy?”). Its humble origins meant that it lacked the institutional stuffiness of a Decca Studios, and Advision’s owners were quick to adopt new technologies: it was likely the first London studio to get an eight-track console; it imported the UK’s first computer mixing desk, the Quad 8, from California in 1975.
In November 1969, Advision moved to a larger space on Gosfield Street, hiring a Swedish acoustician to craft the studio—the floor had triple layers to eliminate vibrations, while the eighteen-foot-high ceilings had similar domed deflectors as those in the Royal Albert Hall. (Within months of the new Advision opening, David Bowie cut The Man Who Sold the World there.) After a time, Advision feared it had created a too-“dead” room sound, so in the mid-Seventies Studio One was reconfigured, with a few bafflers removed, and adding some membrane absorbers tuned to a particular frequency.
“I think everybody got carried away trying to build dead studios and getting absolute separation on tracks and the sounds suffered for that reason,” Advision’s Roger Cameron said in 1975. “We’ve built this studio to give a far more natural sound than before, with one half of the studio designed to be reasonably dead and one half quite live.” The walls were painted a soothing blend of ocher and rust, with dimmable lighting. “An easy studio to spend long periods in” was International Musician & Recording World‘s verdict.
The 26 November 1977 issue of Music Week noted that “Advision has been awash with new wave in the past month,” listing Martin Rushent’s mixing of a Stranglers LP, and Glen Matlock’s Rich Kids recording there, along with a recent EMI signing, Wire.
EMI’s Mike Thorne thought Advision, which by now had a twenty-four-track console, was ideal for Wire since he’d first seen them play at the Roxy. Taken by the clear severity of their sound, even via the notoriously crap Roxy PA system, he wanted to capture the band live in the room. So when making Pink Flag, “unlike the normal, clinically regulated sessions typical of the time, Robert’s drums were placed in the middle of the large studio, to hear real ambience,” Thorne said. “Colin was isolated in the booth where the drums might have been. The group could hear each other and converse, not a possibility on contemporary super-sessions where the musicians were isolated.”
Once the track order was established (Pink Flag‘s sequencing was mostly set before recording started), Thorne ran Wire through their songs, again and again, honing them and drilling them, with Newman in the booth as a spectator and commentator. “We were just desperately trying to get the best performances out of ourselves,” Graham Lewis said. Thorne “was more or less on the shop floor” with the band, Grey recalled, waving his arms to set tempos and to indicate where a drum or bass fill should come in.
Mike Thorne’s sketch of how Wire recorded Pink Flag at Advision; via Wilson Neate’s Pink Flag (33 1/3).
By May 1978, when Wire cut Chairs Missing at Advision, they had warmed to the place. It was no longer the imposing room where they felt as if they’d be fined if they played a wrong note, but their private laboratory, where a mistake—a drum fumble, an unexpected feedback dose—could lead to somewhere more interesting.
“On Pink Flag, Mike was introducing us to the studio,” Newman said. “He didn’t have that role anymore…we knew what [Advision] was like. We were familiar with it, we were happy there.”
Their set-up had changed. Newman was now playing in Studio One with the rest of the group, having become co-“lead rhythm” guitarist with Gilbert. There was also far more time devoted to overdubs, Wire experimenting with synthesizers that Thorne had brought back from the US. These alterations, by the time of 154‘s recording a year later, developed into tensions: Newman was an even more prominent creative force, devoting days to overdubs and looking to move into production, while a Lewis-Gilbert bloc formed to counter what they perceived as Newman and Thorne’s alliance. Advision became the theater of a quiet cold war. Newman would work on songs for his first solo album while Lewis and Gilbert retreated to a nearby pub.
In the two years that Wire recorded at Advision, they replayed the Beatles story in cut time. A young band documents their live set, learning to make an album as they go along (Please Please Me—Pink Flag). A confident, ambitious band turns the studio into a workshop (Revolver/Sgt. Pepper-—Chairs Missing). A band whose members are at odds maps out separate futures while making a spotless closing statement (Abbey Road—154).
AFTER MIDNIGHT.
J.J. Cale’s Naturally (1971); actually a very good record
Composed: John Weldon (“J.J.”) Cale (1938-2013). First release: Cale, Liberty single, Nov. 1966; later: Eric Clapton, 1970, 1988; Cale, 1971. Wire performances: ca. August 1976 rehearsal demo, Watford (unreleased); 1 & 2 April 1977 live recording, The Roxy, London. First release: 13 November 2006, Live at the Roxy.
When Wire played the Roxy on the first two nights of April 1977, they were a newly-reduced unit, having folded from a quintet to a quartet. The first revision of a band which would become devoted to the act of revising.
George Gill was Wire’s founder, primary songwriter, singer, and lead guitarist, and he’d dominated their shambling, hostile debut at the Roxy, opening for The Jam, three months earlier (diary of Roxy co-owner Susan Carrington, on Wire: “urgh, dreadful band”). Then the rest of the group kicked him out.
“The four of us had developed a collective ambition, but George was in his own universe,” Newman later said. “Groups are brutal. But a group that sacks its founding member has committed a very particular act of patricide.”
In the weeks before the April ’77 Roxy shows, Wire purged their setlist of Gill’s songs. The only survivors were his “Mary Is a Dyke” (obnoxious and catchy, it still fit in the mix) and two covers that Wire had played since they began—the Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over” and J.J. Cale’s “After Midnight.”
The Dave Clark Five fit punk orthodoxy. Punks were allowed to do a select number of Sixties hits, as long as these were pre-hippie: after all, the Sex Pistols had started out doing Who, Small Faces and Monkees songs. But a song whose best-known version was by Eric Clapton, who, mere months before, had given a racist diatribe at the Birmingham Odeon, was another story.
Wire’s “After Midnight” sets the song on fire and throws it onto the street.
J.J. Cale released “After Midnight” as a single in 1966. One of few who heard it at the time was the musician Delaney Bramlett. In 1970, helping Clapton with the latter’s solo debut, Bramlett suggested they try Cale’s song. He and Clapton struggled with Cale’s claw-hammer guitar lines, but the song had enough gas to be a hit, breaking the US Top 20 and becoming an FM radio staple. Cale appreciated this, as at the time “I was dirt poor, not making enough to eat and I wasn’t a young man.” The following year, Cale retrieved his song from Clapton, slowing it down, deepening it, sounding as if his voice had been soaked in brandy.
Gill was Wire’s classicist, dismissive of the Modern Lovers (“too weird”) and of punk, which he predicted would be dead by the end of 1976. Wire’s “After Midnight” began as his revved-up homage. But the rest of his band used their interpretation “as a way of taking the piss out of George,” Newman said, as “a way of saying ‘how could you possibly imagine that was any good?'”
Post-Gill, Wire rode “After Midnight” even harder, rattling its bones: they ditched the guitar hooks, even Gill’s sneering lead figures, discarded any trace of R&B rhythms (that “horrible, polite funkiness was what we wanted to do away with, in whatever way we could,” Newman said), and erased much of its top melody. What was left was a bleat and a slam.
Clapton sings the title line as expectation, answering his fall of a fourth on “mid-night” with a leap of an octave (“we gonna let it all…”). Cale, in his remake, has the smiling confidence of a poker ace. And Newman careers through the song, defacing it while keeping a straight face, holding on the same note until he ends phrases by squeezing the closing syllable like a balloon: peachesnCREEEAM…screamnSHOWWT.
As Siouxsie Sioux said, this was a punk stratagem: “taking the piss out of all the songs we hated…’Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,’ ‘She Loves You,’ ‘Young Love’…what song do you really hate? What would you like to throw in as a shock tactic? What can we mutilate and destroy?”
But Wire did a double-edged parody. Their “After Midnight” makes a pogoing joke of Clapton but also mocks the fast-petrifying punk style of spring 1977—it’s a demolition derby. In a performance which the group called the true opening night of Wire, they take punk to an absurd extremity, already on the edge of abandoning it.
ALBINI, STEVE.
Musician, producer, engineer (1962-2024).
To Wilson Neate: “Pink Flag is a perfect record. There are few records you could listen to at any point since the advent of rock music and not necessarily be able to hang them on a certain era and find them rewarding in the same way they were when they came out…If I could make records that sounded that good, I’d be happy…there’s literally no part of Wire that I didn’t want to rip off at one point or another.” (See HEARTBEAT.)
Blue lights in the basement/ Freedom was at hand and you could just taste it…Everything was cool/ The brothers were singing “Ain’t no woman like the one I’ve got”…
The Four Tops at cruising altitude. The spring of 1973 and they have a hit again, a big hit, one to rival their Motown triumphs: “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got),” found on every notch of the radio dial, peaking in early April at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 (#1 in Cash Box), hitting #2 R&B.
Its co-producer, Steve Barri, will take a job with Motown years later. One day Berry Gordy walks into Barri’s office carrying a golf club, sees the gold record for “Ain’t No Woman” on the wall, raises his club and says, with a half-smile, “mind if I smash that?”
“Ain’t No Woman” glides in the radio stream, segued into The Carpenters’ “Sing” and Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”; its fading strings become the Mellotron line that opens Elton John’s “Daniel”; its harmonies soothe after the roadkill yawp of Loudon Wainwright’s “Dead Skunk.”
A song that keeps “Ain’t No Woman” from hitting number one is Gladys Knight & The Pips’ majestic “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye).” Like the Tops, Knight & The Pips have left Motown, after years of service, having grown tired of being the reliable pros, the ones who had to make do. “Neither One of Us” is their last Motown single. Knight & The Pips sign with Buddah, as the Tops do with ABC-Dunhill; 1973 is the year when they all shine elsewhere.
Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds were the first to cut “Ain’t No Woman,” as an LP track in 1972. They do it with broad stage smiles, while the brass players crowd into any space they find: ain’t no wuh-man like the ONE I got y’know it takes a LOT to find uh-nuh-ther BET-ter.
But the Tops parcel out the refrain, each Top taking a line, and they sing the title as a calm affirmation, echoed by a guitar’s satisfied musings, relieving a light tension (“aaain’t no woman like-the-“) by descending a third to close the phrase; it’s like a bottle being uncorked (“one-I’ve GOT”).
Everything about it is assured: the modest but rock-solid beat, the velvet bass, the whoo! that Stubbs exhales as the strings, flute, and increasingly funky guitar usher out the track. “Ain’t No Woman” is sexual equanimity and ease—a song that murmurs and confides at nightclubs and basement parties (Me’Shell Ndegéocello used it as an example of a time when men on the radio praised their women, instead of running them down). But there’s a harsh note near the end: “cause it’s my word, my word she’ll obey.”
Craftsmen
Word quickly spread that Motown had dumped the Four Tops. One Motown executive, Larry Maxwell, told the Tops he’d ask around LA to see if anyone had material for them. He soon called to say he’d found “a couple of badass songs” (as per Duke Fakir) by a pair of songwriters working for ABC-Dunhill: Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter.
Lambert was born in Brooklyn, became a songwriter (he co-wrote “Do the Freddie“), and worked in A&R for Mercury and DCP Records. When he moved to LA, he met Potter, who was nearly a decade older, from England, had drummed in beat groups, had worked for Lionel Bart, and had co-written “Whatcha Gonna Do About It” for the Small Faces.
Within two years, Lambert and Potter had built a catalog, enough for Dusty Springfield to call them a hit factory: “One Tin Soldier,” “Don’t Pull Your Love,” “Two Divided By Love.” And they’d signed a deal with ABC-Dunhill in which they co-owned everything they wrote and produced (“like a label deal, but we don’t have our own label per se,” Lambert told Billboard in 1973).
The Tops liked the demos (“Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman”) and met with ABC-Dunhill president Jay Lasker. He offered them a four-album contract and agreed that the Tops wouldn’t need to relocate to LA (the label would put them up at the Beverly Hills Hilton when they were recording). The Tops asked for $100,000 an album, Lasker countered with $50,000; they settled on $61,500, with the Tops getting a piece of the publishing. The latter point was crucial, as Tops yearned to become self-sufficient, to “create our own publishing company with those royalties coming to us,” Fakir said, and ultimately run their own label.
Talking to Sepia in 1974, Obie Benson described the Tops’ Motown years as “the people who were screwing us were managing us and lawyering us and everything else—it was a bad scene—almost a dictatorship—a plantation. When you’re on the top of the charts you don’t feel it much because they give you a little something to make you happy.” (An anonymous Motown spokesman replied that “we didn’t think they were hot enough for the bread they wanted. When they split they weren’t what they used to be.”)
Lasker agreed, though apparently not on paper, that the Tops would get their own label. At last “we’d be able to control our own product…sign new artists and expand businesswise,” Fakir wrote in his memoir. The deal was announced in September 1972. Legal expenses ate up much of the advance the Tops got for their first ABC-Dunhill album, Keeper of the Castle, released that November.
The Tops in LA with (l to r) Potter, Lambert, and Barri, 1972. The photo got a Stalinist purge-style edit for the sleeve of Keeper of the Castle (above).
Working on the album, Lambert and Potter encouraged the Tops to develop their own songs and handle the vocal arranging, “hoping to give them something to say rather than making them the victims of the chorus,” Lambert told Billboard.
They wanted to prise the Tops loose from their past, to avoid the “grinding, chugging beat in 4/4 time…the Four Tops trademark,” as Potter said, and to spotlight the group’s other members. “Through the Motown years, the group was thought of as a great lead singer with three guys yelling in the background,” he said. “But they really are a consummate vocal group…we wanted to avoid the monotony of one guy doing all the singing.” In another counter-Motown move, “we tried to put songs back into realistic non-screaming keys for them,” Lambert said.
The title track was the lead-off single. Lambert said he introduced the song to the Tops by claiming it was “about the Black man being the true centerpiece of the family, and historically the weak link in the Black family.” (He failed to mention how they reacted to this allegedly “historical” statement, apart from “they said yes—in theory.”) “Keeper of the Castle” is one of the warmest songs about domestic tyranny ever recorded: advice for benevolent patriarchs (to children, be “the provider of all their daily needs/ like a sovereign lord protector, be their destiny’s director”); it hit #10.
“Ain’t No Woman,” released in January 1973, was the clincher. “That motherfucker became a hit the minute it went out,” Fakir recalled. Word got back to them that Berry Gordy was pissed there was a hot new Tops single. When they ran into him in LA, he acted incredulous that they were no longer on his label. “How could I let you go? I never imagined [Ewart Abner] would do that.”
Keeper of the Castle was crafted and packaged as a fresh start—the cover has the Tops as men of property. One of its best tracks was a composition by all four Tops, “Turn on the Light of Your Love,” with a Moog intro, saxophone breaks, and Obie Benson’s rich, raspy performance, especially the darting melody that he sings midway through (starting at 1:38), a series of feints and stresses, as if he’s trying to outflank the chorus. (You can hear how they’d been yearning for their own wild Norman Whitfield-style funk number—being slotted as Motown’s “straight” counterpart to The Temptations had grated on them.)
Benson is the spine of the record. He wrote, with his wife Valaida, two of its best numbers, “Jubilee with Soul” and “Love Makes You Human” (whose keyboard intro was reused in “Catfish,” see below). The latter has a sly Lawrence Payton vocal and subtle, in-the-pocket drumming by Paul Humphrey—it’s the most “Jazz Tops” track on the album, complete with a twenty-four-bar organ solo, chased with a saxophone break, and closed out with more organ. Lambert-Potter’s “Love Music” (“Dennis and Brian got into the groove with us and started tailoring songs for us,” Payton said) is the Tops holding their own with The O’Jays, with a bright Tony Terran trumpet solo. Barri later said that ABC-Dunhill stopped issuing singles from Castle too soon, and that they could have milked it for another year.
The ballads were strong as well—Stubbs scaling the heights of “Put a Little Love Away” (with electric sitar), lingering in the depths of Benson and Payton’s “When Tonight Meets Tomorrow” (piccolo). Lambert and Potter would later give the grand weeper “Remember What I Told You to Forget” (tympani!) to Tavares. And the Benson-sung and Benson/Payton-written “The Good Lord Knows” is gorgeous, especially its ambling verses (Fender Rhodes!).
Main Street People
Duke Fakir at an ABC-Dunhill sales meeting, September 1973, with (l to r) Potter, Lambert, Barri and Jay Lasker.
While making Keeper of the Castle, Lambert, Potter and Barri were working with Dusty Springfield in the same studio in LA. Springfield was undermining herself, cutting note-perfect reference vocals and obsessing over re-recording them. “We weren’t able to convince her how good her reference vocals were, with more flow and feel,” Barri told Springfield’s biographer Lucy O’Brien. Springfield “could never accept that her vocal, cold, was fabulous,” Lambert added. They wound up “punching in so much” that the resulting album, Cameo, often sounded lifeless. Springfield grew frustrated, and once showed up so drunk that she collapsed on the floor.
So the producers came to treasure the jovial, no-fuss Tops, who could nail their vocals in a handful of takes and finish off a background session before dinnertime. “We were recording the Four Tops at the same time, which was so easy in comparison,” Barri said. Sometimes the Tops would chat with Springfield in the studio, heading out for the evening as she was coming in for another grueling night.
The potential for a long-term partnership was there: The Tops, Lambert, Potter, Barri, and ABC-Dunhill. They quickly followed up on “Ain’t No Woman” with a song done for the Shaft in Africa soundtrack, the fierce “Are You Man Enough” (#15 Pop, #2 R&B) (one of its few critics was Stubbs, who claimed “we had far better in the can, but…because the movie was about to be shown nationwide, it would have to be now or never, so they went with it”).
Main Street People (1973) was meant to be a consolidator, to establish the Tops on the same level as their old labelmates Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. In interviews around the time of its making, the Tops were talking about a concept album on “urban issues” but the idea apparently was discarded somewhere along the line, apart from its nostalgia-as-(vague)-social-commentary title track.
The album faltered—its only hit was the earlier-released “Are You Man Enough,” while its two other singles stalled: “I Just Can’t Get You Out of My Mind” (another Tops “Philly Soul” track, if cut in LA) and “Sweet Understanding Love.” The latter, a solid Benson co-composition, was the last time the Tops hit the Pop Top 40 in the Seventies, peaking at #33.
While Lambert and Potter could deliver the catchy radio hit, they had a tendency to dull out in their ballads. In the year of Innervisions and Let’s Get It On, stuffing a Tops record with tracks like “It Won’t Be the First Time” and “Too Little, Too Late,” variations on the same blah theme, didn’t cut it.
Its best tracks were Tops-made. Payton and the Bensons wrote “Am I My Brother’s Keeper” (“my smile’s for children only”), while Fakir, Benson and ex-Contour Huey Marvin Davis wrote “Peace of Mind,” built on a base of chicken-scratch guitar and bongos, with a righteous Stubbs vocal (“we fight for the right to fight and fight again…go on! destroy your soul, brother, to pacify your so-called friends!”).
Meeting of the Minds
In April 1974, the Tops talked to Blues and Soul. They were—at long last!—about to start their own label, to be distributed through ABC-Dunhill. “We enjoy working now. We’re up at eight in the morning, working on a new song,” Benson said. “When we were at Motown, I didn’t even have a record player. I wouldn’t even carry any electronic equipment around because I thought, ‘for what?'” Fakir said the Tops had “a few artists ready to sign whom we won’t name yet until everything’s set up, and we’ll have some releases almost immediately. All the members of the group will serve as producers, A&R men, etc.”
The Tops would develop “young acts who are trying to get into the business,” Benson said. “We’re going to call it the Career Guidance Department. We won’t say Management because that’s a nasty word that has come to mean just taking ten per cent of the artist’s earnings.” Young artists would get “the right contacts” and “when we take a tour, we’ll have a couple of them with us to give them exposure.”
The ethos was “we want to prove that you can be in business without ripping people off. It can be done…We’ve had some big disappointments throughout the years, so we’re going to try to keep them to a minimum for our artists.”
The Tops arranged themselves as a business-in-waiting, a soul cabinet. Fakir, who’d always kept track of the money, was Attorney General, a role described to Sepia as “the one who visits the record company and makes the deals…the business figure.” Benson and Payton, the songwriters and vocal arrangers, would be Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of State, respectively. Stubbs, as the group’s public face, was naturally the President.
But the album meant to launch Four Tops Inc., Meeting of the Minds, released in April 1974, did even worse than Main Street People on the charts, failing to break the R&B Top 20. Its singles—”One Chain Don’t Make No Prison,” their last great moment of strife on record, and “Midnight Flower,” in the inexhaustible rock tradition of songs about magical sex workers—were both hits, but only on Black radio.
Barri said the Tops were among the casualties of the increasing segregation of radio in the mid-Seventies—their singles would consistently make the R&B Top 20, but now died well outside the Pop Top 40. “It wasn’t the records,” he said. “The Tops were no longer embraced by pop radio programmers. The market was changing. Radio went on to other things.”
The group had hit a wall. Touring the UK in November 1974, Stubbs spoke with Blues & Soul and said of Meeting of the Minds, “not our best, I’ll agree, but then we had to work with new producers and we felt obligated to give them a fair crack of the whip and allow them to get across what they felt they wanted.”
A strange statement, given that Meeting of the Minds was the last of the Barri-Lambert-Potter productions, with Lambert and Potter doing their best to give the group livelier and more “relevant” material (the title track, “Right on Brother,” and the back-to-Motown “The Well Is Dry,” complete with “Reach Out I’ll Be There” horseclops in the intro). I wonder if Stubbs was actually talking about the record they were making at the time, Night Lights Harmony, although Barri and Lawrence Payton were doing that one.
ABC, which had been on an acquisition spree in the early Seventies, retired Dunhill in 1975. The Tops were finishing Night Lights Harmony, which fulfilled their original contract (released in April 1975, it was their first LP issued as an ABC release). A quiet, soulful record, it extended their chart collapse.
They met with Lasker to negotiate a new deal and pressed him on the perpetually-delayed plan to have their own imprint. The idea had grown in scope, expanding as the potential for it becoming a reality dwindled. Obie Benson, in a 1975 interview, talked about the Tops opening a “twenty-four-track studio” in Detroit.
Otis Smith, ABC’s newly-appointed head of Black promotions, was at the meeting, and scoffed. “Y’all ain’t ready for that shit,” Fakir recalled Smith saying. “You got that Detroit swagger and all, but you’re not ready to be the kind of businessman it takes to care of this album.” Fakir grabbed Smith, saying “motherfucker, I’ll throw you out this window.” A nonplussed Lasker said “well, you’re sure not gonna get a label now.”
Tops in Japan, 1975
The Tops eventually re-signed with ABC, but their last years there were a recursion of the Tops’ late Motown period. Again, they had lost their champions. In mid-1974, Lambert and Potter moved to Capitol, where they made Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Barri would stick with ABC until it was bought, but he no longer worked on Four Tops records. Lasker was pushed out in January 1975, and formed Ariola America Records later that year.
For the Tops, unlike at Motown, there was no vast, lucrative body of work to draw upon in the lean years—their peak with ABC was two Top 10 singles and one Top 40 album, all of which were now five years old. They had become a second-tier group. “We were devastated,” Fakir recalled. Their candled hopes to build their own business, to be mentors and Detroit boosters, to play the game with ethics—all of it came to nothing.
Moving into their forties, they were still product, and now orphaned on a label that barely wanted them. “We started caring less about what they thought,” Fakir said of ABC. “I suppose they felt the same way about us.”
Disco Daddies, Lost in Space
Fakir thought so little of his late Seventies albums that he claimed in his memoir ABC had released LPs of stale studio outtakes, “material we had recorded under contract to them. By then we were gone.” This doesn’t appear to be accurate, though. The truth is that Catfish (1976) and The Show Must Go On (1977) are the Tops running their own show at last—the most independent that they would ever be, if only because their label didn’t care what they were doing.
The records had Ray Parker Jr. and Melvin “Wah Wah” Watson on guitar, Paulinho Da Costa on percussion, and a host of former Motown Funk Brothers (inc. Earl Van Dyke, Uriel Jones, Eddie “Bongo” Brown) and were mostly cut in Detroit. Lawrence Payton produced them, and most of the tracks were written or co-written by Payton and/or Benson and/or their wives.
Catfish is the Tops, inevitably, going disco. The title track (an R&B #7) is as goofy as it’s horny—in the refrains, the Tops groan “Catfish…makes my nature rise.” Levi Stubbs has to sing “she took me to a fish fry/ that girl danced all night” but can’t bring himself to provide the insinuation the line begs for. Instead he sings “Took Me To A Fish! Fry!” with precise enunciation, as if trying to get a detail right in a deposition. (Catfish returns on “I Know You Like It,” a dance track written for a cruise ship’s margarita hour.) Payton’s stirred up on “Feel Free,” to the point of delirium; Benson’s sated reverie is “Strung Out for Your Love.”
There’s also “Disco Daddy,” which is what you’d imagine the Four Tops doing a song called “Disco Daddy” in 1976 would sound like, apart from a third of it being devoted to the most shredding guitar solo ever heard on a Tops record (possibly by Dennis Coffey).
The Show Must Go On works best when heard at low volume, when it becomes a pleasant half-hour sequence of muted strings, lively bass and Tops harmonies, the words indistinguishable. The title track is a credo for the group’s autumn years (“I’ll go on singing my song/ show must go on, rain or shine, all the time”) and was depicted, for whatever reason, on the LP cover as the Tops being confronted by a cobra. “Runnin’ From Your Love” has labored harmonies that sound like the Tops are hauling logs up a hill.
At the Top (1978) was ABC’s last bid to revive the Tops’ fortunes, handing them to the team of Norman Harris and Ron Tyson, who wrote almost all of the LP’s songs. Harris, a Philly Soul legend, produced the record at Sigma Sound: it resulted in their most promising single in years, “H.E.L.P.” (you can envision Village People-esque choreography for it), but the song died at #38 on the R&B charts.
By the time ABC was bought by MCA in early 1979, the Tops were gone. A decade that had opened with the promise of Still Waters Run Deep would end with the Four Tops much as they had been twenty years earlier. Working the nightclubs and state fairs, doing one-night-stands in towns a day’s drive apart, playing casino ballrooms in the late afternoons; being the foundation of a solid R&B revue; always hustling, forever on the road, able to hook an audience as easily as they put on a suit. No record deal. The occasional three-paragraph newspaper review, the occasional radio spot.
ACT II: DON’T WALK AWAY
The Second Chance, 6 January 1982
The house lights need to stay on, Levi Stubbs regrets. They’re filming the show.
Far East Productions, on behalf of the Pioneer Co. of Japan, is taping in Ann Arbor tonight for future videodisc sale. They’ve roped off much of the dance floor for the cameramen, the lighting and sound techs, and cables that spool out to twin production trailers parked on East Liberty Street.
The Four Tops wear matching black suits, whose jackets they soon cast off. Lawrence Payton is stage left, Duke Fakir to his right, Obie Benson the man in motion—officially to the left of Stubbs, he often darts around to Stubbs’ right, working the room. Stubbs himself: mustached; a touch heftier than when we last saw him; an oak of charisma.
Three decades on the road have burnished the Tops. Stubbs is the great wheel. Payton has always seemed as if he was savoring a private joke: it’s more like a private novel now. He moves lightly, his steps refined. When Fakir and Benson do an aerobic touch-your-toes move, Payton just dips at the waist. Fakir has built up a hustling stage patter. “Sit back and relax, make yourself at home!” he barks as one song ends. “Did you get what you came to see? You doing all right out there?” He has the sharp eye of a maître d’. And Benson is a graceful comedian. He’s grown more agile in middle age, bounding and skating and sliding across the stage, waving and pointing at everyone he sees, as if naming each face.
The Second Chance has a small, low stage and is surmounted by tiers of balconies. It has a dicey reputation in Ann Arbor, known for its heavy metal shows and caveman bouncers, who have a habit of getting sued for assault, including slamming a kid’s hand in a door, booting another in the face, and dangling a third over a balcony (he’d coughed up blood for weeks afterward).
The Four Tops are an odd fit for the place, but the club’s owner, John Carver, sees them as agents of change. “I think he was tired of having a bar he was embarrassed to take his friends to,” one bartender recalls to the Detroit Free Press. The crowds who show up drunk and leave the bathrooms awash in filth and puke. Packs of spotty boys in denim jackets, ready to fight as soon as they park, sniffing around the college town. Carver dreams of having a place with class, somewhere for people with money and a little style. No metal bands, but DJs playing dance hits.
In 1984, he’ll shutter the Second Chance, rename it the Nectarine Ballroom, and try, for a time, to make it an upscale nightclub for “funsters,” as he tells the newspapers.
The Tops can handle any stage—they’ve certainly played worse—and there’s a wink in how Stubbs says “Ann Arbor,” rolling the last “r.” They make of the confined space a showbox, and always know where the cameras are looking (the Tops will get a substantial fee for their performance, along with a cut of the video sales).
They open with “Baby I Need Your Loving,” singing it luridly, with a feeling of impending consummation. “Get it on!” Stubbs yells. “Take it off! Fool around!” After “Ain’t No Woman Like the One I’ve Got,” Stubbs opens his arms, waving in his audience. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, conducting, “we’d like to take a little trip to the Sixties for just a few minutes and reminisce a while! I don’t know about you…but I had plenty of fun then. Do you remember? What it was like then?” Evangelical in his phrasing now. “Cut loose and do what you might’ve done then! We just want you to get involved!”
Stubbs yells “1960!” and the band kicks into “It’s the Same Old Song,” going at a fast tempo, the Tops locked in. A woman in the lower balcony sings as if she’d written the song. “1967!” “Walk Away Renee,” with impeccable harmonies and a wild bassline, brutally cut after its first chorus. “1968!” Stubbs dealing out years. “Do you remember this???” They leap into “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and the room convulses. A man is shaking his head, as if bewildered by memory. “Nineteen Sixty Nine!When we were drinkin’ that fifty cent wine!“ A “Standing in the Shadows of Love” that’s nothing but climax, sung over drum fills.
It’s the basest genre of performance: the greatest hits medley, one’s work reduced to headlines and photo captions. Yet the dexterity of the Tops, how they buckle onto these songs and dispatch them, one after the next, gives their medley a kind of grandeur. They haul in the past—theirs, the band’s, the audience’s, John Carver’s; the past that’s the lie people tell about their youth—and slam it down upon this wafer of a stage.
Yet what gets the most applause, what gets the balconies swaying, enough for the Tops to do it a second time as their encore, is a new song.
“When She Was My Girl,” which peaked at #11 on the pop charts a few months before. It has a lilting groove and Stubbs takes pleasure in its sturdy melody, making each phrase a hook (“shee-hee…used-to-be“) until he throws his curveball in the second chorus. She’s gooooooooooone….THE BIG LEG GIRL IS GONE! He’d improvised the line when the Tops cut the vocal; everyone in the booth cracked up but the producer knew he’d found it, the necessary twist, and Stubbs will sing “big leg girl” in this song for the rest of his life. Obie Benson gets a bassman’s spotlight, singing a run of low notes under a melodica solo.
They’re delighted to be in the same chart as Hall and Oates and Rick Springfield and Christopher Cross. “Anybody that says that they don’t enjoy being on the charts is telling a lie,” Stubbs tells the Washington Post. The single has a last-days-of-analog feel, with synthesizers prominent, not yet all-conquering. On the radio, it segues well with “For Your Eyes Only” and “Waiting for a Girl Like You.”
“When she was my girl,” the Four Tops regret. On their song, The Temptations had soared up on “my,” then wafted down a third to rest on “girl”; the Tops only fall by a tone (G to F), as if her memory has been compromised. The Tops in the early Eighties, summoning a piece of bliss from the mid-Sixties. Everything old is made new again and Motown, as a signifier of something lost, is about to come back, too.
A Night in Casablanca
Will these Detroiters follow the Four Tops into musical oblivion?
Detroit Free Press, review of The Spinners’ Labor of Love, 5 April 1981
Gladys Knight, talking to Newsday in August 1981, believed that the Four Tops had split (“so many pop and rock groups, like the Four Tops and the Supremes, have broken up at this point”). You can see why, as the Tops had been without a record deal for years. Disco was hard on many legacy acts—even James Brown floundered—and the Tops were considered one of its casualties.
The group signing with Casablanca Records, a top disco label and one known for its prodigal publicity campaigns, seemed like a savvy move. But by 1981 Casablanca was a cracked shell of itself.
For Larry Harris, the label’s co-founder, the slide began when Casablanca simultaneously released albums by each member of Kiss, all of which “emphatically bombed” and made its co-owner and distributor, PolyGram, finally aware that “we were losing a fortune…it was impossible that they would fail to notice two million returns. No amount of cooking the books was going to hide truckloads of unwanted records.”
Casablanca had lofted through the decade, its existence one of profitless prosperity, as its founder Neil Bogart described it. Bogart was a New York hustler with a great ear: he got “96 Tears” on tape, snaring a beast in the wild; he had Giorgio Moroder turn “Love to Love You Baby” into a canonical round of orgasms; he knew “Funkytown” was a smash when he heard its keyboard hook, the sound of a pushbutton future. He died of lymphoma at thirty-nine.
His label, founded in 1973, was a scrapper, an opportunist. Like Sixties Motown, Casablanca was a record company as a comic book publisher, its top titles the superhero teams of Kiss, the Village People, and Parliament (the X-Men of the set), along with Donna Summer (the original Dazzler). The label that spun on his records had an illustration of a desert oasis, a market town whisked together in the midst of nowhere. Casablanca lived every cliche of the Seventies music business—office cocaine deliveries, titanic levels of payola—and when the decade died, it followed suit.
The Kiss debacle, followed by the deflation of the disco bubble and Paul Volcker’s recession, was the end. In February 1980 PolyGram bought Bogart out and gutted the label—what had been a 175-person operation was winnowed to 25 by the end of the year. Summer left; Kiss stayed for an extortionate price. So by the time the Four Tops signed with Casablanca, it was a rump enterprise, “little more than a vanity label,” Harris wrote. “From 1981 to 1985, PolyGram used Casablanca as a dumping ground for artists and soundtracks.”
The Tops LPs were in the same catalog as Meco’s Impressions of ‘An American Werewolf in London,’ Aerobic Dance Hits Volume One, Funky Fitness, Heavyhands: The Ultimate Exercise, and the soundtrack to Monsignor.
My copy of Tonight!, with a former owner’s track-by-track annotation: tempo (variable), Super Bad-ness (constant)
Still, Tonight! wasn’t thrown together in the hopes of making a cheap trade on a faded reputation. Charles Koppelman, a Casablanca exec who had survived the purges, saw the Tops as a potentially strong seller, offered them the most promising compositions he had, and gave the record a substantial budget (and the Tops “a nice little advance,” as per Fakir), with tracking done in LA at Cherokee and vocals at RCA in New York.
David Wolfert produced it; Lawrence Payton, as always, did vocal arrangements. Its players were top-echelon pros: drummer Jeff Porcaro; Ron Carter on string bass; Henry Davis, who plays the luxurious bassline on “From a Distance”; the guitarist Carlos Rios; Crusher Bennett on percussion; David Friedman on vibes and orchestra bells; Ralph Schuckett, who plays piano and melodica on “When She Was My Girl.” Composers included Kenny Loggins (“Who’s Right Who’s Wrong”), Raydio’s Jerry Knight (“Don’t Walk Away”) and Stevie Wonder (“All I Do”).
The days of the more democratic Four Tops were over—the record is built on the voice of Levi Stubbs, with the rest of the group as colorists, aside-givers, and supporting actors (Tonight! has some of the best-recorded Tops vocals of their career, with great dynamics). While there are throwbacks to past glories (“look over your shoulder!” Stubbs yells in “Something to Remember”), Tonight! was crafted to be contemporary “adult” R&B, its sound glossed, each instrument placed in the mix as if in a velvet casing.
Take “Don’t Walk Away,” which opens with chimes and rainfall patterns on keyboards, has tensed strings that fly off when a drum fill opens the chorus, a bass figure that shifts from a rapid pulse to a popped-note excursion in the verses, and synth handclaps to rival those on “Bette Davis Eyes.”
It’s a collection of extravagant intros: the guitar, keyboard, strings dialogue of “Tonight I’m Going To Love You All Over” that sets the stage for the four-part harmonies; the saxophone musing on “Who’s Right Who’s Wrong“; the nylon string guitar on “I’ll Never Leave Again“; the synthesizer-to-strings entry ramp of “Let Me Set You Free” (which pits echoed handclaps against a restless bassline—it’s the closest the Tops ever came to a Rick James sound). The essential player is Kashif Saleem, who drapes the record in sounds coaxed from the NED Synclavier II and MiniMoog, particularly on “All I Do,” where Kashif rivals Stevie Wonder in his synth palette: nasally basslines; a high tenor counterpart to Stubbs in the verses; whirring, dancing melodies in the eight-bar solo.
At its best—”Don’t Walk Away,” “When She Was My Girl,” “All I Do,” the fierce “Something to Remember” (Stubbs opens under the gun: “Rumors hound me! Lies surround me!/ Say it isn’t true!”) and “I’ll Never Leave Again,” a fallen man’s beg for forgiveness—Tonight! is the Four Tops at their strongest in a decade. Dressed in late-stage disco finery, they sound hungry again.
One More Mountain (1982) is a lesser Tonight!: same producer, same studios, many of the same musicians—it’s as if Casablanca cloned the earlier record but something went akilter in the lab. If weakened by compositions whose writers have sworn an oath to banality (“take this sad heart, make it a glad heart”), the Tops sound assured, still lively. The uptempo pieces work best—“Givin’ It Up” (longtime player retires, set to scratch guitar); “One More Mountain to Climb” (gentlemen’s electro-funk); “Keep On Lightin’ My Fire” (retired longtime player makes request); “Nobody’s Gonna Love You Like I Do” (marred by canned applause, but Obie Benson saves it); the ballads sag.
Except for “I Believe in You and Me,” which Duke Fakir singled out as a Stubbs vocal masterpiece. It’s Stubbs soaring into falsetto, as if revealing that a grand house has, suddenly, a new top floor. The Tops thought it should have been a smash, but Casablanca dropped the bag by instead making it a B-side to “Sad Hearts”; Whitney Houston finally made the song a hit in the Nineties. A few years before his death, Stubbs sang “I Believe in You and Me” in his last performance. He had suffered a stroke, was in a wheelchair. Aretha Franklin leads it off, and Stubbs finds anchorage in it, singing whatever pieces of the song he can voice.
The Casablanca records sold respectably, put the Tops back on the radio. When they appeared on Motown’s 25th Anniversary television special, filmed in March 1983, they could boast they weren’t some crumbling pillar of the Sixties, but a still-vital act. They were paired with The Temptations for a sing-off (a dress rehearsal: the Tops versus Kool & the Gang for Schlitz Malt Liquor). Cornball yet majestic, the performance is one of the show’s best moments, if eclipsed by Michael Jackson: the grand arrival of Thriller to mass America.
Fakir likened the show’s rehearsals at the Santa Monica Civic Center to a sprawling, oft-estranged family coming together for a wedding.
For the first time since the Sixties, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Tops, Stevie Wonder, Junior Walker, the Temptations were all in the same room. Contesting memories, shit-talking, slapping the boasts down like cards. Michael Jackson took Stubbs aside, said that he played Tops records every morning, that he was in awe of Stubbs’ voice.
Berry Gordy wasn’t around for much of the rehearsals, but took time to pay his respects to the Tops. “Sounding great and looking great,” he said. “Y’all ready to come back?” And they were.
In the last month of the Seventies, days after he turned fifty years old, Berry Gordy learned from his accountant that Motown was insolvent. “You’ve got more liabilities than assets.”
“I knew the responsibility was mine,” Gordy wrote in his memoir. “I hadn’t been paying attention.” He’d gone lost, producing a run of flop movies (The Wiz, Thank God It’s Friday, Almost Summer), and his label was stagnant.
Disco was the province of the shameless and the reckless (see Casablanca); Motown was rooted, cautious. Its marketing operation, once the envy of the industry, was reduced to “let’s hope Stevie Wonder puts out an album this year.” Then even Wonder stumbled, with the brilliant, strange, and unsellable Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants—Motown planned to press two million copies of it until Gordy, upon hearing the record, cut the order by half (“which was still 900,000 too many”).
Another once-savior, Marvin Gaye, turned in a tortured divorce/alimony record and then spent three years on a semi-ironic “love man” record. An exasperated Motown released the latter, In Our Lifetime, without his approval, touching up some rough mixes; it prompted him to bolt to Columbia (Gaye to David Ritz: “Motown shafted me…can you imagine saying to an artist, say Picasso, ‘Okay Pablo, you’ve been fooling with this picture long enough?'”) The Jacksons, The Miracles, The Temptations, Ashford & Simpson, Norman Whitfield were gone. Diana Ross was soon to follow.
Thank God It’s Friday (1978; Motown Productions)
Spending under the delusion that it was still Hitsville USA, Motown’s record division lost $3 million in 1980; the film division was, unsurprisingly, also in the red. It was dire enough for Gordy to consider selling his prime asset: his publishing company, Jobete. Instead he took out a bank loan, to be collateralized by record sale revenues. He described the terms as “the money we got from our distributors [went] directly to a locked box at the bank, where they would pay themselves first, then us.”
An inveterate gambler, Gordy then threw a winning roll. Motown’s last reliables came through for him. Ross’ Chic collaboration, Wonder’s Hotter Than July, Smokey Robinson’s Being with You, the Commodores’ In the Pocket: all went gold or platinum and each had at least one Top 10 hit. He paid off the loan within the year.
But the near-disaster had exposed how fragile Motown had become. The network of independent record distributors it had built over decades—the circulatory system of one of the last big US independent labels left—was fraying. Each time an indie label signed with a major to move their records (A&M, Motown’s former distribution partner, went with RCA in 1979; Chrysalis and Arista with CBS and RCA, respectively, in 1982), more independent distributors collapsed. Each year brought more shipping delays, spottier coverage, more late to non-existent payments.
Bowing to the inevitable, Motown signed a national distribution deal with MCA in 1983. It looked good on paper (Gordy: “one company, one check—that we knew would be there on time”) but it was the start of the end. Motown could no longer dictate marketing strategies to its distributors; it was now a client of a rival.
The Eighties were Motown’s time of scrabbling. Hope the reliables come through yet again, hope for a fluke hit (as happened when DJs revived Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me,” a grotesque “courtesan regrets” single that she’d cut for Motown years before, and made it one of the label’s top sellers of 1982). Gordy slashed executive pay by 15% and hired Jay Lasker, who had signed the Four Tops to ABC/Dunhill, as the label’s new president and COO.
Lasker soon discovered that Motown was riddled through with nepotism: Gordy’s children, siblings, and extended family were in every nook of the business. And he believed the label wasn’t exploiting a trend for which it was ideally suited to exploit.
The Baby Boomers, now in their thirties and forties, were primed to buy albums they had already owned, and almost all of them had owned a Motown record. “Time flies by so fast that the Temptations are becoming nostalgia,” as Chuck Thurston of the Detroit Free Press wrote in October 1980.
In the Motor City, Berry Gordy is seen as an old friend who got advice, didn’t lose his money, but somehow forgot how he’d made it. “Motown has no sound now,” says one Detroiter whose views echo so many others. “It’s just another record company…All they do out there is live off the past.”
Nelson George, Where Did Our Love Go?(1985)
So Lasker issued a score of compilations (Gordy called him “the packager”), flogging them on late-night TV commercials. A syndicated six-hour special, narrated by Smokey Robinson (“The Artists and the Music That Started It All”—Motown as the place where things once had happened), was offered to radio stations for free: giving them a “documentary” that was, in truth, a lengthy advertisement for the Motown catalog. To capitalize on this, as Adam White wrote, Lasker “reactivated dozens of Motown catalog albums as “midlines,” pricing them at $5.98 [the Tops’ Still Waters Run Deep among them] and grossing more than $5 million as a consequence.”
When he saw that Lasker was releasing classic albums as “two-fer” reissues (e.g., What’s Going On and Let’s Get It Onon one CD), Gordy thought the discs looked like “schlock merchandise,” fit for the back bin. “The two-for-ones are keeping us in business,” Lasker told him. “But for how long?” Gordy replied. “We’re selling off our cream.”
No matter. Lasker came to regard his role at Motown as an executor, supervising its inevitable demise. Speaking to the Atlanta Journal in 1983, he claimed Motown’s “sales were up significantly…because we kept a closer eye on what we were doing. We had to. Very frankly, we didn’t have any rich uncle with a deep pocket in Germany or England or a broadcast company to turn to when we get in trouble like other labels owned by conglomerates. So we were very frugal and very selective in the records we put out.”
One result, as per Raynoma Gordy: “What Motown had to show for itself was a million different albums with “Baby Love” and no new talent.”
Motown as a premiere nostalgia brand, increasingly positioned to older white buyers (“The Label That Started It All,” with the unspoken caveat that “It” had ended at some point, probably around the time you hit thirty). And its counterlife: the actual Motown of the early Eighties—a label of mostly Black artists who played R&B and funk, whose records hit in clubs and on the R&B/”urban” charts, but who were rarely in the Pop Top 40: Rick James, the Stone City Band, Teena Marie, High Inergy, Switch, Bettye LaVette, Bobby Nunn, the Dazz Band.
The two Motowns could not be reconciled. Its legacy acts could still manage to get on Top 40 radio, but most of its younger talent was frozen out. A mix of institutional racism at MTV (“they told me Rick James was just not white enough,” Motown’s Nancy Leiviska told Billboard) and Lasker’s refusal to spend money on videos meant that Motown was nowhere on music television.
Apart from one video: a remix of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” cut to scenes from The Big Chill.
Big Chill Campaigns
Even if you’ve never watched Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, you may know the scene. Old friends from the University of Michigan—alleged former student radicals, now in their thirties—reunite for a funeral, spending a weekend in the grand home of Kevin Kline and Glenn Close’s characters. After dinner, Kline puts on The Temptations’ Anthology, kissing the cover as if it’s a holy relic. Jeff Goldblum, who plays the one character who might own a Talking Heads record, teases Kline: “Don’t you have any other music, you know, from this century?” Kline replies, with a sniff: “There is no other music, not in my house.”
Goldblum: There’s been a lot of terrific music in the last ten years.
Kline: Like what?
Case closed. Everyone dances to “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” while doing the dishes.
Music from The Big Chill Soundtrack, issued by Motown in September 1983, was one of the label’s biggest sellers of the decade (“a wonderful soundtrack from a genuinely despicable film,” as per Dave Marsh)—its only rival of the period, in terms of units shifted, was Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down.
Motown first had thought the soundtrack wouldn’t do much. These were old songs you couldn’t promote on the radio and there wasn’t the budget for the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” one of the film’s big numbers. But The Big Chill would be the triumph of Nostalgia Motown (even if only five of its eleven tracks were Motown songs).
Lasker quickly came around once the film was a hit, buying ads on a hundred FM stations with primarily white audiences. “AOR programmers would say this music doesn’t fit their demographics,” he told Billboard. “But the people going to see this movie are basically the same people they say are their demographics. Columbia Pictures tells me, and my own common sense tells me, what the market is on the picture: white, upper middle class college kids and alumni…I think it’s also going to sell in some black shops. But I don’t think that’s where the big market is.”
By early 1984, the soundtrack had sold over 800,000 copies and eventually went triple platinum, spurring the release of More Songs from The Big Chill Soundtrack (also platinum). Columbia Pictures’ Robert Holmes claimed that “Motown has found that people see the movie in a mall theater and come out so happy that they walk right across to the record store and buy the album.” Synergy!
Soon to follow: what the ad industry termed “Big Chill campaigns,” usually set to a Motown track. Lincoln-Mercury kicked it off with a TV spot cued to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (middle-aged people drive to their 25th high school reunion through valley low, river wide, etc.) Young & Rubicam, who made the ad, said it was targeting a market group with “a proclivity to buy imports” to instead consider “buying American.”
Levi’s had an ad in which a soldier, home from some indeterminate war, is handed a pair of 501 jeans by his girlfriend; it’s scored to, naturally, “My Girl.” It culminated in 1986 with the California Raisins dancing to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a piece of late 20th Century minstrelsy in Claymation. There were 300 licensed Raisins products by 1988, including four albums issued within two years (Motown really missed a beat by not being the label to release them).
The other Big Chill effect was the Motown needle-drop, inescapable in movies by the end of the decade. My Girl; nuns singing “My God” and “Ball of Confusion” in the Sister Act pictures; Susan Sarandon, given a terminal diagnosis in Stepmom, warding off the blues by singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” with her kids.
In The Big Chill, the music at least was meant to evoke the characters’ youth. Now there was Motown—reduced to a set of a dozen or so golden hits—as a mood ventilation system. A music free of contemporary troubles, “universal,” bright and solid and everlasting, a music of good times, of elegance, well-cut suits and American cars. A Sixties without a Vietnam, without a Watts ’65 or Detroit ’67; monochrome and monaural and, increasingly, monoracial.
All the compromises that Gordy had made when building his empire, the evasions, the side-steps, all the glosses and airbrushes and tonedowns that he needed to sell his artists and his records: all had been done in the service of a future in which these compromises would not need to be made. But now people yearned for the choreography, to consider as perfection what was meant to be transitory. That the bridge was the destination.
Against this, how could the Motown of the present compete? How could it not seem irrelevant? The Motown 25 special, hosted by a wary-looking Richard Pryor, was greatly the loving recreation of old glories—the Miracles reunited with Smokey Robinson, the classic Supremes (grudgingly) singing together—until Michael Jackson broke the frame with his performance of “Billie Jean,” a sudden incursion of the new. But of course, Jackson was on Epic now.
Back to Back to Basics
The return of the Four Tops to Motown, announced in the summer of 1983, was another sign that the label was calling everyone home.
To keep playing off the “stage rivalry” bit the Tops had done with the Temptations (who had returned to Motown in 1980), the two groups would release albums simultaneously in late 1983, crafted as counterpart reunions.
The Temptations’ Back to Basics, which featured a tuneless duet with the Tops (“The Battle Song”) and a nautical-themed track (“Sail Away”), had songs and production by Norman Whitfield, with whom the Temptations hadn’t worked in a decade. And the Tops’ Back Where I Belong, which had a tuneless duet with the Temptations (“Hang”) and a nautical-themed track (“Sail On”), had songs and production by Lamont Dozier and Brian & Eddie Holland.
The recording of Back Where I Belong was the first time that the Tops and H-D-H had been in the same room since 1967. “A lot of the magic that had sparked between us had gone,” Brian Holland later wrote. “But some of it returned. We came up with half an album’s worth of new songs, which we wrote and produced in exactly the same fashion as we did in the old days. Listening to Levi’s voice after all those years was like stepping into a time machine.”
D Without the H-H
“I tried to get it, but you won’t surrender”: the end, for a time, of the Holland-Dozier-Holland partnership (1973)
By 1973, Invictus and Hot Wax, the record labels that Holland-Dozier-Holland had founded in the wake of their split with Motown, were crumbling.
Singles missed the charts, the acts were restless, payments dried up, the partnership foundered. “We rarely got together to discuss songs or who could cut them and we each began traveling different roads as we got our own responsibilities at the company,” Lamont Dozier wrote in his memoir.
Without Motown as their financier and common cause of complaint, the H-D-H alliance was exposed as the fragile union of two brothers and an outsider. Dozier rarely got his way, as the Hollands were a block vote. He blamed them for Invictus failing to sign Al Green and the Ohio Players, for letting a relationship with George Clinton wither.
Also, Eddie Holland got half of the partnership’s earnings, the remainder split between his brother and Dozier. Eddie claimed this was due to “the other tasks that had fallen to me…I was effectively producing (not to mention schooling) the singers in the studio. I was also active from an administrative angle. Whenever there was a decision to be made, or a problem to be solved, I was the one to whom both Brian and Lamont, and everybody else, turned.”
Lost in a disastrous marriage, an alcoholic who was now suffering panic attacks, Dozier could no longer find solace or even distraction in work. He started recording under his own name again, only to see his singles get barely promoted by a label he co-owned.
Keeping an eye on the Four Tops, Dozier saw the group revive upon departing Motown for ABC/Dunhill. So as Eddie Holland tried to salvage Invictus (“Holland–Dozier–Holland had never known failure in the past. I was adamant that they never would”), Dozier walked away, leaving the Hollands behind in Detroit. He moved to Los Angeles and signed with ABC as a solo artist. Hot Wax folded; Invictus limped on for another few years.
A breakup with the usual repercussions: years of litigation among the Hollands, ABC, and Dozier. “In the end I was finally freed from all my contracts with the Hollands, but I had to forfeit my ownership share of Invictus, Hot Wax and our publishing companies to get completely disentangled. The whole thing was unpleasant, unfortunate, and very expensive,” Dozier wrote.
Goin’ back to being myself I can’t live for nobody else
“Going Back to My Roots”
Still, he could be Lamont Dozier again, not the middle initial of a brand.
He hit with “Trying to Hold On to My Woman” in 1973 and had a solid run, moving to Warner Brothers mid-decade. Some of his finest records were “Fish Ain’t Bitin’,” an R&B #4 whose Nixon barbs (“Tricky Dick is trying to be slick/ And the short end of the stick is all I’m gonna get/ Tricky Dick, please quit!”) earned ABC an angry letter from the White House (some things are eternal); the diaspora funk Going Back to My Roots (1977), cut with Hugh Masekela; and the refined disco Bittersweet (1979), produced by Frank Wilson.
An endearing thing about Dozier as a singer is his inherent gruffness; he’s the most exasperated-sounding of love men. On “Boogie Business,” he yells “Boogie!” like a subway conductor.
Eddie Holland felt betrayed, but over time he could look through Dozier’s eyes. “Throughout those first few years after he went out on his own, people were constantly asking for the three of us. He was always having to explain that he could do it himself and he didn’t need us.”
“[But] I don’t think he understood that the three of us really were much stronger together than apart,” he added. “He could never get that into his head. He would always fight it. He had the thirst for it to be D without the HH. And now it was. But I remember telling him, ‘You could do whatever you wanted on your own, and Brian and I could do whatever we wanted on our own. But we could never be bigger than Holland–Dozier–Holland. Never.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You believe that, don’t you?’ ‘Absolutely,’ I answered.”
Never a great sign when you get the “marina” photo-shoot (1981)
In the early Eighties, Dozier had stopped drinking, was in a marriage which would endure for the rest of his life, and was otherwise a complete disaster. He was being audited by the IRS. He was stuck in an onerous publishing contract and his albums weren’t selling. His house was being foreclosed on. His business manager quit, as there was no money to manage.
So he reconciled with the Hollands, with H-D-H writing and producing for the Real World label (including the 1980 self-titled debut of Sterling Harrison, who sang like a variation on Dozier). His reconciliation with Motown came a few years later, when H-D-H were at the Motown 25 taping, hanging out in rehearsals.
The Hollands already had made their peace with Berry Gordy, once the lawsuits were (temporarily) settled and Eddie had confronted him face to face. “We talked over the past, my departure, the conflict, the lawsuit, and I told him, ‘I blame you for that, because you were the oldest. You knew how to handle that stuff, but you sent me to this person and that person, you refused to talk to me about it and it spiraled out of control,'” Eddie wrote. “And [Gordy] said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. So, let’s make a deal.'”
The Hollands wrote and produced for The Supremes and the Jackson 5, but found the work unrewarding. Motown was no longer Hitsville on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, but a second-tier general entertainment business in Los Angeles. And the Hollands were no longer the magical equation “H-D-H” but a pair of hired guns with a middling track record of late.
The last Supremes album (with the final lineup of Mary Wilson, Scherrie Payne & Susaye Greene), produced and co-written by Brian and Eddie Holland, 1976
One idea, suggested by Motown Productions head Suzanne de Passe, was for the reunited H-D-H to write a Motown-produced Broadway adaptation of Oliver Twist, called Twist, with an all-Black cast. “We were able to set aside the disputes of the recent past, and we worked diligently together, just like we’d done in the old days,” Dozier said. “We came up with a handful of great songs that we were all really proud of.” They wanted to top what Lionel Bart had done in Oliver!: do a Detroit takeover of a storied London property.
Until Motown sent H-D-H “some funky paperwork, asking us to sign over our publishing rights to the songs we created for the score,” Dozier said. He’d already signed a publishing deal with Warner Chappell “and couldn’t have given over the publishing rights even if I’d wanted to! I ended up having to withdraw from the project. Since I was the “idea man,” the Hollands withdrew as well, and the project fell apart.”
This isn’t quite how Eddie Holland recalls it. While he agreed that H-D-H “were going great guns” on Twist, he noted that Dozier was also working on a play of his own, called Angel Quest (a play not mentioned once in Dozier’s memoir). “He wanted to spend [more time] on it, to the detriment of Twist. And finally, he got a bite, and that was it. He pulled out and, because that entire project was predicated on having new songs by Holland–Dozier–Holland, that was the end of it.”
But another 1983 project survived—composing and producing for the Four Tops’ Motown return. The songs came together easily enough. The trio lined up the keyboardist John Barnes for rhythm arrangements and synthesizer programming (Barnes was a Motown regular who’d soon work with Michael Jackson); the Tops were, as always, a quick study in the studio.
One afternoon, a couple of hours after an H-D-H writing session, a pair of FBI agents knocked on Dozier’s door. They asked if the Holland brothers had been there earlier. Dozier realized the FBI had been surveilling his house.
“Now, Eddie and Brian and I have had our differences over the years, but there’s a bond of loyalty there that can’t ever be broken,” Dozier wrote. So he told the FBI, no, the two men they had seen leaving were Jehovah’s Witnesses. He had invited them in and listened to them talk about God in his living room. The FBI came back with a warrant, searched Dozier’s house, found nothing of interest, and left. They never contacted him again. “I still don’t know what it was all about,” Dozier said.
Don’t Look Back, You Can Never Look Back
Motown eventually put the album out, but they didn’t really put it out.
Duke Fakir
In 1983, the Four Tops were back at Motown, back with H-D-H and Berry Gordy, and they made a record whose guests include Aretha Franklin and The Temptations. If you’re not familiar with this album (quite possible), you might wonder if it’s a late-in-career classic, remembered fondly over forty years later. It’s not.
Back Where I Belong stiffed upon release (an R&B #47) and was swiftly forgotten (Fakir, in his memoir, thought that the record had come out in 1985, after Magic). It’s a record on which everyone involved does work so inferior to their past efforts that it feels like a collective act of self-sabotage. “It was the first time we had worked together in so long, there were probably some cobwebs,” Fakir told Billboard in 1985. “We were so glad to be back that we rushed the album.”
It didn’t help that H-D-H and Gordy were at loggerheads again. Dozier claimed that Motown tried the same play as with Twist, asking H-D-H to sign over their publishing to Jobete. “I couldn’t believe that, after everything we’d been through on that very issue,” he wrote. “I wasn’t in a position to do it…and I wouldn’t have considered it. As a result, Motown didn’t really promote the album like they could have, and the whole thing sort of fizzled.”
The Hollands blamed the Jay Lasker-era Motown for being cheap. The first single, one of the LP’s more listenable tracks, ‘”I Just Can’t Walk Away,” started off strongly. “Radio was keen, sales were good, and the promo man was adamant that it was heading for the Top 20,” Brian said. “But only, he said, if Motown put some money behind it.” Eddie: “Berry and I went back and forth on that…but ultimately we could never reach an accord. And then the single started to drop down the chart, so it didn’t matter anymore.”
Back Where I Belong sounds like what it was: men who had been around since the Eisenhower administration flailing in the mid-Eighties. The Tops had been adept, able to handle changing tastes, singing disco and light funk with as much élan as they’d sung Rodgers and Hammerstein numbers. And H-D-H’s records of the start of the decade, particularly the Sterling Harrison album and Dozier’s Lamont, were still credible R&B.
But in a year when labels were going as all-in on synthesizers as companies are now with generative AI, there was no time to adjust, to find the right footing. Instead, the Tops get hurled into the world of Oberheim and Yamaha and the uptempo numbers defeat them.
On the opener, “Make Yourself Right at Home,” Levi Stubbs has to sing over a raucous, downward-sliding synth bass and a battery of keyboard flourishes, and the result sounds like he’s cut his vocal on the floor of an industrial sand plant: “Relax your feelings in my easy chair!..lay back while I open up my…pleasure chest…relax!!!” (one of the more agitated calls to relax! ever recorded). On “Sail On,” the chorus hook is an air raid siren that makes the Tops run for cover.
The best you get are a few worn-out ballads and some “special guest star” shtick, with Aretha Franklin showing up as if the Tops had won a raffle. There’s one outlier: a slow, luxe-ominous version of “The Masquerade Is Over.” Even that track is mixed poorly: throughout the record, the harmonies sound as if they were run through a digital watch. The album’s ideal medium is probably a 96kpbs MP3 file.
D with the HH
Back Where I Belong was the end of H-D-H and the Tops: their footnote. In the following decades, the Hollands and Dozier would work together, drift apart, be drawn together again. As the years went on, the Hollands felt they were strangers in a music business they’d help build. “I suppose I stopped writing for the pop market when rap and hip hop became dominant, and I realized how much things had changed,” Eddie said.
Dozier kept in the game as long as he could. He co-wrote “Two Hearts” and “Loco in Acapulco” (see below) with Phil Collins; he co-wrote a Joss Stone single. H-D-H finally did a musical in the late 2000s—an adaptation of The First Wives Club. The original run closed quickly; a revival in 2015, with a new book and score that interspersed H-D-H’s Motown standards with their newly-written pieces, fared somewhat better. Now the play opened with “Stop! In the Name of Love!,” giving the audience what they wanted.
There came the epilogue years: awards in glass cases, medals, hall of fame inductions, Hollywood Boulevard stars.
After the Hollywood ceremony in 2015, the Hollands and Dozier went to a lunch in their honor. Stevie Wonder sat behind a piano and rifled through their catalog. Has high blood pressure got a hold on me? Love is like an itchin’ in my heart. When you feel that you can’t go on! Drumming chords, laughing upon the swoops of minors to majors, taking one melody line—re-flec-tions of…the way life used-to-be!—and stringing it to another: when I needed the shelter of someone’s arms..there. you. were.
As Wonder sang, Dozier felt everything he’d carried fall away—the resentments, the lawsuits, the grievances and frustrations. He was left with the work. Brian at the piano back in Detroit, seeking with his hands to resolve a verse. A trundle along the bass keys, a sketch for James Jamerson to embellish. Does this key work for Levi? For Marvin? Diana? Wonder sang Dozier a future, showed him where he’d be found in the world that went on after him. “The songs. That’s all that matters now,” Dozier wrote.
He died in 2022, less than a year after his wife passed. “It just took a lot out of him,” Eddie Holland said.
ACT IV: A WALL OF SOLID LOVE
You Know Darn Well, When You Cast Your Spell
The Four Tops’ grand return home had come to naught, so they spent another year trying to do it over again. Their next record, issued in May 1985, was optimistically titled Magic; its cover has each Top clad in a specific color, as if they were Clue suspects.
Rather than Holland-Dozier-Holland (represented only by a plastic caffeinated take on a Sixties H-D-H song, “I’m Ready for Love”), the key figure was now Willie Hutch, who co-wrote and produced most of the LP’s first side, centering the Tops in immaculate mid-Eighties R&B arrangements.
Take the opener, “I Can Feel the Magic,” built on punches of the Oberheim DMX, with washes of keyboards and margin comments by “tasty” guitar and alto sax—there’s room enough for a sixteen-bar Gerald Albright sax solo and an equally long break of volleying Tops harmonies, sax, and guitar, to the point where when Levi Stubbs finally returns to the mike, it’s a mild surprise. “Sexy Ways” has a synclavier hook that’s a cousin to the one in Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson’s “Excellent Birds.” On “Don’t Tell Me That It’s Over,” using an Alfredo Washington bassline as a tightrope, Stubbs is incredulously devastated; Payton, Fakir and Benson offer advice (“don’t do it!”) and comfort.
Hiring Reggie Lucas to write and produce the other half of the record seemed like an inspired choice—his work on Madonna’s debut LP had reminded the Gordys of H-D-H. But Lucas offered a set of nothing compositions (“Don’t Turn Away,” “Again”—just reading the titles fills you with inertia) which have occasionally rising melodies in lieu of choruses; they’re stand-ins for songs. The Tops politely wander through, as if being shown around a house by a realtor.
Magic flopped and the Tops pressed on, starting work on a third album. The sessions yielded the “Hot Nights” single in 1986, their last for Motown. “Hot Nights” is essentially a mid-Eighties Rod Stewart song, suitable for a wine cooler commercial. The Tops sing it better than he could have, but Rod might’ve sold the thing, while the Tops’ single went nowhere. Motown passed on doing another album, and the group was gone again. The Tops/Motown reunion was an empty bag: it might as well have never happened.
Every day now, he woke to find that the walls had moved closer to him.
Berry Gordy had spent nearly thirty years running a record label. Brian Holland said, of the last days of Motown, that there were “a lot more people making decisions, or not making decisions…In the Sixties, we could run in and record when we felt like it. You have an idea, you write it down, you call up the musicians you need, you go in and record. Out in California, though, everything was business. You had to book the studio weeks in advance. There were different people making decisions about what was going to be a hit; all these promotion guys, not really music people, sticking their personal opinions in.”
“It wasn’t about music anymore, it was about what would make money, or what they thought would,” he added. “The problem was, they often thought wrong.” The Hollands and Dozier said Gordy should have never left Detroit, that Motown, ripped from its roots, had become something nebulous and soulless, a brand management company with a gambling habit.
Gordy spent nights at his computer, trying to find an out. Sell the publishing, sell the master tapes at Sotheby’s. Go public. Merge with another indie label. Nothing looked feasible. It now cost a minimum of $100,000 to promote a record, Gordy said—any record, and “you weren’t even guaranteed airplay.” Motown carried a crushing overhead and needed to make $40 million per year just to break even (its income in 1986 was $8 million).
And Motown’s contemporaries were being swallowed up; even the corporations, by larger corporations. In 1986, Bertelsmann bought RCA for $300 million. Sony got Columbia for $2 billion the following year. PolyGram bought A&M in 1989, for $500 million, and then for good measure nabbed Island for $300 million; EMI bought Chrysalis for $75 million.
“It was not only that we were losing money,” Gordy wrote in his memoir. He was running a label whose new releases included Roq-In’ Zoo (“Frig-O-Rator”), Star Search winner Sam Harris (“Sugar Don’t Bite”), hip-hop adjacent General Kane (“Crack Killed Applejack”), and the remnants of a last folly, a “new wave” rock label called Morocco (in a final Marvel Comics parallel, Morocco was Motown’s equivalent, in ambition, embarrassment and longevity, to Marvel’s New Universe). He was the ruler of a kingdom of the ersatz. “I had lost interest,” he said. “After thirty years, it was work, real work.”
In late 1986, Gordy flirted with selling Motown, entering into negotiations with MCA, only to get cold feet when lawyers began hammering out details, which included Gordy being barred from using his name professionally for five years. Stevie Wonder had negotiated a clause in his contract that gave him veto power if he didn’t approve of a buyer for Motown, and the proposed deal, the sale of the largest Black US record label to a conglomerate, had drawn the ire of many, including Jesse Jackson.
Gordy tried to rally, or at least acted like it. In 1987 he fired Jay Lasker, made Skip Miller and Lee Young Jr. co-presidents; he got Al Bell from Stax to reinvigorate the label’s creative division and set a $38 million budget for developing new acts.
It was far too late. Motown had no pool of young talent to draw from (big signings of 1987 included Georgio and Carrie McDowell (“Uh Uh, No No, Casual Sex”)). The label had become a dependent of El DeBarge (dumping the rest of his family in 1986), Lionel Richie (about to go on hiatus until the Clinton administration), and its bottom cards, Robinson and Wonder. The only bet that paid off was Motown signing Bruce Willis to sing sub-karaoke versions of R&B classics, coordinating the album with an HBO special—”Respect Yourself” hit #5 and The Return of Bruno went gold.
Smokey Robinson came into Gordy’s office in the spring of 1988, bustling as usual, talking up his new song as another potential smash. Gordy told him that another smash wouldn’t help. It was time to sell. Robinson sat down, incredulous. “I’m tired, Smoke,” Gordy said. “I know you are, I know you are,” Robinson said, nodding, and, with that, a story ended.
At the end of June 1988, Gordy sold Motown to MCA and Boston Ventures Management for $61 million (MCA would own 20% of the label). Gordy told Jesse Jackson that it had come down to three choices: “sell out, bail out or fall out.” So he’d sold. But he kept his publishing. After all, Jobete earned him $10 million a year, mostly on songs he’d released decades earlier. He wasn’t giving that up yet.
Two months after the sale, the Four Tops put out a new record, their twenty-third album, on a fresh label, Arista. They had been around years before Gordy had imagined Motown; they would be there after it.
The Last Charge
The Tops had approached Clive Davis at Arista, who liked what the group had cut in their last year at Motown, particularly a song by Michael Price and Bobby Sandstrom called “Indestructible.” Davis was masterful at the promotion of grand schmaltz, and “Indestructible” had a chorus worthy of Diane Warren (who also wrote a song on the Tops’ Arista album).
Davis could already hear “Indestructible” being played over workout montages in Stallone movies, soundtracking Super Bowl clips, Jeep Wrangler ads, or Army recruitment spots (U.S. marines storm a Grenadan beach, or Top Gun jocks engage enemy aircraft, while Levi Stubbs hollers “INDESTRUCTIBLE!”—it’s shocking that it didn’t happen).
So Davis signed the Tops, bought the in-progress tracks from Motown and soldered together an album, gave the group money to make a video (the Tops, all wearing Dad jeans, stride through a Hollywood backlot and inspire the gentlest of commotions) and went to work selling the single. Davis flew the Tops to a villa in Spain to do press interviews in Europe; he got the song in NBC promotions for the Seoul Olympics.
And after all of that, “Indestructible” barely cracked the Top 40, falling out after a week; it stalled at #57 on the R&B charts; the album peaked at #149. As Fakir noted, “something about that song just didn’t hit.” Indestructible, the last Tops album of original material, is the work of a dozen studios and nearly as many writing and production teams. The close of a recording life in bright corporate anonymity.
The album was best known for another single, a Phil Collins/Lamont Dozier composition written for Collins’ movie Buster. “Loco in Acapulco” is a more humane version of “Kokomo”—its chorus melody burrows into the brain. It would be the last pop bid (a UK #7) for the group that had sung “Baby I Need Your Loving,” the cosmonauts of “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” Going loco! DOWN in Aca-pulco!
The Tops did a performance of it on Top of the Pops in December 1988. Perfectly choreographed and dressed as always, singing with as much exuberance as they did “I Can’t Help Myself.” Because they had a UK hit, the TOTP producer kept them in London for another day to tape a second performance, causing them to miss the flight they’d booked, which was blown up over Scotland by terrorist bomb. “Loco in Acapulco,” whatever its sins, quite possibly saved their lives.
ACT V: EXEUNT OMNES
Lawrence
Their recording days were over and they settled into a touring life.
Around 1996, Lawrence Payton, who had felt worn down, went to a neurologist, who found that he had high PSA levels. He didn’t go back for a follow-up exam, as the doctor recommended. “He tried to put it out of his mind for a year,” Fakir wrote, until one night, when the Tops were playing Atlantic City, Payton couldn’t go on. He had developed a boil and felt awful. The engagement was cancelled and Payton flew home to Detroit, where he learned that cancer had spread from his prostate to his liver and bladder.
The other Tops visited Payton in the hospital, held “little meetings with him, talking like we always did,” Fakir wrote. “But it became too difficult for him to speak. He’d just nod.” Payton was moved to his house in Southfield, a Detroit suburb, where he died early in the morning of 20 July 1997.
“He just eased on out,” Fakir said. Payton was fifty-nine, “the youngest one of us. We weren’t prepared to let him go.”
The funeral was in Oak Grove. BeBe Winans sang. Stubbs, Fakir, and Benson did a tune that Payton had written a few years before: “there’ll always be the four of us.” They stood at Payton’s casket, “touching him for the last time,” Fakir said. “We cried like babies. It was inconceivable that he was gone.”
They had all thought that once one Top was gone, the others wouldn’t perform under that name again. “But somehow we decided to carry on,” Fakir said. They would tour as a trio. Their manager suggested an alteration—the Three Tops, or The Tops. After briefly considering the latter name, they balked. “We’d worked together for years to remain a foursome, which was our identity,” Fakir said. “The Four Tops was a brand, not a number.”
For a few seconds each night, in the space between when the announcer said their name and when they took their positions on stage, there were still four of them.
Obie
One day in 2004, Obie Benson stubbed his toe, or “at least that’s what we thought,” Fakir said. After a week, the toe grew discolored and Benson had pains shooting up his leg. He kept doing gigs although he could barely dance—he’d have a physical therapist massage him before and after. He passed out in the middle of a Christmas performance. Somehow he kept working until March 2005, when he sang “Reach Out I’ll Be There” with the Tops on the Late Show: it was his last appearance.
The doctors told him he had gangrene, that it had spread, that his leg had to be amputated. Benson woke up after surgery, dazed on painkillers, and screamed at the doctor, “motherfucker! I came to you with a hurt leg and a bad toe and you cut off my whole motherfucking leg!” Fakir said that Benson called him, incredulous, begging him to come get him out of the hospital, as though somehow “the two of us could fix it.”
While Benson was in the hospital, they ran further tests and found he had Stage Four lung cancer. He had a heart attack while undergoing chemotherapy and died in Harper University Hospital in Detroit, in the early morning of 1 July 2005. He was sixty-nine.
Levi
“Having Levi still alive was my greatest consolation,” Fakir wrote.
Stubbs was never the same after Payton died. The three-man Four Tops toured for a while, but Fakir had to do all of the high harmonies, and Stubbs grew wearied. They became a quartet again, hiring an ex-Temptation, Theo Peoples, as their new tenor.
One night, before a show co-headlining with the Beach Boys, Stubbs found that his legs and voice were too weak for him to perform. Ronnie McNeir, the Tops’ pianist, had to be the fourth Top that night. When the Tops walked on stage, the audience yelled “where’s Levi?” A Four Tops without Levi Stubbs was inconceivable, yet here it was. (Another shout: “what’s up with those shoes?” McNeir had had no time to get proper shoes and wore his own, which were fit for piano pedals, not dancing).
Stubbs left the Four Tops at the end of the century: his last show was a Christmas party at the White House, in the ebb of Bill Clinton’s presidency. In the years afterward, he had a series of strokes which, at times, left him unable to move. A man with one of the most magnificent voices on earth now struggled to speak. He developed diabetes and his teeth had deteriorated—the latter was owed to a horrific dentist Stubbs had seen during a UK tour, Fakir claimed, saying that Stubbs’ teeth had never recovered. Fakir would visit Stubbs to find him “lying in one spot, moaning and groaning.”
Stubbs died in his home in Detroit, early in the morning of 17 October 2008. “His passing was merciful for him but it just killed me,” Fakir said. “It was the first time in my life that I felt truly alone.”
Duke
Duke kept living.
“I’m not going to ever retire,” he wrote in 2021. “The Lord can retire me…I know I’m not in the fourth quarter anymore, I’m in overtime.”
He would be the remnant, the original in the group’s new formations [the early 2010s version seen above]. The Four Tops would be Peoples (1998-2010, 2025-; lead vocal), McNeir (2000-present; second tenor), Lawrence Payton Jr. (2005-present; bass/baritone—Payton’s son and Benson’s heir in the group), Harold “Spike” Bonhart (2010-2018; lead vocal), Alexander Morris (2018-2025; lead vocal), and Michael Brock (2024-present, first tenor).
Fakir did a podcast, he wrote a memoir, he was on stage until autumn 2023—in his old age, he had a baronial elegance in his manner. He was here for so long that it became difficult to imagine a world without him; it still does. He died of bladder cancer and heart failure in his home in Detroit, on 22 July 2024. He was eighty-eight.
The Four Tops (A Four Tops) are doing a run of shows in California in a month. Berry Gordy is still here, as are the Hollands. Motown is a brand, a playlist, an earmarked time. Hitsville is a museum. Detroit endures.
A night at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, at the dawn of the Sixties. The Four Tops are young; they ring with ambition. Tonight they’re part of Billy Eckstine’s act. Before the show, Eckstine takes Duke Fakir aside, parts the curtain with his hand, tells him to look out at the audience.
“Take care of them. They’ve been taking care of me no matter what I’ve done all my life,” Eckstine says. “Don’t play them cheap, because they will be your life.” And so they would be, and so they were.
64 Quartets 
