Scritti increasingly focused on language itself as the mechanism of oppression. On the sleeve of the group’s third release, the
Peel Sessions
EP, a page from the imaginary book
Scritto’s Republic
proposes the idea of language as a sort of conductive fluid for power, permeating our consciousness and constructing “reality.” On “P.A.s,” the last track on
4 A Sides,
Green sings about 1920 in Italy and 1933 in Germany as moments when “the language shuts down.” In his most honeyed, airy tones, he ponders the mystery of popular support for totalitarianism: “How did they all
decide
?/What was irrational/Is national!” Then he imagines mass unemployment making the same thing happen in eighties Britain.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, another of Green’s theory gods, argued that all of humanity’s problems stem from our bewitchment by language. The problem, then, was: How do you think your way out of the cage when the only tools are
made
of language? The fraught energy of
4 A Sides
’s “Bibbly-O-Tek” wilts away with the bleak aside “which reminds me, there’s no escape,” before rallying itself for the struggle. Throughout
4 A Sides,
the sheer joy and fervor of music making itself triumphs. “Doubt Beat” sounds resolute, Morley’s driving drums and Jinks’s wriggly, tuneful funk bass conjuring what Gramsci called “optimism of the will” as a bulwark against the lyrics’ “pessimism of the intellect.” The
Peel Sessions
EP, though, sounds like the document of a group that’s foundering. The music feels like it’s shaking itself apart. Green sounds harrowed by thought. “That’s a genuinely ill record,” Green said of the EP some years later. “As some kind of index to my state of mind at the time I find it frightening and I can’t understand it now at all.”
The group’s hard-core lifestyle of self-neglect and self-abuse—not sleeping, eating infrequently, gobbling stimulants, the malodorous squalor of life in the Carol Street squat (which had no bathroom)—took its toll. The stern regime of questioning everything and constant ideological wariness wore Scritti down, too. An abortive recording session in mid-1979 intended to produce a couple of EPs went terribly wrong as the group’s formidable powers of critique turned upon themselves and nothing they produced seemed worthwhile. At the extreme, Scritti’s impulse to challenge every aspect of “the rock process” (even the word “rock” was suspect, Green preferring “beat music”) could resemble Maoist self-criticism tribunals, where party members rebuked themselves for counterrevolutionary and crypto-bourgeois tendencies. “It was all tunneled through Green’s absolutely monomaniacal insistence on what was
correct,
” observes Penman. “He spent most of his time disapproving of things, like an unwashed Pope.”
Scritti’s mind-set started to get embattled, even paranoid. One minute Green proposed dismantling the entire capitalist structure of competition between bands (“Why can’t Western rock bands work like jazz musicians—sharing equipment and ideas, helping each other at just that basic level of co-operation?” he pondered), and the next he was describing a battle to “win space,” which translated as displacing rivals like the Pop Group by discrediting them ideologically.
There was a hefty component of pure ego involved in Green’s intellectual combativeness, too. Typical of Scritti’s abrasive interactions with “opponents” was their encounter with the genial improvisers of the London Musicians’ Collective, also based in Camden, with headquarters a mere few yards from the Engineer, a pub whose back room, according to LMC cofounder Steve Beresford, had become “the court of Scritti.” One evening after the Scritti collective attended an LMC performance, everybody retired to the Engineer, where there was a huge ideological row between the two postpunk factions. Beresford recalls Green “denouncing the bourgeois imperialist improvisers and claiming that
he
was playing ‘
people
’s music.’” For Green, the LMC represented “formalist” experimentation at its most self-indulgent and whimsy addled.
Founded just before punk, in 1975, the London Musicians’ Collective was conceived as an open-to-all alternative to the existing Musicians Co-Op, which was closer to a members-only guild. British improvisational music culture had definite affinities with punk. Being such a small scene, it pioneered a do-it-yourself approach from the early seventies onward, with independent labels such as Incus and publications like the “squabblezine”
Musics
. “There were anarchist ideas floating around,” says David Toop, another LMC cofounder, and notions of incompetence as a liberating force had filtered down from Fluxus and John Cage to inform outfits such as the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an orchestra in which everybody played an instrument at which they weren’t fully proficient. Sinfonia participants included Brian Eno and Steve Beresford.
The LMC believed in bringing together ultravirtuoso improvisers and nonskilled naïfs at events like their Jazz Punk Bonanza festival. “At the time, I was more interested in playing a sort of electric noise music, so I really liked the chaotic side of punk,” says Toop. He and Beresford especially loved the exuberant, primitivistic racket of the early Slits. Says Beresford, “It was hilarious the way they chanted one-two-three-four at the start of each song, not to count in the beat, but because they thought that’s what punk bands
did
as a ritual. And Palmolive’s drumming was amazing, like speech rhythms.” Beresford actually ended up
in
a later incarnation of the Slits, providing “daft noises” on flügelhorn, keyboard, and toy instruments during an American tour.
By 1979, postpunk’s scope had widened so far that its activities overlapped with the prepunk experimental fringe, and musicians such as the Slits’ Viv Albertine began to gravitate toward the LMC, a place where absolutely anybody could play. The LMC space, in a building formerly owned by British Rail, “was filthy and had terrible acoustics,” says Beresford. There was usually no PA system and, according to Toop, a fair proportion of the four or five gigs per week had “no redeeming qualities at all.” Despite all this, the LMC became a real vortex. Its hallmark was fluidity, endless one-off collaborations, musicians being involved in several different groups at once, and so forth. All this polymorphous shifting and drifting represented an attempt to deconstruct the conventional rock band. These loose conglomerates operating on the boundary between music and noise seemed a world away from pop’s melodic sweetness, brand recognition, and long-term careers. And yet the LMC would outdo the entire postpunk world when the Flying Lizards—a Dada-pop outfit featuring contributions from Toop and Beresford, among others—scored a U.K. chart hit bigger than any achieved by PiL or Joy Division.
In the autumn of 1979, the Flying Lizards cover of “Money (That’s What I Want)” took the avant-classical sound of “prepared” instruments into the U.K. Top 5. The bass drum on the single isn’t a drum at all but a bass guitar being hit with a stick, while the banjolike piano sound was created by throwing objects—rubber toys, a glass ashtray, a telephone directory, a cassette recorder, sheet music—inside the piano. Cowritten by Motown founder Berry Gordy, Jr., “Money” is most famous as recorded by the Beatles in 1963. The Flying Lizards’ cover sounds like the Fab Four decided to rerecord it circa “I Am the Walrus.” The distortion-overloaded guitar solo gesticulates wildly like an overexcited man and the backing vocals sound like tribespeople chanting in the rain forest. Lead singer Deborah Evans replaces Lennon’s lusty working-class rasp with icily enunciated aristocratic disdain.
The mastermind behind Flying Lizards was David Cunningham, whom Toop originally met while teaching at Maidstone College of Art. Cunningham wasn’t really a musician so much as a self-taught producer, a scholar of record production, in fact, who listened closely to auteurs such as Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and Lee Perry. In a strong bargaining position after the success of “Money,” he negotiated a deal with Virgin that defined Flying Lizards as a production company and allowed Cunningham to work with a range of musicians, which over the course of two albums would include the Pop Group’s Bruce Smith, composer Michael Nyman (Cunningham’s mentor at Maidstone), and Robert Fripp.
An exercise in pop absurdism, the self-titled debut album from the Flying Lizards featured a Brecht-Weill cover, Sanskrit chants, found sounds, and unlikely instrumental textures. Cunningham’s penchant for excessive studio processing and daft effects intensified the spirit of whimsical artifice that infused the whole project. Still, Cunningham insisted that there
was
“a kind of punk element to the Flying Lizards,” if punk meant simply that you could “do what you felt like doing.” In fact, his idea of punk in 1977 hadn’t been the Clash but This Heat, a highly experimental outfit whose attempts to fuse sonic radicalism and political rage rivaled the infernal intensity of the Pop Group. Cunningham ended up managing This Heat and coproducing their debut album.
Formed a few years before punk, This Heat originated from the same milieu as King Crimson and Soft Machine. There were still audible after-traces of “progressive” in This Heat’s music, especially the plaintive, Robert Wyatt–like vocals. But mostly their sound was determined by late-seventies dread and a spirit of headfuck extremism inspired equally by dub,
musique concrète,
and sixties free jazz. This Heat’s slogan was: “All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four hours alert.”
Believing that “anything was potentially a source of music,” as drummer/vocalist Charles Hayward put it, This Heat collected piles of “broken instruments, damaged toy pianos, half-functioning speaking dolls.” Nonmusician Gareth Williams played a vital role. “Sometimes it would just be down to him playing one note on a keyboard for twelve minutes and slowly manipulating all these effects pedals, making music out of that one note,” recalls Hayward. “It was a refocusing of what ‘technique’ was. Instead of
andante
or
legato
it would be ‘angry’ or ‘stumbling over.’”
The year 1977 provided This Heat with a climate in which their “desire to commit violence to accepted notions of music,” as Hayward puts it, suddenly made perfect sense. “There was a wellspring of punk possibility that accepted and nurtured us, even though we weren’t part of it,” says Hayward. Through David Cunningham, This Heat got access to a studio called Cold Storage, a former meat fridge in a disused South London pie factory, which enabled them to undertake prolonged, in-depth experiments with tape editing. For their self-titled 1979 debut LP, they spliced together lo-fi live recordings with twenty-four stereo tracks recorded at another, more high-tech studio, creating a disconcerting friction of ambiences.
Yet, This Heat’s music wasn’t a formalist-style experiment for its own sake, but abstract protest music, seething with rage and commitment. Nineteen eighty-one’s
Deceit
was almost a concept album about nuclear Armageddon. The opener, “Sleep,” depicts the System lulling people into apathy with consumerism and entertainment, “a life cocooned in a routine of food.” Like so many of their postpunk peers, This Heat wanted to awaken listeners to an acutely discomforting awareness of the world’s evils. The music itself, through its fractures and internal clashes, instills a painful alertness. “That’s why our music wasn’t psychedelic and drifty, why it was so hard edged and angular. We had no interest in making people
stoned
with our sounds,” Hayward says. The band also projected this ferocious sobriety via their image.
Deceit
’s back cover shows the band—Hayward, Williams, and multi-instrumentalist Charles Bullen—dressed in ties and jackets bought at thrift stores, with short, neat haircuts and stern frowns. “The music bred a sort of pride,” says Hayward. “Our look was related to the idea of pulling yourself together, so that you could fight back against these bastards who were ruining the world.”
Deceit
was released on Rough Trade in 1981, when the label was at the height of its power and influence, the vortex of London’s postpunk vanguard. The label’s roster included a hefty proportion of the city’s most adventurous bands—Scritti, the Raincoats, This Heat, Essential Logic, the Red Crayola—along with non-London luminaries like Young Marble Giants, Cabaret Voltaire, Swell Maps, Kleenex, and many more. With a couple of exceptions, all of the above were featured on an epoch-defining compilation designed to introduce the Rough Trade groups to the U.S. market,
Wanna Buy a Bridge?
Released in 1980,
Bridge
is typically described as a life-changing experience by those Americans who bought it.
Rough Trade musicians frequently worked on each other’s projects, a cooperative ethos fostered by label head Geoff Travis. Charles Hayward drummed on the Raincoats’ off-kilter classic
Odyshape,
while Mayo Thompson’s the Red Crayola evolved into a Rough Trade supergroup featuring Swell Maps’ Epic Soundtracks, Essential Logic’s Lora Logic, and the Raincoats’ bassist Gina Birch.
Birch had migrated from Nottingham to attend Hornsey College of Art, arriving in London just in time to get swept up in punk’s “wild, unfocused energy.” The initial trigger for the Raincoats was seeing the Slits. “I was absolutely sick and jealous,” recalls Birch. “But it was that sort of motivating jealousy, ‘I would
love
to have done that.’” She formed the Raincoats with Ana da Silva, a poetic Portuguese woman who, at twenty-seven, was eight years older than Birch and had a doctorate in languages and a thesis on Bob Dylan under her belt. They eventually settled on an all-girl lineup with Palmolive (recently departed from the Slits) on drums, and a classically trained violinist named Vicky Aspinall, previously a member of a feminist all-women musical collective called Jam Today.