Both Rankine and Mackenzie shared the view that during the progressive-rock era of 1967 to 1975, the art of classic song craft had died, having been smothered by exhibitionistic instrumental virtuosity. Ironically, Rankine was one of the postpunk era’s great guitarists. “There was a definite period around 1979–81 where, because of the setup in bands—just guitar, bass, drums, vocal—it was the guitarist who virtually carried the can for all the sound textures in the group,” says Rankine. “I was just trying to use the most basic effects, like the Roland Space Echo turned up full, to make the biggest sounds I possibly could, just to back up the grandeur of what Bill was trying to do vocally. You’ve got to remember, he had no backing vocals harmonizing with him. I tried to make a wall of sound without sounding like punk thrash. Postpunk was all about the creeping back in of degrees of subtlety, giving the song a chance to breathe.”
The Associates’ sound mixed postpunk modernism (the ice-swirl spires of Rankine’s guitar) and the more postmodern traits of New Pop. In the Associates’ case, that meant flashbacks to the stylized romance of bygone forms such as prewar torch songs, postwar musicals, Sinatra-style crooners, and existentialist balladeer Scott Walker’s orchestrated solo albums. Mackenzie’s towering vocals conjured up a lost era when the malady of love was expressed in epic proportions, when singers
luxuriated
in grief. “There was a hell of a Germanic thing going on in our music too,” says Rankine. “Billy got that from Kraftwerk. He liked the starkness. A lot of Bill’s vocal melodies are not rhythmic. They’re stately, they’ve got a dignity to them. He was very conscious that he didn’t want to get into things that were too obviously rhythmic, because that would have been too Americanized. It’s only in retrospect, when you’ve got a whole body of work, that you notice, ‘Wait a minute, how come we haven’t got one song that’s really groovy, and with some overt sexuality to it?’”
And yet the music was erotic in its textured sensuousness, while Mackenzie was nothing if not a highly sexual being. “It’s the weirdest thing. I knew Bill was gay from the moment I met him in 1976, but it really didn’t cross my mind again,” says Rankine. “When we were recording, Bill would sometimes disappear from the studio for six hours at a time and I’d think to myself, maybe he’s off walking around getting ideas for lyrics or just clearing his head. But for all I know he was out cruising for six hours!” Mackenzie was actually more omni-sexual than “gay” in any strictly defined sense. Or as Rankine puts it, “He’d shag anything with a pulse! But the serious side of that was that this was a guy who was constantly questioning himself. He was striving for the third sex.” Mackenzie himself confessed, “I’m the type of person who sees beyond genders. I don’t have many emotional boundaries or hang-ups about who I like, where I like, when I like…. I can swing with the best of them.”
For their self-released debut single, the Associates covered Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging.” Their version came out in late 1979, only months after the original left the charts. As a way of announcing themselves to the world, it neatly combined hubris and homage, simultaneously sparring with and paying tribute to Bowie, one of the biggest influences on Mackenzie’s vocal style. The single caught the ear of Fiction Records, the New Wave subsidiary of Polydor and home of the Cure. In August 1980, just as the music press buzz about Scotland was building, Fiction released the debut Associates album,
The Affectionate Punch
. The striking cover image showed Mackenzie and Rankine as athletes hunched together at the start of a running track. It was a “clean,” healthy, faintly Nietzschean image expressing the singer’s belief that music, bodily movement, and physical fitness were closely related. “Bill had been a very good runner, I had been a very good tennis player,” recalls Rankine. “So that imagery was related to trying to be…not superior exactly, but rising above the shit and nonsense of rock ’n’ roll and the music business.”
The Affectionate Punch
’s windswept never-neverpop garnered a warm critical reception, but sales of the album were modest, and the Associates quickly parted company with Fiction. Mackenzie’s and Rankine’s master plan for 1981 was to make their mark with six singles released in swift succession via the label Situation Two, an imprint of Beggar’s Banquet. Mackenzie announced in
Melody Maker,
“1981 is going to be the year of singles. [Singles] are a lot more fun and disposable and they’ve got an air of excitement about them.” The singles plan was also a bit of a scam. Now living in London, the Associates desperately needed income. In addition to Mackenzie and Rankine, there was also bassist Mike Dempsey and drummer John Murphy to support. They had wrangled money out of a publishing company to record demos, ostensibly to send to major labels, and used the funds to book ultracheap graveyard shift sessions at a studio. “Nine
P
.
M
. Sunday night until nine
A
.
M
. Monday morning, only a hundred pounds,” says Rankine. In a fever of chemically enhanced creativity, the Associates went into the studio every Sunday night for ten weeks and worked until nine in the morning. The substantial difference between what the recordings cost and what Situation Two paid for the singles enabled the group to live handsomely. “I must stress there’s
nothing illegal
about what we were doing!” says Rankine. “It’s just that we weren’t telling Situation Two we were making the singles so cheaply. So it
felt
like a scam to us.”
The coproducer of the Situation Two singles, Flood (who would later work with Depeche Mode and U2) has spoken of “the element of chaos” surrounding the sessions. Rankine and Mackenzie “were full-on, just hyper-creative and a good laugh. They were pretty fueled and go-faster on the sessions and a lot of ridiculous things went on.” Avid but naïve consumers of drugs, they once ended up in the hospital after recklessly snorting seven grams of speed (they thought it was actually one gram of cocaine). “We were just about dead,” Mackenzie told
Melody Maker
. “It was the first time I’d taken speed and I didn’t know anything about it. We just seriously overdosed. I was a virgin, pharmaceutically. Freakin’ out, man!” Rankine recalls the two of them being in the same hospital room wired up to EKG monitors for four days. “Bill was opposite me, and me opposite him, so I could see his heart rate readout. And when his went to one hundred fifty-eight, mine would go up in a panic attack. And when he saw my readout, his would go up even further. It was just a vicious circle. Consequently our balls shrank up inside our bodies and our knobs were the size of walnuts.”
The music that the Associates produced during these chemical-addled sessions was psychedelic, not in any literal, flashback-to-1967 way, but in its pursuit of mutated sounds, saturated textures, and unusual instrumentation. “We did things like ‘balloon guitar’ where you fill a balloon with water until it’s the size of a fairly small breast, and then get feedback out of your amp and modulate it by wiggling the balloon directly on the strings,” recalls Rankine. “We got into glockenspiel, xylophones, vibraphone, but using them in a manic way that hadn’t been done before. We also did vocal treatments. ‘Kitchen Person’ has Bill singing down the long tubing off a vacuum cleaner, while on ‘White Car in Germany,’ some of the vocals were literally sung through a greaseproof paper and a comb!”
One of the Associates’ greatest songs, “White Car in Germany” taps into the un-American “Europe Endless”–ness of Kraftwerk and Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. Mackenzie operatically declaims cryptic lines such as “Walk on eggs in Munich” and “Düsseldorf’s a cold place/Cold as spies can be” over a metronomic march rhythm. There was definitely something Old World about the Associates’ 1981 singles, an ancien régime atmosphere of fading grandeur. “Q Quarters,” another Associates classic, sounds like Hapsburg dub. Its furtive rhythm, broken balalaika riff, echoing footsteps, and dank electronic atmospheres conjure cold war scenarios redolent of
The Third Man
and
The Ipcress File:
partitioned cities, deportations, informers, and double agents. “Ooh, that’s a dark song,” says Rankine. “I’ve heard dogs howl to ‘Q Quarters,’ run out the room and cover their heads with their paws! Bill just let rip with the imagery. The line ‘Washing down bodies seems to me a dead-end chore’ comes from his grandma, who had worked in the morgue during the Second World War.”
Beginning in April 1981 and ending eight months later, the run of six singles received rave reviews but none got anywhere near the charts. Yet gathered together on the compilation album
Fourth Drawer Down
(the title referred to the place the group kept the herbal sedative pills that helped them achieve a warm, pleasantly fuzzy comedown after their manic Sunday-night sessions), the Associates’ 1981 output added up to an astonishing body of work. Mackenzie and Rankine were dissatisfied, though. “At the beginning of last year I thought it was going to be the year of singles,” Mackenzie recollected in an early 1982 interview. “And it was. The thing with our singles was that they got peeled off the turntable halfway through! We want to keep our singles on the turntable this year.” The Associates’ ambition wasn’t going to be sated by being critical darlings and cult favorites. They wanted to be the Bowie or Roxy of the eighties.
BY MID-1981,
Postcard Records had reached an impasse. In many ways, the label had achieved astonishing things in an incredibly short period. Orange Juice’s second single, “Blue Boy,” sold nearly twenty thousand copies and has been described as the Scottish “Anarchy in the U.K.” for its galvanizing effect on new bands north of Hadrian’s Wall. With Orange Juice’s, Josef K’s, and Aztec Camera’s singles barraging the upper reaches of the independent charts, Postcard took Scottish pop from a buzz in 1980 to the Sound of 1981. London’s myopic A&R scouts took heed and started flying up to Glasgow and Edinburgh in droves.
Try as they might, though, Postcard couldn’t propel its groups onto the pop charts. In April 1981, Orange Juice’s fourth single, “Poor Old Soul,” was number one on the independent charts but it only reached number eighty on the “real” charts, where penetrating the Top 75 was the industry definition of a hit. Frustrated, Horne began to contemplate the previously abhorrent notion of hooking up Orange Juice with a London-based major label before the momentum they’d built dissipated. It seemed it might even be necessary to slap a coat of gloss over the group’s music. Orange Juice still sounded too scruffy and scratchy in the pop-chart context.
Meanwhile, Josef K took the next logical step and recorded their debut album. What should have been a triumph turned into a debacle.
Sorry for Laughing,
as the LP was originally called, sounded too glossy for the band’s liking. “The manic and abrasive edge apparent when we played live was missing,” says Haig. Josef K proceeded to rerecord the entire album (jettisoning some of their best songs in the process). Retitled
The Only Fun in Town,
it was released in June 1981. “
Only Fun
was all recorded in a couple of days, like a Velvet Underground record would have been,” recalls Haig. “We purposely drowned the vocals out with guitars in order to get a more live sound. It was an unconscious act of commercial suicide, definitely!” In hindsight, Malcolm Ross regrets the decision. “We should just have released the first version,
Sorry for Laughing
. It would have been out six months earlier than
Only Fun,
so we wouldn’t have lost all that momentum we had.”
Josef K’s critical champions, Morley at
NME
and McCullough at
Sounds,
were horrified by
The Only Fun in Town,
feeling the group had betrayed its pop promise and their expectations. Despite the bad reviews, the album actually sold well, climbed the independent charts, and even enjoyed something of a legacy through its influence on a breed of abrasive indie guitar pop, exemplified by such mideighties bands as the June Brides, the Pastels, and the Wedding Present. But in 1981, the perception was that Josef K had missed their moment. By autumn, the group had split up, with Haig leaving to pursue an electronic-dance direction as Rhythm of Life.
In the last months of 1981, Postcard looked out of step. Synths, string sections, and a slickness beyond Horne and his groups’ reach were the new state of the art. Fatally, the Postcard sound was a rock scholar’s idea of “pure pop.” It played fantastically well within the circuit of the music press and the independent charts, but compared to “proper” pop music it sounded spindly and amateurish.
Still, Postcard had played a huge role in turning hipster opinion against the dowdy seriousness of postpunk. Almost single-handedly they’d made melody, fun, and love songs cool again. “Funk” was the big buzzword of 1981, but few remembered that Orange Juice’s “Falling and Laughing” featured a disco-y bassline or that the group had precociously celebrated Chic. Postcard and Orange Juice had put the concept of “pop” back on the table, but pop, that cruel mistress, had moved too fast for them to keep up. Or had it?
SYNTHPOP
THE HUMAN LEAGUE ARRIVED
with as much fanfare as a new group could hope for. Signed to Virgin, they were touted as the next big thing. David Bowie proclaimed that “watching them is like watching 1980.” Admittedly, he said this in 1979. Still, to be decreed a full year ahead of the pack by the glamdaddy of all things cutting-edge was indeed a fabulous endorsement. When 1980 actually rolled around, though, the Human League seemed stuck. They’d been one of the very first postpunk outfits to talk up “pop” as something to aspire to. Yet they’d failed to become pop. Their first two albums for Virgin, 1979’s
Reproduction
and 1980’s
Travelogue,
sold modestly. Compared to Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco production of Donna Summer and Sparks,
Reproduction
’s version of electrofuturism sounded creaky and strangely quaint, and the League knew it. “We wanted our records to be more brutal on the rhythmic level, but at that point the engineers and producers available in Britain weren’t up to it,” says Ian Craig Marsh.
Travelogue
sounded slightly more forceful and glossy, but a hit single continued to elude the group. As if to rub salt in their wounds, on the eve of its release, pop punkers the Undertones ridiculed the Human League in their Top 10 hit “My Perfect Cousin.” “Kevin,” the song’s goody-two-shoes subject (he’s got a degree “in economics, maths, physics, and bionics”), starts an electronic band with some art school boys. “His mother bought him a
synthesizer,
” spits singer Fear-gal Sharkey with disgust, “Got the Human League in to advise her.” Now that he’s in a band, Kevin gets girls chasing him, “But what a shame/It’s in vain…Kevin, he’s in love with himself.” The song crystallized the early Human League’s public image as music for narcissistic art school poseurs and science geeks.
The group’s cold, off-putting aura was exacerbated by the science-fiction subject matter of many of their early songs.
Reproduction
’s big single, “Empire State Human,” concerned a man who keeps on growing.
Travelogue
’s “The Black Hit of Space” imagines a record so monstrously bland that it turns into a kind of predatory cultural void sucking up everything in its path. As it climbs the charts, the rest of the Top 40 disappears, “until there was nothing but it left to buy.” All the witty astrophysical details in the lyric (gravity being so multiplied in proximity to the disc that your record player’s tonearm weighs “more than Saturn,” and so forth) only confirmed the band’s geeky image. These were the sort of people who read
New Scientist
and
Omni
and who watched James Burke’s
Connections
.
In a bid to stake their claim on being “tomorrow’s pop today,” the Human League came up with the ambitious and slightly loony idea of doing fully automated shows. “Talking Heads asked us to be the support group on their 1980 U.K. tour and we said, ‘We’ll do the gigs but we wanna be in the audience and watch the show,’” grins Marsh, still enthused by the idea over twenty years later. “We’d got these new synchronization units that operated the slide show in sync with the music. We guaranteed that while we wouldn’t be onstage we’d be at every gig talking to the audience, shaking hands and signing autographs.” Says Martyn Ware, “We’d got a long way down the line, all the programming was done. It was going to be this big multimedia show, but Talking Heads changed their minds. Maybe they thought they were going to be upstaged.”
It was as if a curse thwarted the Human League at every step. In May 1980, the League’s
Holiday 80
double single scraped the lower end of the Top 75, and
Top of the Pops,
almost in an act of charity, invited them to appear on the show to perform their cover of Gary Glitter’s “Rock ’n’ Roll, Part One.” Even after this fabulous exposure to the British record-buying public, Human League didn’t make the true Top 40 hit parade. What really hurt was that by mid-1980 it seemed like virtually
anybody
wielding a synth could become a pop star. One year earlier, Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” had reached number one, the first in a string of huge hits for the group’s singer and mastermind, Gary Numan, and the trigger for a deluge of synth-laced chart incursions from acts such as John Foxx, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Ultravox, Visage, and Spandau Ballet. Everybody but the Human League. In the year since Bowie had heralded them, the group had gone from being ahead of their time to lagging behind the futurist pack.
Numan had become a synthpop pioneer almost by accident. Making the first Tubeway Army album in Spaceward Studio in the summer of 1978, he stumbled across a Minimoog left behind by another band. “Although I liked some electronic music I still associated it mainly with pompous supergroups [and] disgusting, self-indulgent solos that went on for half an hour,” Numan said. Before the rental company took the synth back, Numan messed around with it. “Luckily for me the synth had been left on a heavy setting, which produced the most powerful, ground-shaking sound I had ever heard.”
Following this revelation, Tubeway Army’s debut album abruptly swerved from its guitars-only conception to an electronically turbocharged New Wave. This was a transitional sound, hard rock with a futuristic sheen, rooted in the clean punchy riffs of glam. “I was just a guitarist that played keyboards,” Numan said. “I just turned punk songs into electronic songs.” The Moog sound was fat and doomy, not so far from the down-tuned bombast of Black Sabbath, and the way Tubeway Army’s music
moved
had nothing to do with the sequenced pulse beat of Moroder. On
Replicas,
the group’s breakthrough album, the rhythm section was human and potent, with Numan playing guitar as well as keyboards. The next album,
The Pleasure Principle
—which was released under Numan’s name—upped the futurism and abandoned guitars for synths. Numan still avoided programmed rhythm, however, working with a bass guitarist and flesh-and-blood drummer. Numan’s music
rocked,
and even when it didn’t, it possessed an almost symphonic grandeur. Just listen to the chillingly beautiful “Down in the Park,” a sort of dystopian power ballad.
Critics, possibly disconcerted by the way he bypassed the music press en route to the top of the charts, unjustly pegged Numan as a Bowie clone. They sourced his image in Bowie’s aristocratic alien from
The Man Who Fell to Earth
and his sound in
Low
. But what he actually derived from Bowie was the art of creative synthesis—or as Numan put it with characteristic and admirable frankness, “plagiarism”—weaving together an original identity out of pilfered bits and bobs. He also inherited glam rock’s penchant for theater and spectacle. Punk’s “antihero thing” and back-to-basics simplicity were “against everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” Numan explained. He didn’t believe in “being the same as the audience.” He liked distance, a literal gulf between the stage and the crowd. His tours featured stunning lighting, set design, and even robots. “Showbiz for showbiz’s sake more than anything,” Numan explained. “I think I’m just taking it back to cabaret.”
Numan had no time for social realism or everyday subjects, instead adapting his lyrics from a science-fiction novel he’d tried to write. The saga concerned a city in the near future administered by a “wise” megacomputer originally created by humans to bring their society back from the brink of anarchy. The machine decides that humans are actually the problem and embarks on a secret program of elimination. Numan’s lyrics feature a menagerie of “types.” The “friends” of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” are cyborg buddies or sexpals. The Grey Men perform the IQ tests that determine who gets culled first. The Crazies are guerrillas hip to the Machine’s master scheme who fight back.
Lost to all but the most hard-core Numanoids, the details of this dystopian metropolis weren’t important so much as the moods—isolation, paranoia, emotional disconnection, hints of sexual confusion—conjured by the song scenarios. In his autobiography,
Praying to the Aliens,
Numan discussed the way
Replicas
teems “with images of decay, seediness, drug addicts, fragile people and the abandonment of morals. The bisexual allusions are partly based on encounters I had with gay men, most of who were much older than me, who had attempted to persuade me to try things. I was never interested in gay sex…but the seediness of those situations left an impression which I used in
Replicas
.”
Beyond the futuristic sound and imagery, what really hooked Numan’s legion of fans was the vulnerability. Gary’s sullen pout and wounded eyes made for a perfect pinup in the classic teenybop tradition. Numan had transgender appeal. Girls could dream of thawing the iceman, bringing him back to life. Boys could identify with his loneliness, allegorized in songs such as “M.E.,” in which Numan sang from the point of view of “the last living machine” on an Earth where all the people have died. “Its own power source is running down. I used to have a picture in my mind of this sad and desperately alone machine standing in a desert-like wasteland, just waiting to die.”
Teen dreams of tech
noir
alienation,
Replicas
and
The Pleasure Principle
were like cartoon versions of Joy Division’s
Unknown Pleasures
and
Closer
. But Numan’s true contemporary parallel and inspiration was the far less revered Ultravox. Despite having a fairly fierce sound, Ultravox’s artifice and mannerism sat uneasily with punk, and critics generally wrote them off as glam Johnny-come-latelies. Guitars dominated their sound at first, but by 1978’s synth-laden
Systems of Romance,
they verged on a kind of electropunk. Numan was listening and taking notes.
What really made Ultravox crucial precursors of 1980’s synthpop explosion was their European aura and singer/lyricist John Foxx’s frigid imagery of dehumanization and decadence. He told
ZigZag
that the group’s style was based in rejecting rock’s standard “Americanisms.” Billy Currie, the band’s keyboardist, was a classically trained viola player, and he determinedly avoided blues scales. “We feel European,” said Foxx, when
NME
asked why they’d recorded
Systems
with Kraftwerk producer Conny Plank at his studio near Köln. “The sort of background and melodies we tend to come out with just seemed to be Germanic even before we came here.” As for the atmosphere of numb anomie and alienated sexuality, Ultravox laid it all on the table with the debut’s manifesto-like “I Want to Be a Machine” and “MySex,” which bore the heavy imprint of J. G. Ballard’s
Crash
. “MySex is a spark of electro flesh,” sings Foxx, “A neon outline on a high-rise overspill…skyscraper shadows on a car-crash overpass…”
After three unsuccessful major-label albums, Ultravox were in an even worse place than Human League, and at the end of 1978, Island dropped them. Foxx went solo and totally synthetic, abandoning not just guitars but real drums, too. On his debut solo album,
Metamatic,
Foxx developed the cinematic (and cinephile) quality already glimpsed in Ultravox songs such as “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” The imagistic lyrics resembled fragments torn from an avant-garde screenplay: “A flicker of flashback, background dissolves…Underneath the green arcade/A blurred girl.” Foxx’s unveiling as a solo artist coincided with Numania, and benefited from it. The singles “Underpass,” “No One Driving,” and “Burning Car” dented the lower end of the pop charts, but Foxx didn’t achieve anything comparable to the success of his young admirer.
Meanwhile, two other former members of Ultravox, Billy Currie and guitarist Robin Simon, had stumbled on an entire scene based around electronic music and the romance of all things European and cinematic. After being junked by Island and ditched by Foxx, Currie and Simon drowned their sorrows at a Soho nightspot called Billy’s where Rusty Egan deejayed a weekly event called A Club for Heroes. Bowie was the patron saint. His “Heroes” defined the musical mood of grandeur and decay, while his wardrobe of images and personae set the fashion tone somewhere at the intersection of aristocracy, androgyny, and alien. Egan’s soundtrack mixed the Berlin sound of Bowie and Iggy with Moroder, Kraftwerk, early U.K. electropop such as “Being Boiled” and “Warm Leatherette,” and new synthpop outfits such as Belgium’s Telex and Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra. When the party moved to a larger venue called the Blitz, its crowd became known as Blitz Kids.
At the core of the scene was Egan’s flatmate, Steve Strange. He was the club’s doorman, weeding out the riffraff and preserving the atmosphere of in-crowd elitism, while his ever changing image defined the Blitz Kid style as a blend of retro (bolero hats, toy-soldier coats, Russian cummerbunds, pillbox hats) and futuristic (geometric haircuts, stylized makeup that turned the face into an abstract canvas). Strange soon became the front man of Visage, a confederacy of punk failures looking for a second shot at stardom. Founding member Egan had drummed in the Rich Kids, the much hyped but unsuccessful group formed by Glen Matlock after leaving the Sex Pistols. Another Rich Kid, Midge Ure, played guitar. Filling out the lineup were Ultravox’s Billy Currie on keyboards and violin and no less than
three
members—keyboardist Dave Formula, guitarist John McGeoch, bassist Barry Adamson—of Magazine, another postpunk band that had failed to deliver on high expectations. Strange had the least impressive résumé of the lot, his sole exploit to date being a brief involvement with a punk outfit tastelessly named the Moors Murderers who’d garnered a few outraged tabloid headlines.