I think people sometimes forget how bad music was in the late eighties. With the exception of a few groups like the Pet Shop Boys and The Pogues, it was dire out there. Christ, I even had to buy a couple of Wonderstuff and Kingmaker albums for the duration for Chrissake. That's HOW bad it was.
I ended up doing the sensible thing and delving back a few years, rediscovering a few artists like The Jam, The The, Wire, early Human League and, being the musical sheep that I was, religiously buying those albums that the NME would list every two years as the best albums of all time. (Check out that list next time it comes round. Chances are the same top ten place will be in place as was there five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago with a wee bit of musical chairs on the parts of the music journalists to give the impression that they give a toss.*)
Two of the more leftfield groups I got into from the late seventies/early eighties were Gang of Four and the Au Pairs. Part of post-punk music that also comprised of groups like Delta 5, Pop Group, Scritti Politti and Josef K amongst others, it was definitely the case that the music the Au Pairs and Gang of Four wrote and played - all angular, stacatto and with lyrics that would seriously look out of place in Smash Hits - they did fall out of favour quite soon after they were that month's bright young things on the front page of the inky music papers. But every once in a while Q music magazine, or other such worthy, would feature them in a 'Where Are They Now' article, and as suspected the group members had all become respectable upstanding members of society of sorts.
Since getting into them, I would occasionally stumble across a fellow Gang of Four fan but Au Pair fans were rarer to find than a quorate ICC meeting, and with the exception of Greil Marcus writing at length about them (see Reidski below for more), Gang of Four were little more than a curio down the years for most people. 'Something to do with music in Leeds?' 'Did they form before or after The Mekons?'
Well, with the advent of groups like Franz Ferdinand and The Killers being played on the jukebox on Emmerdale, I guess the time is right for the Gang of Four revival to kick in now. Reidski has already waxed lyrical about them here, by way of him telling the world that he has a ticket for their Shepherd's Bush gig at the end of this month, and today's Friday Review in the Guardian carries an interview with Andy Gill and Jon King and a tribute from Red Hot Chilli Peppers Flea.
"In fact, Gang of Four weren't straightforwardly political, taking ideas from the 1968 Paris student uprisings rather than from ideological dogma. The artwork for their debut album, Entertainment!, featured a smiling cowboy shaking a Native American's hand with the caption: "He is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him." It was a potted education in capitalist evil."
As the excerpt from the interview above indicates, it is perhaps because Gang of Four were more influenced by situationism - and I'm sure reading somewhere that they were sympathetic to the autonomist marxist group, Big Flame, of the time - that their politics have not dated as much as some of the agit-prop from the same period. But let's be honest, if the music in the first place wasn't so brilliant no one would give a toss what the political content of their lyrics were like. Just ask Pop Group.
* A fun game for you and the family: just shuffle the following ten albums every six months or so, and you too can come up with the greatest albums of all time: (In no particular order, as they will be switched around at a later date) The Beatles 'Revolver'; Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going on'; 'London Calling' by The Clash; Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited'; 'Exile on Main Street' by The Rolling Stones; Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks'; John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme'; 'Velvet Underground' by Nico and Velvet Underground; Love's 'Forever Changes'. I know that is only nine out of the ten but it wouldn't be an all time top ten list if the current favourite album of the CD wasn't inserted in there to give it that contemporary feel. What if it happens to be Keane's debut album this week? Those are the rules.)
6 comments:
Damn, and not a single woman in the top ten. (I don't count Nico as she was just a spawn of Warhol.) I would have at least hoped to have seen Patti Smith's 'Horses'.
It's not my list. I would have Patsy Cline in there for her voice alone, and in a good year I guess Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' would be hovering just outside the top ten.
But remember, according to 'The Shoe', Patti Smith's 'Horses' didn't even make the NME end of year poll. Daft, I know.
Wow, you wait six weeks for a blog from Darren and three excellent ones come along at the same time.
Before I go on: 2-1 against the forces of evil this afternoon - now wasn't that good?
I hold my hand up, I also dipped into the Wonderstuff and Kingmaker. But I don't think we should apologise for that. But the late eighties also gave us, to mention a mere tow, the Pixies and Huskur Du - surely you will recognise both as among the greatest of all time? But we also got some good shoe-gazing stuff like Stone Roses and, errrrr, fuck, that's it. You're right, the late eighties was shit. It was the early nineties that heralded in a new era of great music!
Anyway, welcome back to blogging, you have been missed!
Oh, and lay off with the compliments regarding my stupid crappy blog, I blush very easily.
Ah, a fellow spirit. Delta 5, Josef K, Gang of Four, and of course, my favourites, the Mekons, who are still at it. Pop over to Counago & Spaves sometime or to Club Mekon. You won't feel lonely for long.
Hello John,
There isn't any chance that you have heard of a Scottish group from the late seventies called 'Flowers'. They were a female led group who played angular post punk that was very reminiscent of the Au Pairs and early Altered Images (who were of course really Siouxsie and the Banshees clones ;-).
I don't think they ever released an album but there best song, 'After Dark', appeared on the second Earcom compilation on Fast Product Records. 'After Dark' is a real lost classic - its sound and lyrical is right up there with PJ Harvey's early song, 'Dress'.
The reason I'm falling back on your extensive knowledge on the subject is because of a Mekons connection. A friend sent me some tracks of theirs which he had originally been recorded on tape (remember them? ;-) and which have now been converted into mp3s, and a couple of the tracks are from a Peel Session from '79. One of the tracks, 'Tunnels' has John Peel at the end of the track where he names the track but where he also mentions that the Flowers were going to be supporting the Human League and the Mekons on tour later that year.
I can find bugger all about them on the internet, other than the tracklisting on the Earcom compliments. Any chance of putting me out of my misery?
Hello Reidski,
Thanks for the kind comments.
The result Sunday was brilliant but after seeing the goals I wonder if Celtic would have got the result if Boumsong was still in the centre of Rangers defence? I'm not going to disparage the result. I just think we had that bit of luck in the game that we didn't have in the last two games with the unmentionables. It's still going to be a long season ;-)
The incident from the game that really sticks in my mind was that bit just after the second half started and all you could hear on the telly was this wall of sound (Phil Spector, eat your heart out)of 55,000 Celtic fans singing 'Walk On'. It was amazing - real hairs standing up on the back of my neck time - and what happens? Hutton whips in a brilliant cross and Ricksen equalises with a well placed header. I had to smile in a rueful way when the 55,000 voices suddenly stopped mid-song, and all you could hear was the faraway noise of a few thousand Rangers supporters, at the opposite end of the ground, spluttering their muffled cheers through their half eaten meat pies and bovril.
On the music front, I'm not knocking Happy Mondays and/or The Stone Roses. They were both great groups (though The Las were always my favourite group of that period) but we just need to both admit that the period prior to that, from '86 to '89 - with a few exceptions -was a particularly shite period for music. It was because the music of that time was so dire that I'm afraid the nostalgic bug of always looking back on music caught me even then and it still hasn't let up. I just know that five years from now I will finally be getting round to listening to The Strokes and The Libertines.
I will be playing catch up with music for the rest of my life ;-)
BTW - Looking forward to your future blog on the Gang of Four concert later month. I've already reserved my seat to read it. ;-)
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