Simon Reynolds on Postpunk

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

"Our own correspondent is sorry to tell, of an uneasy time that all is not well" ('Reuters', Wire 1977)

While punk's initial amphetamine flash was a beguiling antidote to what had come before, it dissipated as rapidly as it arrived. But the ground illuminated by its fleeting glow yielded enough energy to create a greater fireball, one that has flamed since, spitting out sparks to reignite the spirit. What came in punk’s wake fed on its fundamental promise, but took its revolutionary stance far further.

Postpunk didn't so much describe the stylistic signature of the music, as situate it in a particular time and place, bestowing it with the political weight of the era. Punk rallied against the cultural climate of the time, but its direct progeny found a far greater rallying call responding to the political climate. It was a bleak time, the late 1970s and early 80s, and postpunk was a rare pocket of dissent to the new right doctrine sweeping the West.

While its musical traits have been mined over the last few years by acts such as Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Maximo Park and Art Brut, there's something missing. The body moves but it has no soul. For those familiar with the initial postpunk vanguard - Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, PiL et al - this Noughties wave feels like a shallow facsimile, an exercise in exploitation. Nothing personal, they just don't have the oppressive weight of a troubled epoch on their collective shoulders.

"In some senses I think postpunk was one of the last places left to go," muses British music journalist Simon Reynolds. Author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Reynolds has constructed a compelling journey through postpunk and its many aspects - including industrial, New Pop, and Goth. At last a definitive telling of what's described on the cover as 'the most exhilarating moment in Britain's pop/rock history'. Reynolds, who previously penned the history of the nineties rave phenomenon Energy Flash, has covered postpunk in exhaustive and fascinating detail.

"I don't know if people are inspired by the politics and cultural context," he continues. "I get the impression that people don't know that much about it, and there's a certain aspect that is unrecoverable. Someone that grew up after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and communism can't imagine what it was like when it really did seem like the world could get blown up. I think some of the fear of that time is something you can't communicate to people who are young now."

It’s also impossible to ignore the artistic advances made in this six-year period. Reynolds asserts in Rip It Up and Start Again that after punk's digressions into back to basics rock'n'roll, the postpunk pioneers were intent on creating a sound that had no historical precedent. This they largely achieved, bringing adjectives like angular, desolate and abrasive to the forefront of the rock lexicon. Although he's in two minds about the real gains made by the bands covered in the book, Reynolds upholds Leeds legends Gang of Four as an example.

"In some ways Gang of Four were like a pub rock band. They liked to drink a lot and they were playing this white, aggressive, amped up kind of black music. But at the same time they were able to create something that did seem precedentless at the time. By the way they used technology and by exaggerating the spikiness of Wilco Johnson's playing in Dr Feelgood and bringing in dub, and by the way they approached things in this incredible premeditated cold-blooded way. The only things it reminded me of at the time were certain disco records, and it was such an abstraction of those disco records, so stripped of what disco was about, it just seemed so new."

Gang of Four were a highly politicised band, coming from the radical student left. The aggressiveness of their manifesto was an integral part of their music and lyrics. Amongst their postpunk contemporaries there were more strident units (Scritti Politti), and those whose message was delivered in a subtler, and perhaps more subversive package. John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols organisation PiL, and Manchester's revered Joy Division are two that come to mind. By issuing challenging, compelling albums that entered the broader public consciousness, they left glowing embers that would ignite again and again throughout the preceding years.

"Obviously Joy Division weren't as big a band as the Doors, say, or Jimi Hendrix," says Reynolds. "But I think in terms of pushing the boundaries of rock music it is equivalent work. And they created waves within an audience that existed then that was looking for figures to show the way forward - in the same way that in the Sixties people were looking to musicians to lead the way forward."

Joy Division's Ian Curtis was certainly one his generation's answers to the pop culture prophets of the 1960s. His tragic death by his own hand in May 1980 guaranteed his place in the pantheon of rock's departed deities. Late Joy Division producer Martin Hannett told Jon Savage (author of punk history England’s Dreaming) that Curtis "was one of those channels for the Gestalt: the only one I bumped into in that period. A lightning conductor."

While Curtis and Hannett are two who were obviously unavailable to recall their memories of the period, Reynolds has interviewed an outrageous amount of participants - over 120. Certain individuals - John Lydon for instance - didn't respond, but of those who did there was a lot of enthusiasm for the project - although some needed the theme explained.

"A lot of them, when I mentioned postpunk, they didn't quite understand what I meant," recounts Reynolds, still mystified. "Which is odd, because I did all this research in the music papers, and that was what people called it, even then. It's always been known as the postpunk era, it's not something I've invented! So they didn't necessarily have a grip on it, but when I started explaining what I wanted to do about halfway through the interview they'd suddenly get very animated. Like they'd forgotten what a great time it was, and what a great time they'd had. Even though there was a lot of fear at the time, and political fear and anxiety and stuff going on, they would get really animated as they remembered it. Nearly all the people I spoke to were very accommodating."

Just as British punk was inspired by Stateside frontiersmen such as the Ramones, MC5 and Stooges, its own sparks leapt across the Atlantic, in some kind of cultural handshake. Post Modernist-savvy acts like Talking Heads, Devo, Pere Ubu and the Residents all contributed to a movement that was at odds to the prevailing cultural paradigm of North America. All around the world enclaves inspired by punk, and motivated by its offspring, began to emerge. In New Zealand Children's Hour, Danse Macabre, The Gordons, and some of the early 1980s Dunedin music can be attributed to this. Postpunk must have tapped into some preternatural instinct in this country, as both Joy Division and The Fall found early chart success here.

Reynolds says that of all those he interviewed, there was no one overriding common experience. There are mixed feelings, but the majority are immensely proud to have been a part of something so potent.

"Nobody I spoke to disowned what they'd done, or thought it was ridiculous. There was this sense that it was an urgent thing that they were doing. And that's one of the things that is hardest to recreate. Sometimes when I've done interviews, especially with younger people, they get a certain look in their eye, like 'Oh really? Did you really think this was subversive or was going to change the world?' They can't even imagine that it would be possible to believe that. And that's what I was trying to get across, that rightly or wrongly, whether it was a delusion or not, people really thought that what they were doing mattered. It all came from punk I suppose - the punk part of postpunk is very important. There's this tremendous reinvigorated and revived sense of the power of music."

As the more aggressive edges of postpunk were blunted by time, and critical acclaim, a new movement grew out of it. A music concerned with hijacking the charts, using the machinery of the music industry to achieve its subversive ends. New Pop included such chart luminaries as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, Human League and Heaven 17. The post bit remained intact, but the punk bit was perhaps no longer so relevant. At least on the surface…

"Martin Fry from ABC said 'I am a punk, I always have been and always will be,'" says Reynolds. "They saw themselves as living out punk, just by trying to excel and make the most spectacular record they could. To make a record that sounded like a classic disco record but with these sort of biting lyrics, they felt that was part of punk. As much as they rejected the standard rock'n'roll format that punk rock was rooted in on the whole, the punk part of it, that sort of missionary zeal was something they tried to live out."

Simon Reynolds
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984
(Faber and Faber)

See the full transcript of the interview with Simon Reynolds on the Author's website: www.simonreynolds.net

10 Essential Postpunk Albums:
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Wire - Chairs Missing
Gang of Four - Entertainment!
Devo - Freedom of Choice
Killing Joke - Killing Joke
Cabaret Voltaire - The Voice of America
Talking Heads - Fear of Music
PiL - Second Edition
The Fall - Grotesque (After the Gramme)
The Human League - Dare