"Beruhrt Verfurht," ("touched seduced") Robert Gorl (1984) sounds like Alan Vega's (Suicide) German cousin. Mumbly, breathy, inscrutably emphatic, especially in Gorl's case because it's all in German, so no idea what he's on about until I looked it up. Although touching and seduction as subjects wouldn't have been too hard a guess. The girl singer sounds like a dry sassy Dietrich update. It's a nice '80s techno pop period tune.
But Gorl, more like Suicide's Martin Rev, I'm learning is really a pioneering maestro of creative synthpop tempos, goosestepping stomps, hopped up polka Oompahs, robotic Teutonic jamming with a minimalist's blunt appeal, and a widely revered pioneer of Techno music.
Here's Gorl showing off his instrumental chops and drollery on this 1984 failed solo stab at the charts:
But where it all started was Gorl as one-half D.A.F. ("German American Friendship") with Gabi Delgado, German post-punk innovators, pioneers of synth-pop and industrial dance music styles between 1978 and 1984. Gabi adds the punky mock Nazi authority vocals and lyrics, crucial to their radical origins fashioning an electronics and synth based analogue to 1977 London punk rock.
Add Gorl's brilliantly propulsive and minimalist drums and electronics, some production help from Krautrock legend Conny Plank (Kraftwerk, Neu, Cluster), and the first four DAF albums are extremely listenable, a journey from art-punk to what they called "Electronic Body Music" or EBM, and was rarely exceeded in catchy proto-synthpop sounds from that period.
And they are another secret treasure in the annals of postpunk music unearthed for me by Simon Reynolds postpunk book. Back in the day I'd admired DAF no further than "Der Mussolini" as a kind of punk era one-hit-wonder. But never searched any further until running into them again in Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again.
"Der Mussolini" (1981), an international hit and monster in the dance clubs, was my first DAF song. The electro punk edge was instantly grabbing, but I barely noticed the dancing to Mussolini, Hitler, Jesus Christ, Communism, and right/left rhetoric beyond punk provocation and sloganeering. The provocations struck me as mocking as the Sex Pistols.
Anyway, a deeper appreciation of their postpunk electronic synthesis now comes as exciting news. Their punk rock incubation phase is viscerally charged, to say the least. Check out this performance of "Ich und die Wirklichkeit" ("Me and Reality") (1981). Delgado on the mic, Gorl at the drums, but not sure about the New Romantic help on the electronics? But key! An electro charged punk rock fit.
Best translation I could find googling:
Me and I
In real life
Me and I
In reality
I feel so weird
I feel so weird
I feel so weird
I feel so weird
Me and I
In real, ha, life
The reality comes
Reality comes
Reality comes
Reality comes
I feel so weird.
Delgado is a hypnotically effective ranter, his tortured sarcasm comes through without much translation. This one standard issue existential punk rock angst but crucially with drums and electronics, no guitar.
"Sato-Sato" (translates from Japanese as "always active"?), DAF (WestBam Remix from 2017): Priceless original early '80s footage of punkers dancing to DAF's electronic punk montaged by contemporary mixmaster WestBam. Public service:
So of course the more fully up to date music people as opposed to a Mr. Magoo dilettante like me have been onto my DAF discovery for at least twenty years. Here's DAF dominating the Wire Festival in 2003 with another one of their Techno punk classics, "Alle Gegen Alle" ("All Against All") (1981). Flirting with violent fascist imagery via Hobbes, but again emphasizing the power over the hate-mongering.
There's more trigger warning talk online about DAF, about how they were out gays and their lyrics tended toward explicit sex and rough trade stuff. I can definitely see some of the gay leather thing in their album covers but until this late edition song I haven't encountered much explicit language. Again, not that I'd notice with the German, other than to observe a lot of German sounds like cursing to me, if not particularly sexual. But looking up a few translations of the DAF I'm sharing here this is the first song I've come upon with explicit language. So adult content warning but also an evolved example of their special combo of tricky beats and aggressive electronics and sarcastic humor.
"Ich glaub ich fick dich später" ("I Think I'll Fuck You Later") DAF/DOS (1996):
A lot more where this came from that I don't know but a previously unexplored synthpop fountainhead source of electronic music fans of the genre will want to know, I will insist. DAF are one of the key founders of postpunk electronic-based gothic dance music and if you like any one of those musical categories they are not to be missed. Invigorating.
"We avoided the two major rock guitars, the Fender and the Gibson. Playing Gretsches was about bringing back a sixties sensibility, but still having the freneticism of punk. Nobody else used them at the time."--Edwyn Collins in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, by Simon Reynolds
Orange Juice were a post-punk outfit from Scotland early 1980s. A New Wave band into reading. Proto-New Romantic British pop in an indelibly Scottish jangle pop indie record label style. Edwyn Collins' style, OJ's nerdy Lothario front guy. Sort of Brian Ferry as a "New Puritan." And another post-punk vocal original.
Orange Juice were the feature band on Postcard Records, a Glasgow indie label that put out 12 singles and an album between 1979 and 1981. The album featured label mates Josef K, named after a character in Kafka's The Trial, and true to form sounding like Gang of Four agit-funk with a literary bent.
Postcard were dedicated in general to "The Sound of Young Scotland" with a romantic literary bent, in spite of or because the label's boss, Alan Horne, was something of a parochial Spinal Tap-like eccentric petty tyrant band manager type. Postcard also put out records by Aztec Camera and The Go-Betweens (notably not Scottish) and for a few years there were a promising post-punk enterprise from the north country of Great Britain.
Orange Juice joined The Undertones on tour in the fall of 1980. What a hot double-bill that would have been!
At any rate, after one good album, You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (1982), a couple more iffier album propositions, pioneering the C86 jangle pop sound but unable to score the chart hits they wanted, the OJ's called it quits in 1985 but Edwyn Collins finally scored a couple of proper Top 40 hits in the 1990s as a solo artist. Here's one:
"Oh! Brother," The Fall (1984): Mark E. Smith (MES) at his most affable. Off Wonderful and Frightening World, Brix's first full album and also the last Fall album with two drummers.
"League of Bald Headed Men," The Fall (1993): More of MES's semi-affable tip. Off Infotainment Scan, their highest charting album, graphically the worst Fall album, with a couple of standout covers, maybe a slight step back musically from the articulated tribalism, avant-primitivism, of their best work but MES's typically caustic lyrics are playfully sharp.
Let's begin with "Joe," a Demo from 1992's Dry recordings. The vocal performance, so uncannily assured and unselfconscious, is one thing. Then the duet setting of her effortless vocal heaviness against the abstracted slabs of industrial grunge guitar gives the song demo a post-punk conceptual feel. She's a little package but a powerhouse voice and personality. And I'm not just trying to objectify her with that contrast. It seems integral to her power. Like Iggy Pop's "Five Foot One," the power in her voice taunts those that might underestimate her diminutive frame.
Dinosaur riff rock gets stomped on and dominated by Ms. Harvey in one of her perhaps underrated periods. It's a boss performance in England in 1998 circa her album Is This Desire?
"The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore," from 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, my running favorite Harvey album but I need to give some others more attention-Anyway, this number is an absolute rock & roll hall of fame grand salami of a rock single but, I just checked, it didn't chart and she's actually another one not in the official R&R Hall in Cleveland. (More of what's wrong with people and the authorities, I'm telling you!) Harvey doesn't have any big hits but her albums chart okay, a couple top tens. And her audience, or cult, if you prefer, is a sizable alt-rock audience and surely big enough for the Hall's consideration?! Maybe they're still trying to catch up with the '90s? I know how that goes but PJ Harvey is a historic rock star original and past due for serious consideration for recognition by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Also, by 2000's Stories..., note how in the song "Good Fortune" she's still doing her Smithian vocal stylings, my first critical hesitation with her music back in '92/'93, but now she's tossing this stuff off like she's dancing in the streets, like it ain't no thing. Or it's just another kind of art song style she does, no sweat. Patti gives Bruce "Because The Night." PJ gives a confident nod to Patti while maybe throwing in some Stevie Nicks for good measure. Masterful mistress of the late rock era.
More evidence: "When I'm On Ether," from 2007's White Chalk. If not psychedelic, a drug song masterpiece.
Don't have time to get into it too much but I think Harvey is a tremendously rich source of evidence for the rockist argument. I.e., rock is essentially pop with an oppositional, iconoclastic, counter cultural, and/or anti-commercial streak built in. Its authenticity isn't rooted so much in class as in personality; its "wokeness" is a reflexive antagonism to straight authority. It's "alternative," by definition and in principle. Harvey's art insists on her individual identity while at the same time making use of various musical legacies and traditions. Progressive art song and heavy blues rock, for two. And she's part of a long line, if small club, of shamanistic rock stars with big vocal diva prowess.
For heaven's sake, PJ Harvey belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame if ever there was or is such a thing?! Not that I have any idea whether or not she would appreciate the honor or even care. Hall of Fames are bs but if you're going to do bs why not show some judgement and try to make your bs count?
"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," PJ Harvey (1991):
"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair."
Actually, Harvey calls her song "Sheela-Na-Gig," after carved figurines of a naked woman with an exaggerated vulva, architectural grotesques found on cathedrals, castles, and other buildings throughout Europe in the middle ages. Love the esoteric feminist history but had to look it up, of course. I was originally slow on the uptake with Harvey when she first came out in the early 1990s. Both Dry ('92) and Rid of Me ('93) first struck me as too much like Patti Smith. That same melodramatic shamanistic banshee vocalizing thing. Which was such a rock snobby take, no doubt, but for the life of me now I can't hear what a fuss I was making. I mean, sure, there's a vocal styling resemblance but Harvey is way more Sturm und Drang, and way more intensely sexual. Being her own person, like Smith, the power in that, is what Harvey shares most with Smith. Don't try to pigeonhole them too much. They will arrive in their own time and on their own terms. Maybe Harvey was a little bit to the '90s what Smith was to the '70s, rockers, sui generis strong women art rockers. Salute.
"Leave the Capitol," The Fall (1981): The Fall at an early peak; from The Slates EP. In a fitful nightmare I imagine Mark E. Smith taking down Grump in a battle rap royale, jabbing him with his rat a tat tat militant nonsense, dancing around the Fat Bastard spastically. Never being touched. The TKO'd G crumpling with Smith leering over him, pointing a finger at him, taunting him with the hook here, "Then you know in your brain/LEAVE THE CAPITOL!/EXIT THE ROMAN SHELL!" Over and over. The dream look is Clockwork Orange. No doubt the obtuse ranting lends itself to such fantasy because Smith is a little Trumpy; like one of Elvis Costello's "Two Little Hitlers." Apparently, the song is about Smith wanting to get out of London, to get away from the pop press hype. Post-punk revenge pop.
John Lee Hooker's favorite backing band when he toured England in the 1960s. The Groundhogs. Another one of those Top Ten British bands, like Hawkwind, The Pretty Things, The Jam, that never won the same kind of success in the US. They were not played on the classic rock radio I listened to on the West Coast, for instance, although they absolutely perfectly fit the classic rock radio format. Tony McPhee another guitar god with the tasty rhythm riffing blues licks. Folkie interludes abound but full-on maximum r&b pounding and stomping jamrock when it counts. Biker gang cousins to Derek and the Dominos, who were all over classic rock radio. You go for any of this sort of music, blues rock, progressive rock, classic rock radio from the 1970s and 1980s on the harder edged garage rock side you will love their '71 album, Thank Christ For The Bomb (right, the sacrilege probably didn't help their cause in US markets). Not to be missed, anyway. Underrated classic rock album great. Although, if you must forgo the full album experience, "Strange Town" is the peak. The song.
And here's Mark E. Smith, The Fall, being a Groundhogs' "copyist" (as he once said of Pavement, mere "Fall copyists"). And almost four decades later, 2008, Smith sounds drunk, slurring his way through his crank paranoia. It's a "Strangetown," everyone is so glum. He turns the hippie rock into an abstracted studio pop punk noir. A tight edgy riff rock rhythm with a few space rock sound effects. It scales down the original, gives it that Smithian (Mancunian?) bleak, scrappy Fall twist and demonstrates, again, Smith could still sometimes push the right buttons. At age fifty.
"They've seen too much and don't want to know/Violence grows/Violence grows/Violence grows." Brit punk rockers writing their own rules. Honey Bane on the mic. Boosted by John Peel. Edgy and timeless.
"The Pop Group has this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything," once said Vivien Goldman, journalist, member of The Flying Lizards, and Chrissie Hynde's NME London flatmate in the late '70s.
The Pop Group were the first post-punk band or in that conversation, anyway. On paper they were irresistible, for their hilariously blunt agitprop titles alone: Learning to Cope with Cowardice; As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade; For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They were also very into Black music; members eventually formed relationships with On-U-Sound records that has lasted into the 21st century; a label devoted to reggae and dub and related beat music. In the burgeoning punk era British pop press of the late 1970s The Pop Group were a prototype post-punk band. So hot they were on the cover of NME before they even had a record.
And Mark Stewart's voice is the unmistakeable calling card of The Pop Group and Stewart's subsequent outfit, Mark Stewart & the Maffia, and in its loutish way a punk rock monument in its own right. Like a drunken pirate, inflamed with bitter lamentation. Like a 17th century ranter or 19th century romantic poet, caterwauling against the void. Stewart's maybe too smart and didactic and political for a goth icon but he carries on in gothic histrionics anyway. He grabs your attention, whether you like it or not. He'd probably make a great street corner preacher if he wasn't such an angry humanist. He often wails through a bullhorn like a street preacher, even if you'd have to really play close attention to make out much of what he is howling or muttering about.
Which is part of his achievement, turning his tuneless warble into this big scenery-chewing personality, apoplectic about the human surrender to entropy and passivity, or the placid indifference to the poly-crises raging all around us. Stewart is not having any of it and has some things to say.
In your face vocals are a common if not universal feature of punk rock singing, of course. And by such criteria alone Stewart is on a very short list of great punk rock singers. But, it should be noted for the same reasons, this makes anything with Stewart's voice impossible to listen to as background music, how I must admit I do most my music listening anymore. The dude will not blend into the music; or tends to "dominate the frame," is how producer Dennis Bovell once put it.
But in small doses, songs, Stewart's hectoring, shamanistic and dramatically delirious spells are cast; "We Are Time," "Where There's a Will There's a Way," "She's Beyond Good and Evil," etc. And maybe contrary to what you might expect from such a big personality Stewart is actually into the collaboration and band thing. I've never had a full blown crush on any Stewart album but there are times when nothing quite hits the spot like one of Stewart's dub-heavy funky free-jazz political jeremiads.
And this be, I'm afraid, one of those times.
A live record of The Pop Group from the '00s is titled "Idealists in Distress from Bristol." Mark Stewart is an idealist in distress and a post-punk original.
"Rob a Bank" (1980): Robin Hood as Punk Rocker.
"Where There's a Will There's a Way" (1980): Punk-funk, post-punk, perverted disco, etc.
"I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/'Til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," William Blake.
Late song off Rock'n'Roll (1989), and as pure an example of The Mekons rock & roll as you're going to find. One way you can tell the pure stuff is if they, Sally and/or Tom and/or Jon, kick up their heels like drunken Rockettes when the band joins all together on the crashing downbeats. Like bullfighting Ole's, shambolic urban thriftshop world music. Or Mekons Rock'n'Roll!
Or rock & roll or rock-n-roll all superior to rock and roll because they bind the two, the 'rock' and the 'roll,' together more tightly than the common rock 'and' roll. I prefer the upper case musical duets, like Sam & Dave, and the imperial E Pluribus Unum of the ampersand but I'm okay with the informality of the apostrophe too. Mekons Rock'n'Roll.
Latest thing, 2005, w/ The Fall still rocking out, guitars lumbering in extended dirge, 26 minutes of glorious drone stuff, at this stage full-on legacy post-punk legends. This is a Peel Sessions collection of five studio produced versions of a song called Blinded and sometimes goes by (Deaf and) Blindness. I'm calling it stimulating background music for Dad Rockers, somber, hummable, relentless, Smith's penetrating if inarticulate ranting warble, howling at the dying of the light. Hawkwind and Krautrock lovers will rock this, promise. It's all the sound for me tho, not much idea what he's yammering on about. But reminds me of my favorite quote from Smith, "I used to be psychic but I drank myself out of it." Actually, I imagine Smith in a tradition of British ranters going back to the 17th century, mock declaiming, denouncing, traitors, digital illustrators, chanting slogans from his bag of attitudes, mumbling indecipherable snarky asides. Hooks jab at you in short provocative catchy phrases, but mostly remain to me mysterious, cryptic and maybe a little nutty or at least eccentric in a singular Mark E. Smith kind of way. I was walking down the street. Perverted by language. Godfather of post-punk.
Smith in his disco homage phase. Both songs associated with The Infotainment Scam album, their highest charting album ever reaching a Top Ten 9th position, most embarrassingly obvious title and ugliest album cover (give me the scribbled montages or horror grotesque comics, any day), and equally obvious old guard post-punk Smith staking out a respected niche position in the EDM rave music takeover of 1990s British pop music. The music on TIS, however, is considerably punchier and offers more edgy rock contrast to Smith's deadpan than these live takes. But they'll do and I like the way this live version of The Fall leans into Disco's monotonously simple bass heavy melodic groovelines and still manages to give them their own stamp of post-punk rumble like old pros. I'd like to think Bryan Ferry would give this his nod. The lead track is a cover of the 1979 Sister Sledge disco masterpiece, "Lost in Music," Smith adding, cynically, ominously, chanted, "the roads of access lead to the palace of excess." His "I feel so alive" isn't entirely convincing either but his shrieks of "hideaway, hideaway, hideaway" are the only time we're sure he's being moved by the music. The B-side, and the actual single of the pair, "Why Are People Grudgeful?" merges reggae great Joe Gibb's "People Grudgeful" and some Lee 'Scratch' Perry. A sort of reggae world music post-punk lament for an illusions-free peaceful coexistence, as fanciful as that sounds today. Or difficult to swallow coming from such a crank as Smith. Post-punk noir disco.
North country and western England prole art dance music 1983. From album, Perverted by Language, on a short list of my favorite Fall albums for sure, and an even shorter list of truly great post-punk albums. And it's not just Mark E. Smith, in your face, clever, obtuse, cryptic, provoking suspicions, homophobic "Sodmized by presumption," antifa "In a German history book," or antisemitic "a Jew on a motorbike," but the band, who he apparently rarely speaks to, so under him or behind him or in whatever hierarchical relationship to him, actually, rock out with him in rivetingly tight post-punk shambolic intensity. Classic Fall.
"Who Makes The Nazis" (1982), post-punk legend Smith tells you: White-O's [flag waving white supremacists], All the Os, Intellectual half-wits, balding smug faggots [great, more potential homophobia and lumping all us bald guys w Nazis], long horn breeds, smiling Buffalos [atavists?], rapists in mirage Spa Motels, real Irish know [underground violence?], Joe, Benny's cob-web eyes, bad bias TV, BBC, George Orwell [note to self: read that James Burnham book], Burmese Days [colonialism], Black burnt flesh, and Crack unit species [militarists? decade before the Crack epidemic]." And a word from anti-fascist (and, again, likely homophobic) Bobby: "If you're out of love, just give them real soap. Hates not your enemy, love's your enemy." Let me guess: "Bush warriors" have menaced Smith/Benny and they're suffering untreated PTSD? And you still can't argue it isn't a little Hitler like for Smith to fire a musician for eating a salad, as he allegedly once did. Nonetheless, poet laureate of anti-fascist soccer hooligans.
After a long career as one of class of '77 punk's most stylish, accomplished post-Dadaist ranters, Smith tries crooning. No Ray Davies, to be sure. But something semi-sweet in a mumbly wounded animal kind of way. Put out on Cherry Red Records in 2003.
"Headache for Michelle," Au Pairs (1981): I think I thought of the Au Pairs at the time as Johnny-come-latelies, last year's news, or by the time I had caught up with Playing With a Different Sex, anyway. But they actually went back to 1978 and had a way with the post-punk song that shoulda coulda produced in a better world several sharp Top 40 singles; It's Obvious, America, We're So Cool, and this moody, caustic, finely etched post-punk record, for just a few striking instances. Vocalist Lesley Woods was their signature, and a savage critic of contemporary sexual politics. And not bad with the pop hooks. You wouldn't go terribly astray to think of the Au Pairs as a distaff counterpart to the Gang of Four, or as they were. Both inspired by the art school side of the class of '77 punk protest. Both into funk but it comes out more nervous and herky-jerky and clinical when they do it. Both sound like they read hip academic literature on sexual politics, and they chatter a lot in songs about demystifying patriarchy and capitalism. And although the Au Pairs were from Birmingham, they actually did play together often live with Leed's Gang of Four during post-punk's original heyday. And what a double-bill that would have made. The Au Pairs music has aged well and stands as an exemplary model of early 1980s post-punk agitprop feminist dub funk. Shouldn't be missed.
