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

Introduction

Prologue: The Unfinished Revolution

PART 1: POSTPUNK

1. Public Image Belongs to Me:
John Lydon and PiL

2. Autonomy in the U.K.:
DIY and the British Independent-Label Movement

3. Tribal Revival:
The Pop Group and the Slits

4. Militant Entertainment:
Gang of Four, the Mekons, and the Leeds Scene

5. Uncontrollable Urge:
The Industrial Grotesquerie of Pere Ubu and Devo

6. Living for the Future:
Cabaret Voltaire, the Human League, and the Sheffield Scene

7. Just Step Sideways:
The Fall, Joy Division, and the Manchester Scene

8. Industrial Devolution:
Throbbing Gristles Music from the Death Factory

9. Contort Yourself:
No Wave New York

10. Art Attack:
Talking Heads, Wire, and Mission of Burma

11. Messthetics:
The London Vanguard

12. Freak Scene:
Cabaret Noir and Theater of Cruelty in Postpunk San Francisco

13. Careering:
PiL and Postpunks Peak and Fall

PART 2: NEW POP AND NEW ROCK

14. Ghost Dance:
2-Tone and the Ska Resurrection

15. Sex Gang Children:
Malcolm McLaren, the Pied Piper of Pantomime Pop

16. Mutant Disco and Punk Funk:
Crosstown Traffic in Early Eighties New York (and Beyond)

17. Fun n Frenzy:
Postcard Records and the Sound of Young Scotland

18. Electric Dreams: Synthpop

19. Play to Win:
The Pioneers of New Pop

20. New Gold Dreams 81-82-83-84:
New Pops Peak, the Second British Invasion of America, and the Rise of MTV

21. Dark Things and Glory Boys:
The Return of Rock with Goth and the New Psychedelia

22. Raiding the Twentieth Century:
ZTT, the Art of Noise, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Index

PUNK BYPASSED ME almost completely at first. Thirteen going on fourteen at the time, and growing up in an English commuter town, I only have the faintest memories of 1977. I vaguely recall photo spreads of spiky-haired punks in a Sunday newspaper magazine, but thats it really. The Sex Pistols swearing on television, God Save the Queen versus the Royal Jubilee, an entire culture convulsed and quakingI simply did not notice . As for what I was into and up to instead, well, its a bit of a haze. Nineteen seventy-seven, was that the year I wanted to be a cartoonist? Or, having moved onto science fiction, did I spend 1977 systematically working my way through the local librarys cache of Ballard, Pohl, Dick? All I know for sure is that pop music barely impinged on my consciousness.

My younger brother Tim got into punk first. There was always this god-awful racket coming through the bedroom wall. One of the many times I went in there to complain, I must have lingered. The profanity hooked me first (I was fourteen), Johnny Rottens fuck this and fuck that/Fuck it all and fuck her fucking brat. More than the naughty words themselves, it was the vehemence and virulence of Rottens deliverythose percussive fucks, the demonic glee of the rolled r s in brrrrrrrat. There have been a thousand carefully reasoned theses validating the movements sociocultural import, but if anyones really honest, the sheer monstrous evil of punk was a huge part of its appeal. Take the sickness of Devo, for example. Id never heard anything so creepy and debased as their early single Jocko Homo and its flip side, Mongoloid, brought around our house by a far more advanced friend.

When I got into the Pistols and the rest, at some point in the middle of 1978, I had no idea that this was all officially dead. The Pistols were long split. Rotten had already formed Public Image Ltd. Because Id been otherwise occupied and missed the entire birth, life, and death of punk, I also cannily skipped the mourning after, that sickening 78 crash experienced by almost everybody who was there and aware during the exhilarating 77 rush. My belated discovery of punk coincided with the period when things began to pick up again, with what soon became known as postpunk, the subject of this book. So I was listening to X-Ray Spexs Germfree Adolescents, but also the first PiL album, Talking Heads Fear of Music, and Cut by the Slits. It was all one bright, bursting surge of excitement.

Music historians exalt being in the right place at the right time, those critical moments and locations where revolutions and movements are spawned. This is tough on those of us stuck in suburbia or the provinces. This book is for, and about, the people who werent there at the right time and place (in punks case, London and New York circa 1976), but who nonetheless refused to believe it was all over and done with before they joined in.