Grotesque and risible!
Except there is one brief moment, from about 2.20 onwards, where their desire to be Roxy very nearly happens - the sax gets gaseous and the faint whiff of "2HB" and "Amazona" reaches our nostrils - but then it dissipates almost instantly, the sax shifts into a thin-bodied jocosity, like The Piranhas or a dozen other pubby New Wavers
("Desire to be Roxy" - just noticed that "Sweet Dreams" is from 1976's Second Thoughts, produced by no less than Phil Manzanera - I wonder how much he had to do with the eruptive-bit-in-"Amazona" quality to that brief exciting moment in the song?)
By the third album, Dizrythmia, released August 1977, Split Enz are fully, archetypally New Wave, but the late-glam dress-up-box thing lingers
A December 1976 review of Split Enz live, from NME.
"My favorite bit was Noel Crombie's spoons solo" !
Fully transitioned to Noo Wave (so in another sense, rewinding the clock to the pre-psych mid-Sixties - suits, neat hair). But still a bit garish and over-glossed.
Now there were a bunch of groups at this exact midpoint of the '70s who had this "let's get dressed up" late glam thing going on, but in a fatally "let's not take ourselves seriously" way. Generally, they looked a right mess, as if a fancy dress party in its last plastered throes had somehow wandered onto a stage.
Deaf School - just like the Enz, hovering on the cusp between Old Wave and New Wave, with aspects of pastiche and winking irony that are sorta kinda pomo.
Another Aussie - Duffo - a Bowie damaged feller but here hitching a ride on punk (yet also looking like a laughing - or laughable - gnome).
Andrew Parker directs my attention to another Aussie bunch - The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. Strangely, just seeing their name, I could already see-hear them - and they look and sound almost exactly as I imagined!
Bang on the nail in terms of what I am talking about - and again, under the daft campy surface, there is serious musical chops on display. As with some other groups in this list, the music is not so much proggy as more in line with American roots-eclectic sophisto-rock, that area that includes The Band, Little Feat, Dr John, Ry Cooder, The Wild Tchoupitoulas... If not for the silly clothes, voices and lyrics, you could imagine them joining the Last Waltz line-up.
Another late glam troupe were Sailor, here brazenly imitating Roxy circa "Virginia Plain" and getting a couple of chart places higher (#2 to Roxy's #4)
The voice and the piano bit on "Glass of Champagne" are trademark infringement level infractions
And then just a little later in the decade Big In Japan - influenced by Deaf School, also heavily Bowie-damaged in the case of Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson, this troupe split into a number of postpunk / New Wave / careers of greater eminence
And then - later, mid-80s, quite out of synch with pop temporality, but still "at the precise nexus point" - the Cardiacs
Some would argue there's psychedelia in there as well as prog and New Wave.
Kooky but disturbed
Back to the mid-70s historical cusp, I remember Punishment of Luxury well from when I first started listening to late-night Radio 1: the deejays were enamored of the B-side to "Puppet Life", a herky-jerky tune called "Jellyfish". Punilux included fringe theatre people and were obviously proggers and/or Bowie-damaged mime artist types.
Reformed but still deformed
Steevee in comments suggests Toronto New Wavers The Dishes
Conceivably Ze Whiz Kidz (Tomata du Plenty - later of The Tupperwares and then the Screamers), a Seattle "comedy glam troupe", belong here - albeit progless
Max Webster
Singer went solo with a New Wave remodelling
How could I forget? Be-Bop Deluxe - they go from glam-tinged prog to New Wave-adjusted glamprop across several years in the exact midsection of the 1970s. Well I say "prog" but it's actually more like pomp rock - a more refined Queen without the front-man effrontery.
Here it's 1978 and Nelson & Co are trying manfully to adjust the New Wave mandated tightness ("New Precision" indeed) but still keep the guitar heroics.
Rebranded as Red Noise, with quasi-militaristic outfits and herky-jerky riffage, melodies that shriek and jut angularly, nasty Noo Wave sax - an agile style jumper, that Bill. Soon he'd be onto synthpop.
I guess Sensational Alex Harvey Band count as being on the nexus point of prog, glam, and New Wave - the musicians had been Tear Gas, a Zappa-phile prog outfit.... then they happily went theatrical with Harvey as their charismatic frontman, but he had a menace - and street delinquent preoccupations - that anticipated punk (even if the music itself never did)
program from May 1976 Manchester Free Trade Hall - note reference to "punk" in the Cast List
Can't forget SAHB's buddies The Tubes
A common denominator with a lot of these groups is that the band could really play - under the fancy dress and stage stunts, and regardless of the punkoid 'sick humor' / 'bad taste' themes, there is a suspicious (and distressing) level of chops on display
Oingo Boingo were originally a highly theatrical proggish ensemble called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo
Then they become quite literally the worst group that has ever existed. The internal struggle between proggoid desires and New Wave / commercial-aspiring constraints is quite hideous to hear-see.
Amazed to see a lead review of a Danny Elfman project in the Wire in the last year or so.
No glam element with this next one, as far as I'm aware - but certainly existing at some kind of nexus between prog and New Wave: Poli Styrene Jass Band
(although maybe there were theatrics in the live performances = apparently they had some narrative set pieces on stage, and involved actors as well as musicians later on). -
Unusually the prog element here is clearly Canterbury Sound - Kevin Ayers, Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North, Caravan, Egg ... with possibly some Euro-prog / late-psych (Supersister)
Poli Styrene Jass Band (note the odd anticipation of Poly Styrene) eventually became The Styrenes, but via another alter-ego, Styrene Money
(via Cardrossmaniac2)
I feel there are more "nexus point" examples of this syndrome - hyper-theatrical / overdressed late-glam / late-prog outfits who either have proto-New Wave aspects or manage to transition fairly seamlessly. (Toyah - an actress, so has a head start... Sadista Mika Band... The Kursaal Flyers).
There are also New Pop era examples - Howard Jones, fairly clearly (the mime artist dude in chains whose only job in the group is visual is the giveaway). Also Nik Kershaw - not so much image-wise as musically.
The general tendency to visual excess in promo videos is where a lot of these tendencies seep back.
Men Without Hats!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p_BvaHsgGg
Men At Work!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfR9iY5y94s
Ha ha, as an Australian this is the first time I've become aware of Duffo's existence- for all his Bowieisms, he sings in a remarkably strong Aussie accent, which is rare outside country music.
ReplyDeleteOne of the distinguishing characteristics of Oz Rock during the 70s/80s, is its aversion to androgyny - the mild camp of Skyhooks is about as far as it went, there's no real equivalent to Bowie/Boy George/Pete Burns. Oz rock stars could be glamorous (Michael Hutchence) but never ambiguous.
The reference to Men at Work reminds me of arguably the strangest musical copyright cases ever - an innocent question on a musical quiz show led to the copyright holders of a 1930s Australian children's song successfully claiming "Down Under" ripped off their work.
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/quiz-show-sparks-aussie-anthems-battle/news-story/10e8f8d0a9a35637b17b437b235c3574
I felt really bad for Men At Work about the copyright case - an odd feeling as in other respects they do seem due some kind of retribution for cultural crimes.
ReplyDeleteI think they probably were proggers and then heard the Police as sensed they were proggers-turned-New Wave and saw a path for themselves.
Duffo singing Aussie is almost like early Bowie's Anthony Newleyisms.
I saw him on TV just at the point at which I was figuring out music so initially wasn't clear if the act was credible or a joke, or meant to be a joke. It was sort of lumped in my head with other things l'd only just heard like Devo and Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias. Also Punishment of Luxury.
Looking into the case, it seems that they only had to pay 5% of the royalties for the use of the earlier song as the flute riff. So that seems not too heinous. It's not anything like the Verve "Bittersweet Symphony" case where 100% of the royalties went to Jagger /Richards (even though the sampled bit of arrangement was from an Andrew Loog Oldham solo novelty project of orchestrated versions of Stones songs, and not actually arranged by Jagger/Richards). That seemed devastatingly unfair given that the topline melody and lyrics were all the Verve's own work (as per trad 50/50 words & music split).
DeleteA correspondent informs me that some believe the stress of the case led to the death of the flute player in Men At Work - it was listed as a heart attack, but he'd struggled with hard drugs.
It’s very generous to the Verve to describe the melody of Bittersweet Symphony as “all their own work”, IMO. Try singing “Well it’s a bitter sweet symphony, that that’s life” to the tune of “Well I told you once and I told you twice”.
DeleteI think that was what swung the court decision to awarding 100% to Jagger and Richards. Plus the fact that they could afford better lawyers, I am sure.
Though Jagger and Richards were 'inspired' by the chorus from this Staple Singers record.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1jGF-6bFpI
I think you'll find the worst group that ever existed was the Smashing Pumpkins (and thinking about it, their wholly lamentable attempt to blend Pink Floyd, The Cure and Nirvana serves as another nexus point).
ReplyDeleteAnd since you raise Oingo Boingo, why not pursue the John Hughes connection and up the ante with Sigue Sigue Sputnik? Glam and New Wave, without a doubt, and the whole addition of adverts between the songs can be argued as a postmodern prog technique. In any case, haven't there been sporadic bids to salvage elements of SSS's ethos, such as Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes?
I don't see a prog element in Sigue - it's mostly retro-pomo on the musical front (rock'n'roll, Ziggy Stardust, a rip-off of Suicide). But mostly I'm trying to stick to that point in the mid-70s - prog and glam stragglers who don't realise what's round the corner, think it's a question of upping the fancy dress / theatricality side of music even further. Which was a fairly logical assumption to make in '75, but pop history usually has a swerve up its sleeve.
DeleteSmashing Pumpkins are ghastly, yes - but they did create one marvellous tune, "1979", which is like a pop translation of Sonic Youth.
DeleteNo, 1979 is as abominable as all their other songs, and I can prove it. One assumes, especially in conjunction with the video, that 1979 is a wistful, bittersweet recollection of carefree youth. Nope. The chorus goes:
DeleteThat we don't even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don't know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess forgotten and absorbed
Into the earth below
Are you telling me that adding a bit about rotting corpses to a limp song automatically grants it gravitas? But of course, nobody understood what Billy Corgan was singing in the chorus due to his absolutely horrendous, cat-with-its-nuts-caught-in-a-car-door screeching.
While I'm here, I'll also point out that Billy Corgan was 12 in 1979. He wasn't out partying and fingering girls, he was still throwing tantrums when his mum said it was bath night. The only song more ridiculous in this regard is Summer of 69, as Bryan Adams was 10 in 1969, and we are meant to believe that Bryan Adams was so cool he was jamming in bands and sexing up the ladies aged 10 (and if that's true, it's not boastful, but really unsettling)? And yes, I am directly calling Billy Corgan a pale imitation of Bryan Adams.
Yes the Smashing Pumpkins were abysmal. I remember the verdict of a friend of a friend, visiting from China and a musician himself, being played the Smashing Pumpkins for the first time when they were at the height of their popularity. “This music sounds hard, but really it is soft,” he said.
DeleteI have never been able to think of them any other way since then.
Conversely, to be fair to Bryan Adams he did go on the record to make clear that Summer of 69 is not about the year 1969.
DeleteThe Dishes, from Toronto in the late '70s, more or less fit this aesthetic, although they were less prog and more theater-kid art-rock.
ReplyDeleteHow much better would most of these groups have been received if they'd debuted in 1979 and were seen as post-punk?
Never heard of the Dishes!
DeleteWang Chung!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-xpJRwIA-Q
It's Immaterial!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ph0TXv4RxI
(actually really liked It's Immaterial)
There was soooo much of this stuff. I suppose A Flock of Seagulls are too obvious?
I like It's Immaterial too. Is part of your liking that they did a cover of the 'Glers's "Toiler on the Sea". They had a great song with the word "raft" in the title - something about a raft at a sea - and then of course "Driving Away From Home". An unusual sound. Dreamy.
ReplyDeleteSome of these groups you are mentioning, Phil, I don't know if they are actually proggers turned New Wave / New Pop, or even glammers turned etc - it's more like the explosion of the pop promo in the early-mid-Eighties invites a certain kind of clowning around. Dressing up in garish clothes. Stage sets. Visual gimmicks. So it gets a bit hyper-theatrical and there's a lot of misfires. I seem to remember some awful over-dressed, visually ripe China Crisis videos. But then there's such a preponderance of awful, pretentious in the real sense of pretentious, videos, often ransacking imagery the 20th Century avant-garde and art films, that it would be quicker to point to the few lastingly good ones.
I have had the misfortune of seeing Wang Chung live, supporting Bow Wow Wow, at St Albans, in '81 I think, or maybe '82. They were not yet hit-makers. They had a sort of quasi-Eastern look (kimono-like robes?) and a big gong on stage that was struck at various points.
I remember them being on Whistle Test pre-fame, when they were still called Huang Chung. I was quite impressed, but never moved to investigate further. I didn’t make the connection that they were the Dance Hall Days guys until much later.
DeleteTheir rock family tree is a great example of pre- and post-punk musicians combining in strange ways. Predecessor bands included a former drummer with Atomic Rooster, a future bass player with Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, and Glenn Gregory of subsequent Heaven 17 fame!
I have to say that almost as soon as I posted, I thought that It's Immaterial were particularly not what you were aiming at in your original post, as they have no obvious glam roots.
ReplyDeleteIn fact they come from another trend that appeared around the time of New Wave, which was The Ordinary Bloke As Pop Star. Signal examples were Jona Lewie, B.A. Robertson, possibly Joe Jackson. There was this kind of meta-narrative in their work, that they were these normal sane guys that happened to wander into the world of pop, and were showing you its absurdity.
I suppose the likes of Rupert Hine and Robin Scott were their middle-class equivalents. They were all painfully self-aware, whereas the likes of Split Enz, Oingo Boingo etc. were totally un-self-aware, too absorbed in what they were doing to check how it might appear from the outside.
There's a term for all this stuff (retroactively coined, of course, by a DJ and enthusiast of the genre by the name of Terry Sharkie back in 1997): ZOLO!
ReplyDeletehttp://chalkhills.org/articles/Zolo1997.html
Well I suppose I should have known someone would have spotted this moment / lineage before!
DeleteIt's bloody long essay, I've not done more than scan it - seems like the thesis is possibly a bit overstuffed with evidence, some of which only slightly supports the case, but it's admirably large in scope (taking in the Rock In Opposition influence for instance).
My only puzzle is that I don't know why it's called ZOLO.
I seem to remember talk going on at some point in the last 20 years about something called "pronk" - punk meets New Wave. But I can't recall if the theatrical aspect - the late-glam influence - was part of it.
And I remember the blogger Kid Shirt had a riff about "quirk", which back in 2007 he thought was coming back and had evidence in terms of current bands emerging. He laid down a whole historical lineage for it. Unfortunately the blog is shut down, the posts inaccessible, but looking at my blogpost about his blogging - Kid Shirt referenced Split Enz and Punilux and Lene Lovich and talked about the convergence of prog, glam and the new wave. And in my response I mention.... well, what do you know, some of the artists mentioned above! E.g. Duffo, The Tubes, the Cardiacs (the first wheeling-out of my oft-repeated here story about stumbling upon the group completely unawares and unprepared, when they were playing at a free festival on Port Meadow in Oxford, their zany New Wave-isms at odds with the usual Eighties traveler soundtrack.) I also mentioned how the NME writer (and Sixties cat) Miles coined the term "geometric, jerky quickstep" circa 1978 to describe XTC, Devo, Ultravox.
I also brought up the appeal of this style internationally, especially in Eastern Europe where the distance from the blues roots of American rock seemed to facilitate a stiffer and more angular feel, and a love of theatrics. Specifically the Soviet art rock group Zvuki Mu.
I've read that "Zolo" comes from a toy company that started up in the '80s, and they do have a Gary Panter/Pee Wee Herman look. So maybe '70s groups would be "proto-Zolo"?
Deletehttps://zolo.com/pages/about-us
1. A lot of this visual aesthetic - theatrically intricate, often monochromatic sartorialism, distressed and otherwise sent askew - basically transitioned into Goth. How much of the musical ethos went with it is an open question, but I think it was probably more than one would think...
ReplyDelete2. As someone who enjoys some of their work (though not uncritically), I'm amused to learn of your animus towards Oingo Boingo/Elfman - I absolutely see where you're coming from, but I find their ungainly, polarized syncretism more interesting than not (and running deeper that you note - the original Mystic Knights weren't just proggish, but violently eclectic revivalists of everything from Cab Calloway to Lou Harrison-ish faux-gamelan minimalism)
3. 'there is a suspicious (and distressing) level of chops on display' - why suspicious or distressing? That implies that these groups are just failed evolutionary cul-de-sacs on the road to punk, and that their deviations from it are disturbing in a not-quite-right uncanny valley way. That may or may not be true, but it's sort of alien to the way I view musical evolution - which is that while there are generally reasons that events happened as they did, that's not a measure of artistic success or failure as such
1. Yes I think that's true, there is a feed through to glam, it makes sense really given that Goth is glam reborn via New wave strictures and postpunk doominess. Mick Mercer the Goth historian goes on about this group Gloria Mundi, glammers turned New Wavers, as crucial precursor to Goth. They then became the nu-cabaret duo Eddie & Sunshine.
ReplyDelete2. I've never given Oingo Boingo much of chance - the little glimpses I've seen and heard are enough. And then there's the awfulness of the name itself. The violently eclectic revivalism ties in with a lot of what was going on in glam and the theatrical / campy edges of rock in the mid-70s - the Moodies, Sensational Alex Harvey Band, etc. All of history a wardrobe of costumes.
3. i'm not averse to chops per se, or in all circumstances (love the Canterbury sound for instance) but in this case often there is a disjuncture between the angular, zany, reaching-towards-New-Wave visuals / vocals (and thematics) and the music which is professional plain fare that smoothly boogies along. There's no strangeness in the music itself. Sometimes under all the glad rags and antics, the group might sounds a bit like I dunno Badfinger. Or even Wet Willie.
For a possible 2023 example, here's HMLTD's THE WORM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ6Es4t21WA&ab_channel=HMLTDVEVO. There's not much New Wave in it, but the "theater department discovers art rock" element comes across. Early Split Enz could've written some of this album.
ReplyDelete'a disjuncture between the angular, zany, reaching-towards-New-Wave visuals / vocals (and thematics) and the music which is professional plain fare that smoothly boogies along. There's no strangeness in the music itself'
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, I definitely see that with regards to something like Split Enz - a crack I considered putting in my first comment was that they were the musical equivalent of those people who put every bit of mental effort into looking outrageous to disguise that they have no interesting thoughts or ideas otherwise
THE WORM de HMLTD: What is your opinion about this album? Simon
ReplyDeletei just had a look at the video steevee posted - it's not my bag at all. feels more like musical theater or rock opera - which oddly is not really part of the mix in this little quasi-genre i've pinpointed here, even though it is a/ hyper-theatrical and b/ quite Euro in sound often. The stuff in this post is zany / silly, whereas the Worm feels a bit more bombastic and serious. serious
Delete