There can surely be none-more-Old-Wave than this clip of Lindisfarne doing "Fog On The Tyne" on the Old Grey Whistle Test.
Scarcely believable that music like this could exist.
As for the lyrics:
Sittin' in a sleazy snack-bar suckin'
Sickly sausage rolls
Slippin' down slowly
Slippin' down sideways
Think I'll sign off the dole
'cause the fog on the Tyne is all mine, all mine
Could a copper comprehend
That a crooked coffin maker is just an undertaker who
undertakes to be a friend
'cause the fog on the Tyne is all mine, all mine
We can swing together
We can have a wee wee
We can have a wet on the wall
If someone slips a whisper
That his simple sister slapped them down
And they slavered on their smalls
Not only did they exist (still exist in fact) but they were hugely popular - the album Fog On the Tyne got to #1 and was the eighth biggest Brit seller of 1972.
This was the Top 5 single off the album.
The next album rejoiced in the title Dingly Dell.
More albums with very Old Wave artwork
By this point, after the New Wave, they're just wet - Smokie with strings
I associate Lindisfarne with The Strawbs - a group I find oddly fascinating not just as quintessence of Old Wave but also a quintessence of rock middlingness
Ah I'd got the idea it was an anti-union song, but apparently it's a celebration - and became a chant on picket lines.
Now I vaguely remember that arch-Old Waver Steve Harley wrote an anti-union song
Which would make sense given that he'd been traumatized by a walk-out when the original Cockney Rebel demanded more pay and more say.
Is it this one, "Red Is A Mean, Mean Colour"?
Hard to extract that sentiment from the lyrics - or indeed any coherent statement on anything
This one from '78's Hobo With A Grin - presumably made during Grunwick etc etc - does include the line: "I don't believe in unions"
"I don't believe in unions, I don't believe in power
Tired of revolutions, they're dyin' hour by hour
Yes, I believe in open space, yes, I believe in human race
Yes, I believe in open space, yes, I believe in human race"
Some of the Strawbs actually went New Wave
The lyric and album artwork seem Old Wave
Although admittedly there is a twist to the sexism in "Nice Legs" - the singer gets his comeuppance.
Discogs claims The Monks were intended initially as a spoof of punk rock.
And also asserts that their debut album Bad Habits went double platinum in Canada.
None-more-Old-Wave, yes. But imagine these lyrics with different music:
ReplyDeleteSittin' in a sleazy snack-bar suckin'
Sickly sausage rolls
Slippin' down slowly
Slippin' down sideways
Think I'll sign off the dole
It could easily be the Stranglers!
Making love to
DeleteThe Mersey Tunnel
With a sausage
Have you ever been to Liverpool?
I've alluded to it before with my theory that Ian Anderson and Tull were a huge unstated lyrical influence on UK punk/post-punk, but there's a very real sense in which the latter was a direct extension of the most squalid side of the Old Wave - basically, the surface of Glam grafted onto the grubby, scatological, terminally English core of the unassimilated British underground (the pit-hair-and-glitter hybrid of Hawkwind being the way station)
DeleteIn something like Viv Albertine's memoir, there's definitely the sense that punk was less a catastrophic break in her tastes and lifestyle than a linear progression of them - the big change was not in style or substance but in the progression of 'oh, girls can do this now too'
DeleteThe deep-seated disgust at the physicality of sex pointed out by steevee is very Punk, too.
DeleteIs the disgust at sex wrong though?
DeleteThere is an unstated assumption in post-60's culture that sex is somehow innately "healthy", but sex is a potential gateway to all kinds of moral and spiritual corruption, abuse of power etc. It can get very weird, very quickly.
Sex is an extremely ambivalent phenomenon, and I think a certain ability to be discerning towards it, and disdaining certain aspects of it, is more realistic than regarding it with uncritical positivity.
That reminds me of an argument Simon made many years ago… “Against Health and Efficiency”, maybe?
DeleteHere you go. Not exactly the same argument, but definitely aligned with your position, I think: http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2013/07/blog-post.html?m=1
DeleteVery meaty and thought-provoking article, that one. I'd probably go a bit further though and posit that sex is inherently problematic (hate that word) regardless of the dialectics of power or the social relationship.
DeleteIt's just an innately slippery thing, put into this world to delight and frustrate. Like gold, or something.
That piece isn't really about sex as a thing that figures in people's lives (at the time of writing I was obsessed with it as most 22- year-olds), something you do or pursue with varying degrees of alacrity and urgency - or conversely, in some cases, find discomforting (in either sense of the word) or troubling.
DeleteIt's about sex and sexuality as subject matter for and force within pop music; as a site of liberation and purported subversive power, a resource for transgressive and disruptive energy. I think it captures the exhaustion of a certain of hetero drive for "satisfaction" that exploded the '60s and powered much of the '70s, but by the Eighties started to seem like a daft pantomime with the likes of Madonna. Even with a figure I loved like Prince, I was also simultaneously thinking 'why's he always going on about it? he's like a sex maniac out of a Carry On film'." It was somehow exciting - Dirty Mind especially - and old hat at the same time.
But I'm not really figuring into the analysis the various energies of gay / queer /etc sexuality that were still shaking up pop and creating frissons in the 1980s.
And I'm buzzing off heavy ingestion of Foucault which started with the mentally rearranging The History of Sexuality Vol. 1.
Compare this from (I think) George Michael:
DeleteSex is natural, sex is good
Not everybody does it, but everybody should
Sex is normal and sex is fun
Sex is best when it’s one on one
Not his finest hour, TBH
Getting back to The Stranglers, one point I made about them back in the day, is that their overt misogyny is cover for their real message, which is that male sexuality is a godawful miserable burden.
DeleteYes that George Michael lyric is exactly the sort of thing I would have had in my sights, although I think it came out a year or so after than the piece.
DeleteAs poor pro-sex lyric writing goes, possibly only Billy Bragg's "Sexuality" is worse.
Actually Prince has a song called "Sexuality" too doesn't he? On the not-very-good Controversy album. Can't bring myself to look at the lyrics.
Do they sound burdened on "Bring On the Nubiles"? I'm not sure. "Peaches" conceivably, since the character is drooling and panting, it's like Carry On At the Beach or something. Actually it's surprising how few Stranglers are about sex or the opposite sex. They do seem more comfortable in the company of men, or thinking about issues and ideas.
DeleteA punk era song that about male sexuality as tragi-comic burden - "Orgasm Addict"
On Facebook, Simon Price has drawn attention to the fact that Smokey Robinson last year put out an album titled Gasms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasms
DeleteHe's 84. When I was a kid, people who were retired were into things like gardening and gentle walks in the country. They had hobbies and pastimes. Angling. Bowls. Puzzle books. Maybe a little bit of voluntary work. The only thing they were interested in inserting was a ship into a bottle
Rattus Norvegicus is generally a very melancholy record about the various compulsions that accompany desire - Sometimes, London Lady, Princess of the Streets, Hanging Around, etc.
DeleteBring On The Nubiles was a deliberate attempt to be as offensive as possible. And a fairly successful one, tbh.
Re: Smokey, I think in olden times geriatrics didn't have access to viagra, caverjack, etc.
Also, Boomers will be Boomers.
DeleteHey, Smokey's a Silent!
DeleteAs with a lot of things, the phrase 'as far as I knew/wanted to know' has to be added after 'when I was a kid' and 'people who [blank]'
As for the question of sex in music/culture, some of that impatience/boredom might stem from its' inability/unwillingness to push itself into deeper waters (everything has to be restated every generation, because the people opposed to it keep objecting to/erasing it), and partly because so much of what's interesting in how these artists approach sex lies in what's only implied
DeleteFrom posts I made around the time this NY Times article on the suppressed Ezra Edelman documentary [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/magazine/prince-netflix-ezra-edelman-documentary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE4.XsjL.-DzrabcIZsP_&smid=url-share] came out: 'I've always thought Prince was like an underground cartoonist in that the perverted fantasies he insisted on exploring in full view were inextricable from whatever reservoirs of pain went along with them. See ['Sister'], which goes from lasciviousness to begging the sibling not to throw him out in the blink of an eye - which is apparently taken straight from his experiences with homelessness as a teenager.'
"We can have a wee wee/We can have a wet on the wall"=least appealing "clever" allusion to sex ever.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it say that, from punk onwards, British acts largely eschewed putting scantily clad lovelies on their album covers (even the Mondays relegated their porny shots to the inner sleeve), but America, from hard rock and hair metal to gangsta rap and Rnb, stayed enthralled to fat cleavages and flashes of spiders' legs?
ReplyDeleteI think you're comparing the wrong things. Alt culture in the UK was bigger than alt culture in the US, and they were both shy about overtly porn-ish branding - partly out of a somewhat laudable sense of feminist consciousness (or an attempt/pretense of it), partly out of an inborn squeamishness/hypocrisy about sex in general (it's not a coincidence that so much of NYC counterculture in the 80s/90s/00s was enacted by New England WASPs)
DeleteWhen pornishness returned in the early 00s under Vice and American Apparel ads, it was under the questionable guise of blanket 'irony'
DeleteI think that’s mostly right, but there is a funny counter-example on the Sonic Youth live album Walls Have Ears, given an official release for the first time this year.
DeleteIt’s taken from two shows recorded in England in 1985 and 1986. The first track, ‘C.B.’ is a little speech from Claude Bessy, complaining about the fact that Rough Trade had rejected SY’s 12” of Halloween / Flower, because it had a picture of a naked woman on the sleeve. I think maybe the workers at the pressing plant had refused to handle it, although I don’t remember the full story.
I’m not sure that the cover was intended to be “ironic”, exactly. More that SY didn’t feel bound by the same social and moral conventions that constrained Rough Trade (or its workers). In that they were ahead of their times, as they were for many things.
I think it was Rough Trade, or people there, that objected - they still had that mindset of "we won't stock or distribute put out records that are sexist or racist".
DeleteThat makes sense, and helps answer Stylo’s question. In the 80s, anti-sexism was just much more present in rock culture and discourse in the UK than it was in the US.
DeleteOk now I have looked it up and have the facts straight. You are right: it was Rough Trade themselves who objected. The single was on Blast First, but Rough Trade was the distributor in the UK.
Delete