Tag Archives: new wave

music

Mark E. Smith and the Inscrutable Fall

Formed in Manchester in 1976, The Fall — with vocalist and founder Mark E. Smith at the helm — is the most inscrutable of post-punk bands. Experimental and enigmatic, The Fall released 31 studio albums from 1979 to 2017, a significant number of live albums, and many beloved John Peel sessions (24, a record number). Peel himself once cited The Fall as his favorite band, as do many in the British press. But all recordings by them are decidedly uncommercial, and Smith was forever proud for it to be that way.

Mark E. Smith
Mark E. Smith

Born in 1957, Smith had a normal childhood, but always felt like the outsider. At sixteen, he quit school and worked menial jobs — something he may even have become accustomed to had it not been for the summer of 1976 and seeing the  Sex Pistols show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Members of Joy Division / New Order, the Smiths, Magazine, and The Buzzcocks were there, too. Each was inspired that night to eschew the pop music of the time and pick up instruments that most couldn’t even play. Each inarguably original. And Smith — who told Dave Haslam he already had begun his music career in 1975 — from thenceforward took the DIY aesthetic of the Pistols and made something uniquely his own. Unique, even, among his post-punk contemporaries.

Forever the contrarian, Smith — in the 42 years of the band’s existence (with rotating members) — never really had a hit, nor did he want one, really. THE INFOTAINMENT SCAM (1993) reached the UK Top Ten, but it was their only album to achieve this degree of success. Covers of R. Dean Taylor’s “There’s a Ghost in My House” and The Kinks’ “Victoria” charted in the UK in 1987 and 1988, respectively, but among their original material, only “Cruiser’s Creek” — from 1985’s excellent THIS NATION’S SAVING GRACE (where the song was an unreleased b-side until 1988) — broke through to the public at large, becoming a minor classic of what post-punk had become by the middle to late nineteen eighties. Their most heard song? “Hip Priest,” used in the final scenes of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) is played by serial killer Buffalo Bill on an unseen stereo while FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) walks a dark basement, gun drawn. It’s a moment many have seen, but few have really listened to. It’s an uncomfortable moment, and the music is similarly disorienting. Hardly accessible. And hypnotic.

The Fall
Mark E. Smith with his wife, guitarist Brix Smith, and keyboard player Marcia Schofield. Manchester, 1987.

I AM KURIOUS ORANJ (1998) is perhaps their most approachable album. Intended as the soundtrack for the ballet “I Am Curious, Orange,” a collaboration with the dancer Michael Clark, ORANJ was The Fall’s eleventh studio album.

ORANJ was also the last to include then-at-the-time wife Brix Smith, whose songwriting skills were strong — even as her marriage to Mark was weakening. The guitar riff in “Cruiser’s Creek” wer hers, as are many memorable songs on I AM KURIOUS ORANJ. But the lack of her presence on 1990’s EXTRICATE (also deemed accessible by critics) is apparent. Still, the proverbial show went on for The Fall for almost another two decades. Mark E. Smith didn’t seem to skip a beat.

“One of the most intelligent blokes [to walk] the planet,” said Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch in a 1999 issue of UNCUT magazine, Smith’s voice (often heard through a megaphone or cassette recorder which he often brought on stage) may have been caustic — and the music described by those who hate it as repetitive. But it was never boring, and often hypnotic. Smith’s lyrics, though sometimes buried in the mix and occasionally unintelligable, were at times biting, even beautiful.

After his death in 2018 at age 60, the British press and world at large briefly sang his praises, something Smith himself would have hated. He didn’t look for praise. His band didn’t sound like anyone else. And his attitude toward music was as mordant as the man.

In an unreleased documentary, Smith said

“It’s rock and roll. It’s all about the abuse of instruments, not playing instruments. That’s why music is so boring [now]. Every record you hear is so well-produced, and the blokes playing it have the imagination of a flea.”

By being so creative, innovative, and on the fringe for so many years, The Fall was able to help other bands that followed them find the elusive middle between experimentation AND commercialism. It’s a palpable dichotomy. And one need only listen to The Fall’s later albums, like I AM KURIOUS ORANJ, to even begin to hear and try to understand how that convergence and split makes for quite memorable music.

 

music

Listening to Sirens: Gary Numan and The Tubeway Army

Cover photo of Gary Numan's Splinter
Gary Numan: Splinter

With the release of Hesitation Marks  — Nine Inch Nails’ first album in five years — Gary Numan’s new work, Splinter: Songs from a Broken Mind — his first album in seven years — might easily be overlooked.

Numan, primarily known for the 1979  earworm “Cars” (a song used to advertise everything from automobiles to, most recently, Target stores) , rode the crest of the nineteen eighties new British invasion. His success was bolstered by a then burgeoning MTV — which following its launch in 1981 only had about 200 videos to cover its 24/7 rotation; the result: clips like “Cars” were shown at least once a day. It also helped that the single had one of the catchiest bass riffs ever, complemented by the then still relatively new technology of two moog synthesizers.

Numan, however, working in the late seventies with his band Tubeway Army, was no “one-hit wonder” in his homeland; previous releases were quite successful: 1978’s Tubeway Army opens with the unforgettable “Listen to the Sirens”; 1979’s Replicas, which includes the stark and sinister classic “Down in the Park” also spawned a #1 hit single in the UK with “Are Friends Electric?”

Combining the synthetic sounds of synthesizers with the acoustic punch of a solid rhythm section, Numan’s quite deliberate pop sensibility stood in stark contrast to the themes of a cold, dystopian future revealed in his lyrics and embodied by his often emotionless, robotic voice.

Inspired by the works of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard as was (the far superior band of the same period) Joy Division,  Numan and others found themselves in the wake of punk but before the dawn of “college” or “alternative” rock.  They were the “new wave” — a label rarely used by the bands themselves but quite appropriate seeing as how their literary idols Dick and Ballard were known as part of the “new wave of science fiction” in the late 60s / early 70s just as filmmakers  Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were referred to by critics of their time (the late 50s and early 60s) as La Nouvelle Vague. Seems there was always some new wave in art; why not let the critics assign the label. What did it matter?

Numan himself referred to his work as “machine rock” — a likely antecedent of  the “industrial rock” moniker applied to bands like Ministry, KMFDM and Nine Inch Nails a decade later. But even among contemporaries, these labels favored by critics were the stuff of comedy and competition among the artists themselves.

Ian Curtis, for example — the  enigmatic genius who fronted the brief but brilliant Joy Division — seemed unimpressed by any labels assigned by music journalists — as well as any forced comparisons among diverse acts; when asked by a reporter who compared Joy Division to Gary Numan and wondered what Curtis thought of Numan’s claim that “machine rock is the future,” Curtis replied:  “No disrespect to Gary Numan, but what we do is what we do.”

Perhaps the label that fits best, then, is the one used by writers for Sounds magazine in the mid to late seventies: post-punk. In the wake of the spirit of DIY, aggression and rebellion that was punk, a new movement emerged. To paraphrase an astute observation made by someone uncredited in an April 2005 issue of Mojo Magazine writing about Joy Division, this movement, instead of saying “fuck off” said “I’m fucked.” Thus is summed up the aesthetic for many of the British bands of the late seventies and early eighties (the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, and [the band that rose from the ashes of Joy Division] New Order — just to name a few) — an aesthetic even evident in the more accessible work of Gary Numan: the paranoid “here in my car, I feel safest of all / I can lock all my doors” quickly turns to the lonely plea of “will you visit me, please, if I open my door?”

Intentional isolationism. Losing one’s self in the machine. These were among Numan’s major themes. And he’s still going strong. Go to garynuman.com to check out his latest work.