Electronic Dreams: The Human League, Gary Numan, Ultravox, Visage, Spandau Ballet

A hit single continued to elude The Human League. As if to rub salt in their wounds, on the eve of the release of their second album Travelogue, pop-punkers The Undertones took the piss out of the band in their Top 10 hit "My Perfect Cousin". Kevin, the song's goody-two-shoes subject (he's got a degree 'in economics, maths, physics and bionics') starts an electronic band with some art-school boys. 'His mother bought him a synthesizer', spits singer Feargal Sharkey with disgust, 'Got The Human League in to advise her'. Now that he's in a band, Kevin has girls chasing him, 'But what a shame/It's in vain...Kevin, he's in love with himself'. This pretty much crystallized the early Human League's public image - music for narcissistic art-school poseurs and science geeks.

The Undertones - My Perfect Cousin 1980

Their first album Reproduction's big single, "Empire State Human", concerned a man who keeps on growing.  

The Human League - Empire State Human 1979

Travelogue's "The Black Hit of Space" imagines a record so monstrously bland it turns into a kind of predatory cultural void sucking up everything in its path. As it climbs the charts, the rest of the Top 40 disappears 'until there was nothing but it left to buy'. But all the clever astrophysical details (gravity being so multiplied in proximity to the disc that your record player's tone arm weighs 'more than Saturn', etc.) only confirmed the band's nerdy image.

The Human League - The Black Hit of Space 1980

Gary Numan's music rocked, and even when it didn't, it possessed an almost symphonic grandeur - just listen to his most chillingly beautiful song, "Down in the Park", a sort of dystopian power ballad.

Gary Numan and Tubeway Army - Down in the Park 1979

Gary's sullen pout and wounded eyes made for a perfect pin-up in the classic teenybop tradition, with transgender appeal: girls dreamed of thawing the iceman, bringing him back to life; boys identified with his loneliness, allegorized in songs like "M.E.". Here Numan sang from the point of view of 'the last living machine' on an earth where all the people have died. 'Its own power source is running down. I used to have a picture in my mind of this sad and desperately alone machine standing in a desert-like wasteland, just waiting to die', he said.

Gary Numan - M.E. 1979

As for the atmosphere of numb anomie and alienated sexuality, Ultravox laid it all on the table with the debut's manifesto-like "I Want to be a Machine" and Ballard-damaged "My Sex". 'My Sex is a spark of electro flesh', sings John Foxx. 'A neon outline on a high-rise overspill...skyscraper shadows on a car-crash overpass...It wears no future faces, owns just random gender'.

Ultravox - I Want to be a Machine 1977


Ultravox - My Sex 1977

Visage songs like "Fade to Grey" and "The Damned Don't Cry" conjured what Mark Fisher called 'the Euro-aesthete's "exhaustion from life"', especially in tandem with the videos, which evoked pre-war desolation derived from Cabaret and Fritz Lang.

Visage - Fade to Grey 1980


Visage - The Damned Don't Cry 1982

With impeccable timing, the late summer of 1980 saw David Bowie staging his comeback with a number 1 hit, "Ashes to Ashes", which tapped into the same effete, melancholy mood and European electronic sound, as if to remind everybody that he'd done it first with side two of Low. Visage's frontman Steve Strange, dressed as a pierrot, made an appearance in the "Ashes" video.

David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes 1980

Instead of looking westwards for inspiration, the New Romantics pointedly turned their gaze to the east - Germany, obviously, but also Russia. Visage recorded a song called "Moon over Moscow", while Spandau Ballet, the other major group of the scene, plunged into Cossack/Constructivist kitsch with their single "Musclebound".

Visage - Moon Over Moscow 1980


Spandau Ballet - Musclebound 1981

Singer Tony Hadley's operatic vocals bore scant relation to black music. Picking up on the reference to Spandau - site of a purpose-built prison in western Berlin, where Nazi leaders such as Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer were incarcerated - and the neo-classical marble torso on the cover of their debut album Journeys to Glory, neo-fascist magazine Bulldog hailed Spandau as fine exponents of 'musclebound, Nordic' art. New Romanticism, for them, represented a natural aristocracy: the collective narcissism of a self-chosen few. 'I am beautiful and clean and so very, very young' as Hadley crooned on their first hit, "To Cut a Long Story Short".

Spandau Ballet - To Cut a Long Story Short 1980

Meanwhite Ultravox - reformed by keyboardist Billy Currie when he sensed that the pop weather had finally changed in their favour, and with Midge Ure as its new singer - plunged into full-blown Teutonica with the quasi-classical "Vienna". Wreathed in the sonic equivalent of dry ice, this ludicrously portentous ballad, inspired by a vague notion of a past-its-prime Habsburg Empire sliding into decadence, reached number 2 in the charts in the first weeks of 1981 and hovered there for what seemed like an eternity.

Ultravox - Vienna 1980

The sound Martin Rushent and Buzzock frontman Pete Shelley developed was a transitional hybrid of guitar-based New Wave and electropop, heard at its best on the superb single "Homo Sapien". Released in August 1981, "Homo Sapien" was a coded coming-out for Shelley, but the single's innuendoes (the fruity way Shelley enunciates 'homo sapien', plus couplets like 'homo superior/my interior') provoked an unofficial ban from Radio One, and this fatally thwarted its chart prospects.

Pete Shelley - Homo Sapien 1981

Howard Devoto and Magazine's first three albums

With Iggy Pop's The Idiot, released in early 1977, Buzzcocks co-founder Howard Devoto loved the sonorous Sinatra-esque croon Pop had developed. 'You really started to hear the richness of his voice, and when I later tried singing in a low register on Magazine songs like "Motorcade", that was definitely me trying to emulate Iggy a little'.

Magazine - Motorcade 1978

Describing the track "Breakdown" on the Buzzcocks' debut EP Spiral Scratch, the singer archly compared the paranoid protagonist with 'Dostoevsky's underground man or any of them existentialist'. A few years later he'd condense Notes from the Underground into the pop single "A Song from under the Floorboards".

Buzzcocks - Breakdown 1977


Magazine - A Song from under the Floorboards 1980

Everything was building towards a crescendo, and "Shot by Both Sides", Magazine's debut single, rose to the occasion. The riff, originally written by Buzzcocks' guitar player Pete Shelley, had the ringing grandeur of Springsteen's "Born to Run". "Shot" sounded like an anthem, but its emotional core was the opposite of everything anthems stood for: battle-shy and non-committal, it was a clarion for all those who refused calls to solidarity or partisanship.

Without specifically referring to any of the great divisive issues of late seventies Britain (Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League versus the resurgent far right; the collectivist left that was taking over the Labour Party versus the pro-entrepreneur right wing that dominated the Conservative Party), "Shot" captures the era's sense of dreadful polarization, and the vacillation of those caught in the cross-fire with the centre ground disappearing beneath their feet. It is about a non-combatant, an inactivist. It's a defense of the bourgeois art-rock notion that the individual's struggle to be different is what really matters.

Magazine - Shot by Both Sides 1978

It's tempting to read "Shot" as an answer record to Tom Robinson Band's "Better Decide Which Side You're On". Constantly playing benefit gigs, providing info and contacts for various worthy causes on their record sleeves, TRB were icons of radical chic for all who'd hoped something constructive would emerge out of punk.

Tom Robinson Band - Better Decide Which Side You're On 1978

In "Shot by Both Sides" you also get a sense of Devoto recoiling from the rabble-rousing vulgarity that typified most punk gigs by the middle of 1977. The song's key lines are 'I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd/I was shocked by what was allowed/I didn't lose myself in the crowd'. In this respect, "Shot" could also be seen as a riposte in advance to Sham 69's "If the Kids Are United", a massive mid-1978 hit.

Sham 69 - If the Kids Are United 1978

On the brink of the Top 40, Magazine were invited to appear on Top of the Pops. At the last minute, Devoto decided to make a gesture that would indicate his disdain for the the corny charade. 'I didn't want to jump around in an obedient, "here's your entertainment" way. I wanted to be bloody-minded, but in a fairly understated way'. He got the BBC make-up girl to do him up in a whiteface, but instead of a striking glam alien, 'he looked like Marcel Marceau', recalls NME writer Paul Morley. 'And then Devoto decided, because his mind was racing so quick, that he was far ahead of the game and he'd just be still. Very, very still. And this great song was playing, but Devoto stood stock-still. And the next week the record went down the charts and from then on, everything shut down. Killed stone dead.'

Magazine - Shot by Both Sides (Top of the Pops performance) 1978

Following the unexpected failure of their most singular single, Magazine fell back on the prog-rock approach of slow-and-steady career building through albums and touring. 'Prog' was the invidious reference point brandished in the inevitable critical backlash that greeted 1979's Secondhand Daylight. 

Densely produced and overwrought, Secondhand Daylight still contained at least one masterpiece in 'Permafrost', a deliberately sluggish tune whose highlights include Barry Adamson's glutinous bassline, an angular solo from guitarist John McGeoch worthy of Bowie's Lodger, and Devoto's most quoted couplet: 'I will drug you and fuck you/On the permafrost'.

Magazine - Permafrost 1979

Magazine's third album, 1980's The Correct Use of Soap, received a warmer greeting: it was hailed, correctly, as the band's masterpiece. Devoto's lyrics drew inspiration from an idea he'd found in a book of essays on love and lust by Theodor Reik - the notion that you are particularly vulnerable to falling in love after you've experienced some kind of trauma or life crisis.

The Secret Public - 1977

Released at the very end of 1977, almost a full year after Spiral Scratch, ORG-2 wasn't even a record, but a booklet of collages by Linder (singer in the band Ludus) and Jon Savage (journalist for Sounds magazine). "It didn't have a cover price, so it didn't sell very well. Nobody knew what to sell it for!" laughs Boon. "But it did its job. The title The Secret Public was all about that other side of the DIY thing - trying to locate kindred spirits who would 'get it' and respond".

(Scans taken from: www.goldminetrash.blog.co.uk)

The Buzzcocks - Spiral Scratch EP

There are people who will say in all earnestness that the Buzzcocks EP Spiral Scratch was a more epochal punk single than "Anarchy in the UK". Released in January 1977 on the Buzzcocks' own New Hormones label, the EP wasn't the first independently released record, not by a long stretch, but it was the first to make a real polemical point about independence. In the process, Spiral Scratch inspired thousands of people to play the do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself game.
Spiral Scratch was simultaneously a regionalist blow against the capital (Manchester versus London) and a conceptual exercise in demystification ("spiral scratch", because that's what a record materially is, a spiral groove scratched into vinyl).

The back cover itemized details of the recording process, such as which take of the songs they'd used and the number of overdubs. The EP's catalog number, ORG-1, was a Left-leaning bookworm's wisecrack: ORG-1 = ORG ONE = orgone, Wilhelm Reich's neurolibidinous life force.
"Spiral Scratch was playful", says Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. "Play was very important". That spirit came through in the EP's most famous song, "Boredom", which was simultaneously an expression of real ennui ("I'm living in this movie/but it doesn't move me") and a metapop comment on boredom as a prescribed subject for punk songs and punk-related media discourse - a topic that was predictable to the point of being, well, a bit boring.
Pete Shelley's deliberately inane two-note guitar solo sealed the conceptual deal: a "boring" solo that was actually thrillingly tension inducing in its fixated refusal to go anywhere melodically.

The Buzzcocks - Boredom - 1977