Almost black: James Chance and The Contortions

James Brown's influence as the founding musical text for his band Contortions is pinpointed by James Chance to a single track: 1970's "Super Bad, Pts 1 and 2". 'What really got me into JB was the sax solos on that single - real out-there playing like you'd get on an Ayler or Sun Ra record'.

James Brown - Super Bad, Pts 1 and 2 - 1970

Rhythmically and lyrically, James Brown songs like "Sex Machine" and "I Got Ants in My Pants" pointed towards a racked ecstasy of painful pleasure that was almost dehumanizing. Picking up on these hints, Chance imagined funk as voodoo possession and cold-fever delirium - the perfect vehicle for exploring themes of addiction, sexual bondage and morbid ossession.

James Brown - Sex Machine 1970


James Brown - I Got Ants in My Pants 1972

For the disco album Off White, the members of Contortions were hired as session musicians and the project was credited to James White and The Blacks.

"Stained Sheets" resembles a sordid S&M twist on Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby": it's a phone-sex duet between Chance and Lydia Lunch, juxtaposing his blasé sneer with her orgasmic whimpers and non-verbal desperation.

James White and The Blacks (feat. Lydia Lunch) - Stained Sheets 1979


Donna Summer - Love to Love You Baby 1975

Off White and its sister album Buy probed the darker corners of sexuality. Buy's cover featured Terry Sellers, author of The Corrected Sadist, scantily clad in panties and a strange, deconstructed bra designed by Chance's lover/manager Anya Philips.

Inside "I Don't Want to Be Happy" confessed that Chance's 'idea of fun' was 'being whipped on the back of the thighs', while in "Bedroom Athlete" he yelps, 'I won't be your slave unless you will be mine'.

James Chance and The Contortions - I Don't Want to Be Happy 1979


James Chance and The Contortions - Bedroom Athlete 1979

Off White, meanwhile, verged on a musical essay about racial tourism, with the track "Almost Black" representing the most dubious homage to blackness as sociopathology/virile primitivism since Norman Mailer's 1957 essay 'The White Negro'. The track features a white girl and a black girl bitterly disputing the attributes and defects of 'James White': 'Well, he's almost black', 'That nigger's white ', 'Well he's got some moves', 'But they ain't right'.

James White and The Blacks - Almost Black 1979

Appearing on both Buy and Off White in different versions, the anthem "Contort Yourself" evoked a sort of jaded Dionysian frenzy, the joyless flailing of empty souls trying to evacuate even more of their consciousness: 'Take out all the garbage that's in your brain ... Why don't you try being stupid instead of smart?'

James Chance and The Contortions - Contort Yourself 1979


James White and The Blacks - Contort Yourself 1979

Militant entertainment: introducing Gang of Four and the Mekons' "Never Been in a Riot"

Gang of Our shunned the heat of rock spontaneity, the intuitive looseness of letting songs emerge "organically" out of jams. "No jamming - that was the J-word", says guitarist Andy Gill. "Everything was thought out in advance".

Drummer Hugo Burnham worked out unusual drum parts that inverted or frustrated the usual rock modes of rhythmic motion, like the mechanistic drum loop of "Love Like Anthrax", and what he calls the "continuous falling-down-the-stairs flow" of "Guns Before Butter".

Gang of Four - Guns Before Butter 1979

In their most thrilling songs - the taut, geometrical paroxysm of "Natural's Not In It", for instance - everything worked as rhythm, just like in James Brown's funk.

Gang of Four - Natural's Not In It 1979

A stumbling juggernaut of crude guitar and caveman drums, "Never Been in a Riot", the Mekons' debut, was a sonic argument in support of the proposition that rock, in the words of Melody Maker's Mary Harron, "is the only form of music which can actually be done better by people who can't play their instruments than by people who can".

Not everybody bought the argument initially. Rough Trade literally didn't buy it, refusing to take any copies of the single, saying it was just too incompetent. "Shortly thereafter, though, it was made Single of the Week in NME", recalls Fast Product's owner Bob Last (who signed the band for their first single). "And everybody wanted it, including Rough Trade".

NME's seal of approval was all the more significant because it came courtesy of the paper's resident punk rocker Tony Parsons, who took the lyrics of "Never Been in a Riot" as an inspired lampoon of the Clash's street-fighting-man posturing. According to Mekons' leader Tom Greenhalgh, the song is closer to an admission of vulnerability. "That you might be in a riot and be scared. Being open about that kind of weakness rather than trying to put on a front".

The Mekons - Never Been in a Riot 1978