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

Evolution of The Pop Group

Like the Slits, the Pop Group pined for a lost wholeness that they imagined existed before civilization's debilitating effects. The song "Words Disobey Me" even hinted that language itself might be the enemy, that underneath all the layers of conditioning lay a pure, inarticulate speech of the heart. "Speak the unspoken/First words of a child...We don't need words/Throw them away", beseeched Stewart.

The Pop Group - Words Disobey Me 1979

The Pop Group's mounting revulsion for corporate capitalism and corresponding desire for "purity" in a corrupt world inspired the single "We Are All Prostitutes". Musically, it's their most powerful recording. The lyrics, though, abandoned Y's imagistic delirium for a histrionic rant against consumerism, "the most barbaric of all religions". Stewart warned, "our children shall rise up against us". The Pop Group seemed to be changing from lusty poet-warriors to puritanical doomsayers.

The Pop Group - We Are All Prostitutes 1979

The backlash came in March 1980, triggered by a split single that paired the Slits' "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm" with the Pop Group's "Where There's a Will". NME's Ian Penman mockingly dissed them as "Bristol Baezes", evoking sanctimonious sixties folkie Joan Baez.

The Pop Group - Where There's a Will 1980

The second Pop Group album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? got panned as self-righteous soapbox agitprop. The music was still fiery, and actually more focused than Y, but it was hard to stomach the crude finger-pointing of songs like "Blind Faith".

The Pop Group - Blind Faith 1980

The band seemed to proceed methodically through a checklist of issues - "Justice" dealt with police brutality, "How Much Longer" with Nixon and Kissinger's war crimes - and the self-flagellating guilt trip vibe was off-putting. "There Are No Spectators" chided the politically disengaged and passive, declaring, "There is no neutral/No one is innocent".

The Pop Group - Justice 1980


The Pop Group - How Much Longer 1980


The Pop Group - There Are No Spectators 1980

The album was relentlessly pinned to the specifics, from the sleeve with its collage of news clipping about outrages such as East Timor to songs such as "Feed The Hungry", all blurted statistics and denunciation. Hectoring and lecturing, For How Much Longer was as unpoetic as a fringe leftist pamphlet.

The Pop Group - Feed The Hungry 1980

A massive antinuclear rally held in Trafalgar Square in October 1980 was the last time the Pop Group performed together. After this high point - playing to 250.000 people - the Pop Group fell apart. "An organic disintegration", says Stewart. "There was no ill will".

The Slits - Cut

The most delightful element in the Slits' sound on Cut is the strange geometry of the clashing and overlapping vocals, as guitarist Albertine and bass player Pollitt weave around singer Ari Up's shrill, slightly sour warble. On the opener, "Instant Hit", the girls form a roundelay of haphazard harmonies that the singer describes as "a kind of 'Frère Jacques' thing". Albertine's lyrics to "Instant Hit" depict an unhealthily thin boy who "don't like himself very much/'cos he has set his self to self-destruct" - a barbed portrait that applied equally to Sid Vicious and Keith Levene, her junkie bandmates in the band Flowers of Romance.

The Slits - Instant Hit 1979

"So Tough", a frenetic pisstake of macho posturing, gives way to the doleful skank of "Spend, Spend, Spend", its sliding bass and brittle-nerved percussion perfectly complementing the lyric's sketch of a shopaholic vainly trying to "satisfy this empty feeling" with impulse purchases.

The Slits - So Tough 1979


The Slits - Spend, Spend, Spend 1979

"Shoplifting" turns "Spend, Spend, Spend" inside out: the first song's woman-as-consumerist dupe is transformed in the second's petty-thief-as-feminist rebel. Frantic punk reggae, "Shoplifting" surges into adrenalized overdrive as Ari Up, caught red-handed, yells "do the runner". The song climaxes with a shattering scream that mingles terror, glee, and relief at escaping the supermarket detective, a yowl that collapses into the giggled gasp, "I've pissed my knickers!"

The Slits - Shoplifting 1979

The fast songs on Cut are exhilarating - "Shoplifting", "Love Und Romance" (a romance-as-brain-death parody), and the single "Typical Girls" (a diatribe against un-Slitty females who "don't create, don't rebel" and whose heads are addled with women's-magazine-induced anxieties about "spots, fat, unnatural smells").

The Slits - Typical Girls 1979

The most emotionally haunting songs, though, are down-tempo and despondent in the mold of "Spend, Spend, Spend": "FM", "Ping Pong Affair" and "Newtown".

The last takes its name from towns built from scratch after the Second World War, some encircling London and designed to absorb the capital's population overflow, others built in the rural middle of nowhere. All of them, typically, started life as an architect's and urban planner's utopian vision before swiftly degenerating into characterless gridzones of anomie and despair. "Newtown" draws a disconcerting parallel between the normal citizens hooked on cultural tranquilizers like "televisiono" and "footballino", and the Slits' own bohemian peers zonked on illegal narcotics. On the track, Albertine's jittery scrape mimics the fleshcrawling ache of cold turkey.

The Slits - Newtown 1979

Withdrawal of an emotional kind inspired "Ping Pong Affair". Ari Up measures out the empty postbreakup evenings with masturbation ("Same old thing yeah I know/Everybody does it") and cigarettes.

The Slits - Ping Pong Affair 1979

Cut's famous cover photograph of the group as mud-smeared Amazons combines nostalgie de la boue with she-warrior defiance to jab the casual record shop browser right in the eye. Naked but for loincloths and war paint, the three Slits stand proudly bare breasted, outstaring the camera's gaze. Behind them you can see the wall of a picturesque cottage, brambles and roses clambering up the side as if to underline the "we're no delicate English roses and this is no come-hither look" stance. The cottage was Ridge Farm, the studio where Bovell produced Cut. Says Ari Up, "We got so into the countryside when we were doing the album, to the point of rolling around in the earth. So we decided to cover ourselves in mud and show that women could be sexy without dressing in a prescribed way. Sexy in a natural way, and naked without being pornographic".

John Lydon surprises listeners during his radio show "The Punk and His Music" - 1977

Those who tuned in anticipating punk rock were immediately thrown for a loop by the first selection, Tim Buckley's "Sweet Surrender", a lush, sensual R&B song swathed with orchestral strings.
When he talked about identifying with Dr. Alimantado's "Born for a Purpose", a song about being persecuted as a Rasta, Lydon gave his audience an advance glimpse of PiL's aura of paranoia and prophecy, casting himself as a visionary outcast in Babylon, U.K.

Tim Buckley - Sweet Surrender - 1972


Dr. Alimantado - Born for a Purpose - 1976

Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen

The Sex Pistols swearing on television, "God Save the Queen" versus the Royal Jubilee, an entire culture convulsed and quaking-I simply did not notice.

Sex Pistols - Bill Grundy Interview - 1976


Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen - Live on Boat Trip Queen's Jubilee - 1977