Scritti Politti - Skank Bloc Bologna

I step into the room and immediately stumble against a typewriter lurking on the dingy brown carpet. A small tower of books perches precariously on top of the machine. Next to it lies a half-drunk mug of coffee, its thick meniscus greeny-grey with mould. Jutting stacks of pamphlets, broadsheets, and academic paperbacks sprawl across every available surface - TV, mantelpiece, even the top of the gas fire - while the bookshelves look close to collapsing. On the wall above the fireplace, poking through an overlapping foliage of gig flyers and activist leaflets, there's a seven-inch single and a framed Hammer & Sickle, with a used teabag dangling irreverently off the latter's blade.

I never visited Scritti Politti's squat, located in a nondescript side street in Camden, north London. But I feel like I did. As a sixteen-year-old, I stared endlessly at the black-and-white photo of Scritti's living room on the front of their 4 A Sides EP. 

In Scritti's debut single, "Skank Bloc Bologna", there's a brief, sardonic allusion to The Clash's idea of themselves as 'The Magnificent Seven'. (Scritti's leader Green had read an NME interview in which the band compared themselves to the posse of vigilante heroes). 'They said they felt like...a bunch of outlaws that would come into town to put everything to rights', Green told one fanzine. The song's last verse, he explained, punctured this 'silly over-romanticized notion' of the rock group as 'macho gunslingers, the Robin Hoods of today'.

The 'skank' is easy to place: the loping, white-reggae groove of the bass and drums, which Green overlays with plangent rhythm guitar closer to folk-rock than punk. The 'bloc' is a buried allusion to Gramsci (one of Scritti's favourite neo-Marxist theorists) and his concept of the 'historic bloc': an alliance of oppressed classes uniting to overturn the existing order and overhaul the dominant 'common-sense' worldview of what's natural, ordained, possible - revolution as the creation of a new reality. The 'Bologna' of the title is another story: in early 1977 Bologna's Communist mayor lost control of the city to a riotous coalition of 'autonomists' and counter-culture radicals. Self-organized and carnivalesque, il Movimento - as it was nicknamed - aimed not to seize power but to smash it altogether, leaving everybody and nobody in charge. But Mayor Zangheri denounced the rioters as bohemian nihilists and enemies of the proletariat, and after several weeks called in armoured cars to crush the rebellion.
The title 'Skank Bloc Bologna' seems to imagine the Scritti squat as the germ of a future Movimento Inglesi. Yet the tone of the song is desolate. The verses zoom in on a girl adrift: the hapless, hopeless product of bad education and stifled imagination, she's got no sense that change is even possible. Green sounds like he's fighting his own despair - in sleepy London town, revolution seems a long way off. But even if the girl doesn't know it, 'Something in Italy/Is keeping us all alive'. And closer to home there's 'the magnificent six' (the number in the Scritti collective at that point), with their schemes and dreams: 'They're working on a notion and they're working on a hope/A Euro vision and a skanking scope'.

The melody's off-kilter beauty and the plaintive melancholy of Green's singing (indebted to the 'English soul' of Robert Wyatt), along with the intrigue of the lyrics and that cryptic title, captured the imagination.

Scritti Politti - Skank Bloc Bologna 1978

On the photocopied sleeve, Scritti went one better than The Desperate Bicycles in the demystification stakes, itemizing the complete costs of recording, mastering, pressing, printing the labels and so on, along with contact numbers for companies who provided these services.

The early sounds of The Human League

With singer Philip Oakey on board, the Human League shifted decisively in a pop direction with songs like "Dance Like a Star", a lo-fi, cobbled-together counterpart to Summer and Moroder's "I Feel Love". At the start of the song, Oakey taunts, "This is a song for all you bigheads out there who think disco music is lower than the irrelevant musical gibberish and tired platitudes that you try to impress your parents with. We're the Human League, we're much cleverer than you, and this is called 'Dance Like a Star'".

The Human League - Dance Like A Star 1977

The Human League's debut single "Being Boiled" was released in June 1978 with the slogan "Electronically yours" on its cover.

Philip K. Dick's influence is all over early Human League. "Circus of Death", the B-side of their debut single, was partly inspired by Ubik, while "Almost Medieval" from the first album, Reproduction, is based on Counter-Clock World, a novel in which time goes backward.

"Circus of Death" was once described by Human League co-founder Martyn Ware as "a subliminal trip through all the very trashiest films". The story involves an evil clown who runs a nightmare circus and uses the sinister mind control drug Dominion to pacify the population, with Steve McGarrett from american tv series Hawaii Five-O flying in to the rescue.

The Human League - Circus of Death 1978


The Human League - Almost Medieval 1979


As part of their newfound appreciation for conveyor belt pop and epic schmaltz, the Human League started to work up all-electronic cover versions of sixties classics like the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling". That song was both a crowd-pleaser and a striking gesture, almost transgressive. "No one did covers really. During punk, you were supposed to do original material", says Human League co-founder Ian Craig Marsh.

The Human League - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling 1979

Devo & the video for "Whip It"

The band moved to Los Angeles, capital of the entertainment business, and with 1980's Freedom of Choice made a record even more calculatedly commercial than the clinical-sounding Duty. This gave Devo their own platinum album, spurred on by the Top 20 success of "Whip It".

Written during the ailing twilight of the Carter presidency, "Whip It" offered Dale Carnegie-style advice to the embattled leader. "Come on Jimmy, get your shit together", laughs Mothersbaugh. By the time Warner Brothers allowed Devo to make a promo clip for the song, it was clear that Reagan was heading for a landslide victory. Devo made the video into a surreal commentary on America's shift to the Right. The result was a video that twenty-five years later is not the least bit dated looking and is still a huge hoot. It was Devo's one true moment of mass-cultural triumph.

Pitched somewhere between a John Ford Western and David Lynch's Eraserhead, the genuinely creepy video for "Whip It" perfectly cristallizes Devo's "freak show aesthetic". As a bunch of Texas stud muffins and blonde bimbos gawk and giggle, Mothersbaugh wields a whip and one by one lashes away the garments of a strange Grace Jones-like amazon of a woman, whose legs start trembling in an indescribably abject way as she waits for the final whip crack to strip off her last shred of modesty. Meanwhile, the rest of Devo performs the song cooped inside a cattle pen - pasty-faced spud-boys wearing shorts that show off their scrawny knees and the famous "flowerpot hats". "We were horrified by Reagan's ascent", says Casale, "So we were just making fun of myths of cowboys in the West".

Devo - Whip It 1980

As the new decade progressed, the original "eighties industrial band" got chewed up by the industry. Even as they railed against Reaganism with songs like "Freedom of Choice" and "Through Being Cool", Devo found themselves increasingly bossed around by their record company.

Devo - Freedom of Choice 1980


Devo - Through Being Cool 1981

Playing with a different sex: Delta 5 and The Au Pairs

The women in Delta 5 often wrote from a standpoint of defiance, aloofness, self-assertiveness, and unapproachable autonomy. "Mind Your Own Business", their debut single, was hilariously coldhearted and standoffish, resolutely barring entrance to someone craving intimacy and involvement. "Can I interfere in your crisis?/No! Mind your own business!"

Delta 5 - Mind Your Own Business 1979

"You", the second single, was funnier still, a series of accusations and recriminations. "Who left me behind at the baker's?/YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU!/Who likes sex only on Sundays?/YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU!"

Delta 5 - You 1980

Another hard-riffing agit-funk band with a mixed-gender lineup and songs that scrutinized sexuality with an unforgiving eye was The Au Pairs.

Their most famous song, "Come Again", depicts an egalitarian couple who is trying to achieve orgasmic parity. Sung as a duet, it's a microdrama in which Paul Foad plays the eager-to-please man earnestly frigging his long-suffering partner, Lesley Woods. "Is your finger aching?/I can feel you hesitating", she wonders, as the likelihood of orgasm fades to zero. By the end, despite everyone's progressive intentions, she's simply discovered "a new way to fake".

The Au Pairs - Come Again (BBC Sessions) 1981

The Mekons' second single and debut album

The Mekons' second single for Fast Product, the indie smash "Where Were You?" was released toward the end of 1978 and quickly sold out its 27.500-copy first pressing.

The Mekons - Where Were You? 1978

The Mekons were eventually persuaded to step up to the major leagues and sign with Virgin. But the big time didn't really suit a group based around amateurish charm. All the life was sucked out of the Mekons' debut LP, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen, by its being recorded in Virgin's topflight studio, the Manor.

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

The Normal - Warm Leatherette

Working in his North London bedroom, Daniel Miller, aka the Normal, created "T.V.O.D." and "Warm Leatherette", the two sides of his self-released debut single as the Normal.
The Normal's sound was electropunk. "Warm Leatherette" especially - all harsh stabs of analog-synth distortion and dispassionately perverse lyrics about the eroticism of car accidents, via Ballard's Crash - could hardly have been further from the floridly romantic keyboard synth arpeggios of prog rock.
The single did unexpectedly well, selling thirty thousand copies, and inadvertently turned Miller into the CEO of his own record label. Mute Records was the name he'd put on the back of the single, along with his home address. Many people assumed Mute was a proper record label specializing in weird electropop. Within a week of the release of "Warm Leatherette" all kind of peculiar demo tapes started arriving in the mail.

The Normal - Warm Leatherette - 1978


The Normal - T.V.O.D. - 1978

PiL - Public Image

Given Lydon's initial talk of PiL as antimusic and antimelody, the group's debut single, "Public Image", was a massive relief for all concerned-the record company, Pistols fans, and critics. It's a searing, soaring statement of intent.
The glorious, chiming minimalism of Wobble's bassline and Levene's plangent, ringing chords mirror Lydon's quest for purity as he jettisons not just the Rotten alter ego ("somebody had to stop me/...I will not be treated as property") but rock 'n' roll itself.
"That song was the first proper bassline I ever came up with", says Wobble. "Very simple, a beautiful interval from E to B. Just the joy of vibration. And incredible guitar from Keith, this great burst of energy."
"Public Image" is like a blueprint for the reborn, purified rock of the 1980s. One can hear the Edge from U2 in its radiant surge. "It's so clean, so tingly, like a cold shower", says Levene. "It could be really thin glass penetrating you but you don't know until you start bleeding internally".
In "Public Image" Lydon reasserted his rights over "Johnny Rotten"-"Public image belongs to me/It's my entrance, my own creation, my grand finale"-only to end the song by shedding the persona with an echo chamber yell of "goodbye!"

PiL - Public Image - 1978