The last days of analog
Around the time Jose Padilla was making his first mix tapes on Ibiza, another stream of music was winding down. The last gasps of Punk, Post-Punk, Ska, and the New Wave were coming to a bitter end in the late 80’s, though not quietly.
Everyone was looking for the new direction. Most bands folded. Some re-formed in one fashion or another, and then folded again. A few, like the B-52s, took the death blow but got up and (somehow) returned as pop phenomena. Others, like Elvis Costello, managed to stay the course and continued to grow as artists in their own right.
There was a brutal tension in the music of this era between analog and digital. In the late 70s New Wave bands like Devo and the B-52s used electronica to decorate straight rock/blues tunes like “Planet Claire” and “Uncontrollable Urge”. With their conventional guitar / drum / bass construction these songs are recognizably in the rock tradition going back to Chuck Berry.
Despite Devo’s costumes and synthesizers, “Uncontrollable Urge” owes less to Kraftwerk than to the Beatles. At least one Beatle noticed. In 2012 Mark Mothersbaugh told a reporter about running into John Lennon after a gig in New York:
"We were sitting in the van waiting and John Lennon and Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople came staggering out and looked over.
"John Lennon saw it was me and stuck his head in the window, he was kind of drunk and put his face right against mine and went, 'yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!' because he recognised it as being an updating of ‘She Loves You’.
"That was one of my most exciting moments ever."
But “Uncontrollable Urge” was the exception. On average Devo came not to honor the Beatles, but to bury them. There had been a time when analog was about the future…
…but by the end of the 80s Max Headroom was looking like the Herald of Galactus. Analog was in full retreat, and electronica was taking over the clubs, raves, and Virgin megastores. Innovative acts like Devo and Kraftwerk were succeeded by an endless succession of derivative electronic music-like substances.
Finding myself unable to listen to the radio I got a copy of Elvis’s Sun Sessions and played it non-stop for a year. I got a couple of Grateful Dead concert albums and played those to death, too. I loaded up on Motown and Stax. I familiarized myself with Ike Turner instrumentals. When I attempted to return to mainstream culture I immediately encountered Milli Vanilli and Terence Trent D'Arby, and promptly relapsed.
In desperation I looked back at the post-punk era for something I might have missed. I found The Beat:
Wow, what band. Not a synthesizer in sight, sharp lyrics and a 2/2 bass line that just won’t quit. I was in, and still am, but by the time I found them in the mid-80s, they were already over.
Beat guitarist Andy Cox and bassist David Steele went out on their own and spent eight months listening to vocalist audition tapes. They selected Roland Gift, who could really sing, looked like a movie star, and had some songwriting talent, too. The next step was to secure a recording contract, which happened right after they did this:
A close cousin of the music they’d made with The Beat, “Johnny Come Home” still has that lean sound and distinctive bass work. Gift brings an assured vocal that puts muscle on the bones.
The Cannibals were around for eight years, but between gigs, movie appearances (e.g., Tin Men), and their own laborious recording process, they made just two albums. The second one - The Raw and the Cooked - covered Elvis and the Buzzcocks (well), and produced two number one hits in America, “She Drives Me Crazy” and the immaculate “Good Thing”:
Let us be clear, “Good Thing” is perfect. It is crowd-friendly and energetic, bluesy and tasteful, powerful yet whimsical. The opening lick is an appreciative lift from Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love” (here). Jools Holland’s piano (discussed here) takes the song beyond the band’s traditional strengths, to a rarefied level inhabited primarily by mid-career Beatles tunes. What do we call this…? Post-Punk Pop? Ska boogie-woogie? Eh, let historians fight it out. It’s real good is what it is.
Fine Young Cannibals pulled it off because they were deliberately ignoring what was going on around them. They were listening to old records, particularly Stax artists like Otis Redding. In a 2017 interview Gift said:
One of the things when we got together was … well, the stuff we were listening to back then was at least 25 years old, and we wanted to make something that people could listen to 25 years later. That was one of our objectives. We didn’t have a mission statement, but that was one of the things we wanted to do. And we still get radio play, so people are still listening.
And watching. Like the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” or Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” it is impossible to hear "Good Thing” without thinking of the accompanying video. Filmed in glorious black and white, it is the greatest advertisement for late 20th-century scooter travel that Big Scooter could have wished for. But director Peter Care was after more, meticulously documenting a vanishing moment in the mod revival, in the process giving the Jokers and A41 Eagles an immortality not generally on offer to scooter clubs.
According to Songfacts,
the group was hounded to accept sponsorship deals, including a ridiculous one involving this song. "The worst thing was they wanted us to remake the 'Good Thing' video with Hondas instead of Vespas," David Steele told Q magazine in 1990. "I used to hang out with scooter kids and to them the biggest joke in the whole world was the Honda scooter."
Despite the obvious care taken in making the video, I found it jarring when I first saw it. The song is about love lost and (just possibly?) regained; and not, so far as I could tell, about scooters. But Care runs ahead of us, slipping in quick cuts to various people, including an intense-looking pair with details that you’d typically only catch if you were obsessively watching the video over and over during a pandemic lockdown.
They appear at the exact midpoint of the song:
And these occur in quick succession a few moments later…
This is the way.
After The Raw and the Cooked there was, famously, nothing. Gift later said "we made a great deal of money…in a short time and, in a way, it ruined us. I'm not complaining, it's allowed me the freedom to not have to work. But as a band we suddenly became obsessed with writing bigger hits, selling more than five million copies of the next album ... stupid stuff, really. We lost the sense of making music because we enjoyed it.”
There’s not much Fine Young Cannibals, but what there is, is great. As Updike once said of Beerbohm, “the filigree is fine, but of the purest gold.”
And, come to think of it, I think I need to get a scooter.