New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.
Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.
1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.
But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out - similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" .
Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.
As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...
Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al.
A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer.
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Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)
Just a fraction of the NME cassetteography...
I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged...
I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....
Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight
Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time
I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal
Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)
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Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.
The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere.
I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s).
It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music. Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk...
So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms.
I'm guessing MJ Cole, or Wookie might have featured later on.
Am I right or am I right!
I do have an instinct, a nose, for this kind of thing, you see
Probably rather a lot of broken beats.
Mo' Wack, natch
SNC is rather like a Brit version of Wax Poetics.
There's that obsession with image - a love of classic-era jazz rooted in the photographs of it as much as the music, you secretly suspect. (And the record design).
Whereas The Wire, despite a similar emphasis on high quality portrait photography, would have much more in the way of musicians who are image-less. Badly dressed improvisors. Haggard legends with wrinkles and disappearing hair. Frowning scowlers with jowls and baggy sweaters.
^^^^^^^^^
Another thing I think is interesting about this area is how much the original fetishized era of music (fusion, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, etc) is bound up with spiritual questing in a seriously dedicated, committed way ... but I strongly suspect that the Brit demographic drawn to this kind of music don't have anything like the same degree of interest in their revered artists's belief-systems.... it's probably a rather sceptical and down to earth milieu on the whole.
Nothing wrong with that... I personally don't buy into the creeds of musicians I love, whether it's roots reggae or Pharaoh Sanders... you like the musical outcomes that this devotional mentality generates... a vibe or drive or aura that non-believing musicians can't reach
Especially with the Brit fandom for this kind of music... the U.K. being such a faithless culture... For us the music becomes its own fanaticism... religion enough in itself
But then the writing about the music in this sort of zone doesn't really go in much for testifying or mystical language... it's a rather dusty discographic sort of writing (think also of the fact-heavy liner notes you get with dub and roots reissues.... what the music is actually about, its motor yearnings, is largely evaded).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Although Wax Poetics and in a different way Grand Royal show that there are Americans like that, I do tend to think it's a British sensibility. "We are the select few white guys who understand the black music."
It always rubs me up the wrong way. For various reasons, but in part because they don't actually seem to understand it that well. They are always catching up with the cutting edge a little on the late side. They are all about rhythm but often have difficulty initially with the new rhythm.
Which is one reason - among several - that I continue to believe that Melody Maker had the best, most acute coverage of hip hop in the late 80s and early ‘90s, out of all the Brit mags covering it.
Yes, Melody Maker, the paper that had The Cure on the cover all the time. But we also had Schoolly D, Mantronix, Public Enemy, LL Cool J on the cover.
Our coverage of dance music wasn’t shabby either - indeed an entire monthly magazine, Muzik, was spun off the club tracks section of Melody Maker. You can’t say that about Sounds or NME.
All that span plus the sharpest coverage of the new underground rock - why would anyone have read any other music paper during this era? Seriously.
New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.
Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.
1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.
But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out - similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" .
Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.
As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...
Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al.
A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)
Just a fraction of the NME cassetteography...
I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged...
I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....
Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight
Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time
I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal
Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.
The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere.
I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s).
It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music. Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk...
So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms.
I'm guessing MJ Cole, or Wookie might have featured later on.
Am I right or am I right!
I do have an instinct, a nose, for this kind of thing, you see
Probably rather a lot of broken beats.
Mo' Wack, natch
SNC is rather like a Brit version of Wax Poetics.
There's that obsession with image - a love of classic-era jazz rooted in the photographs of it as much as the music, you secretly suspect. (And the record design).
Whereas The Wire, despite a similar emphasis on high quality portrait photography, would have much more in the way of musicians who are image-less. Badly dressed improvisors. Haggard legends with wrinkles and disappearing hair. Frowning scowlers with jowls and baggy sweaters.
^^^^^^^^^
Another thing I think is interesting about this area is how much the original fetishized era of music (fusion, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, etc) is bound up with spiritual questing in a seriously dedicated, committed way ... but I strongly suspect that the Brit demographic drawn to this kind of music don't have anything like the same degree of interest in their revered artists's belief-systems.... it's probably a rather sceptical and down to earth milieu on the whole.
Nothing wrong with that... I personally don't buy into the creeds of musicians I love, whether it's roots reggae or Pharaoh Sanders... you like the musical outcomes that this devotional mentality generates... a vibe or drive or aura that non-believing musicians can't reach
Especially with the Brit fandom for this kind of music... the U.K. being such a faithless culture... For us the music becomes its own fanaticism... religion enough in itself
But then the writing about the music in this sort of zone doesn't really go in much for testifying or mystical language... it's a rather dusty discographic sort of writing (think also of the fact-heavy liner notes you get with dub and roots reissues - where what the music is actually about, its motor yearnings, is largely evaded).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Although Wax Poetics and in a different way Grand Royal show that there are Americans like that, I do tend to think it's a British sensibility. "We are the select few white guys who understand the black music." It always rubs me up the wrong way. For various reasons, but in part because they don't actually seem to understand it that well. They are always catching up with the cutting edge a little on the late side. They are all about rhythm but often have difficulty initially with the new rhythm.
Which is one reason - among several - that I continue to believe that Melody Maker had the best, most acute coverage of hip hop in the late 80s and early ‘90s, out of all the Brit mags covering it. Yes, Melody Maker, the paper that had The Cure on the cover all the time. But we also had Schoolly D, Mantronix, Public Enemy, LL Cool J on the cover.
Our coverage of dance music wasn’t shabby either - indeed an entire monthly magazine, Muzik, was spun off the club tracks section of Melody Maker. You can’t say that about Sounds or NME.
All that span plus the sharpest coverage of the new underground rock - why would anyone have read any other music paper during this era? Seriously.
Perennial unease about retroculture.... here humorously expressed by NME cartoonist Ray Lowry before the word "retro" had achieved traction in parlance, in March 1982
Reminded me tangentially of this
For a moment I wondered if Lowry's "plundering images" had come from reading a famous piece, "The Age of Plunder", written by Jon Savage for The Face, but then realised that the essay came out in early '83, so almost a year after the cartoon appeared.
However Ray Lowry is actually mentioned in the Savage piece, as the creator of The Clash's London Calling album cover - which is really an act of re-creation, based as it is on Elvis Presley's debut album cover.
Savage does actually passingly deploy the word "retro" but I would still say the term is not THE term yet for this whole phenom, at this stage.
By the end of the '80s, though, it is.
There's a bunch of interesting things about the piece in retro-spect, as it were.
It's almost entirely about the visual side of pop - artwork, image - with little about the music (even though recycling and pastiche were almost as evident there as in the wrappings).
So it's a piece about plundergraphics rather than plundersonics.
Another interesting thing is that although Savage argues for a relationship between this culture of appropriation / recycling / revivalism / nostalgia and the Thatcher-Reagan era - a link between cultural conservatism and the New Right ... rather quickly a kind of slippage occurs, one that's familiar to me from my own attempts to pinpoint the Rift of Retro, which kept on receding further and further back into the pop past.
So for instance when Savage brings up punk, he acknowledges that there was a strong strain of self-conscious referencing of the past - borrowings and citations - going on there - the Who and Monkees cover versions that the Pistols did, the image and name of Generation X, a lot of the graphic recycling and allusion
In fact this is where the word "retro" appears in the piece - "punk always had a retro consciousness"
Well, more than that - as I explore in Retromania: the driving force behind punk in its prequel years 1970-75 was largely epigonic, its primary activities took the form of curation and custodianship.
Before some real-deal hooligans got involved, "punk" was a movement of record collectors, embittered fanzine editors holding a torch for the lost styles of their youth, people who did reissues and historical compilations (Nuggets, Hard Up Heroes etc) and penned their elegiaic liner notes, and the sort of people who operate second-hand record stalls or run vintage clothing boutiques.
New York Dolls, Flamin' Groovies, Dr Feelgood - these progenitors of punk-to-be were anti-modernists all, defiantly out of the temporal groove of the first half of the 1970s.
The slippage in "The Age of Plunder" goes back to punk... but it could have gone further still - to glam (Roxy as an essay about Pop So Far, the simultaneity of all past decades in the emerging archive... the rock and roll revival's overlap with glitter )
The fact that much of this retro-activity was taking place during Labour governments complicates this idea that there's a link between the New Right and postmodernism, although there was a certainly a lot of nostalgia and revivalism going on in the Eighties (Brideshead Revisited, young fogies, etc)
Increasingly I tend to think that what happens within pop culture is only loosely linked to the economy or ideological currents in ascendancy, let alone who's in Number 10 or the White House and the policies they pursue....
Pop has its own internal economy, governed by a reactive (il)logic.... swerves and veers and double-backs that operate more like the fashion economy, than a smooth and direct transfer of energies from substructure to superstructure.
One proof of this is that all the socio-economic topics that punk abrasively introduced into rock in 1976-77 - as the subject of songs, as imagery in record design, in the names of groups or artist alter-egos, in terms of clothing etc - all of these problems and conflicts, this sense of malaise, were in existence in the first half of the 1970s. Dead end jobs, urban decay, tower blocks, terrorism, etc etc. The social fabric was frayed. Collapse and decline and decay were in the air. If anything, it was worse earlier in the decade (the 3 day week, power cuts causing blackouts, industrial action bringing the country to a standstill).
Yet these realities barely entered into the lexicon - lyrical or visual - of rock, prior to punk.
Examples of this kind of "street credible" content are vanishingly rare in rock music before punk - there's Third World War, the odd song like Hawkwind's "Urban Guerilla" - and these rare examples were unsuccessful in the marketplace of popular desire. They didn't catch on. They might have defined the times socio-politically but they didn't define the pop times.
A discourse of national crisis existed in the U.K. for years before punk seized it and reflected it back derisively, tauntingly ("Is this the M.P.L.A.? Or is this the U.D.A.? Or is this the I.R.A.? I thought it was the U.K.".
So there must be other reasons - reasons internal to rock history, rock evolution - that caused punk to start writing songs about dole queues and inner city deprivation and the rest. It wasn't a simple response to the social environment.
Put this another way - if Sham 69 had formed in 1972 - i.e. the same people but born a few years earlier - they would have been Slade.
Conversely, if Slade had formed in 1978 - same people but born a few years later - they would have been Sham 69. Or The Black Country Rejects.
Slade's manager Chas Chandler (ex-Animals) actually described Slade as the first real "wage packet" type group in years - i.e. the first proper working class band out of the U.K. since rock had gone arty and studenty.
("Wage packet" is such a period detail - I should have explained this for younger readers in Shock and Awe - this is an era where young working class people don't have bank accounts, they all get paid in cash, in an envelope at the end of the week, and go home and give a portion of to their mum for bed and board and the rest is spending money).
But Slade didn't actually write about wage-packet stuff - boring jobs and the boss and the constraints on kids, the police etc.
They wrote about what the pop times dictated - fun, release, make some noise - and not the underlying social realities.
Their music was a mechanism for release from those social realities.
The headline of this colour supplement piece on punk from 1977 not really substantiated by the article, except a bit on how Joe Strummer was on the dole for years and years (clearly a lifestyle choice) and that youth employment rates had increased a deal since 1967.
However the difference in overall unemployment between early 1971 and late '76 is a steady increase from 3.8% to 5.5% - hardly huge and rapid enough to create a time-defining sense of crisis, an economic determinant for a youth movement
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