Hippies vs. Punks: Magazine's Real Life 1978

Magazine is an interesting band to listen to now if like me you never listened to them back in the day. I listened to plenty of Buzzcocks, the band that Howard Devoto formed with Pete Shelley but had left by early 1977, but never any Magazine. I'm sure I had heard "Shot by Both Sides," Magazine's big single -- the one that Devoto co-writes with Shelley that sounds like a Buzzcocks song; and the one to this day that is most likely to be found on a first wave Punk compilation -- I'm just not conscious of it. And that's the source of my fascination with Magazine -- and Howard Devoto, as I mentioned last week in the post on Penelope Houston -- the extent to which the sound of New Wave English bands formed the backdrop of life in the 1980s and how that backdrop was created out of the clay of first wave UK Punk.

Make no mistake, Magazine is a New Wave band. Devoto leaves the Buzzcocks because he wants to move beyond the Punk formula. He meets art student John McGeoch in April 1977, and they start writing songs that would end up on Magazine's debut album, Real Life (1978).

I downloaded Real Life last weekend and have been listening to it all week. Recorded in the spring of '78 (at a time shortly after the disbanding of the Sex Pistols and shortly before the Hippie bon voyage masterpiece, The Last Waltz, appeared in movie theaters), Real Life was released in June 1978 to strong reviews and ended up making the UK Top 30. It continues to this day to rank in "Greatest" album lists.

Real Life is an excellent album that grows stronger with each listen. For me the real test is when at lunch I retire to the first-floor file room. I lie on my back on the carpeted floor in the dark and drift off listening to my iPod.

The album starts strong with "Definitive Gaze," "My Tulpa," and "Shot by Both Sides." Then it levels off while maintaining its force. The effect is an organic one. By the time you've gotten to Track 8, "The Light Pours Out of Me," you're on higher ground.

What struck me in listening to the lead cut, "Definitive Gaze," is that in one song from 1978 you can hear the entire decade of the New Wave 1980s to come -- its Thatcherism and Reaganism, its nerdy male vocals, its synthesizer parts, its John Hughes The Breakfast Club celebration of suburbia and the transcendence of the Simple Minds sound.

English New Wave of the 1980s. One swam in an ocean of it. One ate it and drank it and bathed in it and slept in it and shit in it. It was the air that one breathed. Most of it sounded the same to me. Bloodless. Any sort of social critique, if there at all, was inscrutable. You would be hard pressed to devise a more anesthetizing music. Sonic ether. Bilious, suffocating, synthesizer-driven pop -- the perfect soundtrack for neoliberalism triumphant.

Real Life should be studied as a rich "present at the creation" record -- spring 1978! -- of how Punk becomes Post-Punk and paves the way for New Wave. The 1978 Peel Sessions kick ass!

I made a list off the top of my head sitting at my desk at work of all the UK New Wave bands and singer-songwriters that would follow the first wave of Punk. Après moi le déluge:

Tubeway Army
Gary Numan
Ultravox
Adam and the Ants
Cabaret Voltaire
Cocteau Twins
Thompson Twins
Simple Minds
The Cure
Thomas Dolby
Flock of Seagulls
Teardrop Explodes
Julian Cope
Echo & the Bunnymen
XTC
OMD
Psychedelic Furs
Spandau Ballet
Depeche Mode
Duran Duran
Soft Cell
The Human League
Howard Jones

One could keep going. But you get the idea. Something terrible happened to us in the '80s.