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 HughesThe 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:
The Friday before last Hippies vs. Punks dealt with the Avengers, the first wave San Francisco Punk band famous for preceding the Sex Pistols at the January 14, 1978 Winterland show that signaled the demise of the Pistols only a few months after the masterpiece Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977) was released.
Ten-years later -- nine years after the Avengers broke up and five years after the release of their sole full-length album, Avengers (1983) -- lead singer and feminine Punk avatar Penelope Houston released her debut solo album, Birdboys (1988).
It was my final year at the university. By 1988 I was, at 23 years of age, somewhat of a salty dog: a drinker, a confused philanderer and occasional street fighter, a reader of weighty texts and a teaching assistant. I was headed back East to live in the Big Apple where my girlfriend, who I would marry en route, had been admitted to medical school.
Nineteen-eighty-eight was a tumultuous year. The Pixies' Surfer Rosa (1988) would appear and put a little pep back into a music scene that was listing from underground indie toward the corporate mainstream. My friends and I were listening to a lot of The Pogues. We played constantly Rum Sodomy & the Lash(1985) and If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988).
It was into this milieu that Penelope Houston made her debut with Birdboys (which was also the name she gave her acoustic backing band). I never owned or even heard the record. Put out by Bay Area Punk label Subterranean Records, I remember reading a review of it in the East Bay Express and seeing a picture of PH in what I took to be some sort of Hippie dress. It confused me. She still had her Punk insouciance, but she was wearing a Hippie dress. My buddy and musical mentor Oliver made a sarcastic comment about the former Avenger's metamorphosis from Punk to Hippie.
I don't think I was alone in avoiding Birdboys. The album didn't find an audience. Most of us were still fully wedded to the "Hey Hey, My My" rock 'n' roll fantasy. It took five more years for Penelope Houston to find her niche, and it turned out to be in Germany, where she was dubbed the "Queen of neo-folk" and would end up signing with major label WEA Germany. (For a helpful synopsis of Penelope Houston's career, see her interview with Richie Unterberger.)
When I was working on the Avengers post a couple weeks back I decided to download Birdboys and listen to what I missed out on 25 years ago. The album garners favorable reviews online.
I wasn't much impressed my first few listens. The songs have a "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" / "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" elementary-school-growing-up-in-California-in-the-'60s-sing-along daintiness and preciousness that is off-putting when listened to on iPod ear buds, prompting me to say to myself, "No wonder she never cashed in like Suzanne Vega."
It wasn't until I heard Birdboys on good speakers at home on a Saturday evening cooking dinner that I found myself enjoying the record. I proceeded to play it repeatedly. I understood what Penelope Houston was up to -- the aural capture of empty space -- and how the "Kumbaya" folkiness of Birdboys is of a piece with the first wave Punk of the Avengers. Here is how Houston explains it in the interview with rock 'n' roll historian Unterberger:
I remember I used to tell people that we were a folk band when I was in the Avengers. What I meant was that we were just playing music that we made up for friends, the way the original of folk is just music of the people. It's the folk music of Mexico, or the folk music of whatever. It's music that's played by regular people. It's not played by the court entertainers for the king. It's just the music that people go out on their porch and start strumming, and the neighbors come around. When I said the Avengers were a folk band, I just meant that we were making it up ourselves, that we'd taken it out of the realm of arena rock and the gigantic showplaces, and taken it back to the garage.
I never really thought, oh, I want to do a cover version of "Wild Mountain Thyme." But there wasn't any...the loudness of the Avengers was so much of the expression. There wasn't really a chance to actually sing. I don't remember ever having monitors. I know we must've had monitors, but I don't remember looking at them and thinking, "I'm not getting enough of myself on the monitor." Everything was really loud and you just screamed at the top of your voice to be heard in live shows. I didn't think our live shows were anything...they were so different than our recorded output.
I guess it was 1984 that I did my first show that was acoustic. The idea of having these big holes in the music, where there was no sound and then my voice would come out, was the most terrifying thing to me. I thought it was much more frightening than getting up in front of a Marshall stack three-piece band and screaming your lungs out. It was like stepping on a tightrope over this huge hole that was left in the music.
And I was never a big fan of rock. I was never a rock'n'roller before I was a punk rocker. I was just a punk. I was just doing it because it was the most exciting thing that was happening. It was different, it was new, and we were creating it ourselves, and I felt the same way when I started doing this music with different instruments that had big holes in it. I didn't think, I'm going to start playing folk music. I just thought, we're doing something new and it's exciting and it's scary. The whole thing became more musical after that. But the way we started it was more like the Violent Femmes. It was more like kind of a punk attitude towards really quiet music. Since then, I think I've become a lot more musical. I guess in that way, I've changed.
Going forward in future Hippies vs. Punks posts, several topics suggest themselves from Penelope Houston's biography; the aforementioned influence of the Violent Femmes, for starters. Also, Houston, during the period she lived in England in the early '80s, performed on Howard Devoto's only solo album, Jerky Versions of the Dream (1983). I intended to post on Jerky Versions of the Dream before. It was ubiquitous at the time of its release, and it typified a kind of sound that spelled doom for the Punks, much like the California pop rock of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac spelled doom for the Hippies.
Finally, PH mentions in the interview that at some point in her solo career she realized how much she had been influenced by English folk rockers Fairport Covention and Pentangle:
When I was younger, before the Avengers, listened to a lot of Pentangle and Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band. I loved them. I didn't really realize this until maybe six years ago, after I'd recorded Birdboys. I got a copy of the double Pentangle album, Sweet Child. I listened to it and I knew ever song on it. I was like, "Whoa! This is weird." It was before my punk life, I'd heard a lot of English folk-rock. So I think that was a big influence that I'd forgotten about somehow.
These are bands that were vital for the Hippies but were also held dear by the Punks. Why is that? Which brings up the issue of Richard and Linda Thompson, who, as I will argue in a future post, provide an example of a Hippie counter-avant-garde during a time when the Punks were wiping out the last vestiges of the longhair Flower Power Freak scene.
