Is Disco The Real Avant-Garde?

My favourite record company in England, Virgin Records, is the home of lost souls. It's a chirpy company, surviving on the sales of Mike Oldfield who doesn't speak but inspires immense love and respect here as a Real Composer, the 70's Edward Elgar. A gentlemanly Rick Wakeman, he celebrates not the death of Empire but the death of grass.

For the rest, Virgin values obscurity and picks up on trends invariably too late. Their reggae signings are so ethnic that not even Jamaicans understand them, their pub rocker, Roy St. John, isn't even English, and their vulgar rock 'n' rollers, Boxer, put so much of their vulgarity into their offensive sleeve design of a naked lady getting it in the balls from a boxing glove, that no-one's ever listened to the music inside. And Virgin Records aren't'just late, they're perverse. Even their acts with commercial potential soon lose it. The company is,run by the last hippies in the business wtiich is why it means so much: a remnant of those dear days when Art battled Commerce and there were no company Kissingers to explain that the truest measures of inspiration and Spirit are the sales figures.

Virgin Records came from a chain of record shops which was started in the late Sixties by Richard Branson, who started himself with a nationally distributed high school newspaper. Branson's shops satisfied two needs at once: for hip records and for cheap records. When pop records became rock albums the only places to buy them in Britain were still department stores or provincial radio shops, none of which exactly welcomed the procession of stoned freaks who had to get down (on the floor) to Cream and Hendrix before they decided what to buy. Virgin shops had hip assistants, burnt incense and provided headphones and cushions. And what's more, they discounted, the first record stores to do so seriously. Virgin became the only place to buy rock albums, a powerful symbol that spread through the provinces. It's not such a hot shop now that everyone else knows about rock and discounts, but even with the worst selection and deals in town a Virgin shop still has potency. The time to test it is on a weekday afternoon, when the longhairs come blinking into the light, nod off to Presence, and smile vaguely through the authentic counter cultural squalour. Virgin still Services A Need.

From the profits of providing this service came the Virgin Record Company and its values. Virgin caters for a closed and self-consciously anticommercial taste. Thei shops (until recently) stocked no singles, no disco, no soul or country, no pop or rock 'n' roll. They do carry racks of German imports and Virgin Records signs up German groups r— most successfully Tangerine Dream, who when they tour England play cathedrals.

Nobody talks about it but Britain is an insignificant music market. Anybody who is anybody sells more in the rest of Europe, and what with the non-value of the pound etc., touring stars only play British gigs out of charity or sentiment. Progressive British musicians have been completely dependent on Europeans for years and not just as consumers . Continental musicians lead the avante-garde. The future of rock 'n'roll is krautrock and its name is Can or Neu or Amon Duul II or Jane or Novalis or Percewood's Onagram or Grabschnitt or Triumvirat or Floh De Cologne or Achim Reichel or Highdelberg. Even an American dumbskull like Lester Bangs realised that Kraftwerk were the most important rock act of 1975.

Last week I went to the local Virgin to get the latest album from my own favourite German group, Silver Convention. They didn't stock it and I had an argument with the assistant. It was clear that good old hippie racism and snobbery were operating: Silver Convention have black singers and pop people dance to them, they aren't art. I argued that Silver Convention are, in fact, austerely avante-garde in their use of minimalist melodies, their lack of emotion, their mathematical calculation of beats — they make the music of the machine age, indeed.

But I lost the argument and had to go somewhere else, to a disco store. I always like flipping through disco racks — there's no better public display of tits and ass in full colour close-up. The pictures are culturally interesting too. American covers go for crotch shots, reggae sleeves have breasts and cheeky grins, British disco is into bondage. Silver Convention's albums have been specially redesigned for us, with private parts and hand-cuffs. But there are no gay attractions at all, which is something that always puzzles me when reading about the U.S. 1 mean, in 1 England discos are the bastions of male dominated hetero sex.

TURN TO PAGE 76

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 40

Sexual attitudes just haven't been changed in British rock. Nobody here believed any of that stuff about Bowie and, anyway, he was never as convincing in drag as Danny La Rue, who's an unambiguous trouper and respectable enough to take tea with the real Queen, When Disco Tex toured our discos he bombed as badly as Jerry Lee Lewis way back when and for the same reason — he combed his hair too much.

The trouble springs from the Kinks' "Lola," which Americans continue to hear as the first celebration of bisexuality. It isn't, as a close textual listening reveals. The key line is: "I'm glad I'm a man and so's my Lola." This does not mean "so's myiLola a man," but does mean "so's my Lola glad that I'm a man so that I can dominate her all night long and she can stop being so aggressive and manlike and be feminine again like she always wanted to be and like girls in discos are meant to be anyway, while the boys are meant to be macho and get into punch-ups like they used to in dance halls and like new supposedly degenerate groups like the Sex Pistols do all the time in an extremely old N fashioned way."

Another avante-garde German artist is Donna Summer whose "found music" of orgasmic noise is influenced by the musical theories of John Cage and Andy Warhol and by Italian conceptual art. Her next single lasts twentyfour hours and is called "Hold On, I'm Coming." It is not on Virgin Records, who, losers to the last, have found that they've had the wrong progressive music all the time....