Stuck Inside A Mobile

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Stuck Inside A Mobile

Simon Frith

by

With those Memphis blues again, even, because whatever else the times may be doing around here they certainly aren't a' changing. Consider: Dylan due, the Stones top of the pops, a new album from the Moody Blues and, worst of all, a rhythm 'n' blues revival!

It seems (haven't actually seen them myself) that there are great hordes of 60's survivors who've never emerged from their sweaty memories of the days when men were men and sat in cellars keeping cool and counting the Elmore James riffs—the good days of British beat before it got popular and girls were allowed in. And so there's the Bishops and Blast Furnace and Wilko Johnson's Solid Spenders and, as for punk, last night I went to see Alternative TV, the group led by Mark P, ex-editor of Sniffin' Glue and the original punk ideologist, and they turned out to be playing support at a free gig organised by the latest incarnation of Gong, the only surviving Euro-hippies (besides Steve Hillage). Everywhere I looked I could see yellow trousers and barefoot roadies, male ponytails and those kinda dumb druggy grins, and women in cheesecloth smocks pogoing and the local punks stilled, as they tried to work out what you're supposed to do during a 50-minute guitar break, but a very

natural gig, true rock provincialism, the English digging in, hippies and punks together, because whatever else a blues revival may mean it will also involve an inferiority complex— clumsy white fingers trying to make like slick black ones and, anyway, George Thorogood has just arrived, righteous and passionate and none of our stilted British earnestness. I mean, what's irritating about the new Stones album is not just that it's better than it should be but also that Mick Jagger is such an essentially false singer and he still won't admit it and come out of his cabaret closet—the Bob Dylan problem, I guess, the only person left who cares about his credibility is himself.

What I used to like about British blues weren't their bluesiness (boring old John Mayall, the interminable Cream) but their pop banalities—e.g. the Animals—and the best old person's record this month isn't the superstars' but is the Stiff anthology of a decade's work of Mickey Jupp, the secret source of the Southend scene from Procol Harum through Dr. Feelgood and the Kursaal Flyers to Eddie and the Hot Rods. Jupp makes the best sort of British club rock: American music—blues and soul and country—mediated through a quirky, poppy sensibility, something like Nick Lowe's and Dave Edmunds' but more self-effacing.

Last year I thought British rock had developed an assertive voice of its own—sneering, conversational, abrupt, graceless, rotten, but now we are drifting back to that old all purpose American enunciation (listen to Jagger sing "wid you") and my conclusion is that if we've got to have fake music let's have it really fake. Like, say, Gruppo Sportivo, a pop group from Holland whose first album, 10 Mistakes, manages to quote everyone from Frank Zappa to Bob Marley ("I shot my manager, cause he used to

We created it, left take it over . . .??? 111

keep my royalties") in an innocent Dutch accent that reduces the false to the bizarre and the decorative to the charming.

And then there are the Darts—the best, the most enjoyable, and, surprisingly enough, the most successful of Britain's many varieties of revivalist.

When I saw the Darts this time last year it was at a free concert in a v London park and they were a conventional bunch of rock 'n' roll buffoons, something like Sha Na Na but their Dart's emphasis was on doo-wop and black rock 'n' roll rather than on teenage pop. Their organisation was extensive and eccentric: ex-members of the John Dummer Blues Band, a typical 60's club outfit (see above); exmembers of Rocky Sharpe and the Razors, a typical 60's pub outfit (a good laugh while the beer flows); an ex-member (of course) of the Mickey Jupp band.

Live, the Darts were wonderful.

They had an acute sense of their visual possibilities—as a nine-piece with a black woman singer who looks like a 40's vamp and a white man singer who looks like Frankenstein—and they revived their music with love .and affection. "Yes," we all thought, "a fun live band but they'll never get a record contract. Too dotty."

A year later and the Darts have had three smash hits, are the most consistent singles sellers in the country, and have just released their second successful album, Everyone Plays Darts, even better than the first and an effective abstract of their live appeal. The point about the D^rts is that, unlike a calculated and mechanical rock 'n' roll revival band like Showaddywaddy, they take their fun seriously. Which is to say that they understand dialectics.

Which is to say that they understand the slight and silly formulas of 50's rock 'n' roll and guy them accordingly but they also understand that these slight and silly formulas expressed, for their consumers if not for L their producers, real and earnest emotions—they don't buy them.

Which is to say that they make me laugh a lot but never nastily. *

Scotland's World Cup team, though, is something else. We (the English) laughed a lot at them and always nastily (my only regret was that Rod Stewart wasn't in the squad).

Back in Britain the month's big contest was between the forces of light (the Tom Robinson Band's first album,

Power In The Darkness) and the forces of darkness (the Stranglers' third album, Black And White). TRB,

I'm glad to say won convincingly on points (though not, of course, in sales). Oh well. "