Lowe Wit, Rude Boys

Lowe Wit, Rude Boys

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by Penny Valentine_

Exhausting times. Keeping up with music changes here is like constantly running for a bus, getting one foot on the platform, then realizing it’s the wrong number. Exciting times. Not in the dramatic sense of a separate movement outside the current mainstream (like punk and reggae were/are) but the way the edges are diffusing, things keep moving and expanding. I can go to a gig now and see something I don’t expect. Sometimes the experiment works. Sometimes it’s too far out in left field and I’m not in the mood to try and work it all out. Sometimes it’s so insidious you need a mole--, cular break-down.

So' Mod music takes old Mod forms and . dashes it with punk resiliance; avant garde pop takes punk’s freneticism and—to an extent— anarchism and intellectualises it. The climate is good. Right now I can’t imagine not having reggae as a constant part of my (white) musical background.^ On the surface it may look like a lot of its main protagonists have been lulled into a euphoric condition by the greenback (Marley and Tosh in particular) but its power as a form of self-expression to blacks here remains undiminished, its influence on the entire British white hew wave bigger than perhaps any of us have ever really noticed. The Clash, Costello...1 don’t expect to pick up a new album frdfn any of them these days and not hear reggae some-. where.

Drawn on unselfconsciously by the new wave, it’s now become part of the main tradition. There’s an argument I suppose that by being taken in like this, the music (and its politics) get somehow diluted, subverted, spmewhere along the line. True, punk suffered like that, but reggae’s different. It’s survived intact because it’s foremost part of an existing culture, originally specific to the Jamaicah experience and now to the British experience of the Jamaicans here. It is borrowed by the white musician, the white audience, so its power in the white mainstream remains intact. By using it the white New Wave make a political statement (even, despite the recent silly fracas, Costello).

v So the musical edges are. blurring here now but in positive ways. And the point is never lost. The best. British reggae single of this year is likely to remain the recent Eddie Grant track “Living On The Front Line”. Powerful, bitter, pain and confusion. A kind of exaltant anguish: “Oh what kind of man would I be/if I don’t talk of what I see/Oh they tell me to beware/Take the little money and go/Me no want no dirty money” ....Ever since it came into our house we can’t stop dancing to it (yes, Cynthia, even before the fifth cup of morning coffee and tenth cancer stick!). Grant’s record is a dance record. Disco reggae.lt seems to me that what it does is take reggae as its main form of expression and adds two indirect influences: disco and rock. The hook relies on one drum beat and four really ~~ filthy dark bass notes, but its insistence relies on the basic reggae rhythm (that tense tease that rolls on incessantly). The interjections come from a synthesiser and electric guitar, deliberately picked to heighten the pain quota and emphasize Grant’s lyrics.

Grant’s record is important. The Specials may be. Not so dramatic, not so powerful, certainly not so specific to the British black experience. More a lesson to the white one. What the Specials have to say isn’t contained in their lyrics, more in their physical appearance. A multi-racial line up. that uses the musical influences of both groups. A bunch of skinny white boys with hair so short that their ears stick out, some Wearing little leather pork-pie hats. Like the early Small Faces I think. Lots of energy but held in. Single-minded. The couple of older looking black guys perch either end of the front line-up like constantly moving bookends. The Specials emerge from two basic traditions, moulding them into something that could well, in a few months, be a main one: post punk/mod and a form of early reggae, ska. Ska sounds naive put up against the reggae we’ve become familiar with now. But in the 60’s it was the first West Indian music we heard (even if.it did come out of New Orleans at the start). Humorous, more localised than reggae, the original Mods loved it with a vengeance.

We went early to the Nick Lowe/Dave Edmunds & Rockpile concert to catch the Specials opening. They’ve already got a determined latter day punk/skinhead following and the audiepce danced two numbers in (not usual with a support group although the audience for Rockpile were in the mood and they’d certainly drained enough glasses dry). The Specials don’t come from’London, but Coventry—a city not noted for the number of good new bands it donates to the capital.

The group starts out with the Mod’s pltra cool. They’re so intense when they play I expected them, at any moment, to simply implode from the effort. The lead singer isn’t great taken out of context but it somehow doesn’t seem to matter much. He half pogos on occasion; most of the time harking back to the early punk style of speak/yell. They’ve got a brilliant little white bass player (so good in fact it took a while to realise, the whole rhythm section weren’t black) who produces that black, hardedged, bending Third World sound—like a plank with a long spring in it. One of the black group members plays a bit of percussion but mainly leaps around yelling “rude boys!” and jumps on the lead singer’s back for a piggy-back ride across stage. Nobody stops playing. The white organist and drummer lay down a terse hiccough bluebeat line to the manner born.

It worked best when the ska rhythm underpinned everything else; worst when they bust up the middle of numbers with experimental Pop Group avant-garde punk. They don’t need that. The tension—caused by the two influences colliding—is hard enough and strange enough right now to provide any audience with enough aural pleasure. The group have already started their own label—2 Tone—to record bands like themselves. They know the dangers about being this month’s thing and are, I think shrew'dly, trying to stop that by extending the idea into a r/iusical movement. I think they’ll succeed. The audience who danced to the Specials danced for Lowe and Edmunds (indeed with some envy we watched a crowd near us switch automatically from terse Mod movements to more extravagant use of floor spaced Lowe and Edmunds played efficient, energetic rock ’n’ roll and seemed to have a good time. After a while we got bored. The problem seems to be that while both. Edmunds and Lowe’s albums use traditional forms cleverly (Edmunds may have the stronger voice but Lowe’s got the sauciest ideas) they seemed determined not to leave any room to show either qualities to advantage. After a while it was like being steamrollered by one endless song. There was no space for Lowe’s wit and it ended up like rock’s answer to routine disco—without meaning to be, that’s the difference. So it was OK if you kept moving, but tedious as hell if you stopped. We danced. in the end, out of desperation. These days, to be firmly in the rock ’n’ roll tradition seems so innocent I suppose. It doesn’t seem quite enough anymore.