MAGAZINE Leader Admits Murdering World (No One Notices)

MAGAZINE Leader Admits Murdering World (No One Notices)

Michael Davis

Rock ’n’ roll has been walking a strangely schizoid path of late. The biggest bands (in America, anyway) invariably promote the images of rebellion, independence and power while their music usually remains predictable pastiches of past styles spiced by a few hip rips. Those groups that actively attempt to Ripply the mythology to the music end up getting called obscure or weird, as if rebellion against the form itself isn’t vital to its survival.

The existence of a band like Magazine brings these contradictions to mind. They’ve got every strength in the book—a provocative singer/lyricist with a unique perspective on the world, four versatile musicians at the height of their creative powers, three albums and several singles already under their belts—but they’re too intent on doing things their own. way to fit( neatly into anybody’s preconceptions.

Oh sure, you can call ’em “new wave” if you wanty though they’ve done songs that remind me more of Roxy Music or even Procol Harum, than the B-52’s or the Knack or Gang of Four. A better phrase might be “post-punk” since Howard Devoto left the Buzzcocks as the English punk movement was beginning to gain momentum in early ’77, before he got Magazine together. Better yet, ignore the phrases and just listen to the music though I know it isn’t that easy; laying down six or seven dollars on the word of an enthusiastic scribe isn’t always in the budget and I know that Magazine are probably not played much if at all on the radio ’cause they don’t fit the format/formula: new wave, old wave, washed up, whatever.

I have been murderer of the world. -Howard Devoto

The things is, I have a lot of trouble thinking of Magazine as being all that bizarrq at the, moment, but I know it’s partly f because they followed Pere Ubu onstage at their Santa Monica Civic concert this year (which, incidentally, was filmed and recorded for the Urgh! A Musfc War movie, along with sets by Stiv Bators, the Members and Wall of Voodoo). Not to put Ubu down—they’re one of my faves and their new Art Of Walking LP may be the First Great Weird Album of the 80’s—but after seeing David Thomas flopping around on the boards and digging Allen Ravenstine’S | unpredictable synthesized blats and hisses, o Devoto and Co. seemed almost normal in j; comparison.

Well, not quite—they didn’t exactly boogie—-but their presentation certainly contained enough familiar elements. The pre-recorded intro tapes and the lighting set-up were pretty standard stuff but when the lights first came up and Devoto beg^n his Lydon-like snarl in “Feed The Enemy,” it became apparent in a hurry that this was no mainstream progressive rock band, eager to flash for the cash. New guitarist Robin Simon (late of Ultravox) played effectively except for a couple of numbers where he was noticeably out of tune, but the dominant instrumental presence was that of bassist Barry Adamson who muscled the music along superbly while keyboard master Dave Formula and drummer John Doyle made their substantial contributions from the rear.

Out front, Devoto was more relaxed, more open than he was in his L. A. debut at the Whiskey last year: no pogo stick poses with the mike stand, fewer cutting looks into the audience. Aside for a couple of brief remarks, there was no attempt at direct communication with us but the man’s lowkeyed charisrria came through the songs anyway. And at the set’s end, when he prefaced “Definitive Gaze” by opening his huge eyes in a sad voyeur’s silent stare, it seemed the perfect gesture for a man who reveals the distance between those who are intimate so well. Then the band exploded behind him, led by Formula’s synthesizer, and Howard’s surly sarcasm returned with a vengeance: “Clarity has reared/its ugly head again/So this is real life/You’re telling me/And everything/Is where it ought to be.”

Two days later, it’s interrogation day and I get to talk to both Formula and Devoto. Howard has a reputation of being a “difficult” interview; the British press has labeled him oblique, indirect, even inarticulate. Me, I figure nobody likes to have to explain what his/her lyrics are about or be pinned down to one “correct” interpretat tion. Devoto certainly knows language well enough to understand itsslimitations; why should I insist he translate his aesthetics into boring black and white if he doesn’t feel comfortable doing that? Maybe I’ve just hung out with enough artsy assholes that one more doesn’t faze me, I dunno. Anyway, we get along OK, and I get a few of my misconceptions cleared up. ,

One of the things we discussed was the stage communication number.

“Yes,” he noted, he did feel audience feedback, “but it’s not always very subtle. The intercourse,” he chuckled, “if you’re not careful, can be very crude. That’s why it’s very easy for a lot of people to pick up the ‘Yeah, yeah, all say yeah now’ thing. But I can’t stand that and there are a lot of groups out now that won’t be patronizing in that way.”

Then I brought up the sad fact that by not doing any of that, he was leaving himself open for lots of misinterpretation and charges of aloofness.

“Well, 1 hope not,” he answered. “I’d just like people to think again, feel again. Not have to be like, This is all very familiar; we know exactly what’s going on here. Let’s go straight ahead.’ I’m just trying to bring people up short a bit.”

Letting the cynic in me take over for a minute, I questioned whether loud, exciting rock music can ever be a thought-provoking medium. Mentioning the wild dancing that accompanied the band’s supercharged version of “Shot By Both Sides,” I wondered out loud if the music seduced the audience into behaving like a crowd even though the lyrics stress individualism.

“Whoa, I don’t know about that,” retorted Devoto. “I would really like to think that we meet people one-to-one, not as a mass of people. I’d really like to reach people as themselves. I mean, there’s no way that our songs are, ‘Yes, we all feel this way, don’t we? Put your hands together because we all feel this way.’ In no way is it like that at all.”

But what the songs are about is not always readily apparent.

“The lyrics are bound to be from a position that I, myself, have been,” he explained. “Perhaps only for a split second, so I couldn’t say ‘Hmm, that’s me all the way down the line,’ but it’s been me for at least a moment. For at least a moment, I have been the murderer of the world...It’s difficult enough to understand yourself, your own God-given equipment, let alone to try to write from somebody else’s point of view. That’s a whole other world.”

Since the world’s still here, I figured Devoto was speaking about fantasy situations, so I decided to dig just a bit deeper into songs that deal with personal manipulations on what is to me kind of a creepy level. Songs like his notorious “Permafrost,” which contains the lines “I will drug you and fuck you/On the permafrost.” So I ask him if songs like that are supposed to be outfront representations of fantasy situations.

“Uh,” he sighs, probably tired of being asked about it, “well, yes, in certain ways those are fantasy pieces but they are rooted in something real, if it’s only something symbolic that people do or that they just allude to. But I don’t think of them as fantasy pieces. The whole warm strength of ‘Permafrost’ is that, yes, I will really do this for you, just as you want.”

“So the assumption is that the person you are addressing in the song is in on it on the same level?”

“Well, yes, or that we’ve come to an understanding about what our respective levels should be,” he answered, laughing, “who should be on top...”

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I'd just like people to think again, feel again. -Howard Devoto

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 33

Well, er, uh, enough; if you wanna find out if Devoto wants to be on top or the bottom, you ask him.

Anyway, time for our history lesson. Obviously, Devote was there early on in the Brit punk sweepstakes, setting up a couple of early Sex Pistols gigs and forming the Buzzcoeks with Pete Shelley in time to play second bill on the second one. So he’s gotta have lots of exciting memories, right? Well...

“I’d left the Buzzcoeks by the time there was a movement really happening,” he reminisced. “It was very...disciplined although I don’t think most people think of it that way. They think of it as a wild, anything-goes thing but it was very disciplined. You were supposed to know how ypu would do things all down the line; it just got a bit tiresome.”

“And that goes against the grain?”

“No, I just don’t want it all one way. It’ssometimes good to alternate discipline With throwing it all out the window; you have to mix the two.”

“And the guitar/bass/drums lineup and the screaming about anarchy became its own orthodoxy after awhile?”

“Yeah, and saying all the songs will be fast, no solos to speak of, the vocalist trying to cram as many words in as possible.. .but that’s a long time ago.”

Later, we talked a bit about Iggy’s role in the early days of British punk.

“Well,” he began, “I was listening to the first three Stooges albums and they were about the only records that were making any sense to me, especially given the fact that I was no accomplished musician, he laughed. “They were so simple yet so vivid. And obviously, at the time, there were other pepple listening to them in England. The very first time I saw the Sex Pistols, they played ‘No Fun’ which made me feel...”

“Click?”

“Yeah, a little. It was by no means all of it but who else was? In the early times of the Buzzcoeks, we rehearsed a couple of Stooges numbers. I think ‘Loose’ was one of them; I don’t remember whether we actually played it or not. But when I was first trying to get the Buzzcoeks together, I would play their records for people, like, ‘What do you think of this, Raw Power?’ But it was difficult. It wasn’t until Peter and I saw the Sex Pistols that we could really put it all together.”

But it wasn’t long before Devoto began losing interest in the Buzzcoeks. Today, all that remains of their association is an import EP called “Spiral Scratch” and several co-written songs; the easiest ones for Americans to get their hands on are “Orgasm Addict” on the Buzzcoeks’ Singles Going Steady LP and “Shot By Both Sides” and “The' Light Pours Out Of Me” on Magazine’s Real Life LP.

The formation of Magazine itself took place a little while later; as Ddvoto explains it, he didn’t have anything specific in mind* at all.

“I wasn’t looking for accomplished musicians, .1 was just looking for people I thought I could work with, which was the most important thing, and ones that didn’t have a standardized approach to music. So I put up these little notices asking to meet people and that’s what I did. I met people and things sort of fell in. Nearly everybody was the first person I met and liked. At the time, Barry had been playing bass for about two weeks when I met him.” ,

That floored me but good—that the Others weren’t exactly seasoned pros either. The recently-departed, highly talented guitarist/saxophone player John McGeoch had only played in one minor Londomband while Dave Formula had only played in pub bands and had done a bit of local session work. Either Devoto was amazingly inspirational in developing these guys’ talents or else he was incredibly lucky in finding them.

Later, Formula added a few details.

“John met Howard at a punk party in Manchester,” he recalled, “there were only 20 or so in the v area so they were very close-knit. I think John and Howard wrote a couple of songs together and saw the possibility of forming a band with Barry after that. This was in August of ’77 and by January of ’78, I’d joined the band.”

It didn’t take long to find out why Devoto believed Formula was not a standardized musician. Inspired largely by jazz pianists from Count Basie and Duke Ellington through McCoy Tyner, Dave started out telling me he thought'' he played “the obvious.” When I blanched at that—no way is this^guy a cliche monger—he admitted, “Well, I play the obvious for Magazine; I just try to make it very personal.” Later, he defined his methods further. “Well, what I do,” he begjan seriously, then suddenly cracked up. “What I was going to say is that I go into a keyboard showroom and get the guy to demonstrate exactly what an instrument can do,? he laughed, “then I don’t play any of those things. That’s a facetious way of saying it but there’s an element of truth to it.”

That clicked in with Devoto’s earlier remark about being inspired by “negative drive” which he explained as “getting fed up with what everybody else is getting away with.’’ Case closed—these two guys were made for each other.

As far as what comes next, both Devoto and Formula are happy with the way new guitarist Simon is coming along, already embellishing McGeoch’s parts with flourishes of his own and contributing to several new compositions in the works. Adamson, Formula and McGeoch will be part of a British recording project called Visage, along with a couple members of Ultravox and several other musicians. McGeoch is on a few tracks of the new Siouxsie and the Banshees album. Devoto recently purchased his first 4-track tape recorder which he expects to change his method of writing somewhat. A new Magazine album will probably be recorded sometime near the end of the year, “but I never make promises,” he laughed, “because I never know what I’m gonna feel in three months time. I’m still really surprised to have done three albums.”

Did I hear someone say NO FUTURE?