SYMPTOMS OF ROMANCE

SYMPTOMS OF ROMANCE

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by

Penny Valentine

'I want a bit of New Romantic!” (Highly unstable 20-year-old boy falls on nearest person at a Blurt appearance—Moonlight Club, London 1981)

The cry is not so much a demand as some belief that he’s getting it. Yet he’s wrong. Blurt are most definitely not part of the New Romantics. Ornette Coleman crossed with James Brown crossed with new music’s intelligent anguish and humor, they owe as much to improvised jazz as Nutbush, City Limits. This is not the arena of pose but of highly defined protest.

It’s hard now to remember if the media came up with it or they did it themselves; the Blitz crowd, the Spandau Ballet-tomanes, the Steve Strange aficionados, the cabaret crowd frilled and kilted and blowing kisses back to the 18th century novel against computer rock...but the New Romantics they have become. Only a few months in and it’s the New Movement but... going where? It’s art school without being revolutionary, style without political awareness. They’ve been compared with the Dadaists but they’ve hardly budged the status quo. Swashbuckling combined with minimalism.

In the current capitalist malaise it does something to tickle the current touchable lethargy. There was no winter of discontent, just a grinding down. The murders of monetarism continue. Sometimes we seem to be going through a triple post-Watergate syndrome (if you count the 60’s as the equivalent, though opposite, of the American Dream). We’d always considered you really naive until then. When cynicism, bewilderment and anger replaced the work ethic we recognized the symptoms. Yet it never got reflected in the music (Hollywood did it only through Night Games, Parallax View, The Conversation; now Reagan is subverting all that in the name of old glory).

The media taught us about romance. In the 60’s the political climate said that there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. Both turned out to be untruths, but the residue flounders on in expectations. No wonder Elvis Costello comes on like a Raymond Chandler character on Trust: “It’s easier to say I love you than yours sincerely I suppose.”

Costello is neat at deconstructing a rorpantic mythology; but he’s only bitter because he believed the movie too. The little disturbances of man. Trust becomes his most impressive album since Armed Forces. A lethal technician with pen and score. A new realist romantic.

Listening to Costello, and the New Romantics, the over-careful constructed sense of distanced desolation by Spandau seems self-conscious. The New Romantics wear desolation as just another pose. Not like Joy Division who relayed it, or as Costello who senses it and fights it, or Blurt who won’t accept it. Listening to Blurt after hearing Trust shows how they touch on the end of Costello’s slipstream. Not the new bohemians, the New Romantics, but the new Front Line.

At the Moonlight Club the audience is not without confusion. Jake Milton and Peter Crese put down a rhythm section sparse and definite, oddly recognizable yet determinedly perverse. Remember those late 60’s Stax records—Phil Spector meets Gil Scott-Heron, tribal collides with terseness. Ted Milton has almost pointed shoulders, a sensibly near-ravaged face, thin ears. His sax-playing protests the limits of its range (from chicken to police siren); his voice owes to Howlin’ Wolf, Dr. John, psychobabble. Even on their first outing on the Factory label you can’t make out the words. Uptight, keep your fingers upright, dyslexia, benighted...That’s all folks. If Milton hadn’t got to “My mother’s a friend of the enemy of the people” (how can you forget a phrase like that even when it’s railed at you in treble time) we wouldn’t have been any wiser.

Blurt play for three-quarters of an hour. We’re exhausted. “Uncompromising!” says a Blurt fan knowledgably. “Ted didn’t even have his green gloves on or his red hanky tonight.”

“Keith Moon reincarnated!” yells the unstable one careening off into another crowd of unsuspecting Friday night out teenagers (pony tails, skirts, low black sweaters: very Left Bank). Ted has been all the while visual: the mobile face screeching into the mike is like watching a foreign film, without subtitles.

Blurt have one side on the Factory Quartet. Their own Live In Berlin will be on another independent, Armaggedon. They live in a village over two hour’s drive from London and their creativeness is the optimistic heart of the new music here, a form just emerging to counteract the New Romantics: a music of absolute dissent.

A more subdued creativeness, the results more traditionally emotive, like a score for a realist romantic electronic movie is the Durutti Column. On the Quartet and with a solo Factory album The Return Of The Durutti Column it is the work of a lone guitarist Vini Reilly, who takes the name of a famous fighter for the Left in the Spanish Civil War and etches haunting sounds against pre-recorded tapes. Not surprisingly, the album cover is a selection of postage stamp paintings by the French artist Dufy. The results are impressionistic, although so delicately placed on melodic structure that they run the risk of addiction (and a resulting allergy to the tracks in some month’s time due to over-kill).

This newest wave of creative excitement seems set to deliberately repell audiences who drag their style along like a shroud. The neo-Realists are not about life imitating art but a certain art ingested then spat out in a new form of subversive activity music life in Britain in the year 1981.