LA VIE EN BLEU (RONDO)
In France for a long weekend, an English family on the Vieux Marche think I am French and speak to me in broken English. As usual, the thrill of their mistake sets me in a good mood for the rest of the day. Returning from four days of Normandy food; patisseries, seafood and the nine a.m. smell of fresh-baked bread wafting from the boulangerie’s, we hit a British ferry and instant tat.
The CREEM Archive presents the magazine as originally created. Digital text has been scanned from its original print format and may contain formatting quirks and inconsistencies.
LETTER FROM BRITAIN
LA VIE EN BLEU (RONDO)
by Penny Valentine
In France for a long weekend, an English family on the Vieux Marche think I am French and speak to me in broken English. As usual, the thrill of their mistake sets me in a good mood for the rest of the day. Returning from four days of Normandy food; patisseries, seafood and the nine a.m. smell of fresh-baked bread wafting from the boulangerie’s, we hit a British ferry and instant tat. The duty-free has run out of practically everything, the ship is dirty, the crew have a bloody-minded bonhomie which thinks bingo, raffles and silly onboard games to win a car will compensate for limp fish and chips, cardboard coffee, white bread wet ham sandwiches and Space Invaders machines.
England is more seedy than ever before. A kind of dull lethargy greets the unemployment figures announced each week. The night of the living dead turns into months. No wonder songs of high-rise anguish and impotence have disappeared from the airwaves. We are now sp gripped in its perpetual overdrive nobody has the energy to remark upon it anymore.
England under the Tories is like living in a sensory deprivation tank. For a while, even though it turns out to be the biggest let-down of the year, Chrissie Hynde’s fury on Pretenders II makes some sense: “From Jacuzzi to Jacuzzi,” she sneers, “I may be a skunk but you’re a piece of junk.” It’s as bad in the U.S. of A., no doubt about it. Never mind Reagan’s welfare cuts, the Moral Majority can even get Soap off the air.
“Cut the crap!” yells Hynde.
Despite her beautiful voice Pretenders II just doesn’t cut it even after a year between outings. Re-working old riffs, the band bash interminably. Hynde’s songs are full of loathing—all strut and no soul. Her original talent was to combine tough with tender, now she’s all leather jacket and boots and even her sensuous nasal touch is used so indiscriminately that it loses its effect.
Yet another lesson in not looking forward. Proof positive that keeping your top lip in a perpetual snarl does not a brilliant contribution to music make.
So the Pretenders don’t deliver, and a session singer with a daft trill about a Japanese boy goes to the top of the chart. The majority of American music is now so dull that the NME don’t even bother to carry a U.S. chart anymore. So what’s going on?
Desperately, and amazingly, British bands continue to come up with new forms, \ new experiments at cutting across barriers and using borrowed snatches like unearthing gems from a dustbin (Weberman was never this lucky going through Bob Dylan’s!) . The recent ICA rock week showcased the uncategonzable effect of Afro-jazz on mainly white boys; the two most influential are likely to be Pigbag and Rip Rig & Panick, both coming out of defunct art school heroes of the latter days of the 70’s The Pop Group. Simon Underwood went on to make Pigbag as feverish “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag” of funk, jazz and Afro while Bruce Smith and Gareth Sager did likewise with the even more esoteric Rip Rig & Panick. No slouches at tickling the I.Q., both combine dance rhythms and computer noise beneath solid rhythm, and are not for the cowardly.
Meanwhile—not even a real trend but tickling a few ribcages—the one U.S. music beginning to be imported into the smaller clubs is salsa. So far its political implications have remained submerged—as indeed for so long was the plundering of black forms of music. After all, salsa remains the real property of another New York ghetto community. Here it so far has just become another set of rhythms to entwine. The most successful and eagerly grasped (by the cognoscenti) is Blue Rondo A La Truk, a collection of British, Brazilian and Barbados musicians playing samba funk but a little suspiciously decked out in the main like redundant gigolos.
Blue Rondo have already made the NME cover, and people were nearly killed getting to their one major gig at a relatively small hall a few weeks back. The word gets round real fast these days, the feeling being that you’ve got to grab any bit of light when it turns up, before someone puts out the flame. Or could it be the same old simple snobbery of being first in on a new thing? Whatever, so far Blue Rondo provide a spark of a new form to be embraced, I reckon, pretty eagerly. Will the new style be akin to Carmen Miranda? Will the boys wear flashy ties, greased-back hair and large lapels? Will it manage to last long enough for anyone to say Ray Baretto? Read next month’s installment...
