POP GOES GREAT BRITAIN!

POP GOES GREAT BRITAIN!

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by

Penny Valentine

"I won't let you down/won't let you down again." The classic single emerges in the shape of Ph.D. In the way of all true pop, who Ph.D are is relatively unimportant, it's what they sound like that counts.

The new pop lays claim to its own statuesque ballad form led in by Ph.D's one track and New Order's "Temptation." These two singles represent parallel lines in pop but emerge from the same tradition: melodic structure, semi-religious chord clusters, ascending tunes with lyrics that imply epic emotional qualities. For New Order—understandably, given their history as Joy Division—the results are the closest yet to the previous classic new music track—Ian Curtis's anthem "Love Will Tear Us Apart." For Ph.D the same beauty and classicism haunts their track. The additional ingredient is also the oldest in popular music terms, the opportunity for nobility; the sense in which A Second Chance is snatched from the jaws of near disaster; the near-confessional rubs shoulders with the passionate. This mix of sacred and profane has been at the base of rock 'n' roll since the first blues. Yet these are definitely white records, raised and sung by and for white kids.

Over on Robert Wyatt's Nothing Can Stop Us album the most haunting track is a wistful shimmering slow version of Chic's "At Last I Am Free." With Robert's extraordinarily ordinary naive voice, gentle piano work and careful control of the very structure of the song it takes on tiew, delicate but firm resonances as a big ballad. Here again love is the key, the search for it in its passionate vibrance of media-induced images, an odyssey. "And now love listen to what I say/I can't go on living life this way/I've tried and I've tried to make you see/This lying, my friend, it just can't be."

The new pop has brought an interesting response along with it. From the American critics, particularly, a sense in which—having come to realize that the effect of music sends its own signals, that its sound can be decoded to say something socially important—they feel let down by this new pop trifling. Taken out of context, it must be hard, as indeed some of the CREEM critics often complain, to make sense of ABC or Haircut 100. Just as for many years it remained—still does sometimes—difficult to make sense of American heavy metal, although having made "sense" of it it has become equally easy to reject it on the grounds that it represents a macho, leather-bound image of a culture that rejects change.

The new pop has re-emphasized the more dangerous than the old. It's not particularly revolutionary either, except that within its terms of reference it's grown up with a slightly adjusted field of vision. Sexism in the new pop isn't quite so rampant; although the terms of reference are, as usual, held to be heterosexual, there is not always a clear spelling out of roles. The correlation of this, however, is that it's still the boys who fill center stage and whose hearts are breaking...

The new pop could easily be seen as reactionary, in the sense of a reaction to the current situation, escapism from the holocaust. In London this weekend a quarter of a million people turned out to march for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Twenty years after the original CND rallies, the cry now is for a program which embraces civil disobedience. On the news, the result of a survey are that over 50 per cent of the population believe in continuing the Falklands war, even if this means a high death toll amongst the British forces.

The new pop has re-emphasised the allure of the single. Along with the most recent classics therefore come the crassest: McCartney and Wonder's dismal liberal belch "Ebony & Ivory." And, even bearing in mind it is six years old, the astoundingly sugary and—despite its title—anti-liberation diatribe from Charlene, "I've Never Been To Me."

Punk struggles to survive at a gig with the Anti-Nowhere League. The problem with punk is that it's lost its arena. The punk group emerging now has no social tapestry against which to aim their thrusts. Punk's real time has gone to the skinheads. A touring company trying out Oi For England, Trevor Griffith's play with music about skins and fascism, prior to a London run, find their production changing all the time to accomodate the skin youth club audience they \eep facing who reject much of the actual construction of theatrical artiface. Original British punks the Rolling Stones are still revolving round live albums and unchanged riffs prior to their concerts here. With ironically precise timing, Marianne Faithfull returns to live work. Sixties survivors carry with them their own sense of time and place. Marianne has managed to beat much of that. For as many who may go along to witness Woman as Victim, more will have turned out on the strength of Dangerous Acquaintances and—most particularly— the wish fulfillment of "Sweetheart," in which there is some effect at sexual liberation, not without its own struggle.

The new pop, like the old pop, is still about times and places and feelings.It represents, as much as commentary on contemporary life, as much as political dynamic of, say. Combat Rock, just, a backdrop to life's little disturbances (birth, death, love).

Now and at some time in the future ABC's "Poison Arrows" will remind someone of an early summer romance with a person they thought they'd forgotten. After all, pop records are like cameras.

The new pop is not unimportant. Neither is it, as an NME scribe pointed out recently, the most exciting and epochmaking period of music ever. These are transitory times against a canvas which happily grows broader by the month. It's this sense of change which is now such a marked part of rock 'n' roll—pop, rock, call it what you will. And it's a change which is being constantly charted. Which brings me to the fact that for the next few months someone else will be taking over the charting of the British end of things while I work out a few changes of my own (naturally against the background of my stereo).