ELECTIVE POP-TICIANS

ELECTIVE POP-TICIANS

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by

Cynthia Rose

Next Thursday is our General Election, though youd never know it from the press—currently theyre decoying us over the question of whether or not that extra half-inch" on the Princess of Wales waistline means shes preggers again. Rather tactless choice of decoy matter, actually, since last week la Di had a less than successful meeting with some school-levers up in the chronically depressed North. They sought her sympathies on their unemployment and, in true Marie Antoinette fashion, she brightly replied, Why you must spend all your time in the pub."

The lads straightened her out: on the dole they could hardly afford to fulfill the handy caricature of themselves as yobs awash in boozy self-pity. Not that they were short on imagination, however—one offered Her Highness a few suggestions for her own alternative employment.

Probably these were fueled by the country-wide undercurrent of frustration with the adult world, particularly the manipulators of media—who seem to have been successful in stripping this election of passion and of obscuring its real stakes. Most kids realize that if the present government is returned, it will be their future that government sacrifices first. And, in manifestations from the explicit to the apathetic, their feelings echo throughout all the listening available outside the corridors of pop power.

Robert Wyatts Shipbuilding" tops both indie and official" charts and the Decorators (a four year-old seven-piece from the London suburbs) hold the fort at the foot of the indie charts with a mini-LP called Rebel Songs. A million housewives every day/Pick up a loaded gun and say/This is a rebel song," declares adenoidal vocalist Mick Bevan, blistered along by compatriot Joe Sax. Rebel Songs is as good a proof as any that Britains youth have reserves of tenderness, too; love songs like Micks Girl" while Baudelaire may satisfy mJf /A hferdry bent> AH of this and more/Amt got nothin on Micks girl."

m* Robert Wyatt and Shipi , ln9 cohort Elvis Costello found out just w much of the elections debate the media a confiscated when they agreed to a joint ppearance on Channel Fours teen chatow, Loose Talk. Staff began to sweat, according to Costello, when he sided with guest Bifo (Franco Ferardi) in complaints that television itself was inherently oppressive." Wyatt agreed, pointing out that before he went on hed been asked not to name the Communist Party, for whom he voted in municipal elections in Spain, where he now lives. Attempts to quickly dampen the discussion set Costello off in a diatribe against the stupidity of anyone who could possibly support Thatcher"—and won him an unscripted ovation from the studio audience.

The most acute representation of this sad situation is available in a controversial new film called The Ploughmans Lunch, which stars a trio of pop-scene figures: The Rocky Horror Shows Tim Curry, Joni Mitchellstyle songstress (of Pilot Of The Airwaves") Charlie Dore, and Jonathon Pryce, the Royal Shakespeare Companys latest antihero Hamlet. The film spins a story of opportunism and media: Pryce plays a BBC newsman entangled with Ms. Dore—the employee of a rival station—and with Curry, a financial writer.

Its text is gradually drawn out from a backdrop of the Falklands war, the burgeoning of anti-nuclear peace camps in Britain, and the 1982 Tory Party Political Conference. And it demonstrates just how the opportunism which drives both sex and careerism in todays Britain insists also on a cosmetic re-vision of what it means to be British." The Tory vision of the Briton it shows is an admans conceit—a character which walks and talks, yet has no inner identity. Just like the ploughmans lunch," traditional English pub fare which—-we find—is not really traditional at all, but the result of a mid-60s ad campaign to get folks back in the pub.

When you see The Ploughmans Lunch—as you certainly will, for it is the most scathingly modern" film by a Briton about his country since 58s Room At The Top—you may understand more about how secondhand the reality of media-merchandized identity" is in this country. Its depiction of the impenetrable joylessness at the heart of Britains entrenched Establishment is uncannily acute and it explains much, including the confused sound of the U.K. today—complacent, hollow, angry, apathetic, brooding, biting and saccharine by turns.

The films author is Ian McEwan, a handsome young novelist just past .30, who became a youth cult figure with the publication of First Love, Last Rites, his initial volume of short stories. McEwan said that making the movie (all of which, including its finale at the Tory conference, was filmed in situ with real politicians participating) offered me an insight not just into the Conservative mind but into the blacker side of human nature." He cites delegates who were transformed at a stroke into a snarling pack of mass murderers; no call for a discussion of real politics could have provoked such passionate ovations as those which greeted demands for hangings, floggings, increased police powers, longer prison sentences, more prisons. Punishment is what the Tory party seeks to inflict and the sense of a common enemy is all that binds them together."

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The majority of Britains pop tacticians, by contrast, may agree on nothing, but most are bound together by threads of that thing Tory philosophy is based on: the abandonment of hope. Im not expecting to grow flowers in the desert/But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime" sing Big Country in their choppy, chunky, assertive single—which carries a threnody of Gaelic keyboards underscoring its sentiments. Big Country includes Pretender-fora-day Tony Butler, and their songs at number 18 and rising—an unusually muscular track for an often-anemic Top 20.

Tartan shades are also audible (its the week before Scotland plays England: a traditional city-under-siege occasion) on PopEyes, the debut solo album from former Lemon Kitten Danielle Dax. Pop-Eyes features probably the most repellent LP sleeve ever to escape a printer—a collage of medical-manual cut-outs scrambled into an ominous visage by Ms. Dax herself. But then Danielles initial stage appearance with Amy Turtle & the Crossroads took place with her own face obscured in a spiders web of black paint, just like the lad in Roger Cormans The Trip.

Danielle offers her sleeve art as a personal depiction of the meat-market syndrome Ive encountered in the music biz" (must have been some shock for a Kitten who used to perform in little more than body paint and her immense long hair). Inside, however, is experimental music worth more than a few moments musing over—particularly a track called The Shame-men," written on the theme of Jim Morrisons macho shaman thing...the whole albums a process of exorcism."

Back in circulation from Paris is NME colleague Vivien Goldman, returned in the form of vocalist/foundress of Chantage (thats French for blackmail," but Viv originally thought it meant singing). An original Flying Lizard around the time of their Money" 45, Chantage continues Ms. Gs preoccupation with the guilt inherent in gelt on an EP entitled Its Only Money (subtitle: Until You Havent Any).

Slight, light, jolly and entirely female rather than feminist, Its Only Money" showcases also one Sylviane Bloune. A free radio DJ in Paris (where she doubles as Vivs flatmate), Sylviane becomes Moona" for recording purposes as Viv becomes Viva". So far theyve hustled three producers for their three tracks—including Chris Thomas and lovers rock queen Caroll Thompson. Contributing musically to Moneys exuberant brew of Calysodic melodrama are several London names," among them London Musicians Collective stalwart Steve Beresford.

On the theme of buried treasures, Ive been meaning for awhile to mention more about the U.K.s ever-expanding indie cassette market. For three years now, recorders and collectors have rabidly assaulted each others Stowaways with whole genres of stuff unattainable elsewhere—while friends madly manufactures specialist" tapes of their own. In London, the hot loops are Test Department, Camp Sophisto and Strafe Fur Rebellion, but bands also copy and distribute countless demos that never made it to the majors.

If youre interested in tuning in, a good bet would be to contact the scenes one panU.K. review mag," which is called Stick It In Your Ear. Stick It is run by Geoff Wall— who also runs his own tape label—from 9 Gladstone Rd., Sholing, Southampton S02 8GU Hampshire, U.K. , and costs 50p (use International Postage Coupons and send appropriate postage). The average issue manages to review about 80 DIY tapes as well as offering the odd mini-feature—this time, the history and tape-ography of The Legendary Pink Dots—and a rundown of bootlegs available at gigs.

Among em, youre guaranteed to hear about gems from all round the country—^; like Happys Demonstration Of Affection" (Bristol), The Plagues soulful dance cassette (Dorset), The Cleaners From Venus Midnight Cleaners" (Essex), Modern Arts Underwater Kites" (West Midlands), or live goodies like Robert Fripps Pleasures In Pieces" (recorded at the Kitchen in NYC) and The Bluebells Venue 6.8.81" (Edinburgh).

After all, even the Tories cant monitor our tapes. That much was proven by the debut of one featuring Maggie T. repeating slogans docilely after her voice coach—last weeks highlight of Londons new, political pirate radio station. About which say no more. Nudge nudge, wink wink. ^