LETTER FROM BRITAIN

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

THE CRUEL, THE COOL & THE GHOUL SCHOOL

Cynthia Rose

With the lazy, spectatorial languors of Wimbledon and cricket at The Oval upon us, the rush to see who would produce the first “post-Election protest” songs was brief. Wham! (Andy Ridgeley and George Michael, the dole-queue-downbeat duo who switched from street threads to leatherqueen slicks to become “Bad Boys”) have taken the teenies by storm with this week’s release of their Fantastic LP. Ian Mac of Liverpool’s fave sons the Bunnymen has described their new—if not different—single, “Never Stop,” as a “post-election protest number.” But the most surprising contender in this elusive genre has come from still-gladto-be gay Tom Robinson.

Robinson’s self-issued “War Baby” 45 entered all the charts within the Top 20. Its author (whose career began back in ’73 with a folk trio called Cafe Society) had been in retreat since the little-noticed demise of Sector 27, his last outfit. Exiled in Hamburg— where he says he was inspired by Way Of The West’s “Don’t Say That’s Just For White Boys” track—Robinson penned “War Baby,” recording it over the course of an entire month.

He’d already made an LP (North By Northwest produced by Richard Mazda) and a German single (“Tango Der Wand”), as well as touring East Germany as part of a Bulgarian-bossed band, before “War Baby” was bom. Back home, however, the gay tag seemed too old to exploit and Sector 27 remained a by-word for failure—i.e. no record company would touch Robinson’s tapes. Consequently, the Panic Records labelwhich issued it—is the composer’s own, and anyone who sends off to 75 Columbo Road, Ilford, Essex, England, will be putting themselves in touch with “Ross” and “Harvey”—two longtime Robinson roadies who volunteered to make the mail-order possible.

When it comes to tango tunes, Robinson may have chosen just the right spot for exile; the demented “Dilettango!”—B-side of a single by Dusseldorf’s Lost Gringos—has become this week’s fave esoterica (that address is Das Buro, Furstenwall 64, D-4000, Dusseldorf, Germany). And gay gossip is news again too—due to another leap from Nowheresville into the charts from Jimmy the Hoover. The single in question is “Tantalise,” a piece of summer pop pap whose diluted Africana is booted up by a tinge of rhythmic suss—and a fake Swahili subtitle, “Wo Wo Ee Yeh Yeh.”

The five Hoovers have not got to their spot without influential help: Scottish lead vocalist Dunbar played stand-in during some of Bowie’s nude scenes in The Hunger, and this is the band who made the video of their single “months before” they ever pressed it, test-marketing the thing on Saturday morning TV. That three-minute promo film was the work of Derek Jarman, the opera designer-turned-indie-film-maker (Jubilee, The Tempest, Sebastiane) who walks tall among the gay mafia of video, film-making and cjubland. And this is a band who turned down management offers from Malcolm McLaren in favor of trendier ex-hairdresser Ollie, who co-manages the capital’s rococo Wag Club.

Jimmy the Hoover’s second single is also due out on the Innervision label: the same that brokered Wham! so successfully, thanks to the major-label push of CBS behind them. “Tantalise” has garnered such critical praise as reminiscent of early Haysi Fantayzee (which is sort of like saying “from the same school of Early Ignorance studies in blood fixation as first-run Nervus Norvus”). Their second, they say. will be called “Kill Me Quickly.”

Which might sum up the sentiments of a growing strata in British rock that’s definitely gone mainstream (even if it’s by default, thanks to the retrograde state of radio and the racist policies which pervade the airwaves): the Nowhere Clan. Their product stretches from the established prattingsabout-pestilence of Sex Gang Children, the Death Cult (formed from the ashes of the Southern Death Cult), and Batcave regulars the Specimen, through aspirants like X-Mal Deutschland, right down to the poseur’s pits: the Sisters Of Mercy (taken up by a few ambitious scribes as “satirists”) and the Virgin Prunes (mercilessly scorned by all but their legions of Mohican-headed fans).

Conceptual spearhead of the swinging skull set remains Germany’s Einsturzende Neubauten, who had the sense to play only one London gig (at the Lyceum) then vamoose, leaving everyone stunned by the sheer wall of sound their custom-built industrial steel drumkit was capable of produc-

ing. A follow-up concert—and American debut—fell through when avowed nonmusician member U.N. Ruh succumbed to the rather sordid disease of overstuffed intestines and was rushed to a Berlin hospital for emergency surgery.

While U.N. (the man who mans the power drill in concert) recovers, Neubauten frontperson Blixa Bargeld is here in London, sharing a borrowed floor with ex-Birthday Party man Nick Cave and investing his daylight hours in arranging the band’s LP deal with Some Bizzare. SB is Marc Almond’s label and home also of Soft Cell spin-off Marc and the Mambas (a collaboration with organist Ann Hogan and “the Venomettes” on back-up), who this week turn their ersatz angst towards the Spanish sun with the flamingo flamink-o of “Black Heart.”

Neubauten’s album for Some Bizzare— tentatively entitled Statagien Gegen Architeckturen (“Strategies Against Architecture”)—is eagerly awaited. But it may surTURN TO PAGE 59 prise those who only heard the Lyceum performance; the group’s debut recording contained lots of patches of classical and church musics, overlaid with their brand of destructo-percussion. It certainly outdoes Glenn Branca’s sonic salon sets, however— Branca’s recent gigs at Riverside Studios brought eager sound-abstractionists out from under every rock in the city, but one can’t say they went away totally galvanized. Still, they probably combined with the Einsturzende imitation (rampant) to give us “The Equinox Event.”

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Meant to run from 9p.m. through 5 a.m. at the, ironically, rather exclusive London Musicians Collective, this was a marathon meant to mark the moment when the sun crosses the equator—equalizing night and day, light and dark, for a moment. The long line-up was composed of “mental metal” and “industrial noise” (the two latest buzzwords) specialists. Prestige guests were Jim Thirwell (Foetus of You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath and proprietor of the Hard’t label), ex-Associates drummer John Murphey, and numerous side-persons from Genesis P. Orridge’s Psychic TV—including ex-bone player Dave Tibet, premiering his new group Dogs Blood Order. Preferred modes alternated between “tapework” and “performance event,” and there were representatives from Belgium (La Drolesse, Club Moral), Birmingham (Death Magazine 62) and Beyond (percussion gangs Pure, Ake and Nurse With Wound—a solo performer who rarely appears live, preferring to invest Springsteenian-style lengths of time in the studio composing LPs like his Individuals And Insects Silenced on United Dairies).

So what happened? Well, I left after the second person threw up over my shoes and the din became literally unbearable (sound effects were chaotic at best, but also rather funny in their way). That was before the fights started, police were called and Thirwell—who in the last ditch declined to perform—was apparently first out the door on his way to disclaim it all as a mockery.

So what if you’re young, British, don’t wanna Go Nowhere but still don’t think of David Bowie or Elvis Costello as God? Well—if you’re ingenious, tough and talented, it is possible for you to turn the same Anglo-German circuit to a different sort of advantage. That’s what the purveyors of the New Bat boom have done with their updated, very British brand of garage rock. If you like Link Wray, the Kinks, Question Mark and Robert Quine, then you’d like the bands that make up this circuit.

The Milkshakes I’ve mentioned before— but their popularity in the capital has mushroomed and their new LP, After School Session, heralds more than the best sleeve art of the year (ace sleeve art has always been a Milkshakes specialty, the department of drummer Bruce). Like their hot new single (“Soldiers Of Love,” the Bside, is the one), this album is the fruit of that long-awaited Record Contract—with the just-established Upright label.

Different rather than second-best are sidekicks the Prisoners, whose LP A Taste Of Pink (Own-Up) is not so new but just as novel. It’s more psychedelic (they’ve got the Farfisa) but, like the Milkshakes, revives the instrumental as an art in itself: something we haven’t been able to dance our mess around to properly since the ’60s. “Just don’t label us revivalists!” is the Prisoners’ plea—but I can’t think of any less accurate angle on this very English vision of the backyard bash.

A new British Invasion? Maybe. These bands have come as far from their German

gigs of five years ago as has the british attitude towards Teutonic sounds (or, as one Milkshake put it, “We were down playin’ the Hamburg docks in ’78 and then they were all wearin’ badges, really into English stuff. Now they’ve got a whole load of arty old music of their own”). But they’re still mainly a live quantity, as were the Beatles in the Cavern days or the Stones at the Marquee (currently celebrating its 25th anniversary). And the only real taster of the scene so far is a compilation called These Guys Ain’t Nothin’ But Trash on Big Beat—which errs by including the Stingrays, while ignoring the Prisoners’ entire ouevre. You should, however, be hearing from the lot of them soon. lH?