OUR DINNER WITH ANDROGYNES

OUR DINNER WITH ANDROGYNES

THE NEW BRITISH INVASION 1983-?

Surely you suspected something when those pictures of Boy George and Annie Lennox hit the cover of Newsweek. And Rolling Stone. And Boy's Life. And Highlights. Yep, it's the time of season for cross-dressing. And speaking of crosses, there's Duran Duran, who perhaps wield the largest one imaginable for all of us, in our way, to bear. Herein writer J. Kordosh speaks of the "current" British Invasion, the one responsible for the bands above and, as he'll explain, too many more. What does it all mean? Don't ask the irrepressible J.l

J. KORDOSH

They're hitting America fast and hard, this latest generation of British musicians. Bizarre names blur across the charts. Songs with inaudible guitars come to be called rock hits. Photos appear in magazines, enticing but weird, suggesting a conspiracy of frozen cynicism afoot. It's almost as if the children's cartoon show, Tales Of The Green Forest—"Where the stories you've heard about all come to life"—has, well...come to life. And Americans, ever credulous and the world's premier television viewers, watch the spectacle unfold on MTV. Meanwhile, a nation's entertainment tradition—the values of Ronco and Rocket J. Squirrelgoes forgotten. What's happened?

Plainly enough, we've been co-opted for another go-round, good or bad. This is—flat-out—the greatest time in the history of the world to be a British musician. Even bands that can't break in England (actually, there's only seven) can become bona fide chartmakers in the United States. That's because it's a pretty good time to be Martha Quinn, too. Of course the essence of the music is American—it seems to be something like slavery, where national dues go without saying...but the British have perfected a shrewd sort of experimentalism Americans find irresistible. As Billy Idol's proven, Jim Morrison died in France but in vain. Like his contemporaries, Idol's found a lot of green in the Green Forest of America.

Still, no one would accuse the latest Limeys of being shysters and wimps, although plenty of them are. Culture Club—the most talented and probably the most successful of the bunch—have shown an almost frightening flair for taking the world by storm. As writers, they've distilled the new British sound as well as anyone: dance beat, fine MOR production and harmless, seeminglymeaningful lyrics. This would amount to at least moderate success in itself, but coupled with Boy George it's a virtual blank check. It wouldn't even be unreasonable to suggest that the New Brits were officially sanctioned when Boy made the cover of Newsweek. Yes, those must've been some fast seven days, all right. But no matter—we're not talking about People, we're talking about news. You remember: hundreds of marines killed in Beirut, Andropov dying, Duran Duran touring, stuff like that. George "He Wuz Robbed" O'Dowd wasn't named Time's "Man Of The Year," but he made up for it by appearing on The Tonight Show with fellow comedienne Joan Rivers—and if that wasn't a message to Middle America, we'll eat our funny black hats.

As a musical footnote, "Karma Chameleon" hit #1 in England and America—a surprisingly difficult trick. Over all these years it's only happened 34 times. (Culture Club wasn't the first of the Latest to pull it off, though. That honor went to Human League for their universally agreeable "Don't You Want Me.") Of course, nobody seemed to care when Boy admitted he'd pretty much ripped off "Handy Man" for the chorus of "Chameleon." It was a good tune to rip. Come-a, come-a, come-a, Karma Chameleon...

But if Culture Club's the designated carrier of the banner, other acts have made considerable hay on the new ethos of sound. In fact, an apt musical metaphor for the entire phenomenon would be Spandau Ballet's (play their initials backwards; it's a clue) "True."

This is one love song that's imaginatively— one is tempted to say daringly—non-assertive. Of course the lyrics are sappy. That's beside the point. Come to think of it, it might even be the point: they may as well be singing about dying on a Mississippi chain gang for all the emotion run amuck in the music. (I, for one, only take the thing about it being hard to write the next line halfway seriously.) But this creative detachment is not only the par for Spandau Ballet, it's practically become an art form, Britishstyle. To actually make music any less threatening you'd have to go a far piece—maybe hum "The Yellow Rose Of Texas" over a glass of lemonade or something.

"These groups are nicely behaved; they know what it's all about." -Malcolm McLaren

Fortunately, brutal tepidness isn't an iron-clad rule—Def Leppard being the obvious exception and Adam Ant the comedic exception. No doubt it's the mode of choice among the Synthesizer Set, as blank-versed a bunch of Bizarro Bob Dylans as we'll ever see. Unlike previous British immortals, they don't peddle the Big Idea (ala Pink Floyd or the Who). Unlike previous British immortals, they don't peddle a Big Image (David Bowie). The product nowadays is the Big Attitude. Bands have become the Merchants of Cool.

Probably most typical of big-league Cool is the Eurythmics, in which Annie Lennox gets to play Girl George with absolutely none of O'Dowd's grasp of what is intrinsically absurd and what is not. The Eurythmics themselves are a bonanza of the absurd, though, which is nicely ironic. A case in point is a recent Billboard ad (Lennox wearing the alwayscryptic Lone Ranger mask) and the copy reading: "THEY WON EVERYONE OVER the first time out with their international smash album and single 'SWEET DREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS)'-both SOLID GOLD. And the video is STILL ON MTV. Now the Eurythmics phenomenon continues." Yes, one consecutive hit album and the phenomenon continues. And the video is "still" (I get it...motionless) on MTV? Surely this means we'll take it in stride if the sun rises in the south-southwest. Well, who knows when Annie will make the cover of Rolling Stone again? Or when she'll field a thoughtful query like "Where does your image come from?" with as suave a response as: "From me. I mean, not from anyone else." If she's playing it that cute with CREEM, can you imagine what kind of inside dope she's feeding Rolling Stone? Talk about what a writer's sweet dreams are made of! The Eurythmics' glacial thoughtprocesses are, happily, bashed in the head by other Britons. Take Adam Ant. Here's a guy whose stage show sends paying customers into deep reminisces of Herman's Hermits. A guy who elicits the question: you can't sing, can't write...what can you do? And—to be fair—a guy whose career was CPR'd by MTV as neatly as anyone else's. We don't wonder where he fits in, we wonder why he fits in at all.

Today's English bands have become the Merchants of Cool.

The best guess is that Adam's the consummate television insect. No kidding, he's more visible than Robert Young on American TV these days. This goes to show you that being the Biggest Thing in England (which he was, briefly) isn't anywhere as neat as being Marcus Welby. Unfortunately for antfans, Adam's chronic inability to write anything...shall we say "substantial" (which seems fair when you consider that his most memorable tune was a paean to hisself)...has reduced him to a likeable cartoon. On the other mandible, we have to grant Mr. Ant considerable guts. What other white British hotshot would have the unbelievable nerve to appear—and dance!—on the Motown TV-trib with Michael Jackson on the same bill?

What's more, Adam actually asked for the booking. We can conclude that his ambition, at least, is American with a capital me—and that he's somewhat more combative than his fellow Brits.

The Ant saga is inescapably tied into the Malcolm McLaren Contribution. McLaren's distinguished himself as a thoroughly modern—and thoroughly British—Tom Parker, having a hand in presenting the Sex Pistols, Adam Ant,

Bow Wow Wow (and George O'Dowd, who made his stage debut with B.W.W.) and whatnot. If all that's not strange enough for several lifetimes, he's also dabbled with the ol' art-form himself. His latest scam is Duck Rock, but we can't help but be pleased that his stirring rendition of "Buffalo Gals" (yes, that "Buffalo Gals") hit #1 in England. Although we're not privy to the wherefores and whereases of Mr. McLaren's business relations, we can't help but notice that his more mine-able proteges (e.g., Ant, O'Dowd) have since split—and that bitter taste in Adam's mouth probably isn't formic acid. Call McLaren a scheming huckster if you will; there's no doubt he's a ubiquitous contributor to British music. As Mr. M. says about the Latest Wave: "These groups are nicely behaved; they know what it's all about." Of course they do.

Speaking of nicely behaved brings us to Duran Duran, currently satisfying America's need for young, good-looking people. (In that, they've broken a longstanding tradition—the initials "D.D." representing physical loathsomeness for, lo, these many years.) Duran Duran's undoubtedly the prime example of exactly how indebted a band can be to the video game: which is not to say that "Hungry Like The Wolf" isn't a great song, it's to say that it had to be released three times before everybody realized just how great it was. Seeing it on MTV some 50,000 times also helped. Without so much as a 20-second timeout, the Double D's became legit stars while people like myself were still reviewing their combs.

If we can't appreciate the Duran's music—essentially one cup beat, one cup melody, 50 gallons water— we can certainly appreciate their greed. Drummer Roger Taylor was recently quoted as saying: "People put us down as a teenybopper thing, like the Osmonds. It makes me angry when I read reviews and they say the audience is full of 15-year-old screaming girls. "The Dodger is, perhaps, thinking of the millions of 15-year-old girls who ponder Twain's latter works over an afternoon of Mark Goodman. "We've become almost like prisoners," he went on to whine. "Now wouldn't even think about walking out the front door. We'd get mobbed."

Certainly a novel twist, this selling millions of records and getting mobbed. Kind of takes all the meaning out of spending a few centuries in front of a mirror.

DD's make-up-minded brethren, Def Leppard, offer a comparable youth/looks quotient with none of the disclaimers. It seems remarkable that Def Lep is shoved into a critical corner when the American media yap about this onging British threat, since they're noticeably monstrous when it comes to making money. It would appear that Lep's at least on the level of Culture Club—maybe even Duran Duran—although, admittedly, lacking the Everest-profile we've come to expect. (One is tempted to hear Joe Elliott rip into his critics with: "It makes me angry when...").

The problem, of course, is that Def Leppard have almost nothing in common with their contemporaries. They could pass for Americans with great ease, having none of the clammy insecurity of the acts who know what it's all about. Their charm—essentially borrowed from Van Halen—lies in appealing to girls (and possibly women) by being young/handsome/& rich while simultaneously appealing to guys by being loud/cocky/& wimmen-slayers. It's an unbeatable combo, especially in America, where hardly anyone takes rock music seriously. (Probably still the prime diff between the U.K. and the U.S.) And that's why Def Leppard are overlooked. They're just too damned American. Who wants to honor a British Invasion by going on about an act that might as well be from L.A.?

For Invasion-fans, there's a whole slew of synth-acts who are clearly not from L.A., American Samoa or any quasar in this man's Universe. The reptiles who ceaselessly champion "dance," yet sing about it as if it were as much fun as dentistry circa 1850. The beings who treat the guitar as a musical effect somewhat less important than the handclap. Clear-eyed campers who confuse clothes with good ideas.

Our favorite among these very interesting bands is the Thompson Twins, a trio consisting of exactly no Thompsons and the same number of twins. Isn't that just about the most creative thing this side of Big Bill Broonzy singing "Indiana Wants Me"? RC Cola sponsoring a Jimmy Reed tour? Ledbelly versus Robert Johnson in the Friday night video showdown?! In any case, the Thompsons didn't need guitars (hell, they didn't even need socks) to record "Lies," which might not be the greatest song in the world—but it's not the worst excuse for a video ever seen, either. The alleged Twins will, indeed, bear watching as the Invasion rolls on. Why? Because, as John Mendelssohn so neatly pointed out: "The Thompson Twins' Tom Bailey dyed half his hair black and half garish orange and then let his ponytail grow as long as a grammar-school-aged youngster is tall.

He looked a perfect dunce." That's why.

Musicos of the TT ilk are practically everywhere you look, though, so you can pick your personal fave easier than you can win a monkey in a teacup. A Flock Of Seagulls have gathered American fans and pity by capturing their music—not to mention their careers—in slow motion. Surely no one's surprised that singer Mike Score wanted to be a hairdresser (the British actually admit this sort of thing), since the Flock—as a band—have proven to be pretty good at arranging the dead parts of their heads. Granted we're partial to the views of Mr. Mendelssohn, but his terse summation of the Gulls—

(they) show no signs whatever of altering the course of popular music in our times''—is not something we'd relegate to personal opinion. It's virtually a fact evident enough to go into second grade curriculum.

As you can imagine, a trend like this—a trend so absolutely British—can get out of hand. But not out of ear, unfortunately. Soft Cell, another of these interchangeable toy musicians, managed to parlay their interest in (are you ready?) sex into "Tainted Love," a tune that stayed on the charts for almost a year. Orchestral Manoevres In The Dark gave new hope to chronically depressed people with a knack for music rivalling their zest for life. More than likely, critics would rather interview their synthesizers than the, uh, band. Echo And The Bunnymen seem to be as good a reason to slit your throat os anything else. Ditto for the agony-torn Fixx. Happily, a vast majority of Americans hove better Wendy's commercials to watch, leaving the honesty/misery dilettantes a chance to get a shave, a haircut, a chance to forget about Human League's uncanny good timing...anything to rouse them from their listlessness. Some psychiatrists recommend guitar lessons.

The British have perfected a shrewd sort of experimentalism Americans find irresistible.

Despite that particular subculture, several of the New Slew hold some promise. The prime contenders—Big Country and Aztec Camera—are both Scottish, which quite possibly says something about London. More interestingly, they're both on the American critical rave-list, which—I guarantee you—says nothing at all. It was a brutal blow to all of us in the "profession" when Limahl split from Kajagoogoo. Probably the only thing that saved our collective sanity was the hours of fun inventing last names for the young ladies in Bananarama, with rules like they had to be homonymns for woodproducts. Seriously.

Yes, Camera and Country are, at least, a couple of bands we can make serious noise over. A.C., fronted by 19-year-old Roddy Frame, is—by all accounts—the Next Everything, unless some terrible unforeseen accident (Roddy getting heavy into L. Ron Hubbard, Michael Jackson continuing his recording career or somesuch) occurs. No less a luminary than Elvis Costello has supposedly called Roddy his foremost writing rival, which must have hurt Boy George everywhere but in his checkbook. But Aztec's debut album, High Land, Hard Rain did indeed lend credibility to half-forgotten phrases like "musical substance" and also spotlighted a long-awaited (at least by British turn from the synth/giamor swagger. Roddy's into anachronisms like acoustic guitars and love songs. If this sounds mighty American, well bingo. Aztec Camera will probably end up being the cruelest trick the British have ever pulled, giving us a band more American than anything America can invent. Whether or not Mr. Frame will fulfill his considerable promise is something we can't say, but we'll be happy if he's half as good as John Fogerty.

Big Country are—at the moment—a little better-known in these States, based on their LP (The Crossing], and appearance on Saturday Night Live and their first American tour. The catchwords for B.C. are "sweeping and grand"—no kidding, I've seen those words in three separate articles about these cats. Maybe they should change their name to The Thousand Dollar Brooms. Like Camera, they seem to conjure up the Return To Folk parade, although their sound is more guitar-aggressive. The only problem so far? Their SNL appearance wasn't halfbad but it was half dull. Most likely, they'll have to go through a period where the public is hype-debriefed before they conquer this particular big country.

As you can see, the Invasion indeed continues full-throttle, permutating redundancies, offering vague promises, entertaining and amusing countless millions. Let's try to look at it as an enriching experience. Which, for a few, it is.

NAMESMANSHIP

About the happiest characteristic known to young British musicians is their Godgiven knack for coming up with totally screwball band names. This isn't as easy as it might look, either, since the game can quickly degenerate into the stupid adjective/non sequitur noun genre, which any 1 2-year-old can master.

They're very strong on simple names, some of our favorites being Yaz, Wham! and Led Zeppelin. Some—like the Smiths—make the ordinary sound intriguing. Others—like ABC—make the alphabet sound abbreviated. How do they do it? Who knows? Is there some way we can find out?

If they're strong on the single-syllable, though, they're positively colossal on the extended gurgle. Bow Wow Wow was a brainstorm unto itself, but Kajagoogoo borders on the collective wisdom of the human race. Names like that can't be bought. Come to think of it, they can't be sold too well, either, but that's not our concern at the moment.

As for the Simply Wonderful...well, can you top Eyeless In Gaza? Jimmy The Hoover? Swell Maps? If so, would you admit it? And to think we once regarded Rush a silly name for grown men. Make room for Thomas Dolby. •