THE THIRD BRITISH INVASION 1977-79

For many, the "third" British Invasion may have been the first one they were even aware of. Pictures of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious were splashed daily on most U.S. newspapers while their infamous band, the Sex Pistols, dribbled their way across these United States. And with those pictures came tales of other bands—the Clash, the Jam, the Stranglers and many more. Did any of these bands hit it big?

Were they, indeed, "big?" Only Richard Riegel can tell you...and he doesn't even know who he is anymore!

RICHARD RIEGEL

Htya kicrc & poms & dads, this is your old Uncle Lezbo Wangs flapping back atcha, rumoj! has it I deep-sixed up in Manhattan a couple years ago, that may or may not be so({l'll leave that verdict to the dry-as-dust chroniclers of such minutiae), all I'm gonna say for now is that if Lou Reed (bless his bloated soulf) really believes he achieved some kinda voidoidal catharsis when he dribbled Meta/ Machine Music on us, he has got several dozen more thinks coming! Yessir, voids upon voids upon voids out here, neighborhood's not even real conducive to those workaday extraterrestrial battles for righteousness the Jehovah's Witness promised me in my credulous youth—fact, v/hole scene here's so lacking in industrial-strength polemics that I've gotta manifest in some worldly rock crit hairpulling one more time.

ANARCHY FROM THE U.K.

Okay, so my Selectrit's in pawn and I left the ticket in limbo (not in Richard Hell's hovel pad), my expression's necessarily gonna take alternate forms, and if Riegel thinks he's taking down my avalanche of prose with his sandbox shovel, well that's HIS literary fantasy, stand back and give the boy room! Don't go too harsh on the lad if he tries to play Eric-burpin'-Burdon spokesman for my truncated Hendrixian typeface yowls. Because someday you too will KNOW implacably that the Universe is one huge tufftitty ordeal without end, a horrible nightmare Woodward Avenoo Of The Soul where all the liquor stores still open at 4 A.M. are on the other side of the street, and all the crossover lanes are slick with discarded Velvet U. banana peel stickers, so that yer Camaro skids & busts its driveshaft buns upon the...

But I digress—therefore I am (was, whatever). Herr Riegel's assignment today is to explain the "British Invasion" ('77 edition), and while that's a subject on which I wore out many a midnight typewriter ribbon in my hopped-up heyday, I'm gonna sit back and let Riegel vent his own spleen-fed opinions, some of which are OK and some of which probably stink as turdishly as his publicly-expressed approval of Cheap Trick. Like I said, it's his fantasy, and if he wants to lift my rant V roll style (which I lifted from Kerouac and from old muscatel-stained Downbeat reviews to start with), more power to him—everything worthwhile ever done in rock is at least a partial plagiarism of Chuck Berry on some under-the-table level or other, it's the great chain of ripoff being!

Except I might clue ya that the real problem w:th early-'70s rock was that too many pop peeps were getting too far away from ol' Chuckie's cheesy r'n'r verities. Here in the U.S. there was a big back-to-the-land folk revival (under the guise of "singer/songwriter''-ism), with a bunch of whey-faced refugees from prep schools back at their acoustic guitars, twanging out tales of whimper & woe. The grungy soul of r'n'r seemed to be in swift decline. Over in England, from which we had received deux ex machina rescue from similar rock doldrums in the '60s, a different breed of rock reaction had set in.

The English sound remained fairly "heavy," but the Tories were definitely back in the driver's seat. The metal groups were into ever-more-rigid stylistic formalities, while the artrockers were retreating to a folky English countryside which contained scads of primordial-Smurf elves and sprites, but nary an everlovin' black nor hillbilly (Yank prole prophets without-which-English-rock-couldn't-havebeen-born-etc.) Problem was that ever since the Beatles had made rock safe for * * * Artistic Potential*** with their Sgt. Pepper in '67, every pissant & his brother active in pop claimed inspiration from the Beatles (no matter how remote the derivation)—they wouldn't let you question any aspect of their dogbane pap, they'd go hollering to Mom that you were besmirching-by-association the Holy Avatars in the Fab Four.

Which was more than tragic, both in perpetuating tons of useless pomporockers in divine-light reigns of the album charts, and in leading the lumpen fans to reject the truly new groups that did come along—the Stooges, MC5, Lou Reed, and the New York Dolls from Amerika alone—because none of them exhibited any overt Beatles ancestry. England was somewhat more flexible (some would say "fickle," but sometimes that's just what it takes) in accepting newer rock, usually in association with the fashionable glamrock boom of the early '70s—David Bowie, Mott The Hoople, Slade, T. Rex—but except for Bowie, almost none of that scene became known to the millions of U.S. fans that could've helped rock turn a corner into the future.

Obviously we all needed some rock 'n' revolution so hugely new &

overwhelming that it would wipe James Taylor and Jethro Tull (twin Jive Turkeys) off the fans' brainslates for good, just the way the (lively not mythic) Beatles had made flyweights like Neil Sedaka and Paul Anka into overnight footnotes in '64. And just as obviously, everybody (i.e., us hoary rockcrits with our advanced degrees in crosscultural pollination) looked toward England as the Nextbigthingsville.

There were false alarms from that quarter throughout the mid-'70s, especially as pulled by the more hairtriggerapocalyptic of the rock scribes. In 1974 we took note of Bad Company, anti-glitter reactionaries dedicated to returning to rock's "basics," but their vision of same proved so comfortably dullard that they earned a lifetime penthouse suite on the charts, sme^k in the middle of all the bloatro .'.ers they ostensibly resented. By 1975 the Limeys had come up with "pub rock," a delibera'ely small-scale movement with no arena-bellied ambitions, as personified by groups like Ducks Deluxe, the Steve Gibbons Band, Dr. Feelgood, the Motors, and Eddie And The Hot Rods. All of 'em stuck real close to the blues 'n' billy verities that had inspired the best Britrock of the early '60s, which was a relief from Pink Floyd's monopoly-capital spaceouts, but none of the pub rockers were quite desperate enough to give us the radical recharge we really needed.

We all neede some rock 'n' roll revolution that would wipe out James Taylor and Jethro Tull for good.

America, meanwhile, was just starting to shake off vermin like the cactus-hearted Eagles, and 1975 brought us both Patti Smith (a true radical, with pushy antiglamour ideals which would become crucial to new rock in another year or so) and the large-scale emergence of Bruce Springsteen, a rock conservator whose romanticism and moral populism made him a quick favorite of the rockcrit establishment hereabouts.

Springsteen's story belongs to American Rock chronicles, but his popularity with the tastemakers led directly to many of the same crits' recognition in 1976 of the first British rocker of the decade to snip that moldy Sgt. Pepper umbilical chord,

Graham Parker. A slight wight with a big beak and bigger eyeglasses, Parker had no myopic illusions about glamour as a sine qua non of rock expression. The considerable art of his first two albums, Howlin' Wind and Heat Treatment, derives precisely from his intense artlessness.

Parker was much closer to the searing hatred of '65 Dylan than to any of the leftover '67 Beatles love-is-all-you-get homilies we had endured so long. He just stood there in front of his band, the descendedfrom-Brinsley-Schwarz Rumour, and spat * out his dry contempt for everyone who got 1 in his way. Parker and his sardonic, brilliantly-bit-off sneers hit their creative peak in the 1979 Squeezing Out Sparks, an almost masochistically thrilling exploration of sexual conflict. Parker's anger softened somewhat in the '80s, with his former champions making for the critical exits, but his trademark I'm-all-l've-gotwhat's-your-excuse? snotty attitude had * already popped up in a number of other ^ new British rockers by that time.

In the meantime, 1976 had also witnessed the public upchucking of the most influential English band from the brand new "punk" movement, the Sex Pistols.

American rockwriters nostalgic for the Shadows of Knights and Standells of their own wankoff pube years had been yapping for a renaissance of punk rock for years, and had already been rewarded on their own turf with the Dictators and the Ramones, but those bands' willed arhateurisms came across more as cartoonish satire of the stagnant rock professionalism of the day than as killer rebellion. Whereas in England, where suburbs & their comfy discontents had never really existed, the kids were already deeply beaten down by unemployment, inflation, and a renascent dassist political system, against which simple bohemianism no longer balled the jack.

Enter the Sex Pistols, four globs of spittle onetime-NY Dolls manager Malcolm McLaren had recruited from the wall-towall layabouts in his Sex kinkyduds shop in London. Lead singer Johnny Rotten, half a generation younger than Graham Parker and that much more oppressed, couldn't even breathe without sneering. The Sex Pistols' songs terrorized the Abbey Rqadblocked soul of British pop society, with raucous denials of hope, art, meaning, feeling—"We're pretty, pretty vacant, and we don't care!"—anything that could be exploited into oppression, ever again. Like pit bulls on bennies, the Sex Pistols not only bit the hands that fed them, but took such patronizing limbs off all the way to their elbows. As the most newsworthy exponents of the new punk scene, the Pistols were snapped up for huge advances, and then dumped the next week, for some fit of "public outrageousness" (usually trumped-up media entrapment) or another. The Clash pursued a more stylized (compared to the Pistols') feud with their record company, CBS, and always managed to stop just short of getting thrown off the label. But there were endless complications. CBS delayed U.S. release of the Clash's debut album as punishment for some careless remark or other, then took egg up the nose as the English edition of the album became the largest-selling import in U.S. history. CBS got the next Clash album, Give 'Em Enough Rope, out in the U.K. and U.S. simultaneously, then came out with a bonus-single-boosted U.S. version of the debut set for insurance.

The Sex Pistols' songs terrorized the Abbey Roadblocked soul of British pop socity.

The Pistols finally settled down long enough to have Virgin release their single "God Save the Queen" ("...and her fascist regime!") just in time for Elizabeth's 1977 Jubilee celebration. Despite a BBC ban, the single hit #1 on the charts, and new depths of outrage had been established.

Eventually the group put out their astounding debut aibum, Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, a longplaying sneer of scarifying rage. The Pistols toured the U.S. as 1977 became 1978, and for a few weeks were daily stains on the people-in-the-news pages of newspapers that had never breathed "punk" until then. The media attention had become so intense by this time that the band just imploded, with Rotten stalking off, and the others falling away in halfcocked disarray.

Bassist Sid Vicious moved to New York, and in short order was arrested for the stabbing death of his girlfriend, and then died of a drug overdose himself, while out on bail. Johnny Rotten had become John Lydon once more, and his sober new group, Public Image Ltd., contained as much raw hatred as the Pistols had, but now Lydon expressed himself with such icy detachment that no one (especially thrillseekers) would want to come near him ever again.

However, long before the Sex Pistols had gone down in the flames of their total anarchy, the British pop weeklies had spread their scabby image throughout the U.K. with mainline swiftness, and overnight England's biggest style revolution since Carnaby St. was out on the pavement. Kids all over the Isles were spiking their hair, safety-pinning random sections of their anatomies, and dressing in secondhand bondage gear, "dustbin liners" (= garbage bags), and old ripped T-shirts Mick Jagger wouldn't even wipe his nose on. The theme of all these costumes was instantaneous shock, especially as directed toward the boring fatcat slothful coke-sniffing rockstars of the mid-'70s. Hippies in the U.S. snorted through their chest-hair mustaches at these upstart nihilistniks, and celebrated their love of predictability by making blands-have-morefun Fleetwood Mac's dreary Rumours one of the top-selling LPs of all time.

More important than their wholesale shock value was the English kids' brassknuckle realization that burning resentment of the status quo was as crucial (maybe more crucial) to rock 'n' roll as guitars themselves. DoltYerself bands sprang up in every corner of Britain, and began to undermine the whole structure of corporate rock by refusing every pop tradition they could. The early apotheosis of these D.I.Y. bands was the Clash, who fused a much more politically-directed rebellion with the Pistols' nonstop sneers.

Ironically, it had been the Sex Pistols' authentically scabrous punk souls that had collapsed on them under the pressure of an all-out assault on the establishment. The parallel development of the Clash, which included Joe Strummer, son of a diplomat, and Paul Simonon, who had seen the insides of several art schools, showed that a touch of "breeding" might actually aid one's "punk" longevity. Strummer seemed understandably burdened with a huge guilt complex over his comfortable origins in the midst of Britain's unemployment and neofascism, and he translated that guilt (with the help of songwriting partner Mick Jones) into acute political anger on the ___T _ _Pistols were

the archetypal punk ranters, but the Clash had come up with the best-conceptualized rants, raw vignettes of daily life in the dole-soaked England of 1977.

By 1975, the Limeys had come up with "pub rock" a deliberately small-scale movement with no arena-bellied ambitions.

The Clash responded cryptically, first with a double set, London Calling, then triple, Sandinistal, which nobody from the record execs to the critics to the fans could ever quite figure out. Were the multipledisc sets a brave attempt by the Clash to give the beleaguered consumers more for their dough, or filler-laden smokescreens to cover the band's slipping sense of punk righteousness? By 1980, the Clash had their first U.S. hit, "London Calling," and a couple of years later they were fixtures on MTV with their much poppier later material. By now (don't ask!) the Clash are split into two armed camps (Strummer vs. Jones) in a denouement of a great band almost as tragic as the Sex Pistols'.

Back in the England of 1977, a whole weedpatch of diversely-assorted bands were springing up under the banner of "punk." Some of them were closer to the first compromise synthesis of pure punk, the journalists' beloved "new wave," but at the same time they definitely weren't the same old same old Jethro Floyds. The Damned, for instance, hold the technical distinction of releasing the first punk album in England (Damned Damned Damned,

Feb. '77) and of making the first Britpunk tour of America (Spring '77), but with names like "Captain Sensible" and "Rat Scabies" the Damned were aimed more at a theatrical self-parody of punk than actual anarchy.

Also prominent in the earliest 1977 stirrings of commercial interest in English punk were the Stranglers, a kind of midlife-crisis expression of parallel snotter rebellions. Vocalist-guitarist Hugh Cornwell was a former university instructor who had picked up an academic hatred of all humanity (especially the female gender), and the arrival of punk gave him a beautiful opportunity to blow his nose on English schoolmarms everywhere. But the real heart of the Stranglers was Dave Greenfield, whose shrill, pulsating, burbling electric organ (not synthesizer) gave the band an unmistakably attractive (if rather dated) sound.

The Stranglers' keyboard virtuosity often got them compared to the Doors, and helped them achieve one of the earliest commercial explosions of the new punk.

The Stranglers had three albums out in the U.S. before the Clash got their first American release. But the promo copies of the Stranglers' U.S. albums arrived plastered with stickers warning of the "explicit language" within, typical of the pointless aggravations that seemed to attend every move the band made. The Stranglers spent many a night in jail for drug busts and concert riots, and Cornwell learned whole new reasons for his bitterness and hostility. By their 1983 album, Feline, the Stranglers sounded very old and tired.

Also notable in the '77 English punk scene (if at least two eons beyond the Stranglers in their mod-ern concerns) were the Jam, likewise readily available in U.S. releases from early on. The group's leader/vocalist/guitarist, Paul Weller, turned out to be the advance guard of thousands of (characteristically postmodern) British youth born in 1955 or later, as he possessed an enormous fetish for style and fashion as rebellion unto themselves. If he parted his hair just so, Weller could look almost exactly like a composite of his twin mod idols, the 1965 Steve Marriott and the 1965 (not '68 or any second later) Pete Townshend.

Like his Clash compatriots, Weller sincerely hated the exploitation of British youth by the socio-economic factors crushing them, but emotionally speaking, he hated flarebottom trousers even more. Despite their image games, the Jam (who sounded like a rougher version of the early Who) created a whole series of albums which encapsulated late-'70s British life with tough, accessible intelligence. Sadly, although they became major popchart stars back home, the Jam had lived out their entire group existence before most Americans even bothered to hear them.

Paul Weller pushes on today with his aptly-dubbed Style Council; the stillunknown-in-the-U.S. magic of the '7/ youth revolt is ancient history for him now.

But the most important personality of the 1977 British Invasion (though not exactly a "punk" himself) arrived on the scene in the non-imposing figure of Elvis Costello (nee Declan McManus). He looked like Buddy Holly as method-acted by Woody Allen, and sang like a gap-toothed parrot on speed, spewing out slashing wordplay and melodies with dazzling brilliance. Costello was initially compared to Graham Parker, as their vocal styles (and their huge reservoirs of seething anger) were similar, but Costello seemed insanely determined to spill it out twice as quick.

Costello came on real hard as the bard of guilt and revenge, apparently a byproduct of his Catholic background—"I had to either be Catholic or Jewish, now didn't l?l?" he economically sneered at the time—and made the papers repeatedly for his verbal & sometimes physical battles with journalists, photographers, and U.S. rockers with more age than sense. None of which mattered to Costello's true essence, as Costello persisted in putting out brilliant album after brilliant album throughout the controversies. This Year's Model and Armed Forces would have been sufficient masterworks to grace anybody's career, but this new kind of Elvis smashed ahead with the back-to-back Get Happy!! and Taking Liberties, each a single-disc, 20 (!!)song (& all of them gems) album. The latter set was actually a collection of scattered singles and B-sides for the U.S. market, but whatever its premise, the album contained more great songs than most performers could collect in a lifetime of greatesthits sets.

In fact, Elvis Costello could legitimately be dubbed The New Dylan (he shared Bob's U.S. label, Columbia)—he was undoubtedly the popsong messiah '60sbred fans had prayed for endlessly, but for whatever reasons (either because his brilliance was just so overwhelmingly blinding that it became invisible, or more likely because he had no folk/hippie trappings), few Americans recognized this year's model of Dylan in their midst, even as they hounded the original to shape up to their twisted antique fantasies. By the '80s, Costello had mellowed in public, had reduced the dazzleability quotient of his records slightly, and proved as perverse as the "other" Dylan in his periodic sneakingoff to Nashville skylines.

Actually, most of the British class of '77 had found that America wasn't quite ready for their no-choice rebellions. The Tom Robinson Band, for instance, did energetic, straightforward rock, but Tom Robinson also happened to be a gay activist who was overt in his songs about persecution of gays and other minorities. Aging peaceniks in the U.S. had been nagging for new protest music for years, but gays' and blacks' concerns just weren't safe & clean like their favored anti-nuke puritanism. Tom Robinson trudged on with Sector 27 and various other lineups in the '80s, but the big moment he could have broken through to American consciousness seemed long lost.

Ian Dury came on otherworldly for Yanks who still regarded Elton John as some benchmark of weirdness; Dury was deformed by childhood polio, but had fought back with a cheerfulness that could never be cloying enough to endear him to Jerry Lewis. Instead, Dury came back with his perfectly-functioning (and healthily "foul"-mouthed) tongue in a punkish update of British music hall traditions. Ian had his angers, too, but he expressed them in a warm, offhandedly vulgar way that certainly wasn't abrasive (maybe just "odd" for those Yanks who still regarded Boz Scaggs as a human being). Emerging first with pub rockers Kilburn & The High Roads, Dury rose to considerable prominence with his debut solo LP, New Boots And Panties, which remains a classic of the era. His later releases have kept his bloody virtues intact.

The British new wave of 1977-78 coughed up numerous & diverse artists who were able to pursue their own courses more fully after the media spotlight had let up. Squeeze (originally "UK Squeeze") appeared to be one more gang of nutters, but their chief songwriters, Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, soon proved to be (at least temporary) contenders for a new Lennon-McCartney songsmith partnership.

As luck would have it, Squeeze toiled in U.S. obscurity for years, then broke up just as MTV threatened to make them stars of a sort. Joe Jackson was touted as a minorleague Costello/Parker type around the end of the '70s, but has done better with his own quirky explorations of older U.S. jazz and tin pan alley forms.

Siouxsie & The Banshees emerged with icy, mechanistic, detached (but still sexy) pop that was just a bit ahead of its time in the punk days, but would be very much at home on today's video synthpop androgyny for the masses. Poly Styrene & X-Ray Spex effectively satirized both the consumer society and the consumed-withrage punks briefly before disappearing (no U.S. record deal). Sham 69 and the Vibrators boasted various degrees of manic punk energy (& suggested the "hardcore" buzzsaw stuff to emerge a few years later), while the Buzzcocks, the Boomtown Rats, and Billy Idol's Generation X all set their sights on various levels of popchart ("power pop" was taking over from pure punk by 1979) breakthrough.

So who did I leave out? Except for Costello and Dury, I've neglected the roster of artists who originated on England's spunky Stiff label in the dawn of '70s punk. Chief among the Stiff alumni would be Nick Lowe, who's made his own cheekily cheerful pop over the years, but is perhaps more important as the producer of Elvis Costello's classic sides. Other Stiff discoveries included Wreckless Eric (a kind of Brit Paul Simon, sans delusions of grandeur), Lene Lovich (a Serbian-EnglishAmerican oddball who has yet to reach her true heights of pop glory), and Rachel Sweet (all-American teen poontanger packaged up with actual Limeys on the Stiff tours).

And Nick Lowe's pal Dave Edmunds, ditto except for the Stiff connection. And then there XTC and Interview and Magazine, that trio of late-'70s Virgin virginals whose more refined slices of nonconformity certainly pointed toward the English synthpoppers about to inundate us in the '80s. Add Ultravox there; their '77 debut presaged MTV & its ranks of serioushaired Brit bands years before the computer realized the potency of that combo. And I can't forget the Das Kapitalthumping Gang Of Four, nor the Specials/Selecter/Madness ska revival at the turn of the decade, nor the wonderful Rezillos/Revillos, who understood FUN better than yer average whoopee cushion...

(But I absolutely refuse to mention the two late-'70s British acts who've been the most successful in the U.S. thus far—-Dire Straits and the Police—since both have done so by catering to the ancient hippies' most ancient fixations, the former with their sicko guitar picking, and the latter with their eternal my-neuroses-are-blander-thanyour-neuroses oneuppance. Go listen to the Members if you wanna know how to put rock and reggae together, Stingl And Elvis Costello can advise you about adjusting to a Catholic upbringing in adult life!)

SO IF THEY'RE SO SMART WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Well, as the sad tales above illustrate, the common experience of almost all the stars of the '77 British Invasion is that they did their best work long before America was fully aware of 'em. That work is mostly still out there in the stores, and is highly recommended to anyone who's already found Duran Duran just too too profoundly innocuous. I've clued ya where the real Limey pyrotechnics can be found, so don't come 'round here with your mewlings when Spandau Ballet leave you flat. How many minutes until the next British Invasion begins?!?