ALWAYS SOMETHING THERE TO REMIND ME

ALWAYS SOMETHING THERE TO REMIND ME

LETTER FROM THE BRITAIN

Cynthia Rose

It’s easy to forget that the way media silently, relentlessly re-write actual history is a central fact of life today. Whether you work within or without the worlds of TV, radio and print, their continuous colorful technobabble insidiously suckers you in further than you can realize. At least until you get a slap directly in the memorybank; something which makes your very reflexes scream ERROR.

Something like coming home to the States for Christmas and seeing Billy Idol on the cover of Rolling Stone. According to his profile inside, Idol (“rock star...video star and soon-to-be movie star’’) is the living -metaphor for Anglo post-punk punk. He growls, spouts a “basic” vocabulary, and—here’s the slightly startling assertion— left the U.K. after his former band accrued “seven hit singles” because punk “got played on the radio.” Billy left, we’re told here, because a)he “got bored”; b)the “old free exciting times” came to an end; and c)it “seemed like a great idea” to hook up with Kissmaker Bill Aucoin’s management and “start all over again” in the U.S.

Rolling Stone focuses more, ot course, on the really important issues. What the writer wore to meet Billy. What Aucpin’s office had suggested thp writer wear.

What Billy wora. And of course—

Billy’s (baswljuminations on love, monevand dating.

Goodhearted as he may or may not be, Billy Broad a.k.a. Idol sounds as thick as rock stars come. But, that’s not the reason his a,b,cj4 are slightly abridged.

The real truth is that Chelsea and Generation X—his former bands—never got taken seriously. During the heyday of punk, Billy stood out like a platinum blond thumb...always the bridesmaid, never the bride. There was never

a thing to prefigure any White Wedding on this side of the Grosserwasser.

Sure he made a few singles that hit, but so did the Desperate Bicycles. And they were regulars down London’s historic Roxy—the Anglo CBGB’s. That was a place where Billy, by contrast, never felt really comfortable.

Nope. In Britain, Billy Idol is a joke. Always has been, always—as far as I can see at this writing—will be. Nothing would mean more to him, of course, than to revenge his second best-at-best past by coming home as a conquering hero. But he’s made several attempts and every one has failed.

Why? Why did last winter’s surge of Goth-glam and Batcave fashion turn up its nose at Billy’s swag-bag of crucifixes and studs? Partly out of scorn for riches

gained abroad. But mostly because Idol (usually dismissed out of hand as “that prat”) is seen as the perfect example of civilian mercenary. He’s the man who merchandized his Britishness abroad— and, to make things worse, he reduced punk to a cartoon to do it.

No Briton views Billy as a latter-day torchbearer of punk (that would be the Anti-Nowhere League and their like). Sure he was around, but so was everybody; punk, for all its subsequent failures, was a genuinely populist phenomenon here. That Idol went on to. video rebellion in the land of MTV and honey changes nothing at home. And the fact that “the Clash were doing their new song and wearing their new stuff?” whin Gen X were “doing their new song and wearing their new stuff” missed the real point. One needs to add that the Adverts, the Slits and XRay Spex were also ’“doing their new song and wearing their new stuff.”

Because, in England!it was how punk failed which mattered; a certain sort of failure led U.K. pop to where it sits this week. A particular loss of nerve gave us Orange Juice then the Smiths; the Style Council and the Redskind And within Britain that slice of history which is busy being erased determined far more than the “New Wave^of American recognition and bucks brought on by the Pretenders, Clash. Durans, Wham! and George-Co. - Those marketplace accomplishments are destined to remain more-or-less irrelevant to the daily lives of average punters here. The neon dollar signs looming across the Atlantic do of course goose the U.K. industry into slavish submission to America’s idea of what it means to be British. We’re now famed for our “packaging” abilities; we’re the new Taiwan when it comes to shooting video. And our "Celtic heritage” is considered reliable as a supplier of Sweeping Scenery Sounds for U.S. stadiums (cf. Simple Minds, U2, Big Country).

But: very little of what we successfully export communicates any of the British music-lover’s true moment, his and her true problems and real “post-punk” musical history. The Fall, Cocteau Twins, Test Tube Babies, New Order—these are not clogging up cable channels in the States. Billy Bragg’s hardly likely to make the cover of Rolling Stone. General Public, the Special AKA, Linton Johnson and Dennis Bovell’s Dub Band, the Pogues, Roddy Frame, and The Men They Couldn’t Hang tend to lose out. What matters is what sells. And that’s the Eurythmics’ now-swollen selfobsessions; the fact that Sade ("packaged properly”) just might give Madonna a run for the money; the reunion of yet more Old Fogies (Page and Paul Rodgers) to collect American monies for the aptly-named Firm.

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In just the same way stardom removes the successful from the average Joe, American success immediately isolates British acts from the realities and dreams of their countrymen. And the isolation is extreme, because the poverty of experience in everyday life here has increased exponentially. Believe me, one trip to an American Safeway comes as a massive culture shock to anyone residing for long in the U.K. on a British wage. This is one of the reasons the Band-Aid single received less street approbation than it might have. Worthy, yes, but the most common verdict in the aisles of the record store? “I heard they didn’t need drums on the tape; they just used the sound of everyone patting each other on the back.”

Nor is America equipped to understand the perverse and masochistic way a troubled U.K. is actually seeking rebellion in tradition. Boys—to a background of pop increasingly resonant of drunken soccer chants—are sinking further and further into drink...farther and farther from any mass activism outside the football terraces. And, as the pub becomes more and more folks’ only affordable outing, “pub rock” has resurfaced in a number of ways.

There's the shambolic parody played out in pub rec-rooms by Turkey Bones And His Wild Dogs, or bands like Serious Drinking. There’s the beer ’n’ beat neat of the Milkshakes or The Men They Couldn’t Hang. There are outfits like the Screaming Blue Messiahs, who everyone desperately wants to succeed. There are crusty re-issues of Nick Lowe and pop-press deification for figures like the Saints’ Chris Bailey (“one of rock’s last and greatest poets of romantic drinking”). Even a Billy Idol-league no-hoper band like the Hollywood Killers gets away with a name-change (to the Company of Wolves) and finds another shot along the pub circuit.

Company of Wolves is named for a chocolate-box of an indie film made here with much hoopla late last year. One of ’84’s bigger disappointments, it boasted of treating ‘female sexuality’ in a fairy-tale format. (The plot of this debut from Palace Pictures re-told Little Red Riding Hood in a supposedly progressive mold. In fact this meant flimsy white nighties, bleeding hoses, big eyes and lots of lipgloss—not to mention a leading lady whose voice was overdubbed into something more suitable for export than her own working-class tones).

Unfortunately, the U.K.’s female population does seem to be allowing their dreams of accomplishments to be circumscribed by women’s magazine propaganda. With fourand-a-half million unemployed, many feel so disheartened that having a family seems to be their only creative outlet. And babies, babies, babies is the media’s latest recipe for shortterm meaning in lives where control has been lost.

No sooner did the obliging Diana deliver her son than the scandal of “Baby Cotton” conveniently arose. Baby Cotton was intended all along by her natural Mum for sale to a childless couple...and ail week the tabloids have trumpeted her case. While public consciousness is urged to fixate on the irresponsible young women selling fictive progeny to the infertile, several girls have come forward to contend that they chose “surrogate motherhood” as a financial preference to prostitution. Jobs for women are just not in abundance. And pop culture hardly helps; this week gave us a TV special wherein “personalities” Paula Yates and Jools Holland of The Tube compared diaper dilemmas with recent “celebrity” parents Suggs and Suzi Quatro. This is roughly comparable to MTV springing a Hoovering special on its prime-time hordes.

Even the music press sat up and noticed Kirsty MacColl (daughter of folkie Ewan and onetime Stiff jailbait, she’s now married to producer Steve Lillywhite) once she was expecting. Previously, of course, Kirsty was disdained for the dismal ditty “There’s A Boy Works Down The Chip Shop Thinks He’s Elvis.” But no less than Billy Bragg recently cut a gem with her self-penned “New England”...one in a line of songwriting specials, several tailored successfully to actress-singer Tracey Ullman’s needs.

Maybe the new MacColl will be an Ms...and the duo can follow the Judds. But a pervasive emphasis on motherhood—given the increasingly desperate state of the English economy since 1979—could easily rob our music’s real vital centers of female participants. I like happy families as much as the next female, but “happy” is the key word. And obsession with parenthood as a solution rather than a responsibility is just as ominous as the current media-enhanced proposition that romance can somehow replace actual finance.

Besides, if one thinks back to the real death of punk, a hefty part of the roll-call (Ari of the Slits, Poly Styrene, the onetime Bette Bright) never quite made it back from hearth ’n’ nursery. The beginning of economic decline coincided with the attempts to start and raise families. And that old punk promise—“NO FUTURE”—remains the sort of birthday surprise no one deserves to get. ^