BEING OF GENERAL PUBLIC INTEREST

BEING OF GENERAL PUBLIC INTEREST

FEATURES

Richard Grabel

As the mainstays of the Beat (known in America as the English Beat, to distinguish them from a California power-pop band that had first dibs on the name the Beat), Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger always seemed on the verge of pop star success. Their gigs were always jammed with very enthused crowds, a lot of people knew who they were, but still they were always a bit short of that real breakthrough.

Now, as the mainstays of General Public, Wakeling and Roger are set for another chance, and the odds seem a bit better. Mainly thanks to the heavy radio exposure of “Tenderness,” a bouncy, romantic single that manages to be both pretty and toughminded, General Public are on their way down the road to stardom—playing the bigger places, selling plenty of records. They are one of the few pairs of potential pop stars I know of whom I’d trust to not let it go to their heads.

Pop stars as a rule tend to be a selfabsorbed lot, unconcerned with much besides their own brilliance and success. The leaders of General Public are an exception.

Ranking Roger is quiet in the extreme. It’s very hard to get much comment out of him, and harder still to form definitive impressions. But Dave Wakeling has never failed to impress me with his sincerity and intelligence, his sharp awareness of what goes on around him and of the various machinations of the business he’s in.

He’s also not a man to pull his verbal punches.

“If you look at the American music world as a whole,” Wakeling tells me, “you’ll have to accuse it from the mountaintop. You’ll have to say to it, don’t you rGGlizG thG fun you’rG missing?

“When we were here last summer, a DJ from Los Angeles, quite famous, told me, ‘To be honest I’m fairly fed up with the fact that every time they tell me there’s an innovative new band coming in and I have to interview them, they have English accents.’ And the reason for that? To me, it’s the racism of the American music world that’s the main reason. Your white musicians and your black musicians don’t gain influence from each other.'So your rock syndrome has nowhere to go and you’re stuck in a stadium for five years doing the same thing.

“It’s good for the English, because it lets us appear to be the best at it. And it’s only because you insist on fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

“Jomo Kenyatta once said—well he was wooing France at the time, but he said that the future of mankind was in the vitality of the Africans and the organization of Europe, that was the great complement of mankind. That’s what you need, power and energy and surge, and also classification and indexation, the scientific approach.

“There’s nothing to the idea that there’s a new type of music, this whole ‘new music’ thing. It’s just a different approach. But it looks like it’s going to be 1975 again real soon if we don’t watch our step.”

The Beat exemplified the process of applying new approaches. Originally part of Britain’s “2-Tone” movement, they showcased white kids embracing black rhythms, especially reggae, and black musicians embracing the hard drive of rock. They took what were, for pop music, relatively clear and unapologetic political stands. But really, I suggest to Wakeling, black-white cross cultural influence has been the key to rock ’n’ roll since Little Richard started screaming and Southern whites like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley started letting the influence of R&B “race” records into their country music.

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“Yeah,” Wakeling agrees, “and the lead for doing that came from America. Americans were the first to do it, and now they are the only people who won’t let themselves do it anymore.”

You hear a lot of talk from the more idealistic people on the business side of the music business about the need to educate the audience versus the need to give them what they want.

“Well, that’s the kick, isn’t it? And usually the approach is to reinforce people’s prejudices, don’t upset the appje cart. It’s like seeing music as a substitute for television.”

Which it now, thanks to MTV, truly is.

“It is very packaged, isn’t it? The trouble is, they’ll end up selling less records again, like in the mid-’70s. Even from a business point of view, the industry should insist that artists throw up ideas that they can exploit. But they don’t look at it that way.”

If Dave Wakeling is the mind of General Public, Ranking Roger is its heart. In the Beat, his role was mainly to “toast”—Jamaican slang for the rhythmic raps that Roger would interject into the middle of the Beat’s songs. But those toasts often contained the songs’ most important emotional messages. Beyond that, Roger was the one whose looseness and humor, great dancing and general presence made the Beat happen on stage.

Last year Dave and Roger decided that the Beat was past its prime. At first they’d gone off by themselves, worked with each other and a couple of synthesizers. But when they decided to bring in some other musicians, they realized that their hometown of Birmingham was loaded with great ones who were out of work. “We didn’t realize that some really good ones would be dead keen to work with us,” Dave says. Horace of the late Specials came aboard along with two ex-members of Dexy’s Midnight Runners and a couple of other people. General Public started to take shape.

General Public are not the Beat Part II. Like the Beat, their songs have punch, the rhythms are strong and sure, they get people dancing. Especially in a live setting, the band works. But the atmosphere is different. It’s not that the Beat were ever didactic or preachy, but they could have a bit of heaviness about them at times. General Public seem to be a lighter thing. Also, the fact that Roger takes more of a leading role all the way through the songs makes the band a bit more fun to hear and to watch.

But Dave and Roger have not dropped the content from their songs. As with the Beat, there is a striving for balance, sometimes a tugof-war, between the desire to say something and the desire to write a nice pop love song.

Dave: “The sloshy bits are usually kept to the chorus.The verses tend to get pithier. The chorus of ‘Tenderness’ is really schmaltzy, it’s meant to be really sentimental, but the words to the verses have nothing to do with that at all, they’re really quite hard-edged. But we both sing them in a nice soft voice, a sweet voice, until the end where it builds up a bit.

“When we wrote the songs, it was usually a long way into the song before we realized which way it was going to tip, whether it was Jove, and politics, or whether it was politics, and love. It’s not quite as simple as that, but I don’t see any of the songs as pure this or that. There is one song on the album that is political and nothing else, but that was a conscious decision to write a song on a particular topic.”

Dave mulls it over a bit, and decides, “They are quite serious, the songs, aren’t they? Quite serious. But we try not to do it in a depressing way. I don’t think that to be serious about things means that you can’t enjoy yourself.”

What about the attitude that runs along the lines of, pop groups should stick to singing about things they know something about?

“I think you should write about anything and everything that influences your life. If not, it just reduces pop music to light entertainment. And in one way it is light entertainment. You don’t have to listen to the words, you can just whistle along to it. But it can work on a couple of levels. And it can also stir people up a bit.”

So General Public remain, as were the Beat, committed to the idea of pop as a means of communicating meaningful ideas.

“You’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to have the freedom to make up poems about the way you feel about things—only you should try to present them in such a way that people are going to find them interesting and not just bombast. Sometimes I write something and then I think, well that’s gone a bit preachy there.”

Dave: “It’s very easy to put your political views across as if they were in the third person. If we were to blame for that in the past, it was just our inexperience, the result of not being articulate. As we write more we get more confident. At first, you’re a bit frightened to make it too personal. So you look at the issue as if you were standing off to the side, reporting it. And then as you feel more confident of being able to say what you mean, in a particular number of words, that rhyme, in the key of E or whatever, then you feel more able to express what you really think, and what you really feel.”

All The Rage, their first album, shows General Public to be a band with a lot of strengths, still very much in its formative stages. I like and respect Dave Wakeling very much, and will always look forward to discovering what his band will do. So let’s wrap this up with the one question I managed to address to Ranking Roger: what did he think people will think the idea of the group General Public is? How will the group be seen?

“I don’t know. That’s a hard one. I think they’ll know us as a dance band first, definitely. But if you asked me what General Public is out to gain, I couldn’t really tell you. Even I don’t know. I mean, that question remains for the future.”