The definitive history of the post-punk explosion: ThePost.ie


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The definitive history of the post-punk explosion
Sunday, May 01, 2005 - Reveiwed by Jonathan O'Brien
Rip It Up And Start Again, by Simon Reynolds, Faber & Faber, €24.45.

This rich history of the staggeringly innovative music that flourished in the years after punk rock could hardly appear at a more opportune time. In a graphic demonstration of pop again coming full circle, the very bands it celebrates - PiL, Gang of Four, Magazine, Joy Division, The Beat, a hundred others - are having their creative legacies remade, remodelled and reinterpreted by successful modern outfits like Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, the Futureheads and Interpol.

There are few music journalists as good or as sharp as Reynolds. This is especially true in these particularly arid times for the art form, but it was equally the case over a decade ago, when he shone brightest among the incredible crop of talent then working at Melody Maker. Stubbs, Bennun, Parkes, Mueller, Price - all were superb writers, yet the quality of Reynolds' pieces made them resemble work experience kids. He's frequently compared to Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, but is realistically a far better writer than either. His last book, Energy Flash, has become the set text on dance music and club culture; Rip It Up and Start Again will fulfil the same role for post-punk.

Reynolds sees the punk movement itself - Pistols, Clash,1977 and all that - not as a glorious new dawn for music, but as the final death-rattle of rock 'n' roll itself. It was only then, he argues, that things began to get interesting. “Those seven post-punk years [1978-1984] saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature,” he writes in the introduction.

“The entire period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music.”

It played itself out in a thousand different ways: the atonal racket of The Fall and The Pop Group; the angular art-rockisms of Gang of Four, the Mekons and Magazine; the sinister rhythms of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle; the vivid ska of the sombre Specials and their cheerful mirror-images Madness; the gleaming New Pop of ABC, the Human League and the Associates; the bleak yearnings of Joy Division; the ambiguities of New Order.

Nobody can get inside the skin of a piece of music like Reynolds, describing it in the sort of ultra-vivid, impressionistic language that gets the song itself instantly echoing through your mind. Describing PiL's bass-heavy fusion of dub reggae and industrial noise, he writes, “[Jah] Wobble's basslines became the human heartbeat in PiL's music, the rollercoaster carriage that simultaneously cocooned you and transported you through the terror ride. And because Wobble's bass carried the melody, Keith Levene's guitar was given licence to freak out.”

ABC's huge 1982 hit Poison Arrow, meanwhile, was “the orchestral disco splendour of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive fused with the word-twisting lyrical depths of an Elvis Costello . . . a lavish tempest of melodramatic grand-piano chords, thunderous drums, and synth-parts simulating string-sweeps and horn fanfares'‘. There's stuff as good as this on virtually every page.

The book teems with fascinatingly contrary and cussed individuals, many of them with large chips on their shoulders, all of them possessed of an overriding impulse to create art that would stand in a different league from formulaic three-chord stodge or chart-friendly pap.

There's Green, the polysyllabic frontman of Scritti Politti, a band who mutated from a squat-dwelling experimental noise-rock collective into a hugely successful (and fantastic) 1980s pop-funk band. Reynolds' interview with Green is a feast of deconstructed subtexts, ultra-meta references and obscurer-than-thou cultural theorising.

There's Howard Devoto, the ex-Buzzcocks frontman whose new band, Magazine, had their promising career “killed stone dead'‘ when he stood completely still for the duration of their first Top of the Pops performance; there's Ian Curtis, the doomed singer of Joy Division who nursed consuming obsessions with mental illness and fascism; and there's Genesis P Orridge, Throbbing Gristle's scat-fixated leader, who would routinely pour buckets of blood over his own head during the band's chaotic gigs.

Yet Reynolds' book never falls into the trap of merely fetishising these people and caricaturing their foibles.

Rather than dominate the narrative, they serve to put a human face on the incredible music that is under discussion here.

Saturated with delicious detail and coruscatingly written, Rip It Up and Start Again is a brilliant analysis of the very last time in pop music when everything really was up for grabs.