White Music

4,102 words

Like a dog to its vomit, a junkie to his stash, or an inveterate gambler to table or race-track, I went back. I was determined to write no more about obscure English rock bands, believing that I had covered the territory to my satisfaction and, one hopes, that of the reader. Having covered Killing Joke, Joy Division, Thin Lizzy (not strictly English, granted), Queen (not exactly obscure), Sex Pistols (ditto), The Fall, The Pogues (definitely not English), Morrissey, The Auteurs, Ultravox!, Ian Dury, Wild Billy Childish, and The Slits, I thought it a job done.

Put together, those artists’ work makes for a good, eclectic, very English record collection (as we used to call it). There was no need for an encore. I even threw in an American band, Pavement, to show my inclusivity and that I am not “racist against” (as the Left put it) American music. How could I forget the nation that gave me The Ramones, Television, Iggy Pop, Afghan Whigs, Idaho, Blondie, Come, and so on and so forth? I even told the editors here. I said, I think I have covered all the white English rock bands I want to write about, can write about. How wrong I was, and for a simple reason. It took a while for the penny to drop, but the bands I have generally written about are not only mostly obscure and mostly English, they are also (Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott gets a pass) white. And they played white music, although that is a genre which dare not speak its name. White Music is the title of a 1978 album by another obscure English band, XTC, whose title would not be approved by any British record company today. But what do we mean – what are we allowed to mean – by “white music”?

The phrase “black music” just seems to be one of those concepts whose worship is mandated by the state. Imagine a vox pop whose question was, “Do you like black music?”. Imagine someone saying “no” on camera. Never happen. And white music? “So, you mean, like Beethoven?” Classical music is one of many cultural phenomena deemed racist by the crazy gang who curate culture. But there is a white music, a music without black origin. Let me explain.

Music of Black Origin (MOBO) is a British organization posing as cultural mavericks but in fact fully in line with long-term, deep-state, British government policy, which is to boost black culture to the detriment of that of the indigenous population. It’s been around for some 30 years in the UK, and features annually yet another awards ceremony, because black people in show business like nothing more than an endless round of self-congratulation. The equivalent of best-movie Oscar is the “Award for Excellence in Music of Black Origin”. To listen to today’s pop music, a 15-year-old could be forgiven for thinking that all music is music of black origin. But if all the music we hear is of black origin, and if the black man invented it, then what the hell they all do wiv it, bro? How comes it took the white man to make it marketable? Why did it need Colonel Tom Parker to sell blues to whites with his boy Elvis? For the same reason that a black tribe once invented the wheel, but only used it for their children’s toys: it never occurred to them to make wheels bigger, attach them to a board, and carry people and things around. So, much as I love Delta blues, what the white man did with them is a cursory tale. And what the white man did with the blues in terms of rock is, quite literally, they played music of black origin. Only they knew what to do with it.

I love the music of the traditional big four English rock bands, at least by my reckoning and probably uncontroversial to anyone familiar with British rock. In no particular order, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The Who can reasonably be called the “big four”, at least for those of my generation (to quote possibly The Who’s most famous song), and they have something in common. I was nine when Yoko broke up The Beatles, so I never saw them (although my mother did), but I saw the other three in their pomp between 1975 and 1976. I have written about this before, so I won’t harp on about it, but the big four all began their musical careers under the direct influence of black music, as they themselves stated.

This is not the place for some sort of appraisal of black music and its supposed influence on white rock. For a start, the phrase “black music” is entirely spurious. Black music is essentially the blues, which anyone can play because it revolves around a simple, three-chord progression. There is more to it than that, as I discovered when I played bass for a blues band for as couple of years. The guitarist is from Austin, Texas, and claims to have met Stevie Ray Vaughan and Buddy Guy, but he is a notorious teller of tales, albeit a great guitarist. But you will find the blues’ fingerprints all over the bands noted. There is a small strain of English rock, however, which contains barely a trace of the blues, and the bands play what I would call “white music”. One such band is Magazine.

Magazine were founded by Howard Devoto (real name, Howard Andrew Trafford) in punk’s year zero, 1977. Devoto had started his musical career with now-legendary punk band Buzzcocks, and recorded a ground-breaking single with the band. The 4-track EP Spiral Scratch was recorded partly with money loaned by the guitarist’s father, the covers assembled in bedrooms, and it is often seen as the first authentic punk single. That was the spirit of punk; do it yourself. The original is worth a fortune now, in vinyl terms.

Devoto left Buzzcocks, viewing punk as transitory and seeking new musical pastures. He teamed up with guitarist John McGeogh, an innovative though troubled guitarist who went on to play for Siouxsie and the Banshees and John Lydon’s PiL, and began writing songs. They found drummer Martin Jackson, keyboard-player Dave Formula, and even a half-caste bass player, Barry Adamson, to weaken my “white music” argument.

The band made five studio albums (not four, as I believed until recently) and a live album. Real Life came out in April of 1978 (even months are important when dating British music of this very short and volatile era) to great critical acclaim, though peaking modestly at 29 in the UK charts. A year later saw Secondhand Daylight, and the band released two more studio albums, The Correct Use of Soap in 1980, and Magic, Murder, and the Weather in 1981, before breaking up. Other than a live album, Play, Magazine were finished. Or so I thought.

Magazine were one of the bands from those heady years between 1977 and 1980, like The Fall, that I just stopped listening to, as I went to university and philosophy increasingly took my attention. But when deciding to write this piece, I discovered that Magazine reformed in 2009 and released a fifth album, No Thyself, in 2011. I haven’t been so excited about a new album since I was a kid, and it is nearly a decade and a half old. I’ve listened to it once, and it is sensational on the first outing – shades of Eno and Captain Beefheart – although I don’t know it well enough to include any of its tracks in my top ten. And, without further ado, here is that top ten from a band who made post-punk come to life.

1-Shot By Both Sides

I had to get it in somewhere, and any actual Magazine fans reading this would doubtless hunt me down and throttle me with one of John McGeogh’s guitar-strings if I failed to include it. There are two versions, single and album (all songs listed here are freely available on YouTube), and I prefer the former. The guitar and bass are more raw, it is somehow more clipped, and surely faster by a whisker. As soon as it opens, this song shows where British punk was supposed to go. It was never meant to be Sid Vicious and Mohican haircuts (or Mohawks, as the Americans call them), or just a kind of thrash metal with English accents, it was destined for exploration, the testing of limits and boundaries. The band snarls its way through a ragged chord sequence and an ascending guitar scale which caused friction between Devoto and his old band-mate, Pete Shelley, as the latter claimed he had written the sequence for a Buzzcocks song called Lipstick. Devoto’s curious diction (we’ll return to that) makes it difficult to understand what exactly, as the English might say, the geezer’s on about. I challenge you to listen to the first verse of Shot by Both Sides for the first time and understand the lyrics:

This and that they must be the same.
What is legal is just what’s real.
What I’m given to understand
Is exactly what I steal.
I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd,
I didn’t lose myself in the crowd.

The paranoia in Shot by Both Sides actually runs through Devoto’s work like the name of a seaside town through a stick of rock candy. “Shot by both sides”, he sings here. “They must have come to a secret understanding”. Fear and paranoia are always present in Devoto’s lyrical landscape. Which brings us neatly to our next song.

2-Because You’re Frightened

This opens the third album, The Correct Use of Soap, and is another shining example of the fruitfulness of marrying the pace of punk rock with skilled musicianship, and all played by a band learning how to use musical chiaroscuro, light and shade. It’s a troubled love song played at punk-rock speed:

I love you because you’re frightened and I’m falling love with you.
Because I’m getting frightened of the things you somehow make me do.

Somewhat elevating the relationship, Devoto even sets the scene for a temptation akin to that of Christ:

They took you to the top of the mountain
And showed you the valley.
You bought it.
You couldn’t wait, could you?

It’s like a lot of Magazine’s songs, menacing while playful, and with a fairly chunky riff in the chorus. Magazine were quite heavy in their own art-rock way. You could almost head-bang to some of it, if that is your preference. But Magazine were at their best in more twilit territory.

 3-Feed the Enemy

After their debut LP, Real Life, took over my life for a glorious teenage summer, I approached Magazine’s second album, Secondhand Daylight, with the trepidation of a true fan. What if it was mostly crap, like No More Heroes by The Stranglers? That is an album obviously stocked with songs that didn’t make Rattus Norvegicus, their debut, and these things mattered then. Would Magazine’s second outing be the same, just all the outtakes from the first album? It would not, and largely because the opening track is Feed the Enemy.

A pulsing, funereal keyboard is joined by John McGeogh’s sax for some strange imperial march before fading out into submarine sonar bleeps. First time I heard it – willing myself to like it – I thought; what next? What is next is a lazy thudding beat, a bass-line Joy Division’s Peter Hook would have loved to have written, and John McGeogh’s now-signature James Bond guitar licks. Devoto’s opening words in his songs often have a knack of setting the scene in existential crisis:

It’s always raining over the border.
There’s been a plane-crash out there.
In the wheatfields they’re picking up the pieces.
We could go and look and stare.

And perhaps Devoto has a warning hidden away in the lyric, one we might do well to heed today:

Whate’er we do it seems things are arranged.
We always have to feed the enemy.

 4-Song From Under the Floorboards

Devoto told the music press that this song was written after he read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and his story stands up from the opening line:

I am angry, I am sick, and I’m as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.

Perhaps Pete Shelley wanted to match Devoto in the reading stakes, as the Buzzcocks single Everybody’s Happy Nowadays was based on Shelley reading Huxley’s Brave New World. “Punk rocker reads book!”, ran the New Musical Express headline in glorious Railroad 50-point, and with a sneery and misplaced sarcasm. Literature was new then to the music fan, but many of the post-punk influencers were well read and steeped in cinema. As the band settle into a languid outro verse, Devoto croons one of his best verses:

I used to make phantoms I could later chase.
Images of all that could be desired.
Then I got tired of counting all these blessings.
Then I just got tired.

 5-Parade

A good last track is essential to any album of merit, I feel, and I refer the reader to my favorite four albums of all time (in no particular order) for validation. Patti Smith’s Elegy, last song on her debut, Horses, is haunting and quite beautiful. The final song on The Who’s concept album and magnum opus Quadrophenia (no, it’s not the over-rated Tommy) is majestic, and I was grateful to the band for choosing Love, Reign O’er Me at Live Aid. Revolution Rock, last track on The Clash’s London Calling, is one of those rare songs that makes me want to dance like a black person – sorry about that – and Joy Division’s I Remember Nothing puts the seal on one of the most sinister albums in English rock history. Very different songs, similar sense of signing off an album and, perhaps, a chapter in the histories of the respective bands. Magazine’s closer to their second album, Parade, is on a par.

It fades in with a piano signature which is almost 1930s Berlin nightclub before morphing into familiar Magazine territory, off-kilter chords, jagged synthesizer runs, and a calmer Devoto setting his usual sinister scene:

It’s so hot in here.
What are they trying to hatch?
We must not be frail.
We must watch.

Devoto was something like an expressionist poet with a sideline in psychological voyeurism. He’s always trying to get into other people’s heads as well as his own.

 6-The Light Pours Out of Me

This opens with a football crowd drumbeat any rioting bunch of thugs could chant along with before being joined by Adamson’s bass pulse, which only seems to turn the screw. Then McGeogh’s single-note fuzz guitar line cuts in with shades of Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll. This is uneasy listening, despite Dave Formula’’s keyboards suddenly mellowing the musical landscape before Devoto’s existential muttering:

Time flies. Time crawls. Like an insect up and down the wall.

The Christ-like refrain, “The light pours out of me”, sees Devoto as a Kafkaesque martyr to time.

 7-Cut-Out Shapes

From the second album, and a clue that Magazine had moved further into the darkness, both lyrically and musically. For me, this piece of psychopathic punk-funk is where Magazine came into their own. The band often open songs with one instrument following another, rising to an ensemble. Roxy Music did the same thing. But Cut-Out Shapes comes straight in like a low harpsichord shuffle in a dark and haunted house, and played by a demonic funk band. Devoto sets the scene as though it were a David Lynch set:

I enter the room, confident enough,
For tonight I walk a straight and narrow way…
We’ve got them dancing to all our confessions.
They don’t know how we rehearse our dreams.

Devoto also chalks up anther of his dysfunctional love stories, and notes his idea of a first date:

We met in a psychiatric unit.

8-The Honeymoon Killers

From the fourth album, this is very Eno-esque in its opening before suddenly becoming a jangling cross between Kurt Weill and a 1960s psychological thriller. Film music gone to waste, of which more later. I must search Devoto online and see if he has produced movie scores. If anyone knows, much appreciated. I can’t believe he hasn’t. We have long lived in a cinematic time in which it is important to get the hip song into your movie and the attendant soundtrack. But I wish more bands had got involved in actual soundtracks, rather than the compilation albums that tend to accompany movies, or at least did.

The lyric is short, and so typical of Devoto’s strange take on the world it is worth quoting in full:

All police leave has been cancelled.
We always imagine we’re being followed.
I saw an advert for ice-cream.
Seems like it was eaten in the Garden of Eden.
I bought you one, you licked it slowly,
And I got that certain feeling of freedom.
Then we listened closely to some Mantovani
And waited for the cops to come.

I can’t say exactly why it is that I enjoy Howard Devoto’s lyrics so much, I just do.

 9-Motorcade

I can’t find any evidence that film-makers have used the music of Magazine, and this baffles me. The opening to Motorcade could have run over the credits of everything from a John Carpenter slasher movie to some European art-house classic set in Estonia. And the only other song – at least of that era – I can think of that takes the shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas as its subject is Catholic Day on the first Adam and the Antz album (their only good album, in my view). But Devoto chooses Dealey Plaza for his next lyrical mis en scène.

The harpsichord-in-a-haunted-house motif is back, and the band glide along as Devoto ramps up the tension on the big day in Dallas:

The man with the hotdog sells lemonade.
Someone over there needs first aid.
Me and the rest of the world
Await the touch of the motorcade.

This is one of those songs with a crazed middle section where the band members all try to play faster than one another, before the song stubs its toe and returns to the original doomy madrigal. The shot heard around the world has been fired, and “the man at the centre of the motorcade has learned to tie his shoes”.

One of those songs that is a little movie in itself, but you have to supply the visuals.

10-Permafrost

From the moment this song begins, you feel uneasy, as though something is not quite right. The beat is really just slow rock and roll, accompanied by a pulsing bass and keyboards that seem too much, like an over-lit restaurant. It then settles into a bass loop in the style of Japan’s late, great bassist, Mick Karn, before Devoto makes his vocal entrance with a strangely anodyne lyric:

Thunder shook loose hail on the outhouse again.
Today I bumped into you again.
I have no idea what you want
But there was something I meant to say.

It reads like a teenager’s diary, and we don’t know who Devoto’s version of Shakespeare’s dark lady is. But we soon find out what he intends to do to her:

As the day stops dead at the place where we’re lost,
I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost.

It was actually quite shocking at the time, not because of the expletive – the air was thick with them during the punk era – but because it came out of nowhere. To me, this whole song (and Devoto plays only a minor vocal part in it) is unquestionably about a real person. This has to have been an ex-paramour of Devoto’s. Listen to the sinister blandness of the second (and only other) verse:

There’s not much that I miss.
I’m much too forgetful for that.
Sugar’s sweet some of the time.
It’s hard to keep some things in mind.

Then it’s back to the scenario out there on the permafrost. This is a genuinely strange song, and Devoto’s band repay his lyrical observations richly with their musical backdrop. McGeogh’s guitar solo is the sound of a severe nervous breakdown.

So, that’s my two bobs’ worth, as the English said before decimalization. A great band I was thrilled to rediscover. Howard Devoto was one of the more interesting characters to emerge from British punk and post-punk. Well-read and well versed in cinema, he is eclectic in his musical tastes. Asked what he was listening to in the mid-1980s, he listed Paul Simon’s Graceland, Don Henley’s Boys of Summer (“a very complete song”), and “lots of Donna Summer”. Approaching Iggy Pop after the Stooges played in Manchester, Devoto gave him a copy of Spiral Scratch. ”I’ve got all your records”, Devoto drawled. “Now you’ve got all mine”.

Clear diction – or lack of – is often a problem for the rock music fan in a manner which does not seem to affect the rap aficionado. It is surprisingly easy to hear and understand what rappers are saying. But then, it is surprisingly easy to hear and understand a pig farting on a still autumnal afternoon. I have experienced both and the latter was more amusing, more rewarding, and a good deal more laden with meaning. But I digress, which Howard Devoto does a lot in his lyrics.

Morrissey’s diction is quite good, and it is even surprisingly easy to understand what Mark E. Smith is banging on about, even though his “singing” sounds like a drunken old northern-English woman telling off her grandson. Ian Curtis was not easy to understand, and the reason Joy Division never officially published lyrics is that they liked that ambiguity, the listener not knowing what Curtis is singing. Peter Hook, both Joy Division’s bass-player and easily the most stoned man I have ever met, told me that. Devoto is similarly hard to decipher, singing as though he were Christopher Lee auditioning for the part of Hannibal Lecter, and I suspect even some of the lyrics available online are optimistic guesses.

Like the English weather, Magazine’s music is dark with intermittent intervals of brightness. Devoto says that although suicide has played a part in his thoughts, he has never gone further than “making preparations”. I’m reminded of one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil; “Suicide is a powerful thought. With the help of it I’ve gone through many a bad night.” An early interviewer asked the singer what frightened him. “Things”, he replied in his Manchester drawl, “that kill.” The same interviewer noted that he had travelled down on the train from Manchester to a gig, and on the same train as the band. The four musicians were in one carriage. Devoto travelled alone in a separate car. Perhaps genius needs to be alone.

Devoto went solo and bought out some pleasantly strange enough stuff, bouncing around Manchester with other musicians like a few Mancunian, post-punks did. Johnny Marr, Bernard Albrecht, anyone who had ever been thrown out of The Fall, they all were guns for hire for a while after the gunfight of punk subsided. Actually, Albrecht and Marr recorded a hugely under-rated album under the name Electronic, which is essential listening if you liked The Smiths and New Order. Even A Pet Shop Boy turns up on the album, a phrase only an Englishman of my generation – or a pop music nerd – would understand.

I saw Magazine twice. The first time was at my beloved Croydon Greyhound club (RIP), where I talked to Siouxsie Sioux at the bar and stood on Billy Idol’s blue suede shoes. She’s very nice, he’s very short. I had hurried back from watching The Clash in Victoria Park, and got in just as the band began (love doing that). The second gig was after the band’s reformation in 2009, when they played all their singles and B-sides at the legendary Roundhouse in Islington. Devoto onstage in ‘79 was like watching Steerpike sing vaudeville, while the latter gig – with Devoto having put on weight and gone completely bald – he jumped around like Nosferatu employed as a security guard, draped in a huge, gauche, pink bingo-master’s jacket. Both were superb, memorable gigs. This is a band I really liked, and I welcome them back into my life. Magazine’s early cover art also introduced me to the work of the great French artist and lithographer, Odilon Redon.

Magazine are exemplars of white music, which is not a reason to listen to them in and of itself, but rather a recognition that such a genre exists, and dare speak its name.