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Rock 'n' roll seems more like
The Wizard of Oz every day. You never know what's lurking behind that latest piece of festive product from Emerald City - a studio gimmick? A one-man band? A "concept"? Or (gasp!) a real person or persons? Scratch M of "Pop Muzik" fame and you get Robin Scott sitting in a Swiss studio toodling out a whole albumful of cute, bouncy pop Muzak. Meanwhile, Mi-Sex of the similarly bleepy-bloopy "Computer Games" turns out to be a real (though boring) bunch of New Zealanders who've already gigged their way across Australia with Cheap Trick. Then there's someone like Prince, who's a Smokey-sweet one-man Bee Gees on record but in person leads a loud, lurid punk-funk combo (see last week's SWN). What's a munchkin to do?
Try tracking down the Flying Lizards and Tubeway Army, the creators of two
of 1979's weirdest and most popular British singles ("Money" and" Are 'Friends' Electric?" respectively), and at the end of the yellow brick road you'll find yourself in both cases like Toto yapping at the single pair of feet under the curtain. David Cunningham, who masterminded the Flying Lizards' irreverent remakes (a disembowelment of "Summertime Blues" preceded the travesty of "Money”), is a polite, bespectacled 25-year-old with prematurely gray hair and the pretensions of an art school graduate; he can tell you his teacher David Hall is "the master of impregnable structuralism," though he can't quite tell you what impregnable structuralism is. Gary Numan, who wrote, arranged and produced two albums of sinister, synthesized, machine-obsessed songs
(Replicas, credited to Tubeway Army, and The Pleasure
Principle, released under his own name), is a soft-spoken, star-struck 22-year-old whose vacant eyes and shy, toothy smile make him look like a paranoid clone of Beaver Cleaver. Both of these guys are more proficient as studio operators than as musicians - they're manipulators. Like the real Wizard of Oz.
The Flying Lizards made their/its/his debut on the British charts early in 1979 with "Summertime Blues." "Money" followed not long after, but the two singles were actually recorded three years apart. “Summertime Blues" was conceived and produced by Cunningham in 1976 while he was still in school. He wanted to make a raucous, Tina Turner-ish version of the song, which he'd heard by Eddie Cochran and the Who (though not by Blue Cheer - in fact, he still hasn't heard that one), even though he had no idea how to make a
record. Using materials lying around his Brixton studio (a converted slaughterhouse), he put together three backing tracks: piano (rudimentary, at best), guitar (plugged into the back of a transistor radio), and percussion (mike stand, armchair, cardboard box). Then he had a friend named Deborah Evans do the vocal track; after trying to do it like Tina Turner and Joni Mitchell (?), she ended up simply reciting the words because, Cunningham says bluntly, "she can't sing.”
Delighted with the results, he sent the tape around to record companies and promptly accumulated 20 rejection slips, though he points out that this was before there was much of a singles market in Britain. "It used to be that you would either sell 300 copies or have a huge hit. After punk; you could sell 20-30,000 and not be a huge hit.” By the time labels started thinking singles, a friend of Cunningham's had been hired by Virgin Records, one of the 20 rejectors; the friend remembered "Summertime Blues" and replugged it. Virgin, emboldened by its success with the Sex Pistols and other unsavory characters, decided to take a chance, and an off-the-wall hit was born. When Virgin requested a sequel to "Summertime Blues," Cunningham gladly assembled some friends in his living room, threw a bunch of junk in the piano, and recorded "Money" with the inimitable Evans on pissed-off lead vocal.
The singles are goofy and grotesque, fun and effective - never before has the line "I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations" from "Summertime Blues" sounded like a threat with teeth. But fans of "Blues" and "Money" may find the Flying Lizards' LP disappointing; except for a helium-fed rendition, of Brecht-Weill's "Mandalay Song," the rest of the tracks are droning, patchwork compositions by Cunningham and his
cronies - they sound like a budding conceptual artist's idea of a pop record. The cover features a quote from Roland Barthes'
Musica Practica: "There are two musics ... the music one listens to, the music one plays." Certainly,
The Flying Lizards sounds like it was more fun to make than to listen to.
When I proposed this to Cunningham, he feigns indignation ("Wotever do you mean?") but he admits that he purposely let the stunningly eventless cut "Russia'"
go on too long as a tribute to dub reggae, which he loves. He also confesses that the album's most soothing cut, "Events During Flood," is simply the slowed-down master tape for "The Flood," a cut whose entire lyric consists of the list of major exchanges in the German international telephone directory. And Cunningham confirms the rumor that the album contains a much-transformed version of Anita Ward's disco hit "Ring My Bell," but he won't say which cut it is (I've spent hours looking but can't find it).
The willful amateurishness of Cunningham's work seems partly a dadaist response to the English music scene. "As far as I'm concerned, punk never lived up
to its promise, which was 'We're gonna take these shitty instruments and push them to their limits.' I tend to want to go into the studio and, if I’m recording drums, say, to make it really different -- change the EQs, get an echo - so that it's irritating, so that something about the sound upsets you."
Cunningham's fascination with "dreadful noise" and "the subordination of ability to curiosity" is also his attempt to emulate American experimental composers he admires, such as Steve Reich and LaMonte Young. The key difference is that Cunningham has no discernible talent except for self-promotion. "I mean, I can hardly play a musical instrument," he chirps. Why should anyone want to listen to a record by someone who can't playa musical instrument, I ask, just to be contentious. He replies in the same spirit. "Why should anyone listen to a record by someone who can play a musical instrument? Because you might like it!"
Gary Numan is just the opposite. Nothing is left to choice in his music; it's carefully programmed, its surfaces slick and tidy. Originally guitarist in a punk band, Numan got bored with guitars, punk, and the band. Discovering the joy of synthesizers (no muss, no fuss), he set about developing a distinct sound complete with mechanical pulse and buzzy, layered keyboards. Lyrically, he invented a sterile futuristic landscape to match the sound, inhabited by machinelike men and manlike machines.
As Numan has acknowledged in the press, his music borrows freely from synthesizer bands like Ultravox, and his pose cops equally from Bowie and Burroughs. But
Replicas and The Pleasure Principle, the two Numan albums released in America by Atco, seem strikingly original - not for the music, which doesn't even explore its narrow range all that imaginatively, but because they depict a frightening, self-contained world. Especially on
Pleasure, the better LP, the music is all electronic, but Numan's
voice has Bowie's affecting, lonely-android plaintiveness: and the lyrics are bleak yet oblique, inviting you to make up your own scenario, which is
actually a lotta fun.
The narrator of Numan's songs could be the sole surviving human whose only companions are replicas of himself in glass (mirrors), in metal (machines), in flesh (clones). “Am I a photo?" he muses in "Conversation," "I don't remember." Womanless and unfeeling, Numan's world works as a stylization of gay male subculture: "Complex" seems to describe the feeling of being a romantic queen surrounded by codified, fast-food sex: "They won't come back / You know it's always the same / They're sure to forget / Saying 'Everyone Lies'...” It's conceivable that the stark, mechanized environment Numan portrays is merely a reflection on his life as a recording artist holed up in the studio, surrounded by machines. "We are your heartbeat,"' intone the title characters of “Engineers." “We keep you alive. For
now."
When you talk to him, though, Numan turns out not to be a sage, spacey fantasist but a sweet, sheltered kid full of standard interview raps and celluloid dreams. He does tell me that
Replicas was basically about man looking at machines, while
Pleasure was about what machines are thinking. The cover of
The Pleasure Principle, he says, is a parody of the Magritte painting of the same name, only with Numan staring at a glowing pyramid which represents machines and wondering whether they will bring pleasure. "It should be a question," he says, "but the question mark looked so ugly so we left it off."
Most of the songs in the .album, though, express his feelings about (yawn) the music business. "Conversation" is about "me and the press, and me and the fans - you pick up a magazine and you're talked about like a goldfish in a bowl." "Films" registers his dissatisfaction while watching a videotape of his stage show ("I don't like the
scenery / And I don't like the set / But I like the actors / And I like the show"). And "Cars," which seems to be the most deliriously danceable pop song about paranoia ever, also reads very straightforwardly as a tune about what the British call "Motoring" - Numan's favorite pastime. "Driving is more fun in England," he gushes, "because you can go faster."
And when you see him onstage, any vision of Numan as a wizardly one-man music machine evaporates. Oh, on three or four numbers he twiddles a few knobs to produce
Star Trek noises - but his chest-high consoles look a trifle expensive to be New Year's noisemakers. The rest of the show Numan struts and slinks around in front of his modular, flickering stage set repeating the same few stagey gestures and trailing a microphone cord like a punk Judy Garland. His whole mystique is reduced to a freeze-frame pose. On the phone from Philadelphia, he'd confided the motivation for his career. "You know how when you watch old films there's always the hero who saves the day? I always wanted to be Clint Eastwood or someone like that. And when you're onstage you get a chance to be that, a hero, for an hour or so. And the more famous you get, the more often you get a chance to do it." Maybe that's the creepiest thing about Numan - when he strikes his favorite pose, you know it's what he always wanted to be. Backlit by heavenly rays, footlit by reptilian greens, waist-deep in enough smoke to satisfy even Fran Lebowitz, left arm upraised in a stern salute, he looks like Adolf Hitler and Eartha Kitt mated to produce a messianic chipmunk. And we're certainly not in Kansas anymore.
Soho Weekly News, February 27, 1980.
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