Jonh Wilde - Tin Machine - Tin Machine II - Melody Maker - August 31 1991 [ 08-Feb-26 3:12am ]
Apparently there is a new documentary on David Bowie - I think it's about the later years of his life, making a case for his continued creativity - and at one point, they present the journalist who wrote the brutal take-down above with his own words. Which he hadn't seen in decades. Startled by the disrespect to the (inter)national treasure and immortal icon, he recants it. Or at least expresses regret for the harshness.
I dunno, though... there's a certain zesty vehemence to the way the verdict is handed down, but I can't actually see anything inaccurate about the points made.
File under: "right-footed in real-time".
I get it - I've certainly winced now and then at some of my more savage reviews from back in the day...
Yet while the task of demolition might have been gone about with an unseemly exuberance, invariably the reason for the demolition stands.
I also think (having received some bad reviews over the years, nasty missives to the readers' letters page, plus the sort of bizarre aspersions and attributions of motives that pop up in the channels of online chatter) that if you put yourself in the public eye or public ear, you kind of have to take your lumps...
Here's what I wrote about Tin Machine phase in the Aftershocks section of Shock and Awe:
1989, May
The Eighties started out looking like they were going to be the Bowie Decade, both in its terms of his own full-spectrum dominance (album sales and tours, but also starring film roles like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and acclaimed Broadway roles like The Elephant Man) and his influence being legion. But by the mid-decade point, it all went very wrong: Tonight, the Live Aid "Dancing In the Street" video team-up with Jagger, the preposterously overblown Glass Spider tour, Never Let Me Down, the flop Jim Henson movie Labyrinth.... Bowie later recalled being unhappy and directionless for much of the late Eighties, while his friend Julien Temple spoke of the singer's struggle with the "grueling nature of reinvention... the huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically."
Bowie-ism itself has gone out of style, with a shift towards underground rock and anti-glamour. Bowie's antennae, sharp as ever, detect this. Although he has sometimes mocked the notion of himself as a chameleon - pointing out that the lizard changes colour to be inconspicuous, to not stand out from their surroundings: hardly Bowie's M/O or desire! - "chameleonic" fits what he does when he forms Tin Machine. Influenced by alt-rock groups like Pixies and Sonic Youth, who'd been developing the template for what would later reach the mainstream as grunge, Bowie subsumes himself for the first time within the band format. Tin Machine, at least in theory, is a democracy: on the self-titled debut's front, Bowie appears as just one bloke among four equals. The album is recorded live, with no overdubs, a raw blast of guitar, bass, drums and voice, that is intended - says guitarist Reeves Gabrels - as a two-finger gesture to all that dance crap on the radio. Tin Machine songs are "screaming at the world", adds Gabrels - and note how the interviews pointedly involve the entire band, not just the star frontman. In another first, Bowie grows a beard - a sign of the coming times, anticipating the facial hair soon to be rife among alt-rock and grunge bands.
I seem to remember one of my colleagues getting the chance to interview Bowie for the first time off the back of that first Tin Machine album. Finally a chance to meet the hero of his youth! And then, he told us bitterly, he was ushered into the record company room and found Bowie flanked by the other three members of Tin Machine. His heart sank! He had dreamed of a tête-à-tête with the most fascinating man in all of rock. Instead, there was he was, sat on one side of a conference table, Bowie deferentially letting his colleagues speak, Reeves Gabrels expatiating about guitar sounds...
On the cover, not only is it not just Bowie's face on the front - as it was with all his previous album covers - but he is the smallest and furthest back figure. The suits and ties don't look very alt-rock admittedly. But the Julien Temple megamix promo film above does show "audience members" jumping onstage and diving off again at one point, which does seem like an attempt to reposition DB with the young thing. Also struck by the fact that Tin Machine played Town and Country Club - i.e. the sort of venue the likes of Pixies and Loop would play - and much smaller than the kind of venue Bowie could command normally.
I suppose the parallel work at that time to Tin Machine / Tin Machine II - elders trying to get with the young thing - would be Achtung Baby. After the debacle (not commercially but in terms of credibility as well as quality) that was Rattle and Hum, U2 had a major rethink and an aesthetic refueling / reorientation. And apparently what they listened to was things like The Young Gods and My Bloody Valentine - i.e. the Maker canon.
In fact, here is an Eno quote about the self-induced transvaluation U2 underwent:
"Buzzwords on this record were trashy, throwaway, dark, sexy, and industrial (all good) and earnest, polite, sweet, righteous, rockist and linear (all bad). It was good if a song took you on a journey or made you think your hifi was broken, bad if it reminded you of recording studios or U2. Sly Stone, T. Rex, Scott Walker, My Bloody Valentine, KMFDM, the Young Gods, Alan Vega, Al Green, and Insekt were all in favour. And Berlin ... became a conceptual backdrop for the record. The Berlin of the Thirties—decadent, sexual and dark—resonating against the Berlin of the Nineties—reborn, chaotic and optimistic ..."
Now, who the fuck were Insekt? I have always wondered that and have never thought to find out!
Also "rockist" as a no-no? You can't get more rockist - in the sense of exulting-in-guitar than MBV or The Young Gods (albeit in their case done through sampling punk and metal riffs)... Alan Vega is pure rock'n'roll: Elvis filtered thru Iggy.. T. Rex is the eternal spirit of rock'n'roll.,,
But I get what Eno means - U2 were rejecting a certain kind of rockism prevalent in the compact-disc Eighties: that godawful Robbie Robertson album (that now I think about it he made with Daniel Lanois), the comeback of John Fogerty, Dire Straits's Brothers In Arms... with Achtung, they were jettisoning all that rootsy, bluesy, Memphis-invoking bollocks that infused Rattle.
But U2 being much more rockers (and rockist) at core than Bowie ever was, on Achtung they managed to pull it off handsomely.
I wonder if it was galling for DB to see U2 scoring hits and plaudits having done such a similar move to what he'd attempted on the two Tin Machines...
At the event in North London for Rip It Up and Start Again in 2005, I remember a voice in the audience piping up - apropos of absolutely nothing that the panel were discussing - to cry out:
"ABBA were better than the Velvet Underground!"
A poptimist, obviously - responding to an uncontrollable contrarian urge from within.
At the time I thought that - alongside its Tourettic quality and irrelevance to what we were talking about at that moment - that this was a really silly opposition to make. As if you had to choose, or to rank one above the other. Isn't Poptimism supposed to have freed itself, and all of us, from such binaries and hierarchies, rather than simply inverted them?
(Some years later I watched a doc on ABBA and concluded that they operated just like any other "artistically autonomous unit" from the mid-Sixties onwards. They were a proper band, writing their own material and producing it themselves, aspiring to superhuman levels of craft and musicianship, with lyrics that grew increasingly adult and emotionally sophisticated. Structurally, then, ABBA were "rockist" - operating very much not like a boyband or girl group (bossed around by producers, singing words written by professional others). So ABBA's true peers at that time would be Fleetwood Mac, as opposed to The Jacksons.).
Perhaps the outcry was based on a sense of historical injustice, ABBA having not been given their fair due?
Well, they are the first entry in the Spin Guide to Alternative Music, so some respect had been granted in the 1990s.
And in fact, if you go back to the music press of the time, you will see a fair amount of positive commentary on ABBA's pop genius.
And it came from musicians too: Elvis Costello famously described them as a big influence on Armed Forces (the dramatic piano cascades of "Oliver's Army", the sleek bright tightness of the sound throughout).
Okay the Richard Cook review is a little retrospective,and after the event, coming out in 1982, but hey look here's Dave McCullough raving about them in their "imperial phase" real time.
And then a few years later you have Paul Morley describing Human League as the new ABBA.
My ABfav ABBA tune
What a strange, super-sophisticated song structure! So many hook-full phases, such great playing.
Number 2 would be "S.O.S.", jostling hard - equal probably - with "Dancing Queen".
Saddened to hear of the death of Jack Barron - who wrote for Sounds and then NME among other places - after a long illness.
I didn't know Jack well but I really enjoyed the couple of encounters we had.
The first was when we were both sent as representatives of our respective music papers (Sounds then still, for him) to Warsaw to cover the first ever East-meets-West festival of alternative music in March 1987- the Carrot Festival, aka Marchewka. (You can read my report on it in this RIP post about David Thomas, who performed there).
Jack looked then almost exactly the same as in the much later photograph above, minus the eyepatch (which gives him a bit of a salty sea dog look)
Jack was already a seasoned veteran of visits to the Eastern Bloc countries and he had come prepared. His suitcase appeared to be entirely full of cassettes - advance copies of albums he'd been sent as a journo but that as released records would be extremely hard to get hold of behind the Iron Curtain. He told me that these advance tapes, once gifted, would then be copied, and that copy would be recopied, and so on.... ultimately circulating throughout Communist Europe.
I was very impressed by this act of munificence and the following year, when there was a second Carrot Festival, in Budapest (my report can be found in the same David Thomas tribute post), I came prepared myself, with a large cache of advance tapes of recent alternative releases.
However I could get no takers for them - and ended taking them all back home with me.
Hungary then was one of the most liberal and permissive of Soviet-aligned nations - I remember being struck by a billboard of a glamorous, made-up female TV presenter, whereas Warsaw had been completely devoid of advertising, apart from the odd propaganda poster, a fabulously desolate and grey place. And because of that relative freedom and the country's proximity to Austria, Hungarian hipsters could get hold of all the music they wanted. Indeed they all seemed quite blasé about the festival and the weirdo-rock visitors from the U.K, whereas the first Carrot was treated as an enormously significant event by the Polish media (Jack and I were both interviewed by TV reporters) and by all the Poles we met.
Jack had a dry, low-key manner with just a gruff hint of baleful - which he possibly deliberately developed. At one point he mentioned having studied (I think in college - doing linguistics?) how speech patterns and conversational cadence could be deployed to exert an almost hypnotic control over people. Something to do with speaking slowly and quietly and with pauses of a certain length - this compelled attention, the listener would be forced to lean in and couldn't break away.
Which was not unlike the way he spoke when telling me this...
The second time we met was when I was researching Energy Flash and I interviewed him along with his partner Helen Mead (both of them working for NME) and Barry Ashworth from Dub Pistols. These three friends were veterans of acid house from its early days.
Jack had some extraordinary tales about his adventures with MDMA. Let's just say that he plunged into the scene with great commitment and intensity and took it as far as almost anyone at that time. He seemed none the worse for wear, though - his characteristic dry wit intact.
A fine writer and one of those unusual characters who found a place in the menagerie that was the UK weekly music press.
Here's an early-ish singles review in which swipes amusingly at Paul Morley while acknowledging the greatness of Art of Noise.
And here's an interesting take on the Cocteau Twins
Early on, Jack was one of Sounds's main writers about reggae and dancehall. Jamaican music, as I noted here, received sustained and serious coverage by the paper, far more than you'd imagine given its reputation as an oracle for Oi! and NWBHM. You'll find many pieces by Jack in that post.
As I also noted in an earlier post here, his pen name is possibly an alias taken from the science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron.
Looking at the Rock Back Pages bio, I see Jack actually wrote for a while for Melody Maker, in 1998, a good while after my time there was up. This makes him one of those rare examples of the "inkie clean sweep" - someone who wrote for all three leading UK weeklies. (Another would be Vivien Goldman).
(Sorry - I don't count Record Mirror as "leading". Mind you, there are even-rarer examples of people who wrote for all four, I believe).
As a counterbalance to the recent Japan-love posts, here is Jonh Wilde both befuddled by and scornful of the veneration for David Sylvian (including his usually closely aesthetically aligned comrade Chris Roberts, whose viewpoint is incorporated into the review)
I do find bracing these Radically Other takes on bands you love - and I've never forgotten the voice like hair lacquer line.
"Musicians", loosely understood, although Malcolm had broken out as a performing artist by the time he wrote this for the NME Christmas look-back on '82 / look-forward to '83.
The Stooges: Side Two
By Jonathan Richman
Fusion Magazine, Oct. 16, 1970
It happened to The Doors. They were loved in '66 for their new approach, hated in '68 for their pretensions, and are right at this minute being courted again 'cause Morrison is so funny and after all they really can play.
Meanwhile another segment of the audience had never heard of them in '66, bought all their albums from July '67 to mid '69 and now is losing interest.
Now it's The Stooges.
Among others, I've changed my opinion because they've changed some ways, and because I've changed my mind specifically about Iggy's stage show.
In mid '69 a few local critics and I thought they were a powerful band with a tough sound who made the Ten Years After crowd puke, knew what a song was and had a sense of humor. But the main thing we were interested in, and what most viewers talked about, was Iggy.
The Stooges ' "Phenomenon" = The Actions of Iggy
A pleasant change from the style of Joe Cocker, Robert Plant, and many schmucky stage performers, Iggy looked exciting on stage, could talk intelligently off stage, seemed a powerful person and one with beautiful ideas and taste. These 'old' Stooges were beautiful because they were so honest, I love their first album. It is unlike much else, exciting, really sexy and funny. "No Fun" and "Not Right" lead a list of songs which don't wear thin after lots of listening...
Terrific Ron Asheton
The main thing I liked about the first album (at first without realizing it, and the group's artistic standout both live and recorded) was guitarist Ron Asheton. I now think that most of what is good in The Stooges' sound and image is his responsibility. The reason I like their live shows better than recordings is that you can hear Ron at ear-splitting volume.
Asheton is most exciting on stage where Marshall amplifiers with volume on full, and treble, bass middle and prescence controls on approximately half (plus Vox fuzz, Vox wah-wah, a newly added Binson echorec and a red Fender Stratocaster enable him to produce stunning guitar sound.
These all contribute to Ron's near-perfect image. That guitar, used by most of the surf groups, "Buddy Holly" and others, symbolized white rock and roll. Of course it's red, symbolically a violent color often favored by kids who like to act tough. Perhaps, back in Michigan, Ron has a red & white full dress Harley Davidson cycle; maybe a black 50's Lincoln Continental or Chrysler Imperial or a 1957 Thunderbird.
You see Marshall amps look tough. So do his wide stance, sober but child-like expression, sunglasses and the Nazi symbols he attaches to his belongings. I always wonder if he plans these things.
Their second album, to keep you up to date on their artistic slide, features songs with less staying power than those of the first. These songs have little to say other that how "loose" Iggy is and how we'd all better look out. The first was also better 'cause one heard more Ron Asheton. He plays some nice savage parts ("On the Street," Loose", "1970") and one patrician pretty one ("Dirt"). Outside of his contributions I don't see anything interesting on it.
Novelty Factor
Two things about the Stooges wear thin with repetition:
1. Many of their songs.
2. Iggy's stage performance.
The latter becomes more like watching a magician from behind. Assumed spontaneity is revealed as calculation. The show became humorous, an amusing night out, until I realized the audience segment was fooled into fear by Iggy, fooled into regarding him as a daring, fearless man, sent by God to test your ego hangups. Then it started to stink, bringing us to the next section titled
The Obvious and Forgotten Devices used by Iggy or Iggy's "Charisma" Exposed and Analyzed
Since Iggy's exposure (artistically harmful, perhaps), to the Big City's bright lights and wordy critics there has been talk of Iggy's ability "to make anyone feel uptight."
He's so powerful people in the audience just can't stand up to him, we are told.
He's so charismatic, one doesn't want to, they say.
All right, now look. Charismatic or not, any stage performer has advantages about which any 11-year old bully instinctively knows, but which many rock critics, especially female, have forgotten.
First off, the things Iggy does which have caused admiration, wonderment and anger involve things like leaping into the audience, getting fresh with women, spilling drinks on people, dancing on tables, sitting on people's laps and occasionally pushing people out of chairs. We are led to believe that the "victims" in the audience are too "uptight" to do anything. Well, why shouldn't people be nervous?
When a stage performer leaves his stage, goes into the audience and singles out one person for anything, he will usually be nervous. Watch "The Tonight Show" when Carson plays "Stump the Band." It's obviously in fun, but still with all those eyes on them most people are relieved when through with the TV camera.
Throw in sexual aspects to the above and think of how tensions would obviously increase. You see, circus clowns have used this device for 100 years. They run through the crowd with custard pie and water pail in hand and stare out customers (except, having some good taste and some sense, only briefly) letting the customer toy with the idea that maybe the clown will do him in and letting him go just a bit edgy. Why then were these clowns not called charismatic geniuses? artists? stars? Because Iggy does this kind of thing but plays to the audience's biggest collective weakness, its sexual identity.
He's out to show how loose he is and how uptight you are and I don't think it's charming. I think it's bush league and sucks. Some people wonder why Iggy hasn't been attacked. How miraculous, they say Iggy is fearless we are told.
Be serious, out there! Who wants to hit a stage performer? In spite of Iggy's tactics there are people who have senses of humor. Well, this is part of the act, good luck to him say the better adjusted. By the third time I saw them I no longer saw humor nor did I see Iggy as a performer. I saw him as a man using little judgement or taste and tensely awaited a confrontation that didn't happen.
"Shit, one of these days some guy's gonna haul off and...."
I've heard that a few times. If that does happen it will be because someone has decided that Iggy Stooge has overstepped his bounds as a performer and is acting in such a manner as to offer us not entertainment but a severe imposition.
This geezer was fast approaching sixty years old (born 1909!) and a seasoned veteran of writing about Tin Pan Alley and American vernacular music forms (first book published 1945!), when he finished writing The Rock Revolution. It was one of the first of that spate of books about rock that came out in 1968-70. They must have all been commissioned by publishers in 1967 when they abruptly realized that rock was not just a teen fad but was going to stick around. It had an audience now that a/ liked to read b/ would also like the whole phenomenon they'd been caught up explained and historicized. Furthermore there might also be a market of elder outsiders who wanted to understand what their kids were into.
Younger critics of that time didn't reckon much on Arnold Shaw's effort - they thought he was an old, square, clueless interloper... a hack... and perhaps they were jealous of the fact that he'd got the book deal and not them.
But I must say I was surprised by how perceptive and well organized these opening chapters are as an argument.
I was also struck by the chapter sub title "The Recording Studio Is The Instrument".
Could this be the first iteration of the studio-as-instrument idea, years before the likes of Eno talked it up? Or was it just a commonplace idea by the late Sixties, in the wake of Sgt. Pepper's?
This extract is another example of the way that people then talked about "electronic rock", meaning not just the use of Moogs and synths, but the painting-with-sound enabled by multi-track recording, a.k.a. psychedelia. See this Lillian Roxon Rock Encylopedia entry.
You think of Sounds and the things that spring to mind would be Oi! and Bushellism, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. And maybe if you knew your British rock paper history, you would also think about Jon Savage and New Musick, and the "grey overcoat" Fac-loving thing associated with Dave McCullough, at least until he flipped for Postcard and his own version of poptimism.
But alongside all that - the many flavours of ROCK - Sounds consistently covered reggae and dancehall. Put Jamaican and Black British artists on the cover.
(They also covered funk and soul, did pieces on early rap and hip hop).
NME was probably even better at covering these areas, but Sounds did a creditable job.
Especially considering this was verily the Dark Age of Rockisme. Or so we are told.
A lot of the late '70s coverage is coming from Vivien Goldman, before she jumped to first Melody Maker and then to NME. But there were other writers who kept it going deep into the Eighties, including Jack Barron and Edwin Pouncey.
And not just the roots-rock-rebel stuff, they also covered reggae at its poppiest - lover's.
Even Gaz Bushell wrote a bit about reggae now and then
I did not know that Chris Petit, maker of the great Radio On, also did a bit of rock writing, for Melody Maker. (He was also the Film Editor of Time Out at this time)
Here he reviews Wreckless Eric, whose "Whole Wide World" is memorably used in the film
Here Melody Maker's then editor Richard Williams blogs about a later Petit work The Museum of Loneliness and recalls sending Petit to Germany to write a piece about German music including Kraftwerk but also Boney M!
And here's Petit himself, talking about how his brief foray into rock journalism was instrumental in the making of Radio On:
"I became a rather bad music journalist for Melody Maker with the express intention of meeting Kraftwerk. This achieved, I gave them a folder with the script for Radio On. Ralph Hütter mistook the name of the folder for the title of the film and thereafter it was referred to between us as The Digby Wallet. We completed the package by going to Dave Robinson at Stiff Records and offered the film as a way of promoting Stiff's material. The specific track wanted was Wreckless Eric's Whole Wide World, but we were given the run of its catalogue."
Wreckless Eric is someone I would have probably never bothered to check out, if not for the film, which introduced me to "Whole Wide World"
Elton John rather perceptively described it as Troggs-y.
At his enjoyable blog Eric Goulden remembers the moment when Elton John was infatuated with Wreckless Eric and - very briefly - a guest member:
One night we were at the Hemel Hempstead Pavilion. I was sitting in a corner of a large dressing room full of bands, trying not to let everything get on my nerves, when a woman I knew walked in. I knew her because she'd done some PR work for Stiff Records at some point and we'd got on well. She came straight over to me, said hello and addressed me in hushed voice:
'I'm here with Elton John, he's out in the corridor - he'd really like to meet you.'
... He was in a corner of the corridor looking as though he was trying to melt into the wall. There must have been other people around but I didn't see them, just him, alone and exuding vulnerability. His face lit up when he saw me. He seemed at once other worldly and completely normal. He was wearing a black 1920s flapper suit and a floppy herringbone tweed cap.
We said hello, and our awkwardness hung in the air between us. His eyes were soft and grey, and very kind. He had an Edwardian shirt buttoned to the neck with some sort of Art Deco, bakelite bow tie.
'Um, er... does that light up?'
He laughed: 'No, I'm off duty.'
Elton joins the band onstage to play piano on "Whole Wide World" and then the whole thing escalates:
Then he was at the piano, playing and singing some weird slow blues that turned out to be a half speed version of Chuck Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen. We were playing along and it was getting intense, and then there was one of those massive piano fills that goes from one end of the keyboard to the other, and we were up to full speed and rocking. The guitars were shrieking and I turned round in time to see Elton kick back the piano stool, take a backward run, then head forward like a raging bull and leap off the stool and on to the top of the piano where he stood for an instant like the rock god he most undoubtedly was. Then he jumped off the piano into the centre of the stage and cut the entire band with one gesture.
He stood in the spotlight and just for an instant the world stopped turning. He raised his arms above his head and started to clap his hands. The energy that was coming off him was almost physical. I've never again experienced such a thing. At that moment I fully understood why he was such a huge star.
The whole story is well worth a read.
