Luxuria
Beast Box

In 1988, not yet forty, Howard Devoto already boasted a prolific and celebrated musical career and still felt a strong urge to keep expressing himself. A charismatic figure with a distinctive voice and style, he had been the frontman of one of the very first British punk bands—the Buzzcocks—and then of Magazine, which he founded with keyboardist Dave Formula, who would later become involved with Ultravox and Visage. Magazine debuted in 1978 with Real Life, an ahead-of-its-time album that would turn out to be one of the most influential of that crucial transitional phase between punk and new wave (along with Pere Ubu’s Modern Dance).

So when the decisive creative blaze of those aforementioned bands had burned out, Devoto started a third project. It was 1988, and he named his collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Noko (aka Norman Fisher-Jones) Luxuria. Their debut album, Unanswerable Lust, partly inherited the lessons of Magazine (Noko, incidentally, went on to become a guest guitarist in a posthumous Magazine reunion), steering towards a rocking new wave, enriched with brass and electronic-baroque flourishes; always focused on “square” rhythmic foundations and fairly traditional song structures. The title track closing the album is beautiful—an anthology piece—with an anarcho-gnostic lyric that perfectly conveys a certain forma mentis of Devoto, traceable in many clues scattered throughout Luxuria’s production. But it’s with the subsequent—and final—album, Beast Box, that the British duo plays their trump cards, defying any reasonable appeal to the record market, radio airplay, and even the fanbase that had followed Howard for over a decade.

Released in 1990, this album almost entirely sets aside drums and percussion, concentrating all the atmospheric work Devoto weaves for the many songs in the tracklist into string instruments, pianos, and arrangements that are sometimes orchestral, sometimes minimalist. The melodies are captivating, the lyrics—as always—biting and sardonic, and the arrangements highlight Noko’s ability to juggle a wide range of sounds, giving each song its own distinctive feel.

A niche record nonetheless, for listeners whose taste is not necessarily demanding, but at least capable of understanding an artistic evolution born from a very specific cultural revolution and then increasingly endowed with its own personality. Standing out among them are Stupid Blood,
We Keep On Getting There, Dirty Beating Heart, Smoking Mirror, I’ve Been Expecting You, tracks that I have always found original and stylistically eclectic enough to enjoy an autonomy that has seen them age quite well. Unlike the debut album, which was more attuned to the then-current mood of a funk-tinged new wave now reaching its twilight, Beast Box maintains an aura not easily attributable to any particular trend; in fact, during its nearly hour-long span, it rarely betrays the period in which it was recorded.

The Luxuria project soon came to its natural end. Three years of activity and two LPs, both met with generally lukewarm attention. Magazine came back to celebrate their youthful highs and to honor the premature passing of the legendary guitarist John McGeogh, an influential and still underrated musician with a distinguished career (he also played with Visage and Siouxsie). They rediscovered such cohesion and attention that they remain active even today.

People have certainly spoken—and still speak—less about Luxuria, but for me the message left through the songs and iconography of Beast Box remains vivid and powerful. I consider it a highly significant legacy of Devoto’s artistry and philosophy. Just think of the photo inside the album, where a crowd of gentlemen in black trench coats, umbrellas in hand under the rain, watch crucifixions atop the crest of a modern Golgotha.