•
Rating: Try to imagine, if you can.
A group capable of combining the communicative urgency of early English punk with the energy borrowed from the original rock 'n' roll, let's say Buzzcocks or Adverts with the Clash of London Calling. To combine the burning beat of mod ancestry with a pop sophistication not devoid of almost-glam nuances, let's say the very first Jam with Magazine, illegitimate offspring of Roxy Music on amphetamines. To ride the tiger of expressive impetuosity by evolving it into a sophisticated pop song form with the gift of good intellect, a challenge that in those years succeeded so well in the homeland only for the XTC of genius Andy Partridge and across the Ocean, shortly before with the supervision of John Cale, for the Modern Lovers of Sir Jonathan Richman.
Now, if such a group really existed, what traces could we find of it in the Great Book of Music circa 1977? At least a fundamental chapter, right? Wrong, if you were very lucky you would read about it for a paragraph or two at most, but it's more realistic to think you'd find it only in a small footnote. And only some old survivor from those days, hearing the name of the Subway Sect and their Bristolian lieutenant Vic Napper, also known as Godard - cultured and quotational, the friend... -, would be illuminated with immense joy and smiling eyes at the memory of a shooting star yet among the brightest of the Minor Punk Bear. Shall we do justice?
Yet it wasn't a low-key start. London 1976, the right "circle", the one around McLaren to be clear, a name that often and willingly stands out on the bill at the 100 Club on Oxford Street alongside that of the Sex Pistols, a Suzie not-yet-Siouxsie, and the Clash. With the latter, the following year, they even go on a spree together throughout the UK, in that trivial little happening called the White Riot Tour. All this, despite a public image that to call "ordinary" makes it so that, within the context, people like the Wire can be considered compared to them as much as the Kiss. Your favorite civil registry employees. Or, rather, your postmen, since that was the activity that provided our Victor with daily bread shortly after the mid-eighties. Precisely for this reason, let's tell the whole story: as and perhaps more than for many others of that brood , for Vic and company, punk was immediately the "scenario", the "situation", the context in which to plunge the multiple facets of their spectrum. To go beyond, and quickly, this was the order of the day. One single after another. In the middle, the usual story - this one, yes, very punk - of quarrels, "lost" albums, break-ups, misunderstandings and incomprehensible turns.
Since what was to be the first album mysteriously vanished from view for thirty years finally being released third, that the second is actually the first, but is little more than a patchwork collection of tracks assembled by a group that in fact no longer exists, this is why the appearance in early 1985 of this retrospective of the best of their best was welcomed by the author as manna from heaven.
Starting like a lightning bolt. "Nobody's Scared" and "Don't Split It" are the Ramones crossing the Atlantic not to help the Pistols spread the new Word, but to introduce the young English with mohawks to the songs of the first, legendary Modern Lovers album, playing them, however, as the Stranglers of "Rattus Norvegicus" would play. Alternatively, by inserting sideways and rough chants like "Parallel Lines", or with adrenalized and abrasive rides like "Double Negative", they seem to warn the unsuspecting listener that with them "It's NOT only punk'n'roll, but I like it". Still skeptical? Then down with "Ambition", pop-punk pollution with a dancing rhythm, accompanied by a lascivious little keyboard and Godard's singing never so glam, helpful to understand why Bowie and Bryan Ferry must be considered putative fathers of much that occurred after '77. Or, "Stool Pidgeon", a white-hot pop delight that Pete Shelley could always and only dream for his Buzzcocks.
Surely, if you go on tour with the Clash, you must have in your repertoire punk anthems like "Chain Smoking", capable of challenging Strummer & Jones on their very terrain. But at the same time, in the manner of Dr. Feelgood, you want to try and be bold pub-rock heroes for the British underclass with a heavy drink, accompanied by none other than a boogie piano in "Rock And Roll Even". Then, you fail, I fail, the burns of those first, formidable years are treated by the emollient zeal of a leader who tries to leave behind the dirty and smelly subway seats of the suburbs in exchange for the comfortable and velvety ones of a la page theaters. The farewell from a now phantom group will therefore be a Godard aspiring to be a crooner, as will also happen to other collateral heroes of that glorious season such as Kevin Rowland or Edwyn Collins. And if the link between past and future still shines bright in a "Watching The Devil" that blues and rocks like the Violent Femmes never managed, "Spring Is Grey", with its Pulp-like melodrama, and "Stop That Girl", with choruses and accordion (!) counterpoints, definitively certify that, as our old folks often said, "one is born incendiary and dies a firefighter".
But, I don't know about you, when the material is truly flammable and the fire is really unforgettable, it will always be quite fun to occasionally joke about it. Even if it's fleeting.
Loading comments slowly
