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Gene Hunt hasn’t been in his grave two weeks and already
we’re trying to contact another dead eighties spirit.
A closer look at the word 'séance' should yield a few
clues: a meeting of people who are gathered to receive
messages from spirits or to listen to a spirit medium
communicate with or relay messages from other spirits
in the hope of convincing sceptics and non-believers.
Not that we’re likely to have many sceptics and non-believers
left, one would suspect. Just a casual glance at the
charts will confirm what we have long suspected: the
eighties are back and not even twenty-seven years and
half a dozen format changes of ‘Now That’s What I Call
Music Retro’ are likely to stale the era’s infinite
variety either. Not that this new Bustin’ Out series
offers any real clues to the success of ‘80s-lite’ revivalists
like La Roux and Empire of the Sun – as chipper as they
are – because what we have here is the dark side of
the sun: brutal, rather crude, shamelessly existential
and fizzing with more analogue and more static than
a Sony Walkman radio.
Conceived of by veteran DJ Mike Maguire, the
‘Bustin’ Out’ series charts the groundbreaking
developments in electronic-based music through the 80s.
There’s no Pierrot clowns, sadly, nor are there lingering
shots of Keely Hawes’ painstakingly recreated 1980s
bottom, but what it lacks in gimmicks it more than makes
up for in class, kicking off with Germany (where else?)
with proto-industrial Electronic Body Music and
moving through a deliriously meccanic selection of tunes
that includes Vancouver’s Moev (and the monstrously
pretty ‘Cracked Mirror’), the haunted-city style of
Tubeway Army ‘Repilcas’, a 1981 demo from 4AD’s
bonkers gothic anarchists, Dead Can Dance and
the frankly ‘otherwordly’ ‘Body to Body’ from Front
242 who did for Belgian avante-garde what Throbbing
Gristle and Caberet Voltaire did for Yorkshire.
Why our continuing fascination with the 1980s? It’s
hard to tell. Perhaps it was one of the last periods
in recent memory when music arose out of a need to break
moulds rather than recast them, when youthful inspiration
came from a need to escape the centrifugal force of
the music industry rather than add to its already considerable
mass. Or perhaps it was just how ruddy crude it all
sounded: the masking tape, the wires, the rudimentary,
synthetic beats. For all it’s artifice it still sounded
more real and more human than anything we have today.
‘Anger is an energy’. Remember that …
Bustin' Out New Wave To New Beat: The Post Punk
Era 1979-1981 – Various Artists OUT NOW on Future
Noise/Year Zero.
Bustin' Out New Wave To New Beat: Vol.2 – 1982 –
Various Artists Out June 7th 2010 on Future Noise/Year
Zero.
More info:
http://www.futurenoisemusic.com/
Alan Sargeant for Crud Magazine 2009©
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