I was reading an article in The Onion a while back about Devo, the cult post-punk / new wave / synthpop band from the late 1970s stroke 1980s. Here in the UK they rose from obscurity into utter oblivion - the trendy music press briefly hated them, and then forgot them, and they never troubled the charts - but they’re fascinating, because they had an ideology, dammit. A weltanschauung. The Police sold more records than Devo but they were boring, because they never had a weltanschauung. They never dressed up as sperm whilst a semi-naked woman wearing fake breasts spat on them. No-one ever called Sting a fascist clown.
But, yes, Devo’s early history is well-documented, in a series of demo compilations called Hardcore Devo, and the thing that fascinates me about them is that they were a post-punk band that went around being post-punk in the pre-punk era; at a time when punk bands were scattered and punk as a genre was an amorphous thing for most people. Devo were bashing out “Jocko Homo” and “Mongoloid” at a time when John Lydon was still hanging around Malcolm McLaren’s clothes shop in a cut-up Pink Floyd t-shirt.
So I gots to thinking about other post-punk bands that predated the punk explosion. By which I mean bands that could have been plucked from 1974, 1975 and dropped wholesale into the post-punk music scene circa 1978, 1979, without seeming old-fashioned. I don’t mean bands that existed before punk but only became popular after changing their style in the wake of punk; I mean bands that had a recognisably post-punk sound at a time when punk bands were still struggling to get record contracts.
And when I think of post-punk, I think of a specific style. Dire Straits were technically post-punk, in the sense that they came to public attention after punk had shot its load, but they didn’t have a post-punk sound. To my mind the post-punk sound consisted of:
- scratchy guitars, a la Gang of Four, and/or cheap-sounding synthesisers
- miserable frowny singers who seemed angry that people might be having fun somewhere
- lyrics where the word love was always in “quotes”, e.g. I really really “love” you, “love” is fantastic, I’m so in “love” with you
- and in fact everything was in quotes. Punk was a scream of rage; post-punk was a lot more restrained
- the band dressed smartly, in shirt and tie, or plain t-shirts
The other bands that spring to mind are Pere Ubu, who had the scratchy guitars and “quotes” down pat in 1975, and Television, who had been around for years before they had a chance to release Marquee Moon. Kraftwerk, possibly - not a guitar band, but they had a consistent weltanschauung, although their music circa 1978 was a lot darker and colder than it had been before punk. Google tells me that Swell Maps formed in 1972, although as with Television they didn’t get a chance to release anything until the punk era. Talking Heads were just about pre-punk, and although they didn’t wear shirts, everything about them was in ironic quotes, from the name onwards.
Any more? Blondie?