| Fragments of Linear B | ||
| —This
piece originally appeared in Last Plane to Jakarta #3, published in Colo,
Iowa in Winter, 1998— Oh, yeah, I sez in my best northern Minnesotan fourth-generation Swedish farmer accent, I remember Spandau Ballet. Me an’ my friend Jerome, you know, we used to laugh about how they’d made what was the worst song not only of 1983 but of the whole decade. Sure, Spandau Ballet. How could you forget ‘em? They were like Roxy Music for the empty-headed teenage crowd, with all the sound and none of the craft. Their singer was David Bowie without a game plan. Total genius. Cotton candy so pure you couldn’t make it to the end of the first bite. About twelve years after the last time anybody’d mentioned Spandau Ballet except as the answer to a trivia question, I found myself in Dublin, hanging out with Robert and John Parkinson on the day when they ran across a 12” single of “Gold,” the band’s follow-up to their worldwide #1 single “True.” Following an obsession in which I was shortly to become involved, Robert bought the record and we all went back to their house. Once there, the shining vinyl disc (it looked as though it had been either greatly revered or completely ignored) was placed on the turntable with a sense of ceremony, and we all sat near the speakers listening. I remembered that I’d bought “Gold” back when it came out in the hopes of hearing something even more unbearable than “True.” Back then I hadn’t known quite what to make of it. I knew now, though. It was good. It made me wonder if I hadn’t missed whole schools of good music because their public presentations had been all wrong. (I still wonder about that sometimes.) Musical moves that had seemed like some very nasty schmaltz in 1983 sounded, in 1996, like huge, gaudily passionate gestures bravely standing up and bracing themselves in preparation for the waves of ridicule about to crash against them. I didn’t exactly make it my mission in life to get the bottom of the Spandau Ballet question, but I did give them their own folder in the fat and getting fatter all the time “to be investigated” file that eats up potentially useful bandwidth in my brain. Slowly but surely I began to get a bead on Spandau Ballet. A couple of years later, in a record store in St Louis, I finally broke down and bought True, the album which had given Spandau Ballet their only real taste of American success, . I bought a used vinyl copy in great condition. It only cost me $2.99. If you’d’ve told me in 1983 that I’d someday be gearing up to publicly announce that my investment in True was one of the soundest I’d ever made, I’d have called you insane, but I am beginning to come around to the opinion that the whole purpose of living is to work such miracles of contrast. True was a real revelation; listening to it, working out its frame of reference and figuring out what drove it into existence, was no less exciting than learning that Eat a Peach isn’t just a cultural artifact but one of the greatest albums of all time. Before you think I’ve finally gone permanently off the deep end, let me say that True is in by no means as good an album as Eat a Peach. The stakes in the former case are nowhere near as high as they are in the latter, and the values are too disparate -- the Allman Brothers, whatever their sins against fashion, were artists then in direct communion with the high muses, and Eat a Peach is a record explicitly about death. True, by contrast, is an almost purely aesthetic exercise. I don’t pretend that it can hope to play with the big boys for too long. That will come later. What I do want to say is, first, that True inhabits a space which is, if not unique to itself in the history of music, at least quite elite: despite its proven ability to fit in (it sold very well in the U.S., and incredibly well abroad), it really had nothing to do with the audience that received it, and this is borne out by the album that followed it, which will, if you’ll only give me a little leeway, eventually be the point of all this. Before we go even a step further, though, we’re going to have to take a good look at True. The album was a worldwide success, thanks in no small part to its title track, which -- the third single released from the album, following “Lifeline” and “Communication” -- reached the Number One position in the U.K. charts and #5 in the U.S. Those of us who lived through it remember -- some happily, some ruefully and bitterly -- how impossible it was to avoid “True” in the spring and summer of 1983. It was played at my junior prom; there can be little doubt that bands playing at junior high homecoming dances across the country lured countless thousands of pre-teens into slow dancing using “True” as bait. It sounded tailor-made for my favorite southern California radio station, KOST, which pronounced itself “coast” (as in “Love Songs -- along the KOST”) and has fed its listeners an unrelenting diet of love songs for years, with a fairly strict cut-off point of no songs recorded prior to 1965. The sentiments that inform KOST’s entire rotation can be cleanly divided into two categories: there are the “I love you so much and how wonderful it is” songs, and there are the “Where oh where has our love gone to now” songs. I’d bet a week’s wages that “True” is serving out its afterlife as a KOST staple, since its sound is so smooth, so sweet, and so steeped in the ways of love. What I wanted to know in 1983, and what I’m still trying to figure out today, is what kind of love song, exactly, goes like this: So true funny how it seems Always in time, but never in line for dreams Head over heels, when toe to toe This is the sound of my soul (This is the sound) I bought a ticket to the world But now I’ve come back again Why do I find it hard to write the next line When I want the truth to be said I know this much is true (Lyrics by Gary Kemp, published by Reformation Publishing © and -p- 1983 Chrysalis Records Inc.) As I am so often compelled to ask: What the hell is he talking about? I challenge -- no, I dare anyone to make any sense of the lyrics above, what to speak of construing them as the lyrics to a love song. There is no feeling of any kind mentioned, though a sort of detached amusement is invoked in the phrase “funny how it seems,” though how what seems funny is left to the imagination. If we are to take the first two lines as a lead-in to the third, we might be getting somewhere, but unfortunately for everyone concerned the third line is “Always in time, but never in line for dreams,” which, in its total refusal to yield to even the closest reading, is a masterstroke of codespeak. The Latinate sentence structure is cute -- making two clauses depend on the same object (“dreams”) while using only one preposition (“for”) -- but the sense of it is forever buried. Nor is it the case that all will be explained later. Once passed, the line is never revisited. Radical subjectivists may find some sense to cling to, but without a subject -- Am I always in time? Are “we” in general always in time but never in line? Is this supposed to be taken as an attack, a complaint, a disinterested observation? -- there really is nothing for us to grab at. Those of you who are skeptical of close readings when the whole text hasn’t been presented to you are urged to continue through to the song’s conclusion: With a thrill in my head and a pill on my tongue Dissolve the nerves that have just begun Listening to Marvin all night long This is the sound of my soul (this is the sound) Always slipping from my hands Sand’s a time of its own Take your seaside arms and write the next line Oh I want the truth to be known I don’t know about you, but ultimate and total victory of emptiness over substance in the lines above sends chills up and down my spine. There is literally nothing there. You are quite welcome to write your own scenario within which the lyrics to “True” might take place, but the song itself would not offer you an oar if you were drowning at sea. It is a love song -- sure, it sounds enough like one for me to give you that -- but the object of its affection is a void so endless and so profound that it is a wonder to me that the project made it through the multiple hurdles that must be passed before a song gets released as a single. Lest the reader be mistaken, I am in no way criticising lyricist Gary Kemp for failing to invest his words with meaning. To the contrary, I am praising him for stripping them of it. It is no mean trick. And it gives me perverse delight to report to you that the whole album is like this. In musical terms, Jerome and I were well within our rights to laugh at “True.” It is pure treacle. Time has made its sweetness a little less cloying, and the rest of the album is rather better -- there’s that “Gold” song that’s just terrific, and the uncannily wistful “Heaven Is A Secret,” and the bridge in the song “Code of Love” is a deft bit of pop sleight of hand; Tony Hadley’s singing is a study in sleek romanticism -- but you can hardly blame anyone for dismissing the whole record outright. It doesn’t come looking for your approval so much as it outright asks for your money. Once it had that, its creators slipped off the North American stage almost entirely; the follow-up, Parade, lacked a single as cunningly geared for American radio as “True,” and so it is now remembered only by the faithful and by garbage-eaters like me, who are willing to swallow quite a lot of grime in the hopes of running across something rich and good.I hope you’re sitting down, though some of you know me well enough by now to see this one coming: Parade is a freaking masterpiece, as monolithic in its success-at-what-it-does as Physical Graffiti or Rocks. If I remember correctly, Parade came and went, you’ll forgive the obvious conceit, with all the fanfare of a janitor’s arrival. Stateside, at least, I think I was pretty much the only person who noticed that the follow-up to True had been recorded, packaged, and released. In a very brief period of time, the people who’d been pushing Spandau Ballet had either moved on to other things or dropped off the map completely, and so, predictably, had Spandau Ballet. Such evidence as I have suggests that their expiration-date came a little later across the pond, but here at Last Plane to Jakarta we are only interested in what’s happening on and around the runway. Parade’s lone U.S. single, “Only When You Leave,” skipped like a small stone halfway across a narrow stream and sank to the bottom somewhere near the middle. To the best of my knowledge I am one of the only people who remembers it. Like all Spandau Ballet songs, it is quite bizarre, to state the case mildly. Its leads off the Parade album in a mood similar to that of True but quite a good deal richer; it is a spiced rum truffle to True’s Mr Goodbar. One can tell immediately that Gary Kemp thought he’d stumbled onto, if not a goldmine, then at least a bank vault, and that he meant to stick around a while publicly courting his muse. The rich textures of True are fleshed out a little more here, and the saxophone is more lush, more languid than it had been before, and the air that a band gives off once they’ve cleared the hurdle of the top ten is all over the place. Their confidence is as thick as musk. Perhaps this is why the fairly simple (if ultimately impenetrable) platitudes of “True” have here given way to this: Only when you leave I’ll need to love you and when the action has all gone, I’m just a little fool enough to need you fool enough too long. Only when you leave you’ll leave in danger, oh, I’ll make sure that you pay. So give a little passion to a stranger, and take this soul away. It may be that Gary Kemp imagined an audience filled with listeners who had surmounted the gap between author and reader and who were therefore able to read his mind. It may be. Or it may be that he was conducting an experiment in secrecy. Either way, there is no indication anywhere in the song as to what exactly the departing lover will pay for or with; nor can even the keenest critical mind determine what is meant by “give a little passion to a stranger,” to say nothing of “take this soul away.” Clearly the spurned lover is angry, but further than that lies uncharted water. Our only hope would have lay in “True,” had we been able to get to the bottom of that one, but it will be recalled that we were were most decidedly not. Parade, though, is all “True,” with the sweetness replaced by something more apparently ominous and the focus narrowed if still quite blurred. Every song is more deeply obscure than the one that precedes it, and each one successfully creates a mood without ever showing its hand. Even the cover speaks in an iconography to which we cannot be granted access. It depicts a huge grey building against a yellow sky; the architecture is post-second-world-war Soviet Grandiose, the sort of thing you’d expect to see on a Laibach sleeve. There’s a huge tapestry hung from the building’s edifice, obscuring almost all of its face; it’s a painting of a man in a blue shirt and pants, his right hand at his brow as though shielding his eyes from the sun, his left hand pointing (the color of the sky behind the building seems to indicate a setting sun) south with his arm at full extension. At the foot of the building is a parade led by a man carrying a crude megaphone, which he holds at his mouth as he approaches the enormous building’s door. Behind him, the members of a parade march forward: they are clad in a chaotic assortment of costumes, ranging from uniforms of the American Revolution to the two-piece get-ups used at New Year’s by the Chinese Lion Dancers. There’s a guy in a harlequin costume. There’s a drill team carrying a banner, which, if you scrutinize the matter far more closely than you probably would, bears the emblem of the Amalgamed Wheel and Cartwright’s Trade Union. The back cover shows a detail of the banner with the light a little later in the evening. “Only When You Leave” is the most lucid thing on the whole record; the closer from side one, “Nature of the Beast,” has a chorus that runs: “Despite all this heat, they’ll be dancing west to east/This is the nature of the beast.” The album sails by like some dark dream dreamt by one afflicted with high fever, eight songs long, which was the exact length of True as well as of True’s predecessor, Diamond. There is no making heads or tails of any of this. Repeated ventures into Parade only increase the distance between itself and the listener, which is a pretty neat trick: generally speaking, if I study a thing long enough, sooner or later it’s going to have to open up and reveal its secrets. Parade, however, is a long series of false doors and blind alleys, a sort of aesthetic Winchester house beckoning from the glitzy heart of the eighties. It makes good on the promise of “Gold” insofar as any stories that one might try to find hiding behind the lyrics wind up getting holes punched in them almost as soon as they’re told. To contend that the lyrics are merely badly written is to overlook the stunning fact that they accomplish the same feat -- turning something into nothing -- again and again, by means of an elusive, transparent effect that leaves the listener feeling as though the mood in which he comes away from the songs (a vague sadness, usually, with hints of indignation or shame) were somehow rooted somewhere, when the evidence strongly suggests that there is no place within reason for these songs to take root. Consequently, one is forced to revisit the songs endlessly, since the mind will not accept what it finds, or fails to find, in them. By the time one reaches “With the Pride,” the penultimate song on the album’s second side, lyrics like Just leave me with the pride that I worked for, now they’ve taken the reason away. Just leave me with the pride that I worked for today slide into the listener almost completely unnoticed, like nettles or odorless gas. It is so exactly like dreaming that to say any more about it is perhaps the most vain exercise I have ever engaged in. Oh, yeah, I sez, shivering a little and drawing my coat around myself, wishing for a second that I hadn’t given up smoking. I remember Spandau Ballet. They all wore tuxedos. They were awesome. |
||