1979: The Birthing Pangs of Post-Punk

Has it been 45 years already? Forty-five years since the single most exciting and innovative year in rock history? Damn, I'm old as dirt. But also unspeakably grateful for having been there.


Post-Punk is one of those terms I didn't really hear bandied about until well after the movement had largely petered. And I would argue that the moniker describes more a point in time than a distinct musical style. Largely because the big bands filed under that label were so different from each other that you can't really fit them into a category without qualifiers.

By that I mean you need to describe the particular sounds of these bands to make sense of the Post-Punk label, since all that really unites them is an attitude. You could say that most of these bands all took advantage of the new musical technology flowing out of America and Japan, and used electronics and studio technique as another instrument. But many others got their strange sounds simply from non-traditional approaches in their playing.

Johnny Rotten's post-Sex Pistols outfit Public Image Ltd were trailblazers in this regard, building a sound with Krautrock-inspired drumming, dub-inspired bass and abstract, Prog-inspired guitar lines. Their 1979 set Metal Box AKA Second Edition remains one of the most influential albums of its time, even if the band started falling apart shortly following its release.

Producers became de facto members of bands during the Post-Punk era. Producers becoming important contributors to the creative process was not new in Rock - see George Martin, Phil Spector, Bob Ezrin, et al - but Post-Punk and radical new technologies took this process to a new level.

Joy Division were pretty hopeless musicians, and their songwriting was strictly rudimentary garage-band stuff, but visionary producer Martin Hannett alchemically transmogrified the band's limitless ineptitude and made it an essential part of the style. You can hear how weak and sad they sounded onstage without Hannett's genius, which ultimately set the stage for producers marginalizing their charges almost entirely, a process which reached its apogee five years later with Trevor Horn and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Producer Mike Thorne took it a step further with Wire, playing keyboards for the band and becoming an active participant in the songwriting process. As with Joy Division, Wire were essentially an arty garage band without Thorne's musicality, which you can hear contrasting their studio and live work.

Wire's 1979 opus 154 is not only a great album in itself, but a profoundly influential milestone in the development of Post-Punk, not to mention the producer-as-rock-star phenomenon. Thorne's contributions are essential and irreducible to the experience. You'd see that process hit the jackpot the following year when Steve Lillywhite took the pathetically-inept U2 and magically transformed them into international stars with his insidious techno-wizardry.

Gary Numan's own production skills are woefully underappreciated, given how mind-staggeringly influential his two 1979 LPs Replicas (as Tubeway Army) and The Pleasure Principle were. Numan basically raided the Bowie/Eno Berlin Trilogy, leavened it with Sixties-era "New Wave of Sci-Fi" pessimism and dissociation and hit the Post-Punk Powerball all over the world.

Of the two LPs, Replicas is by far the superior to the filler-ridden Pleasure Principle. But both - and the albums that directly preceded (Tubeway Army) and followed (1980s Telekon) - are very much worth your time. A lot of other artists were trying, but no one had yet nailed the Post-Punk Synthpop sound quite the way Numan had. No surprise he retains cult status to this day, when most of his contemporaries are long since forgotten.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark approached proto-synthpop from a different direction than Numan, playing down the android-chic and pumping up the emotion. They also boasted a more vigorous rhythm section than their peers, led by Andy McCluskey's driving basslines. 

OMD would also be more successful for longer than the other Class of '79 keyboard-ticklers, scoring a huge hit in 1986 with "If You Leave" from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, which dukes it out with "Take on Me" for the honor of most definitive 80s New Wave hit.

Speaking of Eno, he'd become more than the fifth member of Talking Heads. With 79's Fear of Music and the following year's Remain in Light, Eno was essentially the second member, concocting the songs and arrangements along with top Head David Byrne. Eno's ethnoforgery musical tourism would play a huge role in the band's evolution, and the producer was working up similar recipes with David Bowie on 1979's Lodger.

Robert Fripp played guitar on Fear of Music's leadoff track, "I Zimbra," road-testing the polyrhythmic riffing that he'd make the foundation of his new-model King Crimson in 1981. But he'd also unleash his seminal solo LP Exposure, which enlisted a cast of luminaries (Eno, Daryl Hall, Peter Hammill, Phil Collins, Narada Michael Walden, Tony Levin, etc) to forge a ferocious hybrid of late-period Crimson and proto-Post-Punk. 

He also made Frippertronics - based on a tape-loop technique invented by Eno for the 1972 LP No Pussyfooting - an integral part of his work. Soon countless other bands would make loops and tape reels a central part of their sound.

Loops and other techno-weirdness were integral to Throbbing Gristle's sound, unleashed on an unsuspecting public with 1979's hilariously-named 20 Jazz-Funk Greats. The cover photo was taken at Beachy Head, a notorious suicide spot.

I always considered Throbbing Gristle to be more a historical phenomenon than a musical one (meaning their music is more interesting in theory than practice). They also set about to intentional repel and disgust their audiences, even going so far to search for sonic frequencies that would make fans vomit or loose their bowels, techniques they'd rehearse on the local transients. 

In short, the Gristles were the kind of music most normal people would usually only listen to on a dare. But they were incredibly influential all the same.

Chrome were a lot more audience-friendly than Throbbing Gristle, but were too weird and insane to ever catch on with the clubsters. Meaning truly insane, not play-acting like Genesis P Orridge. Chrome's lo-fi Post-Punk industrial/psychedelia was also a bit too leavened with late-hippie mysticism to ever catch on with the tastemakers. 

I'd argue that Chrome's work was highly influential on Killing Joke, whose music I often confused them with back in the day. I'd bet the Jokers spent a lot of time listening to Chrome's 1979 LP Half-Machine Lip Moves quite a lot and thought to themselves, "Hey, this is really cool, but we can do it better."

Before they discovered samplers and sequencers, early Cabaret Voltaire operated in similar fields to Throbbing Gristle and Chrome. I much prefer their later, MicroPhonies kind of sound, but the early Cabs certainly have their defenders. It just comes off a bit "You had to be there" at this point in the timeline. But Al Jourgensen and Trent Reznor were certainly paying attention.

Scotland's Simple Minds aren't the first name one would associate with Krautrock-influenced proto-Industrial, but that's certainly the best way to describe their '79 to '81 sound. Their '79 LP Reel to Real Cacophony isn't nearly as impressive as the following year's Empires and Dance, but it shows just how different the early Minds were to the later model (they also rode the John Hughes escalator to stardom).

The Minds try a bit too hard to sound weird on Reel, but "Changeling" is as good as Post-Punk ever gets. Do note the proto-U2 guitar, belying the popular misconception that the Edge was doing anything new or unique. Funny then that the Minds enlisted Steve Lillywhite five years later in an attempt to steal their thunder back from the Dublin-based poseur/traitor sellouts.

Some might reduce Post-Punk to simply pasting punk guitar over dance music rhythms, a charge which isn't as specious as it may sound. Leeds' finest Gang of Four certainly hewed closely to that formula on their 1979 landmark, Entertainment! 

Granted there's still a lot of punk proper on the album, as well as healthy servings of Captain Beefheart-influenced dissonance, but tracks like "Not Great Men" and "Ether" saw the Gang creating something entirely new. 

Sadly, the Gang would become Post-Punk's most ridiculous sellouts just four short years with their 1983 soft-rock stinker, Hard. Happily, the original lineup would reform a couple decades later and put on one of the most intense shows I've ever seen in my life. 

Athens' Pylon were working similar territory to UK bands like Gang of Four, although sounding considerably more psychotic thanks to Vanessa Ellison's completely-unhinged vocals. 

Millions of rock singers wanted you to think they were wild and crazy, but Ellison not only radiated genuine psychosis, she was given to uncontrollable shrieking fits onstage. In other words, Ellison was the real McCoy, which may explain why Pylon dropped out of sight just as they were about to break big.

Though no one would use the term for several years to come, Goth came into its own in 1979. The ultimate Goth band Bauhaus released their seminal "Bela Lugosi's Dead" single that year and launched a lifestyle that continues on to this day.

Given that these Post-Punk bands were comprised mainly of neurotic art students, a lot of them split just before they made it big and Bauhaus was no exception. They split after their 1983 LP Burning from the Inside, but would reform several times over the years to delight mini-Goths all over the world.

 

The Cure wouldn't go full Goth until 1980's Seventeen Seconds, but 1979's Three Imaginary Boys (released in the US as Boys Don't Cry) still boasted enough miserablism to delight the black nailpolish set. Still and all, most of the LP was Post-Punk pop in the vein of Wire and The Soft Boys. 

The biggest mystery about Three Imaginary Boys though is how two nimble players like Robert Smith and bassist Michael Dempsey tolerated Lol Tolhurst's amateurish drumming. I mean, seriously.

Smith would do double-duty in 1979, filling in on guitar with Slits drummer Budgie after Banshees John McKay and Kenny Morris decided they'd had enough of Siouxsie's Queen Bitch routine and bailed out during a record signing for '79's Join Hands LP. Smith would return to the Banshees four years later for the Nocturne and Hyaena LPs, and would also embark on The Glove side-project with Steve Severin.

And just in case you thought Robert Smith was all delicate arpeggios and mope, listen to that metallic noise he grinds out on this storming version of "Love in a Void."

Finally, The Psychedelic Furs would premiere their Bowie meets the Sex Pistols sound with their 1979 single, "We Love You." The Furs are often overlooked by Post-Punk fans, probably because they morphed into SynthPop hitmakers a few years later. 

But their first two albums are as pure an expression of the form as anything you can name and their most recent set (Made of Rain) is as good as anything they've ever done. The Furs are still touring and still put on one of the best shows you'll ever see. Don't miss them if they come to your town.

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