Swimmer One: Comments

Architecture and Morality

I had a dream about OMD the other night. Yes, that’s right. I am in an electronic pop duo and I have dreams about electronic pop duos. For the record, this hardly ever happens.

Anyway, they were playing a big gig in a field, and were on their last song, which was their new single. And because they were playing a slightly rubbish new song instead of, say, Electricity or Enola Gay, everyone was already leaving. I was embarrassed for them, but that wasn’t stopping me from wandering off too. Cut to the next day‚ still in the dream, this is - and I’m walking through town with Andy McCluskey and someone like Janet Street Porter (the dream was conspicuously vague on this point; it was either Janet Street Porter or some similar, vaguely yoof culture-associated British media type, an early 1980s Muriel Gray maybe). Andy is explaining why he went from making landmark experimental pop albums like Architecture & Morality and Dazzleships to writing gloopy, predictable ballads for Atomic Kitten. To illustrate the different direction his life could have gone in, he takes us to Billy Childish’s house. Billy, for some reason, is living in absolute squalor in a squat in the far corner of an old warehouse, which you can only reach by climbing over a wire fence. I’m sort of tagging along in an awkward way, while Andy and Janet/Muriel do most of the talking.

I know exactly what this dream is about. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a fairly harsh review of OMD’s new live show for the Scotsman newspaper, and ever since I’ve been fretting that I was writing as a disgruntled fan rather than an objective reviewer, and therefore being unfair. My complaint was this. The show had pointedly been advertised as ‘OMD play their classic, experimental pop album Architecture and Morality’, and they had talked in interviews about how they wanted to reclaim their reputation as electronic pop pioneers. But actually it was an annoyingly under-rehearsed dash through that album, followed by a frequently excruciating greatest hits set. They seemed determined to play all their least interesting songs‚ Locomotion, Talking Loud and Clear, even Walking on the Milky Way, a 1990s song that I’d completely forgotten (judging by the audience reaction, everyone else had too) and which sounds like bad Oasis (I hate Oasis in the first place, so this is a fairly damning criticism). They did all this while dancing so badly I became convinced the entire point of the show was to embarrass their teenage children in public. I was furious with them.

OMD’s problem, of course, is that they are two different bands, with two different audiences. The first band was the one whose commercial and artistic high point was Architecture & Morality, who proved that you could make a fantastically odd and self-indulgent album consisting of two (two!) songs about Joan of Arc, plus lots of peculiar noises but few actual tunes, and still sell millions of records‚ OMD’s peers, remember, were Depeche Mode and the Human League rather than Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. They were the kind of band that danced badly on Top of the Pops, while pushing the boundaries of what was considered mainstream pop. That, whether it’s the Beatles, or Bowie, or Roxy Music, or Prince, or Pulp, is always exciting to watch. Even if it’s dressed in a bad jumper from C&A.

Architecture & Morality did so well that the next one, Dazzleships, did it again with bells on. The day after my dream I listened to Dazzleships again, to see if it was as obtuse as I remembered, and it was. A third of it isn’t even music as such, instead you get samples from Radio Prague and the BBC, people reading out the time in various languages, and a song consisting entirely of the words ‘A-B-C, 1-2-3’ (in, it should be explained, an unsettling sci-fi way rather than in a Jackson Five sort of way). I still think it’s wonderful‚ eerie, eccentric and oddly moving. Sadly I’m in a minority. It didn’t sell‚ at least, not in the numbers that a follow-up to Architecture & Morality would be expected to sell - and OMD seemed to lose their nerve. They became a different band, one of those safe, daytime radio-friendly 1980s outfits who were popular at the time because radio stations played them constantly (a more successful Red Box or Cutting Crew, maybe) but are forgotten now because no one really cared about them that much in the first place. It was a crying, baffling, hair-tearing, what-were-they-thinking shame. No more peculiar songs about Hiroshima, or electricity, or bunker soldiers, or genetic engineering. Instead, lots of middle of the road gush like So In Love, Talking Loud and Clear and Locomotion. And saxophone solos. If OMD don’t have the reputation of New Order or the Human League, it’s because of these dreary records. The fans who loved their early stuff got fed up of defending them, and the more fickle audience they found later slipped away too. And Andy McCluskey cut his losses and wrote songs for - as if to add insult to fan injury - Atomic Kitten.

Why would OMD want to play all this stuff? My first thought was that this is what they thought people would want to hear, and that they were afraid of playing the earlier, more experimental stuff in case people didn’t like it. I was infuriated by their loss of nerve‚ they set out to reclaim their reputation as pioneers, and just end up reminding us why we fell out of love with them.

Except that ‘we’ here are the hardcore fans who could hardly bear to watch the show‚ like my friend Simon, who had booked his tickets months in advance and, on the night, looked like he wanted to weep. The rest of the audience - people in their forties who, at the risk of sounding like a terrible rock snob, probably go to two or three gigs a year and discovered OMD via Forever Live and Die being a big hit, or If You Leave turning up on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack - seemed to be having a great time. And OMD did too, suggesting that actually they really like playing the later stuff, that they think it’s good.

And actually it sort of is, in the broadest, most charitable sense. It’s fine‚ nice pop songs with nice choruses, the kind of mainstream synthpop I frequently find myself defending from silly tirades by horrible rockist snobs (not unlike the one who wrote the last paragraph, perhaps). I just wanted OMD to have gone down a different path. And that’s what I was reviewing, the band they didn’t become rather than the band they did become. In the dream, Janet/Muriel represents a sort of ‘proper’ professional pop commentator, contrasting with amateurish little me, letting my fan prejudices get in the way of the job I’m supposed to be doing. As for Billy Childish, well, I’m not sure my subconscious made a particularly good choice there. It was trying to think of a hip cult figure of some kind, no doubt, but it makes less sense the more you think about it.

So my dream, essentially, is an anxiety dream, about what constitutes artistry in pop music, my own ability to make that judgment call, and my worry that I’m being a hypocrite whenever I accuse someone of selling out (which, in pop music, has always been a silly accusation really‚ musicians are hardly nurses or aid workers in the first place). The battle lines of this argument have changed somewhat in recent years, of course. Mainstream pop is more avant-garde now than it was for a long time, if that’s not a contradiction. Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani and Beyonce Knowles, Girls Aloud, the Streets and others are squeezing loads of fantastically daring and clever ideas into three minute pop songs. Connected to this is the long gestating rebellion of poptimist writers against rockist writers and, connected to this, the Guilty Pleasures movement (which I heartily endorse, even though I wish it wasn’t called Guilty Pleasures, since the entire point is surely that feeling guilty about the kind of music you like is ridiculous). And there’s the fact that ‘rock’, the music that we’re supposed to take more seriously than ‘pop’ (even though the distinction is, and always has been, a false one; I’ll rant about this some other time) seems hopelessly stuck in a creative rut, alternately recycling ideas from 20 years ago, then 15 years ago, then 27 years ago (a bit we’d forgotten about, maybe, like Josef K).

In theory, that should give me more ammunition to throw at OMD. Think of the band they could have been if they’d kept their nerve. But I can’t bring myself to judge them for that, because pop, in the end, is just pop. If they like saxophone solos and cheesy songs about lying in the grass with the sun on their backs, who am I to judge them? A critic? Apparently not. I should stick to writing songs.

How the Swimmer One album will fit into all this I have no idea. A minor footnote, possibly. I’m convinced we have in us a killer, experimental pop single that is both leftfield and massively popular, a Virginia Plain, or Enola Gay, or Heroes, or Personal Jesus, or West End Girls. I thought Largs Hum might be it. Maybe it could be, still, with money and momentum behind it, although the fact that even Vic Galloway, champion of all Scottish indie, thought it too leftfield for his Radio One show last year gave me a bit of a confidence crisis on that score. Maybe we were going for an Architecture & Morality vibe and we came up with a Dazzleships one. Damn it.

As alternatives, I currently have three very rough, unfinished song ideas‚ Time Capsule: Do Not Open Until Scotland is Completely Destroyed, Psychogeography and We Are All Refugees From Somewhere, all still to be properly explored‚ that I have high hopes for. If none of these works out, maybe there’s a girl band somewhere who we can write songs for.

Andrew

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I’ve been trying to make a cocktail for you called “The Dazzleship” but I’m struggling to find a way of mixing in the Speaking Clock with the Martini.
If you must write a song for a girl group,please let it be the one which consists of Laurie Anderson on Violin,Delia Derbyshire on Synths,Madonna on Drums and Bjork on Mike...(you Ok Mike??)

Posted by Logan 5 on 11/19 at 10:59 PM

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