 |
|
...and then there was Josef K, a four piece group who formed for a number of reasons. These are some of the reasons: Once we all sit around, in the distant pop future, finalising our lists, presenting the ultimate judgement to whoever's been waiting, deciding who the greatest rock group of all-time was with a name beginning with J, it wouldn't be as simple as just saying: Joy Division. There might be some people sitting around making noises on behalf of J.Geils Band, Jethro Tull, The Jam, Jane's Addiction, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Jesus and Mary Chain, Jefferson Airplane and Japan. But the true battle will be between Joy Division, who made two albums, and who then influenced so much of what was to come in a way that, say, Jethro Tull didn't, and Josef K, who made one album, twice-ish, and then influenced so much etc in a way that, say, J. Geils didn't.
It says something about Josef K, and this scratchy, catchy, twitchy, sublime music made in the early '80s by young men born in the mid '60s, by thoughtful, deprived '70s teenagers who went to school together in a Scottish city roughly assembled in the historical image of Edinburgh, that they will also seriously battle it in the pop group category with The Jackson 5. Some might say, hang on, The Jackson 5 had massive hits, a bigger history, a lead singer as grotesquely great as late Elvis and they danced in tight show business trousers as if reality might scream to a halt if they stopped. Josef K didn't have any hits, leaked into history if at all very slowly over such a long period of time that one century actually turned into another, and they danced in baggy Oxfam trousers as if any sign of sensual life in the hip and knee area would cause reality to dissolve. Josef K, though, can be seriously considered to be the greatest pop group of all-time beginning with a J, because of the way they organised a pop song and presented it with deadpan aggression and tender loving care, because of the way they were involved in inventing a kind of pop music best heard on the soon to be extinct seven inch single that was lavishly sombre and oddly high spirited. There needed to be gloomy remotely intimate glam pop group named after a character created by Franz Kafka who detuned their pained, pining guitars like The Velvet Underground, who screwed up dance beats with as much nimble knowingness and/or amateurish exuberance as Devo, who faced up to long lasting reality with as much sad, mad grace as Magazine, who got stuck into logic as defiantly as Pere Ubu, who had spent a lot of time watching Television and listening to the first six or seven songs written by Buzzcocks. The world needed a squeamish, jumpy quartet of po-faced, slapstick modish punk kids with concerns about their mental health who would leave behind a messy legacy, a near legend, a fragmented narrative, a bent brilliance, a throbbing rumour of false starts, different versions, other mixes, half songs, shadowy codas, rejected tracks, bits and pieces, lost meolodies, twisted torch, bitty thoughts, missed hits, different members, temporary aberrations, bad dreams, old classics, nervy remakes, buried treasure, Peel sessions, failed ambition, part time associations, sure things, collapsed potential, scattered lies, romantic vision, sentimental sickness, solo attempts and dynamic inadequacy. At the end of the 1970s, after punk rock had to some extent realigned British musical history and established urgent new priorities, there just had to be, somewhere at the rainy edge of reason, something that was christened The Sound of Young Scotland. Some of this Sound was being produced by a group who had finally found a name for themselves after previously being known as something so embarrassing it has been wiped from history - possibly Have You Banged Your Head Or Something - and after that as TV Art. The name TV Art gave the game away too quickly about the kind of music they listened to and what they wanted to sound like. They slipped to the enigmatic side of the road, just next to the gutter, and put on the mask of Josef K, the biggest star in Franz Kafka's funny, frightening world of indifference and hostility. They played desolate, fidgety songs by David Bowie, Talking Heads and Television that could have belonged to a dry, extravagant musical based on the definitively alienated life of Josef K, cerebral, visceral songs that were filtered through the newly minted post-punk attitude that cliches murdered inspiration. They took themselves very seriously whilst circling the idea that fun was a very peculiar notion. They wore suits, even ties - fastidiously peeling away from the leather, pins and gunk of the trad punk look - and their pale, trim and amused, vaguely guilt-ridden lead singer Paul Haig was a ghostly hint of a non-existent mod Samuel Beckett who played double bass in '60s Paris for a visiting Sonny Rollins. You could imagine the hemmed-in Josef K himself dressed like they were, with such dishevelled elegance, walking into a troubling movie about fame and photography directed by Visconti or Roeg. They became part of a fashionable scene, something they quite enjoyed, being discreet snobs, based in the refined, ancient Edinburgh that was all around them destined to last longer than they ever would. This new scene included groups as fabulous and as doomed as Josef K were, with names like Scars, The Associates. TV21 and The Fire Engines. They all made coarse, smart music full of angles, angst and attack that made it very clear they knew all about how the music of Bowie, Ferry, Reed, Cale, Eno, Byrne, Verlaine, Devoto and Shelley mixed in with their own dreams and desires. Some in this scene toasted Beefheart too. Josef K allegedly had a soft spot for Chic. Josef K, either because they were getting Television or Talking Heads wrong and accidentally arriving at a new point, or because they knew exactly where to spurt next, stretched the sound of their guitars until they trilled like bells and trembled for dear life. This was a guitar sound you could fall in love with because it sounded like a guitar sound that was itself in love. They shaped the bass and drums, using time, space and whatever they were looking at, into a kind of spare, skinny discount funk that possibly represented a fundamental search for pleasure. What completed what in hindsight has been called a formula, and is something that ever since other novel bands and groups have if not copied then certainly have been very aware of, were the vocals. The voice, coming out of the slim, vain Paul Haig, hung light, white and heavy somewhere between the monotonous and the emotional. Here was style and no mistake. He lived in a dark place into which an uncertain sun never entered. Seeing things very clearly which were not true. Too bored to be lonely. What I loved about Haig and his voice as soon as I heard it, as the '70s flowed into the '80s, on a seven inch single, spinning in classic circles, there it was, his voice, calmly making curious sense with such tender intensity, was that it sounded exactly like the singer in a group called Josef K should sound. It sounded like Josef K himself would sound if he slipped into this world, and lurked behind the eerie modernised disguise of a pop song. He sounded like someone intensely concerned with language, which instantly reminded me of another favourite of mine - Howard Devoto, whose intentions, wonderfully, were never simple. Haig clearly shared the same commitment to detachment, yet obviously stood for life, for better or worse. He was having the private time of his life, living in a world of imagination, where everything is related, everything counts and truth is accessible. This is what I thought hearing his voice singing pop songs that, wonderfully, didn't look on the bright side. They were The Sound of Young Scotland, together with Orange Juice, whose guitars were also radiant and brittle, whose rhythms were also scrubbed and blunt, whose vocals were also proud and serious, but who sounded like another group completely. A touch more rational. A little less glaring. A splinter less uptight. Lacking, perhaps, the art for art's sake element that some of us swooned over, and which we see explicitly echoed in the way, say, the popular Franz Ferdinand express themselves. JK and OJ were both operating high above England, tense and certain, cool and fraught, closer in a way to New York and Detroit than London. They were on the cusp between the '70s and the '80s, closer in a way to the '60s and the 21st Century. They were describing that feeling you get when you realise that you are not as such living a charmed life. Josef K said, to me, in fact, as an NME journalist who had heard them on seven inch single and the John Peel show, in an interview that took place in the middle of the year 1980, which was neither the '70s nor the '80s, they said, putting on an act, believing it, it was something to say, not believing it, showing off to the journalist, it was their first, second, third ever interview, they were shy, they were drinking, a little, they were in London, a long way from home, they said, we'll make one album, and then we'll stop, that'll be the adventure, that'll be our show, our grand gesture. They believed it, and didn't really believe it. It was something to say, it made them look uncompromising, and in control. Their own men. In their own special time. Who would know when it was time to quit. Who would know when they had nothing else new and astounding to report. It was the attitude such bands had then. It wasn't a career. It wasn't a business. It wasn't worked out. It wasn't, as such, planned. It was for, in a manner of speaking, real. Josef K didn't plan it, but it turned out like they threatened, at the young, naive beginning, when they were establishing their credentials and boasting about their purity, and they only made one album. They sort of made it twice. Don't ask. They lasted about as long as one of their songs. It's a mad world, funny how things turn out, what shall we do now, who's in control, and why do things happen the way that they do, as Josef K said, one way or another, in their short, smiling and frowning songs. Songs sung by the man, the suave, slightly sinister Paul Haig, who we thought, as the '80s began, would become so famous the whole world would actually know him as Josef K. Michael Jackson was all over the '80s. Duran Duran dominated the decade, which for those of us who liked to wander down cobbled streets hand in hand with the wrongly accused Josef K was a disgraceful injustice. Duran Duran were cockroaches with credit cards. Josef K were angels with accents. Nearly everyone ignored Josef K, including ultimately themselves. But they were right all along. They wrote prickly, plaintive pop songs that were the sound of depressed young men having lethargic tantrums about the mysteriously inevitable everyday. They added something new to the possibility of pop, combining that which needs to be leisurely interpreted with a quick, sensational celebration of the moment that just needs to be taken, prized, and thrown away. They were, as much as The Jackson 5, as much as, Joy Division, in their own cajoling, quizzical way, showmen. They were showmen who specialised in the metaphysical. Showmen with real crazy nerve laughing until they cried until they laughed until they disappeared into the shadows wondering what on earth was going to happen next. Paul
Morley, July 2006 |
|
