ans of the NEW and NOW, please forgive me. There's no new release to hang this article on as a consumer announcement, no new nostalgia trip to accompany the exhumation/rehabilitation of another back-catalog. I put off writing this article for months now because of my own inescapable burn out with the newfound public fascination with post-punk. All this time passed and it shows little signs of abating. DFA, nu-electro, the revival of that old critical black magic (scything, angular, danceable)...the late 70s/early 80s are IN!, have been in, will continue to be in (will they ever be out?...surely an odd turn of events when one surveys the landscape of the American indie early 90s where hordes of shaggy young men clutching Lubricated Goat 7"s howled about the horror that was the 80s, the synthesizer, the 12" dance mix.)


It's a cliché even this soon to say that this nu-p-punk revival has focused on the most easily accessed totems from the "original" era: death disco snare patterns, early MTV blue screen & mascara irony, the painful pull of that warm analogue nostalgia. But so what? What's so wrong with a little cheap glamour, a little easy retro, a few crassly tossed about signifiers with little actually being signified? A: absolutely nothing. This is at least one way - albeit a rather easy and banal one - to read "pop" as a whole. And surely, even with exhaustion factored in, ZTT/Ze Records/Depeche/Pop Group riffs are certainly fresher than yet another garage rock go-round.


But, even with this respect/admiration/costume play/lip-service paid to artists previously thought consigned to the dustbin of pop history, where does this new round of myth raiding leave them in the cold actual glare of 2002? Ask Afrikaa Bambaataa, playing an MTV dance show to a couple hundred (and a couple hundred thousand around the world) kids asking who the fuck these old guys in fringe vests were and where is Paul Oakenfold already? Ask ESG who have been coaxed out of a long-suffering silence wherein they witnessed their earliest JB’s-as-proto-house records being sampled almost as much as JB himself only to end in dwindling returns for both sampler and sampled. Ask The Human League, who’s Secrets was one of the best records of 2001, proving they were still most adept at the world they had so completely changed, even as they were eclipsed by their sad, ugly children.


Ask Howard Devoto.


Howard Traford works as a photo archivist in London. He vacated his most well known vehicle, The Buzzcocks, twenty-five years ago, having brokered punk rock from the London scenesters into the north and the midlands and all the little squat shrub and dirt suburbs in-between. The itchy, trebly intensity of his first – and only – EP with the Buzzcocks, Spiral Scratch, helped to codify the DIY-or-die fervor that resulted in so many scrappy English 7”s over the next few years. (As The Desperate Bicycles said, it was cheap and easy: go and do it. The Buzzcocks showed many the way, the light, the truth, before going on to even greater success as the Pete Shelley fronted pop band that produced their best work.) He broke up Magazine, his second most well known vehicle, twenty-one years ago, a year after their second and last single to chart (at #54) seemed as good as place as any. To say nothing else of the man, if he took nothing else from “punk rock”, he knows how to not let moss grow on his projects. Like Burrough’s Nova Police, he does his work and goes. Aside from a brief stint in/as Luxuria in the late 80s, Devoto’s public silence has been total over the last decade. Howard Devoto is a photo archivist in London.


In March of last year, far further out of nowhere than the Human League (who have soldiered on unbrowed to one degree or another for the last twenty-odd years), Devoto reunited with Shelley (as, appropriately enough, DevotoShelley) to record and release BuzzKunst. Shelley had been touring the zombie version of the Buzzcocks on the Warped Tour hoofer circuit for the usual, unknowable reasons. (It would be rude and presumptuous to claim it was money or feelings of inadequacy or deferred fame via Billy Joe Armstrong, so we won’t.) In-between his canonization as shifty godfather of upbeat soundtrack pop punk, Shelley had recorded a few solo albums in the early-mid 80s, luckily falling in love with synth-pop just as the entryist ethos of New Pop was killing the dour, raincoat-ed post-punk (all punk for that matter, besides hardcore boors so “underground” they couldn’t hope to chart even if they pulled their heads from each others asses long enough to notice the march of larger culture) generation dead. The music on Buzzkunst (composed by Shelley, largely on computer) was occasionally energetic, occasionally bland electronica cut with the mirrored coffee table edge that Adult. or Ectomorph (or The League) has clearly proven to be able to work more convincingly in the 21st century.


Devoto, though, dripped with the same loathing – spewed upon all heads, not the least of which was his own – he had in his prime. It was as if 1980 Howard Devoto had been pickled in a slow process, and stored in a mason jar in the post-punk basement. This followed a 2000 Magazine box set, Maybe It’s Right To Be Nervous Now (a maddening and impossible document which traded the definitive moments for a clutch of outtakes, remixes, Peel Sessions, and demos), and a new best-of, Where The Power Is (while, oddly, the better, earlier best of Rays and Hails remains in print), released in the same year to minor acclaim if basic indifference. Obviously there was some sort of market for this sort of thing (after all, how else can we really gauge “importance” in 2002?), so why was it falling on deaf ears? In a sense it’s just another fold in Howard Devoto’s public legacy of attempted disappearance, a man who truly follows the dictum: “sometimes, if you do your work well enough, no one will think you’ve done anything at all.”


It’s hard to imagine the reaction, even within the band, to Devoto leaving the Buzzcocks in January 1977. It was clear to everyone that big things were in the air. Punk was still “hot,” and the weekly press was equally hot to begin acknowledging the sometimes odd, occasionally incomprehensible, but undeniably vital new talent that was bubbling up in places other than the capital. Moreover, the record companies realized that England’s Shit could be shined up a little, given a little drab, boxy production, and marketed to every punter within earshot. (Even broken in America with the right sales pitch.) Even better then: the Buzzcocks were neither odd nor incomprehensible; even under Devoto they couldn’t hide the pop band at their heart. Devoto was gone a month before Spiral Scratch was even released in February ’77 (the Buzzcocks signed to United Artists that Novemeber.) Devoto formed Magazine in April. By the end of ’77, Never Mind the Bollocks was released to a confused if ravenous audience (“of course the real fans aren’t buying it.” McClaren crowed in a statement mobius strip perfect in its illogic) as the Pistols were imploding in one of their then typical gross public displays that had since lost any glamour. Magazine had already been signed to Virgin Records, a benefit of Devotos growing underground reputation, the medias as yet unburnt fascination with all things punk, and their early live shows. But, tellingly, Magazine couldn’t even hold their original lineup for the first recording; original keyboardist Bob Dickinson had left before the band was signed. The rest of the band - Devoto, guitarist John McGeoch, bassist Barry Adamson, drummer Martin Jackson – went into the studio.


Many people call Magazine’s 1978 debut single “Shot By Both Sides” the first post-punk record. (I don’t think it is, but choosing the point at which punk became post-punk is as impossible as figuring when funk/soul became disco or rock itself blurred into punk. No matter what established date/moment is settled on, there’ll always be some obscure Swedish 45 from ’67 that comes to light, in which wights with fuzzboxes “birth punk rock.” This is both immensely frustrating and as it should be.) More than anything, “Shot By Both Sides” sounds like the Buzzcocks song it was written as, but soured- the nervous energy of “Boredom” (surely one of the 10 greatest singles of the 70s) tuned to the frequency of a speedhead’s twitchy, fruitless anticipation. It also sounds little like Magazine’s other recordings, vitriolic but too linear, as Jon Savage said about Never Mind the Bollocks, “airless, no spaces in the music.”


Magazine were inspired by Roxy Music, the melodic side of Krautrock, and the icier side of funk and soul, but, like all post-punk (which should be obvious in name but is often overlooked in the frothing rhetoric “completing failed musical revolutions”), it took punk rock to unlock the secret usefulness of those forebears and rebuild them, to make Magazine “more” than art-rock. (Whatever that means.) By the time they had recorded their first album, Real Life, their new (and far more active) keyboardist Dave Formula represented most clearly the slapped white glove in the face of the boors who bottled Suicide off the stage while opening for The Clash in the same year. (One cannot overstate the loathing the oi-boys had for the synthesizer or anything that remotely stank of “art” & a return to proggish values. If you want any proof of the kind of impenetrable cul de sac punk orthodoxy can build, check out a MaximumRock&Roll reviews page, reactionaries who harbor this baseless resentment and silly, sullen fear to this day.) Real Life, was anchored on one end by “Shot By Both Sides” for the punk songs (“Recoil”) and the slate and marble euphoria of “The Light Pours Out of Me” on the other (the more expansive direction they were already well into: “Definitive Gaze,” “Motorcade,” “Parade.)


Listen to the opening of “Definitive Gaze,” a shuffling dance party for vampires with triumphant piano fills and keyboards that swirl like black toffee. “So this is real life/you’re telling me/that everything/is where it ought to be,” Devoto whinnies. The song is cartoon goth, psychedelia with a funky ass drum break half-way through. Then it shudders deep in its guts, piano harmonics splintering like Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane,” before building again to its final, cheesy, glorious peak. “Motorcade” sends shivering whispers of Devoto’s vocal multi-tracking deliriously around himself, before it explodes in raunchy glam metal. “In the back of his car,” and then a skidding guitar, “the man in the center of the motorcade/has learned to tie his boots.” As oblique and hilariously harrowing as the Associates’ “White Car In Germany,” pounding drums subverted by the swirl of harpsichord (or its synthesized equivalent.) And last but hardly least, “The Light Pours Out of Me", opening with a drumbeat that sounds uncannily (unintentional homage?...well, maybe because they didn’t mention it in interviews...) like The Bay City Roller’s “Saturday Night.” A buzzing bass and Devoto: “time craaaaawls.” For a second it does, before the briefest glimpse of the title’s light as the music rises. Another crawl over broken glass and guitar, stately restraint obviously deferring some ecstatic release through base penitence. And then it comes: McGeoch rips a solo so gaseous and incandescent that it sounds like Phil Manzanera stumbling drunk and delirious through an early morning fog bank.


By 1979, Manchester was now post-punk ground zero (at least outside The Capital, or maybe more accurately, Ladbroke Grove.) Soon to be it’s most famous (and famously short lived) son, Ian Curtis was as much a child of the Buzzcocks (who’s success had allowed Warsaw to even form as anything other than a garage band) as Nico or Iggy Pop. Joy Division had released Unknown Pleasures in May/June of 1979 (although their success would really be cemented with the release of the “Transmission” single in October.) It must have been a chilly spring in Britain that year. Without getting into tired “grim oop north” clichés, there was now a crepuscular, cold, and “atmospheric” slant to Magazine’s rock that had only been alluded to previously. This Heat recorded in an actual (and abandoned) meat locker, but Magazine’s second album, Secondhand Daylight released in March of ‘79, sounds as if freezer units fired on full blast the entire time. Formula’s keyboards dance like ice crystals forming in suspension. (Perhaps too often; if there’s one glaring criticism of the record, it’s that Formula buries the music in an impenetrable snowdrift of piled keys.) It also contains Magazine’s peak, in “Permafrost.” Over backing from the band that burns slow and orange like dying embers, Devoto purrs “I will drug you and fuck you, on the permafrost.” It’s at once silly (that “fuck” sitting fat and ridiculous and obscene in the middle of the line), and deeply unsettling, perhaps the only time Devoto sounds dangerous on record to anyone but himself.


Thematically, the record could be called Singles Going Insane, the coy teenage lovers discourse of the Buzzcocks blown monstrous and hurtful and ugly. (Like real love, naturally.) In “Permafrost”, Devoto’s nameless, faceless characters circle each other with the depressing regularity of city buses, crossing paths but never (thankfully?) colliding. It’s an apt metaphor for the album as a whole. On “Back To Nature”, he sings: “And I'm telling you/I know what you've been going through/In my heart of hearts/When I was here/And you were there/Nothing was between us.” Something impossible has come between them, however; again and again throughout the record human contact is confirmed as impossible or, worse, achievable only to dissolve in mutual loathing or apathy. “'I will love you when the devil is blind’/I wanted your heart/you didn’t want mine.” There’s a definite cold war paranoia running throughout (as was common, consciously or not, at the time.) The opener, “Feed The Enemy”, opens with a minute and a half of frostbitten synth and keyboard drone, early morning on the Odessa Steppes. The lyrics hint at action taking place in a foreign police state, what with talk of “over the border” and “border guards.” When the closest thing you have to a single is called “Rhythm of Cruelty” and features lines such as “it even hurts when I scream,” it should be clear that you have not released the feel-good hit of the year. (In a year that wasn’t lacking for depressingly realist/sardonic “entertainment”: Unknown Pleasures, Metal Box/Second Edition, Entertainment!, Fear of Music, 154, etc.)


By 1980, Magazine’s fame had allowed them to tour extensively, including the US in ‘79. Their third album, The Correct Use of Soap, (and perhaps success) thawed the chill to some extent. The rhythms are impish, with splashes of color accent other than blue, black, and gray. (Odd, when one considers that this is the record they got Joy Division’s monomaniacal mad scientist Martin Hamnett to record.) Formula recedes back into the mix, and the real stars – aside from Devoto – are the rhythm section. The opener, “Because You’re Frightened”, is Magazine’s “Do The Strand”, a consolidation of everything they did well injected into the straightjacket fit of a pop song. The guitar stoopidly chugs while Formula pounds out Little Richard by way of Brian Eno piano. You might be forgiven for thinking that “You Never Knew Me” was Elton John in low-schmaltz mode. “I Want To Burn Again” opens with acoustic jangle and Devoto’s best Ferry impression, before a descending synth and drum line transforms it into piano-led adult contemporary, say, David Gray if his soul had been turned inside out to reveal the blackness and evil we all know coats his guts.


Devoto, while not as immediately magnetizing as John Lydon, certainly matched him pound for pound in contemptuousness. Not a pleasant chap, clearly. Witness, for example, the opening to “A Song From Under The Floorboards”:


I am angry, I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it

This is a song from under the floorboards
This is a song from where the wall is cracked
My force of habit, I am an insect
I have to confess I'm proud as hell of that fact


Unlike the anguished delivery of Secondhand Daylight or the snarl of Real Life, Devoto sounds almost amused here. Jaunty, even. Something was changing within Magazine. It was the dawning of a new era. In 1979 the Buggles went number one with their cheeky, Supertramp-meets-Sparks “Video Killed The Radio Star.” Two years later, as all know, it ushered in MTV. A year after that the Buggles’ Trevor Horn would produce ABC’s Lexicon Of Love, a record that would wipe the now gauche Jeremiahs of Rough Trade from the public consciousness for good. (Or so everyone thought; history has a way of undoing such Final Solutions in its own time.)


A live album, Play released at the end of 1980, should have been the worrying stop-gap warning sign it always is for ostensible non-rockists turning into “rock institutions.” (Cf. PIL’s Paris Au Printempts.) Internal tensions were mounting. (By 1981, Devoto and Adamson were the only two original members remaining, McGeoch having left in 1980 to join Siouxie and the Banshees who he had been moonlighting with, first replaced with Robin Simon and soon after that Bob Mandelson. Jackson had been replaced by John Doyle in 1979.) The ragtag later Magazine reconvened to record Magic, Murder and the Weather in 1981. Not a bad album per se (it hints at a more streamlined new wave/new pop direction Magazine could have taken in an alternate universe), but the moment had clearly passed (instead of seizing on this new wave out – an out they had helped to build in the first place – Magazine went even more obscurantist than before [read: too much Formula].) Devoto, bored or frustrated or both, left to release a solo album a few years later, Jerky Versions of the Dream. Perhaps taking a missed lesson from the Velvet Underground, Magazine - leader-less - broke up.


In his sprawling, 9 page survey of the 1978-81 post-punk scene in December 2001’s Uncut, Simon Reynolds suspiciously omits Magazine. Despite their influence on songwriters as disparate as Thom Yorke and Momus, Devoto’s songs are largely overlooked in surveys of turn of the decade rock and pop. Magazine remain post-punk's forgotten group because they remain inassimilable, even with the voracious appetites of today’s market. Unlike the shuffling, gray white funk made by bands like The Delta 5 and A Certain Ratio, they were only ever “funky” in the most nominal sense. (Not as funky as A Certain Ratio...that sounds more damning than intended. But listen to the way they turn Sly Stone’s “Thank You (Falllettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” – itself not exactly a romp – into sleazy, nonstop-Teutonic-cabaret music.) They had their first hit with a barnstorming punk chugger, but, in the final analysis, they were practically a prog band for chrissakes, as evidenced by the times when you want to chop off Formula’s overly busy, Jools Holland-style hands. Unlike the versions of “prog” as championed by bands like This Heat, they were ultimately too tame, too archaic in their handling of rock history to be admitted to the anti-rockist, deconstructionist hall of fame. They were thorny, yes, and at times their sound is almost as fractured and unknitting as early Scritti Politti. But they also traded in melody and understood a pop hook, if only to know when not to use one.


I wonder what I’m affirming by calling Howard Devoto a “hero.” He would likely laugh behind my back, if not to my face, if told. (Despite my reservations above, he’s actually a very nice man by all accounts.) There is more than a little of the stink of wallowing in ones own depression by getting off on the witty loathing of another. Plenty of people, of course, take getting off on the loathing of another as the basis for their very sub-culture: Magazine originally came to my attention by showing up on Dark Pleasures, a collection of early 80s goth classics that my ex-girlfriend bought while we were visiting her parents in Ohio. (It also, more improbably, featured Wire. But Magazine’s inclusion isn’t that odd; they were as much proto-new romantic, proto-goth as post-punk. McGeoch, Adamson, and Formula were in Visage, for god sakes!) Unlike most goth I know there’s very little camp about Magazine. (That nonstop-Teutonic-cabaret music described above just couldn’t compete with the fabulous coked-out version Soft Cell would perfect a year later.) It’s earnest, sometimes to a fault, and like most earnest music (emo, anyone?), it doesn’t have the masques (or the eyeliner) to hide behind when someone calls it on its bullshit and excesses. There’s nothing wrong with a little cheap catharsis, either (again, cf. emo and goth), but basing your life around it seems self-flagellating and anti-pop at best.


This earnestness doesn’t make Magazine better than Visage or Soft Cell (or even Fischerspooner.) But it does go a long way to why I love Magazine rather than “like” them; it’s certainly not a discography I dip into every day. This is angry, violent music. Their vision of humanity isn’t sugarcoated only because it’s not quite hopeless, because at the other end of that realization = suicide, and Devoto boils too hot to ever burn out like that. Magazine just isn’t very likeable by and large. The bleak earnestness is also oddly what connects Magazine to the camp of Visage (and even Fischerspooner); they were not afraid to look like morons, fall flat on their faces in public, act the fool, prance like jibbering bald insects. Their earnestness is just another form of high-concept play is just another way of wanting/needing to be heard/noticed: “Howard Devoto says everything I feel but could never say in public.” Also, just for fairness sake, Devoto never wrapped himself in tin foil and lipstick, but, blank on the page, the lyrics from “The Garden” could easily be heard out of an “ironic” vocoder at either end of the last two decades:


I'm in a web
I TASTED BLOOD IN THE GARDEN
I'm in a maze, I'm in a maze
SO THEY HUNG SCIENCE IN MY HEART
I'm in a web
"YOUR PHONEY GHOSTS WENT BY" I LAUGHED
I'm in a maze, I'm in a maze
"I DRAGGED THEM OUT OF THE DARK"
I'm open wide
I PRESSED THORNS INTO MY FLESH
I am awake, I am awake
MY EYES LOOK LIKE CLAWS
I'm open wide
MAN EATING MAN EATING MAN
I am awake, I am awake
MY SICKNESS IS MY REWARD


Bands with an all-encompassing, deeply personal/hermetic/“difficult” vision are actually easier to love than those - like Daft Punk or Fischerspooner – who purportedly shuck earnestness for masques, at least in our irony encrusted, reality-centric rock-crit bound culture that privileges “realness” over everything else. (Taking sides: Wilco vs. Basement Jaxx, or more bluntly, Americana vs. Eurotrash.) But too much reality is as frightening as too little (both unsettle the gentle balances rock music has settled into over the last dozen years.) There’d be little place for a band like Magazine today. Pop music is brighter, more vital in 1997-2002 than any time I can remember (having grown up in the run-out grooves of the late 80s and the comparative drought of the early alt-rock 90s.) Really, it’s just like 1982 all over again: wet and shiny, thoroughly modernist electronic pop barnstorming the charts. And it unsettles for the same reasons it did then: a good beat, a hook every dozen bars, a memorable chorus and a flash image are once again more important than Proper Songwriting. While the second tier is filled with old faces (Sonic Youth, U2, REM, Radiohead who really shouldn’t be here because of their own – admittedly oblique – commitment to the modernist cause) and dull & worthy arena rockers (Coldplay, et al.)


Meanwhile everyone on the indie message boards, everyone I know who still harbors any remaining love for music made with guitars is clambering for a nu-“Spiral Scratch” revolution. (This is an evergreen wish; the smart – including yours truly – have long since contented themselves with dance and hip-hop and pop and the furthest fringes of “guitar rock.” You know, where the money is.) Rather than another false dawn of nu-punk, however, Magazine suggests a little used third route. “Adult” in pop is typically shorthand for the worst possible blandness, dryness, overly demonstrative emoting, 10-cent word Dylan grabs, “Fire and Rain” balladeering, the tomb of respectability and grace. But it can also mean evasion and worry and fear and sarcasm and loathing and depth of blackness and regret and hope and all the other things adults feel once the knowledge that one doesn’t live forever sets in, wriggles into guts and hearts, and is lived with, breathed, made musical. Dull truisms such as the one that Magazine is one of the few successful marriages of rock and adult concern (largely because one usually precludes the other) do little more than make a listener feel better about themselves for listening to them rather than James Taylor or Bruce Springsteen.


Ian Penman once opined that the real mark of maturity in music might be the ability to offer up a convincingly joyous song. I’m not sure I necessarily agree (in the same review he uses this to damn Radiohead he praises PIL, hardly sunshine and lollipops), but there’s a bit of truth there, I’ll grant. Maybe the real mark of maturity in music might be the ability to suggest a joyous song. Or maybe just to suggest in their way that suicide is not a solution, without resorting to that old Nietzschean nugget or Walkin On Sunshine saccharine self-help. So maybe Howard Devoto is my hero because he keeps me from offing myself. Good enough, tonight.





(Thanks to the Magazine/Devoto website, www.shotbybothsides.com, for transcripts of lyrics and interviews.)