anti-theatricality in rock (Coleman's Disgustard)

"The Clash were, I am fairly sure, playing the Apollo — so if it was the Apollo... you were only too aware of the way this small but potent punkish enterprise was scaling itself up rapidly and quite aggressively. The group were evidently no longer an organic continuation of their scrotty urban environment, existing somehow independently of the cogs and flywheels of an egregious industrial machine — and if you are younger than sixty you will have to take it on trust that there once was a time when rock groups really did appear to operate independently of good industrial practice, represented, regulated and approved by that chafing machine.

"You yourself rocked up in all your teased out tousle to the chipped-Deco embrace of the Apollo’s mighty frontage, highly conscious that this was rather more than a halfway house to the big time, and once inside and facing the framing device of a hefty proscenium arch, you were instantly visited by the sense that the Clash, this small aggregation of individuals in military trousers was no longer a socio-political pustule exploding with electric guitars; this was a show. Something that had been put on for an audience by professionals who know how things work. Showbusiness. A put-on, not a turn-on.

"I have no other way of addressing this strange perceptual contortion except to say, in a self-reproaching tone, that I loved the Clash at the time. I did not regard them as fakes or put-ons. They obviously were not fakes or put-ons. And yet I remember finding myself unable to swallow the Kool-Aid that night.

"I fear I may have made too much afterwards of Mick Jones in his white jumpsuit (white!) and the way he appeared to turn a bright eye on himself, as all rock guitarists have done since a shapely Fender was first slung over a young person’s shoulder, observing themselves almost as the Method actor does, from the inside, looking out from within, and then back at his or her outer form with a critical edge on their gaze — as if their inner selves must seal the deal formally with the outer cladding in getting the look, the moves, the face, the grace, la figura, the right stuff right. The ideal projection of self. Mick Jones was getting very good at this kind of eyeless self-scrutiny and projection and I thought it was very bad form. I may have even used the word “narcissistic” when among friends. And I’d have then probably punched you if you’d said to me that I was carrying my responsibilities as a paying member of the audience a smidge too far. No, of course I wouldn’t. But I would have probably fantasised about punching you."

Nick Coleman, at his Substack, which is full of interesting musings about music and the roles it's played in his life. The post is titled "the death of rock: and it was on my watch!"

I think what I would say about the Clash is that if you were to look, today, at footage of them from even their very earliest days, the elements of theatre would scream out to your eyes - there's a rhetoric of bodily movements, from the way Simonon held his bass and pumped his leg, to the quasi-military formation of the players on stage, to how Strummer is projecting towards the mic and the audience. 

Well, looky here, footage of The Clash at the Manchester Apollo, two years before Coleman saw them at the same venue. 

Yet it must have seemed at the time to have a quality of unvarnished urgency that felt like Reality arriving on the stage, instantly outmoding the Old Wave ways of going about rock performance. 

But I mean, quite quite early on they started having backdrops of photos taken on the war torn streets of Belfast, right? So that's already in the realm of theatre, even as it projects towards the Real and tries to bring it onstage with them.  

Jump to 4.46 for a satirical scene from Rock Follies in which Old Waver Stevie Streeter tries to go New Wave with staged urban decay. Tim Curry in top form!

anti-theatricality in rock (and a little bit of pro-theatricality in rock)

(from Viv Albertine's memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music, Boys. Boys. Boys.)

 

Dennis DeYoung of Styx, early '80s NME interview

Oooh talking about Mr Roboto's

Numan actually had giant robots on stage in one of his superstar-era tours, didn't he? 

fragments from Rip It Up and the research: 

Critics, possibly disconcerted by the way Numan had bypassed the music press en route to the top of the charts, unjustly pegged him as a Bowie Xerox. They sourced Numan’s image in Bowie’s aristocratic alien from The Man Who Fell To Earth and his sound in Low. But what he actually derived from Bowie was less specific: the art of creative synthesis, or as Numan put it with characteristic and admirable frankness, “plagiarism”--weaving together an original identity out of pilfered bits and bobs. He also inherited glam rock’s penchant for theatre and spectacle. Punk’s “anti-hero thing” and back-to-basics simplicity were   “against everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” Numan told NME. He didn’t believe in “being the same as the audience”;  he liked distance, a literally physical gulf between the stage and the crowd. His tours featured stunning lighting, set design, and even robots. “Showbiz for showbiz’s sake more than anything…”  Numan told Sounds. ”I think I’m just taking it back to cabaret.” 

He even does a version of ‘On Broadway’ in his set. 

Numan doesn’t like venues without seats - likes a gulf between stage and audience, an orchestra pit preferably.

Numan on leaving behind punk:

“The anti-hero thing could never happen because this country has always had the heroes, it always will do-- I think it’s a very English thing to make heroes… I never agreed with coming on and being the same as the audience, I never liked that side of it.” 

“I very rarely write about ordinary things”

“I don’t see the point in singing about things which are happening every day. I don’t want to go out and listen to a bloke prattling on about how terrible it is living on the dole”

"I don't mind contrived things. cos if something's contrived it shows that someone has gone out and thought about something and worked for it.... Commendable, isn't it?"

anti-theatricality in rock (slight return's slight return)

 Continuing from the previous post.... 

The title of Paul Stump's excellent book on prog rock The Music's All That Matters captures the idea expressed in the anti-punk letter to NME - - we don't put on a show, we leave that to commercial bands, we don't go in for image, we're all about the music and nothing but the music... 

But then again, one of the things that prog bands, or some prog bands, explored was, well, showmanship: theatrics, costumes....  Jethro Tull and Gabriel-era Genesis being only two of the most glaring examples 

There is a good bit in Philip Auslander's excellent, unusually-angled study Performing Glam Rock, where he contrasts the hairy Underground's gestural language onstage with glam performers.  He talks about how your prog or blues-heavy or acid-jam type band would project inwardness - as if totally absorbed in making music. Minimal eye contact with the audience, no banter....  at times almost acting as if the audience wasn't there. Eyes closed. No strutting or guitar poses or even much moving about on the stage.  A fairly static, concentrating-hard-on-the-job sort of stage presence. Distance maintained between rock-as-art and pop-as-entertainment.

Interestingly, Wendy Fonarow in her excellent anthropological study of British indie rock Empire of Dirt talks about "gaze strategies" - how bands similarly project inwardness,  a "lost in music" aura, almost obliviousness to the audience's existence.  This suggests that as much as it comes from shyness and from the need to look down at all those foot pedals, the gazing at shoes is an instinctive re-irruption of  the Underground era approach of anti-performance.

Slowdive did talk about how they were more influenced by Pink Floyd than Sex Pistols. 

anti-theatricality in rock (slight return)

 

New Musical Express, 

December 18 1976 

The title of Paul Stump's excellent book on prog rock captures this idea - we're all about the music, we don't put on a show, we leave that to commercial bands - but then again, one of the things that prog bands, or some prog bands, explored was, well, showmanship: theatrics, costumes....   Jethro Tull and Gabriel-era Genesis being only two of the most blatant examples 

There is a good bit in Philip Auslander's excellent, unusually-angled study of glam rock, Performing Glam Rock, where he contrasts the Underground's gestural language onstage with glam artists.  He talks about your prog or blues-heavy or acid-jam type band would project inwardness - as if totally absorbed in making music. No eye contact with the audience, no banter....  almost acting as if the audience wasn't there. Eyes closed often. No strutting or guitar poses or moving about.  A fairly static, perpendicular, concentrating-hard sort of stage presence. 

Interestingly Wendy Fonarow in her excellent study of British indie rock Empire of Dirt talks about "gaze strategies" - how bands, particularly shoegazey bands, similarly project inwardness, "lost in music", an obliviousness to the audience's existence.  This suggests that as much as it comes from shyness and from the need to look down at all those foot peals, the gazing at shoes is an instinctive re-irruption of an Underground era mode of anti-performance.

Slowdive did talk about they were more influenced by Pink Floyd than Sex Pistols. 

anti-theatricality and rock (slight return)

Greil Marcus on Graham Parker and the Rumour's The Parkerilla, Rolling Stone, June 15 1978 

“They think it’s a show,” English rocker Graham Parker muttered one night last fall, coming off a stage in Phoenix. “But it isn’t a show, it’s real!” The Parkerilla, three sides of live material (side four is taken up by a new studio version of “Don’t Ask Me Questions,” reduced to just under four minutes for the benefit of AM radio), is a show.

We find Parker and the Rumour, who at their best greet a crowd like a storm warning, on something less than a hot night; rather, they’re very competent, which is to say that The Parkerilla is close to pointless. Parker and the Rumour don’t take off from their three previous albums, they clone them: the live version of “Don’t Ask Me Questions” offered here misses the original studio take by a mere six seconds.

The only vital differences are negative. Stephen Goulding, whose drumming on Howlin Wind and Heat Treatment is so clean and full of snap, overplays constantly; like a nightclub hack who can underline a phrase only with his cymbals, he sounds cloddish. Bob Andrews’ cute, emotionally barren piano capsizes the “Maggie May” romanticism of “Gypsy Blood.” A certain amount of bullshit has crept into Parker’s singing: he pumps up “Don’t Ask Me Questions” with melodrama, and the natural intensity of his attack sometimes crosses the line into ersatz hysteria. You can hear him pushing.

What truly makes this record a waste of time is the song selection. Parker’s last album, Stick to Me, was miserably recorded, virtually snuffing the power of the three blazing, intelligent tunes he then proceeded to rescue on-stage: “Stick to Me,” “Soul on Ice” and the magnificent “Thunder and Rain.” None is included on The Parkerilla—nor is “Pouring It All Out,” as perfect a rock & roll song as anyone has written in the Seventies, and the essence of Parker’s live dose of “reality.” What we get instead are seven and a half minutes of "The Heat in Harlem,” a cliched fantasy that only Carmen Miranda could save. And so on.

Parker’s career has clearly hit a snag, both in terms of commercial failure—FM airplay hasn’t sold his records—and in terms of his ideas of what to do about it. The enormous critical support he received for his first two albums—all of it deserved—has been pretty much transferred to Elvis Costello, who has a far more distinct (i.e., marketable and easy-to-write-about) image, and who projects the pop (as opposed to Parker’s personal) obsessiveness that critics, pop obsessives themselves, respond to most deeply. It’s not inconceivable that a nicely titled live album could put Parker across. Such artifacts have worked for other stalled performers recently: Peter Frampton, of course, but also Bob Seger, with whom Graham Parker has a lot in common. Vegas, however, is not posting any odds.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Laurence Olivier said, ‘What is acting but lying, and what is good lying but convincing lying?’ I don’t want to look at acting that way. Why not experiment?”  - Nicholas Cage, to New York Times. 

anti-theatricality and rock (part 2)

Nik Cohn, from Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, on early English "rock and roller" Tommy Steele (and his manager John Kennedy)

Not that it interferes with the SUPREME GREATNESS of Awop (rereading it at the moment, must be the fourth go-round) but Cohn constantly flip-flops around this opposition "rock and roll" versus "showbiz". Or at least it's a kind of wobbly, reversible ideologeme throughout the book...    After all, it's clear that nearly all the early rockers were showmen with routines and shticks and stage stunts...  they were acts as much as they were raw realness,  rehearsed as much as "wild". Elvis was a fan of Dean Martin (and as the journey of "Hound Dog" indicates, in practice it's hard to separate the blues and Vegas-style variety).  And then there's P.J. Proby - just about Cohn's favorite performer, a talismanic figure - who's the most outrageous ham ever.   

Barney Hoskyns on The Fall and Mark E. Smith, sideswiping punk as just another form of showbiz, instantly recuperated by the Spectacle  

 

Andy Gill on The Birthday Party

The idea that there is no theatre in the Birthday Party seems misplaced.

Perhaps it is the theatre of cruelty - Artaud-rock versus art-rock

But "Nick the Stripper" is a self-lacerating satire of the exhibitionism involved in getting onstage, as far as I can work it out.

And later Cave would be quite interested in the idea of the Performer, the Showman - e.g. "The Singer"

Hadn't realised his Bad Seeds / Kicking Against the Pricks phase love of "entertainment music, what some would call corn" went all the way back to the first group

Ray Lowry interviewing Chris Dean of The Redskins, August 1983

Kim Gordon, in Artforum, 1983

In the spring of 1981 the rock group Public Image Ltd. (PiL) played at the Ritz in New York. That club’s movie-scale video screen, which functioned as a barrier and was used to create or motivate the crowd’s reaction, was the center of the performance. PiL’s three members were projected on the screen, both as shadows (they were lit from behind for the video cameras) and as a video picture. A giant image of John Lydon’s face, laughing, appeared, larger than the Wizard of Oz. He began singing, and then the live image was changed to a pre-recorded tape of a demented commercial rock video. Furious at the ghostlike, ritualistic silhouettes of the group behind the screen—instead of, as usual, directly in front of them—the crowd constantly interrupted the music. They barraged the screen with bottles, finally tearing it down. The group hadn’t intended to cause a riot; in their words, they were trying something new. They did not want to mechanistically continue in the learned role of rock entertainers. As PiL’s Keith Levene remarked in an interview in ZigZag magazine in August 1981, “You’re more honest putting on a video or sending a video round to do 30 dates, rather than sending a band around to do it . . .You’re standing up there and saying ‘after you’ve bought my album for so many pounds and heard how great we are you can now stand in front of us and see how great we are . . .’” 

People pay to see others believe in themselves. Many people don’t know whether they can experience the erotic or whether it exists only in commercials: but on stage, in the midst of rock ‘n’ roll, many things happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment. As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy. Performers appear to be submitting to the audience, but in the process they gain control of the audience’s emotions. They begin to dominate the situation through the awe inspired by their total submission to it. Someone who works hard at his or her job is not going to become a “hero,” but may make just enough money to be able to afford to be liberated temporarily through entertainment. A performer, however, as the hero, will be paid for being sexually uncontrolled, but will still be at the mercy of the clubs and of the way the media shapes identity. How long can someone continue to exert intensity before it becomes mannered and dishonest?

Scott Miller of Game Theory / Loud Family / Music: What Happened? 

"As you know, I kid the 1980s. I wonder can it possibly be fair to condemn an entire decade as a horrifying decline in every kind of musical competency, but nostalgia for the Eighties baffles me. Eighties nostalgia has lowered my opinion of nostalgia. So you're right, I was unconsciously targeting that kind of decline with "What Happened?" But pop music is great in that a true decline fosters a true pop response, like R.E.M. Eighties music suffered from a coliseum spectacle mentality, and R.E.M. reached around that with a sort of small-combo, home-spun literary connection approach."

Michael Stipe

"Awhile back I found myself repeating a lot of things on stage — a lot of the vocal parts, and the same motions. That made me feel insincere about what I was doing." He pauses as people talking loudly pass the car. "So I stopped using a set list; I don't start many songs so I really don't have to know what's coming up. It is always a surprise to me; and we always change the set around. I have to keep things interesting: I despise the idea of Keith Richard playing 'Street Fighting Man' 15 years after he's written it. It's horrid; the idea of that is like being in hell."

Anti-theatricality and rock part 1