The Beat Surrender

Some contradictory thoughts about music and childish behaviour.

In Gunter Grass’s book ‘The Tin Drum’, Oskar is a small boy who magically refuses to grow up, preferring to spend his time wondering round 1930’s Germany beating a kid’s tin drum, and shattering glass with his weird screams, a childish and amoral witness to the rise of Nazism. Ok, I think Gunter meant Oskar to be a mirror of the German people, but I can’t help finding parallels with what it’s like to be in a band in the current global climate. I mean, is music just a massive distraction from the horror what’s really going on? Shouldn’t we all just grow up?

Of course, refusing to grow up and banging drums in inappropriate places is the essence of punk and should be applauded wherever it occurs…

In the summer holidays of 1984, TFS, my first band (I am now actually blushing at the memory of what those letters stood for) spent the days in the basement of Studio 21, a club owned by our bass player’s Dad on Oxford St (don’t look for it, it isn’t there now..) rehearsing and stealing drinks from the optics. We were working on such greats as the political tirade Israel (“Blood on my brain…”) and the epic Eighties psychodrama of Panic (“All I can do is scream…”). I was wrestling with the technical difficulties of mastering bar chords and a voice that couldn’t decide whether it had broken or not. We were young. We were shit. We were not as subversive as we thought we were. It was brilliant.

I always like reading about the Dadaists in Zurich, who, during World War 1, spent their time at the Cabaret Voltaire within earshot of the guns of the Western Front, doing childish paintings and singing nonsense songs ….stupid? Oh yes. Subversive? Well I think so.

By the time our band Strangelove broke up in 1998 I had managed to get a good picture of how major labels try to turn adults into children. And I don’t mean wide-eyed, inquisitive children who ask awkward questions, I mean dead-eyed, fat, couch potato kids reared on junk food and muted by their own TV’s. Majors treat you like you are utterly incapable of doing anything on your own. Like some toddler who is constantly about to insert their fingers into a plug socket, you are watched over, bussed about, fed and sometimes even medicated. You may have spent the last four years honing the complex lifeskills required to survive on state benefits alone, but once you’re signed it is assumed you are an idiot, probably not yet toilet trained, and certainly incapable of knowing what’s best for you (Actually, on the toilet training issue I do remember one incident…).

A bunch of creative, excited, exciting people get taken apart and re assembled as hopeless brats. This is company policy for majors, as it keeps artists busy complaining about wrong-shaped bread, rather than concentrating on being in control of their music or how the label are spending the money the label so generously lent them in the first place. I dread to think what Strangelove technically owed EMI by the end, but it was a lot of money. Much of it spent on ridiculous cab fares, ill-advised photo shoots and some really shoddy videos.

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