post-punk

These pen portraits build up into a gallery of special people. These people have made unique contributions to popular culture. Some of the stories will be fairly familiar, and some may seem slightly strange. There are some glaring omissions, and some odd inclusions. A thread of narrative runs through, and it’s all as subjective as hell.

Just occasionally you read something on pop matters that has you punching the air with sheer joy. One of those moments for celebration came chancing upon a delightfully detailed Ut interview at Warped Reality, where Andrea Feldman had long been flying the flag for one of the great pop groups. The reissue by Blast First of the In Gut’s House and Griller titles by Ut gave the perfect opportunity for Andrea to delve, and it gives a great excuse to air my Ut story.

Way back in the mid-‘80s when I started a new job I was distracted by an envelope on one of my new colleagues’ desks, addressed to one Jacqui Ham. I was intrigued. Jacqui Ham was a member of Ut, the cantankerous pop explorers. Could it be her? Eventually I plucked up the courage to ask. My new colleague didn’t have a clue what I was on about, but promised to check with her partner who mastered records for a living. And, yes, it turned out it was our Jacqui Ham, and he had been, erm, utterly astonished to hear his partner come home talking about Ut, warning her that the new work colleague must be into some strange stuff.

It was an early incarnation of pop writer Everett True, when he was The Legend!, that woke me up to the possibilities of Ut when scribbling for Alan McGee’s legendary fanzine Communication Blur, which made up for deficiencies in literacy with its extraordinary enthusiasm which was completely contagious, vitally important, and incredibly inspirational. I seem to recall The Legend! comparing Ut to the Young Marble Giants, in terms of stark simplicity, but that could be my memory playing tricks on me. Was it the Raincoats?

And memories do play tricks on me. I somehow had got it into my head that there was an article on Ut in an old edition of much-loved Manchester fanzine Debris by Lizzie Borden, with photos by Birrer. Dave Haslam’s great magazine definitely did run an Ut feature (1987-ish), but it turns out it was by Elizabeth Johnson and starts fantastically: “For me, Ut represent one of the most intense musical experiences in the known universe. Are you ready to have your head trip with infinite velocity, sheer and primal ferocity?” She goes on: “To consider their music a random clang of guitars, erratic rhythms, and screamingly abstract vocals is to commit exorcism on their cohesive dark-sided collage.” Birrer did take the pictures, by the way.

And anyway a Lizzie Borden did write for Debris, and in fact in a slightly earlier edition reviewed Diamanda Galas’ The Divine Punishment: “She is a rare flame of brilliance shining her talent on subjects as these and illuminating them in such a unique way, that anyone who is brave enough to bear that torrent and whirlpool of sound can see them by a flaming light of truth.” The next review is of Marc Riley decimating the NME C86 cassette.

Lizzie Borden is if anything best known for the early ‘80s film, Born In Flames, which like much of the art of the time was a response to having little money. While in turn it is known for the Lora Logic/Red Crayola title track, the film itself is an absolute gem, enriched by its revolutionary feminist theme, and the more things change the more they remain the same sense.

Born In Flames features a freewheeling improvising Adele Bertei as a revolutionary preacher on a pirate radio station, somewhere between her days as a member of the Contortions and her solo “success” strangely in the wake of Madonna, with records like the great Little Lives where she sings about Jim and his saxophone and the gang hitting the East Side back in ’79 and how “crazy visions kept the fools on the run but times keep changin’ and money keeps changin’ hands when Angels with Dirty Faces turn into Babes in Moneyland.”

Ut emerged from that same downtown NYC art/punk no wave scene that has since been the stuff of so many dreams. Interestingly where DNA’s Arto Lindsay traced roots and connections to Brazil and Caetano Veloso, so the girls from Ut traced roots and connections to the UK underground and The Fall in particular. Maybe more than anyone Ut understood where The Fall were coming from and what they were saying and how they were behaving. And it seems Mark E Smith was incredibly accommodating and encouraging and supportive of Ut’s stretching of pop possibilities.

The reissue of In Gut’s House and Griller respectively highlight how far ahead Ut were as a pop unit. Their determinedly democratic approach to structuring sound reached fruition on these wonderful sets, and what is most striking is the taut tenacity that is held so strikingly in check, with an impressive discipline, along the lines of Mark E Smith hectoring his boys not to start improvising. As with The Fall and Fire Engines, there is no such thing as a conventional guitar solo in an Ut song. It’s what you always dreamed Sonic Youth would be.

Emerging from the same milieu, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon has been quoted as saying her group was always trying to catch up with Ut. The interesting thing, perhaps by dint of their background (check out Andrea’s interview!), is how Ut avoided the clichés of American rock which so attracted many contemporaries and who claimed that their upbringing was so coloured by the Black Sabbaths, Bostons, and Kiss curls of sound on the AOR radio. Despite being way ahead, Ut left behind such a slim set of recordings (you need to hear the early 12”s and live recordings by the way), whereas Kim coolly has seemed so organised, with Sonic Youth, and her X-Girl clothing range with Daisy von Furth, and side projects like Free Kitten (we love their rendition of Teenie Weenie Boppie) and the astonishing SYR 5 with DJ Olive and Ikue Mori, and before that Harry Crews with Lydia Lunch, whose own Teenage Jesus kick started so much.

Unlike many pop peers Ut knew when to stop, but devotees new and anew are urged to track down offshoots like Jacqui Ham’s Dial (and that envelope by the way contained a DAT of Dial) and Sally Young’s Quint who both continued the pioneering work of the parent group. Quint’s addition of trumpet adds a strangely warped pop veneer eerily reminiscent of Ut contemporaries the June Brides, which can only be a good thing. —John Carney

Reposted from Tangents.co.uk | © John Carney

On Site
Theoretical Music: Ut + Talk Normal
Issue Project Room
New York, USA

During a panel discussion on the No Wave era, part of the three-night multimedia survey Theoretical Music, Thurston Moore shared an amusing downtown-NYC yarn. In the early ’90s, he met six-string wizard Robert Quine in a studio, and the latter attempted to initiate a blues jam. It was a futile gesture; the Sonic Youth guitarist was clueless when it came to such conventional modes. Relating the tale, Moore seemed humiliated, but also proud to have invented musical vocabularies rather than simply built on old ones. His stance echoed the remarks of bandmate Kim Gordon—a participant in another No Wave panel earlier the same evening—who spoke about how the unmooring of punk performance practices from rock & roll orthodoxy was the era’s key innovation. More specifically, it was the revolution that gave her, a self-described non-musician, tacit permission to try her hand at music.

Revisiting the primal lurch and skronk of, say, DNA, it’s easy to hear exactly what Gordon was getting at. Some of the sounds that emerged from NYC’s downtown scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s did seem ahistorical. But even as Theoretical Music organizers Branden W. Joseph and David Grubbs cultivated this viewpoint and echoed a recent rash of books (by Moore and Wire contributor Byron Coley, as well as Marc Masters) in singling out No Wave as a hermetic movement, they issued a shrewd corollary by booking the reunited trio Ut as their marquee performer. The band’s enthralling set, their first in the US since 1991, exhibited a deep idiosyncrasy, yet it also thrived on time-tested rock & roll energy.

Tellingly, the most memorable moment of Ut’s performance was also the most conventional. During “Wailhouse,” from the band’s final LP, 1989’s Griller, members Sally Young, Nina Canal and Jacqui Ham —who, as in the old days, swapped instruments throughout the night— and guest drummer Tom Surgal (of White Out) locked into an insistent, slow-churning swagger. Young’s sultry, goth-chanteuse vocal drove home the notion that the band wasn’t as far removed from the blues as No Wave fetishists might assert.

Of course, the set also featured plenty of old-fashioned artiness: Young bowing her bass with a drum stick, Ham’s steel-wool guitar scribbles, drum-set rhythms from Canal that thudded in and out of meter. At times, these gestures made the trio seem more like an insular tribe than a band, enacting its own secret rituals. But overall, Ut registered as more human and less severe than listeners who had only heard them on record (me, for one) may have expected. Despite their motley appearance —the tallish, silver-haired Canal in black clogs, Young sporting a leather mini dress and Ham looking at once disheveled and ultra-stylish in a gray suit— and marathon tuning sessions, they came off as inviting, even friendly. Canal won over the crowd between songs by cueing up a surfing video (featuring the most anti-No Wave imagery one could think of) and even amid technical travails, the three band members exchanged easy smiles. Their easygoing attitudes cut right through the arty pretension that inevitably surrounds nostalgia for the downtown New York of yore.

Musically too, Ut didn’t come across as a band tied to any movement—instead these were three distinct musical personalities meshing in multiple equally effective configurations. In the strongest of these, Ham layered her weird, plaintive whine over Canal’s rough-edged yet deeply propulsive drumming, while Young’s sturdy, repetitive bass lines provided crucial melodic hooks. Ut’s instrument-switching was no gimmick; it seemed more like a logical set-pacing strategy, such that near the show’s end, when Ham (who had spent much of the show on guitar) finally sat down at the drums to play a gangly tribal groove, it felt like a triumphant payoff. Overall, Ut exemplified the freedom of No Wave while at the same time bucking the movement’s retrospectively calcified aesthetics.

Opener Talk Normal, the NYC duo of guitarist Sarah Register and drummer Andrya Ambro, summoned a more foreboding mood. Their driving yet amorphous sound fields obscured song and left the audience to puzzle out the structural elements. Ambryo acted as a both compass, directing the pieces with brisk, repetitive beats, and engine, galvanizing them with moments of explosive intensity. The set reached a gripping climax when she shoved her stool aside and jitterbugged spastically as she pounded out dense snare and tom rolls. There was a harshness in these outbursts, echoed in Register’s eerie guitar haze and alarmed wail, but as with Ut, other emotions crept in. During a break, Ambro walked over to Register’s area and borrowed her beer for a quick chug. The guitarist grinned and patted the drummer on the back, as if to acknowledge that even in the avant-garde, rock & roll’s first principles still prevail. — Hank Shteamer

This article originally appeared in The Wire issue 322, December 2010. Reproduced by permission. www.thewire.co.uk | Photo: Andrea Feldman