Teardrop Manoeuvres in the Dark

Owen on Julian Cope’s autobiography, Head-on, his abilities as a writer and how wrong his musical preferences seen in retrospect: Part of what is interesting in it is in seeing just how wrong the Liverpool in-crowd (of which Cope was unabashedly one) were, how their coolness and their talent were in inverse proportion. As a rule, if the young Cope dismisses a band – John Foxx’s Ultravox, Visage, Japan, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – they will be very interesting, but if he takes them seriously – Echo and the Bunnymen, Wah!, his own group – then it’s Merseybombast all the way. .

Of course, even at the time Echo and the Bunnymen were a punchline on The Young Ones… Like Depeche Mode, they were a band always trying slightly too hard to be convincing. Cope’s own band, The Teardrop Explodes at least had the saving grace of having a sense of humour — how could it not, Cope having named it after a specific panel of a specific Daredevil comic? Cope could get awfully seriously and was convinced of his own importance as musical genius at the time, but it was always balanced by a certain playfullness his more poofaced rivals didn’t have. This is best seen in Kilimanjaro, the 1980 debut album and the Teardrops’ best, one of the best albums of the first half of the eighties: with all its punk and post-punk influences it also has a sparkling, natural lightness to it, cheerful keyboards and brass section, sort of hinting of what Paul Weller would do much later much more bombastically. There’s more than Merseybombast there.

(And isn’t that, or “Madchester” or Bristolian blagging just a localised version of second or even third city syndrome, where to even be noticed by the juggernaut that’s London you need to shout seven times louder? It’s not something we really have in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam may be the biggest city in the country, but is not much bigger than Rotterdam or Utrecht and while it may be so arrogant as to assume it’s the centre of all arts, the reality is that it’s just as provincial as any sleepy town out in the boondocks, endlessly gazing its navel, letting the other cities go on with actually doing things. But I digress.)

Fortunately Owen didn’t write this post just to slag off Cope and his pals, but to praise another of my favourite albums of that time, OMD’s Dazzle Ships:

If Dazzle Ships is a concept album, the concept seems to be communication, travel and distribution as enabled by technology, something usually carried out dispassionately, but here made overwhelmingly romantic, a pathetic fallacy for obsolete machinery, with an underlying terror at the prospect of turning ourselves over to abstractions, whether technology or capital. So there’s a willed innocence to much of it, with ‘Telegram’ making this wholly superseded technology wildly exciting – ‘I’ve got a telegram!’ he sings, attempting to tap into the joy of its early discovery. Elsewhere, it’s about deception as much as communication. The Dazzle Ships of the title are perfectly chosen, as this experiment in warpaint for Great War battleships was, until after 1945 Britain’s only major experiment with Modernist abstraction in public life, a utopian idea utilised for depressingly, if impressively atavistic purposes. The title track, with its collage of empty space, foghorns, forlorn drones and sudden, panicked alarms, is almost synaesthetic in its evocation of a locked-down landscape controlled by the defence industries, a blank lullaby to Cold War big tech.

What Dazzle Ships evokes in me is a feeling of retrofuturism. It sounds like it could be the sidetrack to one of those mid-seventies distopian big budget movies like Rollerball or Logan’s Run where most of the interest is in the set building, but unlike those movies aware that this future won’t happen. There’s an element of both repellance and fascination about technology in Dazzle Ships. On the one hand there’s that seventies view of modern technology as being inherently alienating through its use by big business and big government as tools to oppress and regimentise the life of its workers and citizen. By teh time Dazzle Ships came out this view was already oldfashioned, as both government and business were busily shedding their paternalism for other ways to screw us over. On the other hand, as Owen writes, OMD sings about these technologies with a sense of innocence, “overwhelmingly romantic”. Robots might put car workers out of work, they’re still fascinating pieces of equipment, as any twelve year old knows.

All of which evokes a certain continental view of the future as seen in the rearview mirror, of a time when it was possible to imagine the Cold War would stay semi-thawed forever and we would keep continue to have to imagine our futures under the shadow of World War III, with limited room for imagination but quite safe in a way.