UK Post-Punk by Simon Reynolds

Author:Simon Reynolds [Simon Reynolds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: uk_post_punk_apple
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Flyer for the Factory nights at the Russell Club, Manchester. This June 1978 show has Joy Division playing support to The Tiller Boys, the experimental side project of Buzzcock Pete Shelley

As the city’s top indie, Factory dominated Manchester’s post-punk scene. The main alternative came from a cluster of activity around an organization called the Manchester Music Collective, which was the brainchild of experimental musicians Trevor Wishart and Dick Witts (one of Wilson’s colleagues at Granada TV). Using a grant from a regional branch of the Arts Council, Wishart and Witts hired a basement in the posh King Street and turned it into a Monday-night showcase. The Fall played their first gig there, and Joy Division were regular MMC participants. ‘It gave us somewhere to play, we met other musicians, talked, swapped ideas,’ Ian Curtis told the NME. ‘Also it gave us a chance to experiment in front of people.’ Richard Boon recalls, ‘The MMC was a great intervention. There was a whole stream of funny little groups who shared equipment – Dislocation Dance, Gay Animals, The Hamsters, and a bunch of groups on the Object Music label, like Spherical Objects, Grow-Up, and Dick Witts’ own group, The Passage.’

The Passage gave Joy Division a close run for their money at one point, with a string of independent chart hits like their LP Degenerates. Their debut, Pindrop, was hailed by Paul Morley in the NME as a post-punk classic comparable to Unknown Pleasures, grappling with the grand themes of ‘love, power and fear’ in atmospheric, doom-laden music. Formerly a classically trained percussionist, Witts built dense, dramatic arrangements that were stirringly rhythmical but not in the least rock-like. ‘We used bell sounds, military sounds like trumpet fanfares, brass and trumpets – anything that suggested things outside rock,’ he says. Matching the epic sound was a thematic loftiness verging on the didactic: ‘Devils and Angels’ railed against organized religion, while ‘XOYO’ obliquely explored gender politics.

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