Quite a few people asked me this week whether I'd made a trip to London to see the Magazine reunion. The answer is no. I have nothing against Devoto doing it -- I'm glad he has -- and if I'd been in the UK I might have attended. But these things are always something of a let-down. Technically I've "seen" the Sex Pistols and the Velvet Underground live, but I haven't really seen those legendary bands; what I saw were 1990s reunion tours put together to squeeze cash from kudos.
In Magazine's case I did see them at their peak. I saw them at Aberdeen University Student Union in 1979, touring their Secondhand Daylight album, and even reviewed the show for Gaudie, the student paper, describing Devoto as a "deer trapped in headlights". Then I saw them playing at a club in Edinburgh called The Moon (with Josef K supporting) during their Correct Use of Soap period. I remember being particularly impressed, that night, by the way the mid-section of I'm A Party broke off into a completely different time signature. It was dizzying. And Devoto was still a deer in headlights.
Much later I saw Luxuria at the Forum, the legendary 1988 gig where Morrissey came out and read some Proust. When Devoto and Noko (who's playing guitar in the 2009 shows -- spookily note-perfect reproductions of the late John McGeogh's licks) were featured on Snub TV in 1990 they asked specifically that I should interview them, which I did. Later, I was lucky enough to go for dinner several times with Devoto. Sitting across the table from me he was... a deer in headlights. I remember quizzing him about the line about drugging and fucking someone on the permafrost (he said it was a love song), about why the first line of Philadelphia doesn't turn into a short story ("I write songs differently than you do, Nick"), and I remember how Devoto quoted Eliot's Prufrock as we left the restaurant.
I wouldn't have missed dinner with Devoto for the world, but I missed the "cash from kudos" reunion tour with equanimity. Because it's part of the kind of Retro Necro culture I abhor (as I said in my tribute song, "I wouldn't want to put you in any Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame -- I assume you view such things with uproarious disdain"). Because I saw them when they were young. Because I saw them while McGeogh was still alive. And because cash from kudos is an exchange subject -- like the human body -- to the second law of thermodynamics; entropy. Energy has a tendency to diminish over time. Even the most brilliant brilliance sags. In the entertainment world's own version of the laws of physics, kudos can be converted to cash, but afterwards kudos is diminished. I'm interested to watch the YouTube videos that have appeared over the last few days of Magazine's latest shows, of course I am. But I also note that, whereas Magazine videos used to be few but intense (like the Cut-Out Shapes video above), now they're plentiful and... less intense. Some of the kudos has become cash. Not as much cash as the most important man alive deserves, but cash anyway.
I measure the important man's importance today by the searing traces he's left in me. The teenaged me could never have dreamed that an article in The Financial Times on Devoto's re-emergence would mention me, but I'm delighted that his impact on me has become part of the story of his impact on everyone. At my 1979 concert last night Devoto was invisibly there as I sang a song I wrote at 19 which begins: "Time crawls slowly round the room when you, you make your entrance / Eyes like headlights switch on you then I, I seek my vengeance". It was pure pastiche Devoto, one part The Light Pours Out Of Me, one part Give Me Everything. In fact my entire first album (The Happy Family album) is Devoto pastiche: the title track interjects evocative micro-narratives just as Magazine's Come Alive does ("At Leonardo Da Vinci Intercontinental Airport a Swiss pathologist missed his connecting flight").
And I'm still doing it today. Here's an exclusive: the first draft of the song Ichabod Crane from the Joemus album. It's called The Accident, and it's one part Because You're Frightened, one part Spiral Scratch:
The Accident
Drudgery and buggery and someone else's lover Sent me on a journey with your idiot brother Well he's shallow and he's callous and I'm green about the gills With a book of filthy pictures and a bunch of daffodils
Well I get a little nervous at the summit of the mountain You are nowhere to be seen and there are thunderstorms gathering I try to work out just exactly where you put the synth But your brother's got no manners and the cliff's a labyrinth
Then it happened The argument That's when we had The accident
Like a spiral in a record I am spinning round and round With a stupid needle in me, screaming stupid sounds And my stupid friends are far away, smoking cigarettes And indulging in occasionally gratifying sex
Then it happened The argument That's when we had The accident
To escape your fucking mother and her yellow telephone This endless fucking mountain was the only place to go But the last thing I expected was that she'd be here to get me With a loaded gun, a croissant and a book by Dostoyevsky
Then it happened The argument That's when we had The accident
Thank you, Mr Devoto, deer in headlights, most important man alive. Kudos to you, and may the cash keep flowing.
Look, this is simple. Venerable bands used to get royalties from their back catalogue. They didn't have to haul their tired asses from venue to venue anymore. It's not a moral issue. The economics have changed, that's all.
But these things are always something of a let-down.
Yeah, this was my pretty much attitude - but I went anyway, and, god - just one of the best gigs I've ever been to. I dunno how they managed to pull off, but it was pretty magical.
I think it could be one of the best gigs you've ever been to and still be not as good as a Magazine gig in 1979, so it would have to represent "the second law of thermodynamics" for someone who'd seen them then.
Just to give a tiny example, Devoto is seen "conducting" Noko through the guitar riffs in many of the YouTube videos of the new shows. When he's not singing, he's doing this "conducting" gesture. Now, 1979 Devoto would not have done that. He projected an aura of cold, powerful detachment, something glacial, somewhat related to Bowie's Thin White Duke character. He turned his back on the audience, climbed a specially-constructed microphone stand, stared like a Gogolian madman. To go over and make a conductor gesture in front of the guitarist would have seemed uncool to this Devoto.
Now, of course "cool" is silly, something we grow out of just as surely as we lose our youthful arrogance. But cool and arrogance create their own power, a power that seems to have been lost in these new performances. I'm sure that new forms of power replaced it, though: a warm sense of nostalgia, a sense of genuine human frailty, the maxim tempus fugit, and so on.
The Pixies were and are fine as a reunion. I think this is because: - They were never a pop band - They always looked embarrassing - They always dressed badly - They always represented outsiderdom - Their core emotions - surreal, angry, frustrated, animalistic - can even improve with age
One little in-joke that only hardcore Magazine fans will get: in the 2009 version of Model Worker
Devoto sings "I know Obama will look after me". The original version of the song said "I know the cadre will look after me", but so many people misheard it as "I know that Carter will look after me" that Devoto made that the official lyric. Then when Reagan was elected, he sang (in particularly chilling tones) "I know that Reagan will look after me". And now (skipping Bush pere, Clinton and Bush fils entirely) it's Obama who will look after the immortal communist backslider.
How eerily appropriate--just had an accident the other day, fell down a flight of stairs, hurt myself pretty badly, but doing all right now thanks to drugs--at least I can lie in bed and type! And enjoy this great song.
But how sad I feel thinking of Magazine and my brother--he, who was usually a very pop consumer, bought the first two Magazine albums when they came out, and I was immediately captivated (though I still prefer the Wire albums of that period). Surely my brother was the only Magazine fan within five-hundred miles of us then--and now he's dead, and Magazine is alive, after a fashion. You're right--bringing back the dead is wrong, it places them within a context where they no longer make sense and a world they don't belong in, as if I were to bring back my brother and expect him to cope with the world today.
What a great series of posts - I'd sensed there must be better analysis out there and here it is. Of course this was an exhumation, but like that of a medieval saint, the body was remarkably preserved and fragrant, which just goes to show thirty years of canonization wasn't so misguided. And that I did know a good thing when I saw it.
"I remember being particularly impressed, that night, by the way the mid-section of I'm A Party broke off into a completely different time signature."
You are just an old prog rocker at heart really. I think all the kudos Magazine are receiving is a bit over rated, they had a few good songs, yes, but when they start to venture into prog rock territory it it's just embarrassing. The Buzzcocks were way better, I wonder how they would have progressed had Howard not left when he did?
I think Spiral Scratch is great, but, as Devoto says in the Tony Wilson interview I embedded, the band provided a very limited character and musical palate for him to be stuck in for long. The answer to your question on how they would have developed is: Magazine.
As for the Shelley Buzzcocks, I never found them at all interesting. Not sure why, really. If Devoto sounds at times too macho, cruel, detached, exotic, voyeuristic, Pete Shelley sounds too camp, too fey, too ordinary, too trivial. You know, compare Shot By Both Sides with Lipstick, Shelley's use of the same chords and riff. How it's possible to throw the power of that away, I don't know, but Shelley manages.
I've never been tempted to attend a reunion gig before, but to be honest I thought seriously about going to see Magazine. What put me of, in the end, was the hiatus between Magazine originally folding up stall and these reunion concerts. After twenty seven years, surely Devoto must feel like he is in a covers band, these songs were written by an angry, cerebral, sensitive but arrogant young man and after almost three decades away from them it must seem like performing someone else's songs..
There's an interesting new take on Permafrost, which Devoto announces as "a song for kinder times". Instead of the rape scenario of "As the day stops dead at the place where we're lost I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost", Devoto now sings: "As the day stops dead at the place where we're lost you want me to drug you and fuck you on the permafrost":
As a piece of revisionism, this is on the scale of Kraftwerk changing Radioactivity -- in their 1990s concerts -- into "Stop Radioactivity!" It's obviously relevant to yesterday's discussion on the meaning of simulated rape in video games, and I have to say I think in both cases (Kraftwerk's and Magazine's) there's a real loss of dramatic power involved in making the songs fit a politically-correct message. The original Radioactivity song was as objective as a Wikipedia entry ("discovered by Madame Curie"), but the revised version is just a pamphlet someone presses into your hand at a demo whose objectives you agree with.
Permafrost, in the original version, is one of the most chilling and nasty songs ever written, I think. And its power comes precisely from that stark, callous quality. "I have no idea what you want, but there was something I meant to say..." And what this distanced, uncaring person meant to say was that he would rape the other character under Arctic conditions. Suddenly the appalling sadness of that scenario in a landscape of utter barrenness meshes with the tremulous thrill of the guitars and the icicle synth lines to make some kind of horrific beauty. In the new version, though, it's just two consenting adults larking about in the cold. Sure, it's nicer, but was the world really just waiting for a kinder version of Permafrost?
You were talking about how these concerts would take something away from your memories of how Magazine used to be. I have a similar problem with this performer called Momus. Him now dressing up as Widow Twanky is ruining my memories of when he used to be an intense singer of songs with great narrative lyrics set to great melodies on a cool record label. It happens to the best of them in the end!
Momus, as usual you picked a interesting analogy , but what you say about the 2nd Law is not entirely accurate. The thing is, energy does not diminish in time (energy is conserved, it stays constant.) Instead, entropy increases with time, which is roughly an a measure of how much energy cannot be used to do work; in other words, entropy increase means waste -not loss- of energy. I think the analogy can still be used in your argument though.
This was the song that convinced me, in 1978, that Magazine were great. I heard it on Peel, and that was it; I had to get the album. The way the music and the poetry conjur the scene, the rising anticipation, the suddenly mounting pace, the rush of the limousines themselves, the sirens, and the narrator projecting himself, at the climactic moment, into the back of the car, and the bathetic futility of the great man's choice between coffee and tea...
The entire gig was wonderful, whether or not it was Retro-necro. Magazine simply have incredible songs and they are also the reason why I first stumbled across your own material (in the form of The Most Important Man alive) whilst googling in 2002. In fact, that would have made very suitable outro music for the gigs.
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