Portrait of the Artist as a Young Psychomodo

[ Part 1 ]



“Image”--what we hear about an artist, how they dress, walk, talk, and carry themselves--has way too much to do with how the music itself comes to be regarded. (Forgive me for even bringing it up--anybody who needs to be told a thing like that isn’t likely to have their mind changed by anything they happen to read.) Sometimes it’s more the fault of the performer. Other times the critics are to blame and the artists merely play along as best they can. And sometimes there’s a sad synergy of the two, in which case the writers usually survive while the artist suffers the downward spiral to oblivion. Cockney Rebel illustrated that fact as well as any other band I can think of just offhand. Such questions of “image” would (in a real world) have been the most peripheral and ephemeral thing to do with them. Unfortunately, they’re all too often a bigger factor in an artist’s possibility of achievement than anything the artist does in terms of whatever work it is they’re putting before the public. (Unless you buy into the conceit that by dressing up like The Man From GLAD or by vogueing in any other way, one somehow manages to turn oneself into “living art.”)

What does such arrogant crap have to do with Cockney Rebel? Not a hell of a lot, except that they went down the tubes commercially because they assumed an image at variance with their music, thereby confusing an audience that needed to hear the bells ringing at just the proper pitch in order to salivate as trained, and also because they played the wrong politics with the critics when their natural constituency (British aesthetes and the Anglophiles who love them) wasn’t at all likely to go for anything that didn’t have a written seal of someone else’s approval...

Why do I care? I don’t know, it’s just that I was listening to their Psychomodo CD the other night, so I’m writing this today. Musically, they were very much a product of the UK in the early 70s, progressive on one hand but with surprisingly strong songwriting (often a sore point with progrock) on the other, and with the Dylan and Bowie influences obvious but held nicely in check. They managed to parlay all this into hit singles in Britain, even if they never made a dent in the States. Their instrumentation was creative for the time, with liberal use of electric violin and electric piano (neither of which you hear much of anymore), choirs and flutes and orchestras lurking and ready to pounce at any time, yet not nearly as annoying as you might expect and sounding nothing like a Donovan record either. The band in full swing could conjure up a dementia that belied the fact that they were dealing in such traditionally non-demented forms as music hall and chorales and AM hooks, equally adept at approximating everything from circus music to samba to fusion to bubblegum reggae, while smoking spider venom that most likely came from Mars. In a strictly musical sense this band bridged the gap between late 60s and early 70s rock experimentalism (while never quite belonging wholeheartedly to either decade)--although they were too busy doing so to stop and inform anybody. Since their pop instincts were sounder than anything you’d expect to find growing on such stylistic astroturf, they were never noticed as such at the time.

What they were trying to inform the world of was perhaps even worse, though--namely that their Steve Harley was gifted, special, a musical colossus and a literary genius. He was gifted--in fact he was (or rather, might have been, had he been given the fair chance) everything Marc Bolan believed himself to be--i.e., gifted, special, a musical colossus and a literary genius. No wait, that can’t be...either he was or he wasn’t, and I just said both. Too bad--we’ll never really know, and that’s my point exactly. I suppose he was a sort of alternate Bolan for a year or two: not the teenybop sensation, true, nor even particularly the rock’n’roller--but the Bolan who attempted a lost, Tolkeinesque rock opera, The Children Of Rarn...the Bolan who took a fortnight off from bongo-yipping to scribble a notebook’s worth of stream-of-consciousness sword’n’sorcery jottings and wound up with Britain’s best-selling book of poetry for his trouble...the Bolan who would fill his interviews with prehistoric forces and elves and wizards and being better than Lennon and Townshend...the Bolan who was unabashedly full of shit!

Also like Bolan, he wasn’t totally full of shit (he’d done a lot more acid than Marc, and therefore was much less hippy-dippy). Steve Harley believed everything he said at the time he was saying it. Which was a good thing, too, because after being slammed as a fraud and poseur he was obliged to say things like, “I’ve never heard of a pioneer that didn’t suffer; they kick the one who does it first, and then pat the copyists on the back shouting ‘New Wave!’...I’ve got something you haven’t got, because God has blessed me and I’m trying to share it with you. I’m doing you a favor.”

His social commentary was correct in his assessments--if nothing else he deserves a certain enshrinement for the sheer ballsiness (in a country where people were consciously influenced one way or the other by what they read in the rock mags) of stating the terms of the proper relationship of a true innovator vis-à-vis the press’n’public so...bluntly. (The Britcritical response was that he belonged not in the pantheon but “in a padded cell.”) The point he missed, though, is that paying those dues is, after all, in the script--they’re supposed to suffer for their art and be prophets without honor and live out the various archetypes pretty much on schedule even as they walk on down the hall. It builds character. The last thing one should ever do is whine to the press about getting bad press--it doesn’t matter if you’re Ian Anderson or Adam Ant: no way to do it without looking like a schmuck. Take a tip from the Eagles: challenge the staff of Rolling Stone to a game of softball instead. The whining thing only works if you’re a politician, and only if you time it just right (i.e., chastise them for “media bias” against you a week or so before attempting something you shouldn’t be allowed to get away with, and watch them bend over backwards to be “unbiased”). And since Harley’s career prior to Cockney Rebel had been--dig it!--nothing less than journalism itself, he had no excuse not to have known better. Had the roles been reversed and he as a journalist been sent to interview a personage so contrived as...well, himself...what else could he have possibly made of it (other than lunchmeat)? Harley wasn’t even his real name; it’d been Steven Nice. (As if it made a difference--he could’ve called himself Steve Hulkhogan but there was no way he’d ever be mistaken for anybody’s badass.) Ah, but how soon they forget--once they’ve had a taste of the boho life, how’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm?

As for popstar Steve Harley, what’s debatable is what any of the suffering-artist gig had to do with him. As a matter of historical fact, it had very little bearing, but this was his honest perception of what he was all about--his intent was to elevate popular music from the slump it was (re)currently in. (“Success in the rock & roll business I regard as a very mild challenge. I mean, I’m very upset that standards are so low.”) He felt things had gone badly awry since the fabled 60s (they had) and needed somebody to come along and save them (they did), someone exalted (the King is gone), someone elect (but he’s not forgotten), someone like (is this the story of) Steve Harley (who?).

[...continued here...]

--melodylaughter--

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