Let’s
get one thing straight about British pop music in the early 1980s. The
most exciting independent music scene in the nation, the world, and probably
the universe, was to be found in Norwich, Norfolk, a medieval city nestling
amid fen and broad some 116 miles east of London, 20 miles short of the
North Sea, and light-years away from anything resembling the conventionally
hip.
Now,
I know this flies in the face of all you’ve gleaned from 24 Hour Party
People, well-thumbed copies of Morrisey and Marr: The Severed Alliance,
and the hoopla over the twentieth anniversary of The Smith’s first single,
all of which will have encouraged you to think that Manchester was the 
happeningest
place in Britain as the Thatcherite decade began. Nonsense. For much of
the very early 1980s, Manchester was reeling from the suicide of Ian Curtis
and trying to ignore the fact that New Order was initially a poor facsimile
of Joy Division. There were a few signs of innovation. Guitarist Vini Reilly
noodled away rather entrancingly in the Duritti Column, often to the delight
of as many as 12 devoted followers and a small dog called Corrie. A Certain
Ratio concocted a peculiarly Spartan brand of doom-laden funk and New Order
quickly matured into a much beloved dance band. Nonetheless, until the
Smiths released “Hand in Glove” and saved pop, the city was in a sonic
slump—and for some time afterwards, the Smiths were the only new Manc band
worth a damn. Even the Manchester United soccer team sucked in the early
1980s. Anyway, my point is that Manchester music at the start of 1980s
was treading water, if not drowning. It was certainly a long way from the
baggy trousered ecstasy of the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, and the
whole Madchester scene of the late 1980s.
So
if Manchester’s claims to be the toppermost of the British poppermost in
the early ‘80s are truly Kate Moss (decidedly slim), what of other pretenders
to the crown that should rightly belong to Norwich? London doesn’t really
count, partly because the dynamic punk scene of the late 1970s had just
about exhausted the musical energies of a whole generation of young musicians;
partly because bands from so many other places ended up recording there
that the London scene was almost too cosmopolitan to be particularly distinctive.
Of course, there were still acts who proudly dropped their “h”s in the
time ‘onored cockney manner, or equally proudly name-dropped their neighborhood
haunts. The line from the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” to the Jam’s “A-Bomb
In Wardour Street” was well traveled. And, I suppose there were the last
echoes of the Weller-ite mod revival: all Merton Parkas, Lambrettas, Secret
Affair, and retroactive obsessions with the Who, Small Faces, cappuccino,
and bowling shoes. Still, I’d swear on the grave of my skinniest tie that
the most vibrant musical scene in London in the late 1970s and early 1980s
revolved less around local bands than around clubs playing mighty dub and
reggae records from the Caribbean, or white label post-disco funk and nascent
rap from America.
A much
better candidate than either London or Manchester, would be Edinburgh,
home in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the Postcard label and its top
trio of wan popsters: Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, and Josef K (who, incidentally,
win my nomination for the band with buzzsaw guitars most ripe for rediscovery
in 2003). These bands had the advantage of singing with a distinctive—often
unintelligible—Scottish accent, so at least they sounded as if they were
from somewhere other than a recording studio. Or London. Other jock-rockers
of the period, like the Skids 
and
their progeny Big Country, tended to have a big, proud, almost martial
sound, as if they were preparing the soundtrack for Braveheart.
By contrast, the Postcard acts sounded as if they were scoring Gregory’s
Girl, the hugely popular Scottish soccer teen romance that featured
Altered Images’ leader singer and Caledonian pixie Claire Grogan. The Edinburgh
bands specialized in winsome melancholia. It was the sound of centuries
of national oppression, a succession of embarrassing World Cup defeats,
and a dozen doomed love affairs processed through the Velvet Underground’s
“Pale Blue Eyes” playbook. If there were occasionally moments when insufferable
twee trumped infectious twang, jewels like Orange Juice’s “Blue Boy,” Aztec
Camera’s “Mattress of Wire,” and Josef K’s “Sorry For Laughing” nearly
made up for the fact that their ancestors had spent so much time inventing
golf that they forgot to rid the country of Englishmen. Yes, for a moment
Edinburgh really did have an exhilarating scene and a distinctive sound
on, ahem, a par with Norwich. But, then again, it was such a brief and
homogenous moment. Josef K folded in late 1981, shortly after releasing
a superb debut album, The Only Fun in Town. Orange Juice had already
moved to a major label, Polydor, by 1982, when it cut its first album,
the over-produced yet still precious, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever.
By 1983 Roddy Frame’s Aztec Camera were on Rough Trade and flirting with
superstardom thanks to the worldwide success of the painfully mediocre
“Oblivious.” Four years later, they nearly climbed out of their maudlin
rut by recording an impossibly brilliant, feedback-laced version of Van
Halen’s “Jump” for a New Musical Express compilation tape. By then,
however, the Postcard moment was long gone.
This
really leaves only Liverpool to offer a meaningful challenge to Norwich’s
claim to be Britain’s brightest pop city in the early 1980s. And, yes,
I really will get around to describing those claims in just a moment. Liverpool
pop had been stuck in a deadly nostalgia trap since the heady days of Merseybeat
in the early 1960s. By the late 1970s, however, a new generation of Scousers
had emerged. Fired by the boisterous chordage and uppity attitudes of punk,
they were far from intimidated by the legacy of the Beatles—not surprising,
since they hit their high teens with “Mull of Kintyre” not “Magical Mystery
Tour” on the radio. A major scene coalesced around the Zoo club and its
record label, venues such as the Pyramid and Eric’s, and the diverse talents
of the crucial three: Pete Wylie, Julian Cope, and Ian McCullough. Their
bands—Wah! Heat, Teardrop Explodes, and Echo and the Bunnymen, respectively—were
besotted with late 1960s bands like the Doors, the Velvet Underground,
and Love. But they filtered those influences not only through a new wave
sensibility, but also, especially in Cope’s case, a rather mannered, British
sense of chemically induced eccentricity and humor. Other local acts, including
Big in Japan (featuring future members of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the
KLF, and the Lightning Seeds), the Turquoise Swimming Pools, Lori and the
Chameleons, and the wonderfully named Dalek, I Love you, also displayed
a kind of surreal, off-beat humor. It was as if they all saw the world
through a glass of murky Mersey water. Or, maybe they’d actually rearranged
their perceptions by actually drinking the stuff. Anyway, it was this off-kilter
take on life, seeing it as part uproarious farce, part fearsome gothic
horror, that gave the Liverpool scene a unique vibe.
In
fact, the more I think about it, I reckon that Liverpool might even have
snatched the prize for the most vibrant music scene of the early 1980s
away from Norwich, if only it hadn’t spawned Orchestral Manouevres in the
Dark. Now don’t get me wrong, it was hard not to be enchanted by the music
box charms of “Enola Gay” or “Joan Of Arc.” 
Back
then there probably was a place for bands who sounded as if they had just
discovered the world’s first Casio keyboard and used it to pick out dainty
pop tunes, or occasionally dark dirges, above a swirling sea of freshly
synthesized sound. After all, somebody had to draw the dots for Interpol
to join some twenty years later. The problem was that OMD gave two of the
most mind-numbingly boring concerts I have ever seen in my life. I really
thought I might die yawning. Clearly, Liverpool’s music scene must shoulder
some collective responsibility for this. Like many early electro-synth
bands, OMD tried to compensate for the fact the group members had to remain
tethered to their keyboards, by going completely overboard with their light
and smoke show. The first time I saw them, I assumed that the pyrotechnics
had actually gone awry because the explosions drowned out large sections
of the music. I lasted four songs and walked out. The second time I saw
them, I had a free ticket and lasted two songs. There was a little less
visual bombast, but this only revealed the pointlessness of the perfect,
note-for-note recapitulations of their recordings. You could have done
surgery in the concert hall, the atmosphere was so sterile. When I got
home, I put “Messages” on a turntable, boiled a kettle until steam began
to fill the room. Then I put on an old pair of cardboard 3-D glasses (one
red eye, one green eye), and turned the light on and off as quickly as
I could. Aside from the reassuring crush of other concertgoers, it really
wasn’t much different from being at the live show.
Now—thank
you for your patience, gentle reader—this bring us to Norwich, which was
where I suffered both my OMD ordeals. In fact, one of the reasons why I’m
still so embittered about the second OMD gig was that I succumbed to the
lure of a free ticket instead of shelling out a meager portion of my student
grant to see The Farmers Boys at the Jacquard Club on Magdalene Street.
And, in some ways, the Farmers Boys were the muddy-booted heart of a music
scene that was as refreshing and devoid of pomp and pretentiousness as
any I’ve experienced or heard tell of.
Perhaps
this had something to do with the fact that Norwich was really just a glorified,
if very picturesque, market town in the heart of East Anglian farming country
whose period of greatest power and prestige had been about 500 years earlier.
There were no airs and graces, no sense of entitlement, about Norwich bands.
Well, that’s not strictly true, the Farmers Boys gave the distinct impression
that they might be keenly interested in local grazing entitlements and
fishing rights. The cover art for their single “Phew Wow” actually featured
a fish called the burbot. By correctly answering a question relating to
the burbot’s characteristics, fans could win guitarist Stan’s Mini car.
The Farmers Boys—Stan, Mark, Baz, and Frog—were like that: generous to
a fault, heart and soul (possibly sole), of the local community, friends
to all. That was certainly the sentiment of “Phew Wow” with its “that’s
what friends are for” chorus—and timeless good advice for the lovesick:
“Don’t worry, stop thinking, let’s go and do some drinking.”
The
Farmers Boys were purveyors of a pristine, witty pop, built on jangling
guitars, the odd stab of brass, and some rudimentary keyboard fills. That
keyboard was something to behold. The Boys really had found the prototype
Casio--and usually perched it atop an ironing board, right next to a pint
of Adnams 
best
bitter, during live shows. Actually, ironing boards also loomed large in
the career of another local band, the duo Unity Series, but I digress.
The Farmers Boys simply refused to take themselves too seriously. They
once showed up to support Orange Juice dressed in bright yellow souwesters
and announced that they were renaming themselves Bananafarmer in deference
to the popular girl group. But even on songs like “Muck It Out” and their
ebullient cover of Cliff Richards’ “In The Country” (a modest national
pop hit!) that played up to their rustic image, there was a sort of genuinely
beguiling, un-affected, folk wisdom at work. This bucolic, communal perspective
offered a welcome respite from the self-absorbed angst of the Goths and
Joy Division acolytes, the hollow narcissism of the New Romantics, or the
increasingly grim visions of social decay emanating from the urban centers
of Thatcher’s Britain. But the Farmers Boys were more than a pastoral novelty
act. Songs like “More Than A Dream,” “For You,” and “I Think I Need Help”
demonstrated a talent for the kind of bittersweet observation that would
become Morrissey’s lyrical stock-in-trade, while their solid grasp of pop
melody ensured they were always eminently humable.
Although
they would eventually make two albums for EMI (“Get Out And Walk in 1983
and “With These Hands” in 1985), the Farmers Boys’ first singles were recorded
for Back’s Records, a local label and distribution company that 
had
somehow emerged from one of the world’s most cramped record stores. For
a while the label was, pun intended, the backbone of the Norwich scene.
The Higsons, the first of the Norwich bands to attract national attention,
recorded their debut single, “I Don’t Want to Live With Monkeys” for Back’s
subsidiary Romans in Britain. The song was Sounds’ single of the
week, hailed by their journalist Mark Sinclair as “A flash brash, funky
conglomeration of sound, catapulting the listener into a frenzied two-minute
bout of manic gyrations and all round limb blurring.” It reached number
one on the NME independent record charts and even made German magazine
SPEX’s
Top Twenty singles of 1981. For several months, nay years, you could hear
indie kids chanting the song’s glorious opening: “Hoop, hup, be-doobedoobedooobe,
hoop hup be-doodoodoo” (or variations on this dada-ist manifesto). Subsequent
releases were on their very own Back’s subsidiary WAAP Records, named in
honor of their euphonious masterpiece “It Goes Waap”—which indeed, it did.
Eventually, the band signed with Two Tone records, where they were produced
by Jerry Dammers of the Specials and cut the epic “Run Me Down” single—and
minor pop hit—with backup “oooohs and aaaaaghs” by the Three Degrees!
Until
the mid-1980s, the Higsons ruled the roost in Norwich. If you’ve not heard
the Higsons (for shame!), imagine the Bunnymen’s guritarist Will Sergeant
and refugees from the Tower of Power horn section getting together to cover
the early Mekons, all topped off with Charlie “Switch” Higson’s slightly
strangulated vocals (Tom Verlaine sings James Brown….). Their best work,
like “Gotta Let This Heat Out” (immortalized by Robyn Hitchcock in “Listening
to the Higsons” where, no doubt aware of Norwich’s agricultural 
environs,
he hears the lyric as “Gotta let this hen out.”) and “Conspiracy”
(a song that linked the theft of the Higsons’ bongos, to an assassination
attempt on the Pope and, in a curiously prescient moment, the USA’s decision
to back Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s conflict with Iran), was bodacious punk-funk
of the highest order.
The
Higsons could never quite capture on vinyl the sweaty thrill of their live
shows. The band pretty much gave up when a patchy first album, The Curse
of the Higsons, failed to make them megastars. Lead singer Charlie
Higson went on to write a couple of decent mystery novels and later become
a writer and actor in The Fast Show, the most important and innovative
British comedy program of the late 1990s. Coincidentally, Paul Whitehouse,
another star of The Fast Show (for some reason re-titled Brilliant
for American audiences), was also in a late-70s Norwich band called The
Right Hand Lovers. Multi-instrumentalist Teddy Edwards found ready employment
as a session man and recorded some terrific cover EP’s playing horn-driven
remakes of Jesus and Mary Chain, Miles Davis, Fall, and Cure classics.
Now,
it’s important to stress that the Higsons and Farmers Boys were merely
the twin peaks of a rocking iceberg that contained literally hundreds of
indie bands in the early 1980s. There was Screen Three, permanent bridesmaid
to both the Higsons and the Farmers Boys—and with a brassy power pop sound
on records like “Red Dust” that actually sounded like a slick mix of the
two. Also in the first Norwave were the rather doleful Happy Few, the moody
Popular Voice, the punky Clynics, the anarchic Capitalist Music, and a
little later the vaguely new romantic Tall Boys and the synth-soaked Falling
Men. The emergence of this vibrant scene was immortalized on the Romans
In Britain compilation album Welcome to Norwich: A Fine City, named
in deference to the city’s unassuming, but remarkably apt motto. Highlights
included two songs by the avant-garde sonic sculptors, the Mohawk Twins:
“Five Hawaiian Bullets” was about John Lennon, while “Railway Sex” was
a seamy tale about, well, railways and sex.
By
this time, legendary radio deejay and reluctant scene-shaper John Peel
had clearly decided that Norwich was the only place in the musical universe
that mattered. Not only did he give regular airplay and session time to
just about any band who could affect the wide vowels of the Norfolk brogue
(even The Crabs, a fairly banal girl group, got a precious Peel Session,
for God’s sake), but he was also a regular at gigs and clubs around the
city. Eventually, Peel actually moved to the area, no doubt to be closer
to his beloved Farmers Boys. Peel’s prestige and steady patronage on his
late night Radio One show was crucial factor in stimulating and sustaining
the Norwich scene.
There
were other factors, too. The presence of the University of East Anglia
was vital. Students gravitated there from far and wide, bringing the usual
wide range of musical predilections and spawning bands like the Clynics,
Higsons, 
Testcard
F, and Bloody Hell. UEA was also the biggest venue in a region hard-pressed
for decent concert halls. In the first half of the 1980s, the University
became an obligatory stop on many British tours, hosting acts as diverse
as Madness, the Fall, U2, the Jam, the Skids, Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop
Explodes, the Smiths, Rockpile, U2, Haircut 100, Depeche Mode, Kid Creole
and the Coconuts, Tenpole Tudor, Elvis Costello, the Red Guitars, the Divinyls,
and, well, yes, Gary Glitter and OMD. Beyond the University, other venues
also attracted nationally renowned acts. The Cure played the beautiful
St. Andrews church, supported by Carnage Visors—a bizarre and largely
unwatchable animated film for which Robert Smith had written a bizarre
and largely unlistenable soundtrack. The show was good though, especially
when the band realized it was much better at pop than faux-Goth. Another
church was converted into an eclectic arts and entertainment club called
Premises, which hosted not only indie hopefuls, but Texas blues legend
Lowell Fulsom and ex-patriot jazz-blues pianist Memphis Slim. By mid-decade,
the Wilde Club, the Jacquard Club, the scary Festival House (the last stronghold
for bikers and heavy metal in Norwich), were among the countless other
pubs around the city that featured live music by visitors and locals alike.
Clubs,
concerts, and fanzines (Happy Cheese, MasterBag, and The
Blue Blanket) helped to keep the scene together, but in retrospect
it was probably geography and demographics that combined to give the Norwich
musical cocktail its peculiar flavor. The city was far enough away from
London—in fact, it was far enough away from just about everywhere—to develop
its own identity. This was especially true in the days before the electrification
of the eastern region railway line brought London nearer and the new Thetford
by-pass made it possible to drive to cosmopolitan Cambridge without spending
the whole day stuck behind a tractor. In 1980, this relative remoteness
meant that Norwich, unlike jaded London, still had a thriving punk scene—albeit
one that overlapped with a Goth insurgency on the tiny city center green
outside the Brown Derby pub where local youngsters gathered on Saturday
afternoons to sample premium strength lager, fish and chips, glue, and
Gene Loves Jezebel. Norwich’s bands and fine citizens prided themselves
on this distance from and indifference to the self-conscious centers of
musical chic. Moreover, although there were the usual tensions between
“town & gown” in a university town, this cultivated iconoclasm meant
that students and local young musicians worked out their own definitions
of what was cool and stylish in the city. In the early 1980s, the Norwich
scene had a unique, somewhat quaint, rather tweedy sort of vibe. The archetypal
Norwich hipster was part village idiot, part trainspotting nerd, part salon
intellectual; satorially, they were equally at home in secondhand 1940s
demob suits (or Grace Kelly-chic for the ladies), army fatigues, sub-Bunnymen
raincoats, or lab coats.
Which
brings me to Tom “Brick” Smith: student, concrete poet, and co-founder
of Gee Mr. Tracy. GMT was part of a long line of Norwich electro experimenters
that included The Home Service, Nuclear Sockets, and Itch (whose 
tremendous
single “Take Me To Your Leaders” sampled John F. Kennedy and sounded like
a template for the fusion of dancetronica and shoegazing that Curve would
later perfect). Brick Smith was like a cross between an overweight Dean
Martin (after a week in a bar) and the Ignatius Reilly character in A
Confederacy of Dunces. It was always hard to tell if he was battling
against or luxuriating in the absurdities of modern life. It didn’t really
matter because he wore cool Oxfam suits, was drunk a lot, and managed to
sing with a sort of insouciant cool while puffing on a cigarette. Partnered
by Vince Rogers, a yeoman of the Norwich scene who had hosted a UEA tv
arts show and been part of electro pioneers Testcard F, GMT recorded some
of the funniest songs to come out of the city. The best of the bunch was
the minimalist, yet strangely lush “Permanent Swoon,” where Smith’s romanticism
and alcoholic longings merged beautifully. “If you left me, I’d go live
in the sea, drink barrels of rum and sing to the whales,” he crooned. This
was typical of a scene awash with self-deprecating humor, where puns were
virtually legal tender. Just listen to the Fire Hydrant Men’s “Baby I’m
A U-Boat,” or “I’m In The Pits Since My Racing Driver Baby Left Me,” or
to the way the Higsons managed to align “Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Thomas
Mann, Man Ray, Ray Milland, and the Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” on “Ylang
Ylang.”
By
the time GMT had hit their uncertain stride, it was already 1985 and even
I am willing to concede that the center of musical gravity had moved north
and west. There were still some terrific Norwich bands after the mid-1980s,
to be sure. The puckish ska-punkers Serious Drinking celebrated booze,
football, and pop culture on their albums The Revolution Starts at Closing
Time and the Batman-inspired EP They May Be Drinkers, Robin, But
They’re Still Human Beings. The Reindeers were the best of the Velvet
Underground apostles. The Inspirational Sound of Morty McVicar’s Good Rocking
Celebration of Eternity failed heroically to reinvent the soul revue as
modern rock. The Caz Carnaby 5 offered a mutant brand of lounge pop. Bizzumble
were manic folkies, but not as manic as the seven-strong psychedelafolkians
Celtica. The Bardots took a good long look at their footwear--and came
up with some erotic musings on their Eye Baby album--before losing
out in the shoegazing stakes to local rivals, the still popular Catherine
Wheel.
More
recently, Beth Orton was born and raised in Norwich, only leaving in her
mid-teens about the time that the extraordinary scene of the early 1980s
began to decline. In some ways, however, Orton’s easy mix of beats and
folk music harks back to the blend of science and nature, electricity and
earthiness, knowledge and whimsy, beer and more beer, that defined the
sounds and style of the Fine City during the years when it ruled the musical
world.
Norwich
scene links:
The
A-Z of Norwich Bands
The
Farmers Boys
BBC
profile on The Higsons
BBC
Radio Documentary on the Norwich Scene
Brian
Ward is the history department Chair at the University of Florida.
He is the author of the award-winning Just
My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations,
and editor of Media,
Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle.
He is also an avid fan of West Ham United.
This
article first appeared in the Summer
2003 edition of Tidal Wave Magazine.
