We met with music-writer Simon Reynolds to talk about his new book on postpunk.

Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978 – 1984

Penguin Group

It’s a fine time of year for postpunk. Perhaps Penguin has chosen to delay the American publication of Simon Reynolds’ chronicle of the dirty, crisp, muddled, excited, and ambitious music responding to the overtly gray cultural landscape until late February to ensure a proper context. Few records can make as much sense on six block walk under slate skies and through freezing temperatures as one of the holy books of postpunk, such as Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures or Wire’s Chairs Missing. Reynolds succeeds at shedding a good deal of light on this previously underconsidered collection of artists, records, and events by revisiting sites and sounds thrilling yet bleak as that Pennsylvanian groundhog’s promise of six more weeks of winter.

Interview after the jump...

Reynolds effectively pursues his own promises with Rip It Up. The period following the much romanticized and dramatized swell and crash of punk with a capital “P” has long wallowed in the shadow of the larger spectacle, viewed with flash-shocked eyes as the younger, less talented, legacy-riding sibling or lumped in with the often misguided and cheap stock of camp and kitsch remember-loving-the-80’s? compilations and theme parties. This book revisits the records made by The Fall, Joy Division, John Lydon’s Public Image Limited, the New York No Wave scene, Cabaret Voltaire, Wire, The Human League, Scritti Politti, The Raincoats, Talking Heads, and the long and wide list of musicians active while the 70’s doldrums reached for the 80’s opulence. The story, as told by Reynolds, is broken into local scenes organized by geography and certain links in sonic methodology. It is a story that required Reynolds to go back in time -- past his three other books and countless articles for Village Voice, Spin, The Wire, The Guardian, and others, past his tenure at the once powerful Melody Maker, and past the fledgling music magazine, Monitor, he co-founded in 1984 -- to the time when music, the local culture it encouraged, and the global culture it pulled from mattered more than anything.

Reynolds blames his career path on the postpunk era and he’s had enough of the benching of those groups and those records that made him who he is. Because of this investment, the history proposed here does damned-well demand its rightful place on the shelf. Rip it Up brings the falling to complete waste scenery of London, Manchester, Cleveland, New York, and Sheffield to the imagined horizon drawn by opening a book and brings the colorful characters that made the music happen to an animated life above your shoulder. Reynolds’ writing captures the thrill of a record -- the life-renewing and affirming energy that junky noise, crisp electronics or tightened up bounce of a bassline emit -- and creates a sudden need to find an old tape hidden in a dusty box or stop in and buy a copy at lunch. The chapters dedicated to Wire, PiL, or Talking Heads fly by with a teenage urgency and reanimates those groups (now mainly history) with vitality.

Yet, in constructing an explanation or drawing lines to set a story, Reynolds falls into the traps that plague most accounts of cultural history. Rip It Up, for better or worse, can often read like a docudrama. In arguing for the brilliance and importance of the postpunk era, Reynolds outlines a certain utopia via nostalgia. In this lens, the ideal state exists only through a romanticized 20-20 hindsight. This is not necessarily of detriment. By exploring and exposing the number of new, ingenious, and important perspectives obtained and techniques employed by the artists accounted for in this book, Reynolds effectively calls upon current and future artists to live and create by the same ethos. While he demonstrates an obvious predilection for the ideas of certain artists (Gang of Four’s neo-Brechtian art-is-politics-is art, Brian Eno’s use of studio as instrument and Oblique Strategies for creativity, Scritti Politti’s deconstruction, or the Pop Group’s incorporation of world beats, for example), he argues less for the method than the need to continue the very process that lent itself as the book’s title. Conversely, certain chapters fall victim to sentimental appraisals of change that can so easily result from the need for a narrative arc. The chapter on New York, for example, mourns (a touch too much) the conversion to club culture often blamed for the decline in live music venues. On one hand, that is a natural reaction to change. On another, it suggests an attachment to stasis contradictory to the demand for new sounds, ways of listening, and forward-leaning culture.

Defining why things matter is essentially a romantic game of hermeneutics, and such a game can have dangerous implications. Music, especially pop music, is a personal matter played out in public. Choice and its kinfolk, taste, are necessarily mediated by market and odd cultural forces but remain based primarily upon the individual. The enjoyment of music is an emotion thing, and even the best arguments made by critics, connoisseurs, and scholars can not overcome that. While founding an explanation via deconstruction and thoughtful reconsideration, in Reynolds’ case, does provide enjoyment (especially for the music fans that enjoy sense making), such analysis tends to shed smoke on the actual events, numbing the immediate emotional response. Books of this variety provide voyeurism. A guided set of glimpses that keep the actual senses buttoned up. Of course, this is a failing inherent to any book of cultural history, any book that tries to order moments now gone. Rip It Up provides excellent and filling voyeurism. The headiness, the need to explain through large ideas, may be exactly what held some of the postpunk groups back. Perhaps the boyish embracing of critical theories and the obsession with subversion and stepping coupled with the need to explain their music (to the press and public) prevented these artists from making music for the body. Perhaps all the clever games just lead to headaches. Reynolds almost suggests as much.

The bulk of anecdotal memories collected and arranged for inclusion in this possibly too thin volume do back the postpunk era as a time in cultural history as fertile and revolutionary as the 1960’s. Many of the groups Reynolds details regularly appeared in the pop charts and on television and mainstream radio. The years covered in Rip It Up were a golden age for music newsweekly in the United Kingdom. The Do It Yourself ethic sparked by punk led to an explosion of small, independent, artist-run businesses and has had lasting impact on the way the music industry is run, both in the UK and, to a different extent, in America. The sound of postpunk changed the nature of pop music and the subject matter it explored allowed for a serious democratization of what can and should be sung about. The same anecdotes and the associated revisiting works to scuff the polished history of punk and the foolishly hung-onto belief that disco sucked, that rock (especially prog) was trad and blown-out, that intelligence and art were deplorable, and that Chuck Berry wrote the only records to rip off. In Reynolds’ account, the postpunk artists drew heavily on dance musics of the world, art movements, critical theory, and the simple belief that the world may have gone green and was in severe need for new blood, new buildings, and food for thought. That account encourages an envy for that sprightly thinking, the actual results, and general atmosphere of that time and advocates the notion that the only cure for that emerald rash would be following in suit.

I had the opportunity to meet with Simon Reynolds in New York and discuss some dust kicked up by his latest book. Fittingly, Talking Heads played loudly in the East Village establishment we sat in (and helped make the tape nearly impossible to decipher).

bb: You’ve talk quite a lot about the nature of the cultural scene in the UK at the time of postpunk, and only touch upon the whole youth culture/youth cult thing that happens in the UK. The whole mods and rockers, tedddyboys, skins thing. Can you talk about that? Why do you think you get these dedicated cults and aesthetics in the UK, as it never seems to quite happen in America?

SR: It’s a bit of a mystery why there weren’t the sort of style tribes in the same way in America, but I think dressing up and looking fabulous has a charge in certain groups. There’s a whole black tradition of style and a gay tradition of looking fabulous, but your sort of ordinary rock fans look a bit crap, don’t they. If you look at the stadium crowds, whether its Grand Funk Railroad or Aerosmith or whoever, the audience is this shapeless mass. Even with a group with a tribal following, like the Grateful Dead -- if you see footage of them from 1970 at the Filmore or something – they have a look, but it’s a disgusting look. The hippies had a look, a sort of Janis Joplin-like thing. It wasn’t very cool, but it was influential. Britain has this sort of working class identity played out through style. It has something to do with the class system and its almost as though idealism, hope, and energy are somehow sublimated through clothing. There’s a great line in The Specials’ song, “Do Nothing”, where he says something to the effect of “the only sunshine in my life is the new shoes on my feet”. When things are keeping you down in England, when you can’t quite escape your class identity, and the country is so drab – the weather, and the look of everything. Everyday buildings, shops, and things are so lacking in any sense of design – style becomes quite libidinized. It carries a utopian charge. The mods, for example, were obsessed with Europe, the motorcycles and so on. Style became a way to escape England, in a very utopian, fetishized way. They were also caught up with black America and the Jamaican immigrants and they would dress in this parodic, excessively smart way – almost dressing trangressively smart, using elegance to cut through the drabness of British life.

There are all these theories to explain these subcultures, but one thing they don’t grapple with is why people choose different ones. Why does one person choose to be a teddyboy and fight the punks and other people choose to be punks? There’s a mystery there. Why would someone choose to be Goth? There are certain generalities there. It tends to be more middleclass people, mainly in the North, interested in style but not willing to go with the whole black culture route. So Goth is a way of stepping out or acting different.

bb: Someone once told me about a clip in some old punk film where this kid being interviewed explains that England was at war, in some sort of way, forever, but by the 1970’s there was peace, and so the people needed something to stand for, to fight against. That seems to explain the youth cult and football fanaticism as well.

SR: It’s a system of intensification, and all those things kind of work together. Football, dressing up, drugs are all ways of steeping up life. I remember reading an interview with the band Northside, around the time of the whole Madchester thing. They were on Factory and were kind of lumped into that scene with Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses. The interviewer tells how he discovered, when listening to the tape, that the band had picked up the tape recorder while he was in the bathroom and shouted “City are wankers. City are Cunts” into it. Its pretty meaningless. They were United fans, but choosing the team to support is pretty meaningless. Once you decide, though, you’re part of something that makes life very exciting. It’s a very arbitrary semiotic system you sell yourself into to make life more exhilarating.

bb: It generates a passion. It gives you something to be concerned with other than the day to day.

It seems to be a much more male thing as well.

SR: To an extent. In the mod or the ska scenes there were women, but they tended to be a bit more peripheral, especially in the working class scenes. With things like Glam or Goth, which I think were more middle or upper working class scenes, there were more women. Remember, Britain is still quite class stratified. One of America’s founding myths is that there is no class system – though things do play out on the race and ethnicity level, but Britain still lives by it.

bb: Can we talk a little about gender and the postpunk period? There seemed to be both more women involved in that period and in more involved ways. Sure, there were female popstars in the 60’s and the 70’s…

SR: But they were all singers.

bb: Right. There’s a huge difference between Maryanne Faithful and Ari Up. It seems like the women involved with postpunk were quite forward and very different. In certain ways, they seemed to push further against and step further past convention than the boys.

SR: That’s true, the women did some very interesting things, but I didn’t want to bang on that drum too much. Certain aspects are understood and I had already written the book on the feminist approach to music history (The Sex Revolts) with my wife. So I let gender issues kind of stand on their own. I got into some of it in the chapter on Leeds. They had a very unisex approach. Bands like Delta 5, the reigning idea at the time was that women were as punk as men, and it wasn’t about men becoming more soft or anything. Certainly Lydia Lunch was doing things that were pretty unprecedented in their ferocity, in a wild, feral, unsocialized girl sort of way.

bb: To me, that is one of the remarkable things about postpunk. There was a sense that gender almost didn’t matter. There wasn’t a girl/boy divide; everyone was up to the same thing. No one really talks about it. There were just girls in the group. What about the more pop bands, like the Human League? Do you think they brought the women in as a gag? Two attractive women kind of playing in this dehumanized group…

SR: I don’t think it was a gag. The women in the Human League were attractive, but in that sort of ordinary, girl in the office that you fancy a bit way. They weren’t superstars, like Blondie; they were approachable. I think they were brought in to make things more pop, though. Unlike New Order who, to their credit, brought in Gillian and gave a lot of consideration to her input, I don’t think the women in the Human League had much to do with the songwriting. But they’re still around, so they were pretty crucial to the band’s success.

bb: They were more than just placeholders. To jump both forward and back, in the piece you wrote on Radiohead in The Wire around Kid A/Amnesiac, you mention the divide between the UK and the US in terms of how the two cultures view the use of the studio and authenticity and rock. Can you talk about that?

SR: There is a great history of using the studio and studio wizardry in America. Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Todd Rundgren, Lindsey Buckingham; they all embraced the studio and overdubs and all that and see it as a privileged site where music happens, but I think there’s much greater emphasis on live performance in America. I remember talking to people about bands in the early 90’s and getting the idea that they were holding their opinion until a live performance. Whereas, in Britain I think there’s a much larger sense that the record is the real thing and that live performance is just supplemental to that. In my own experience it’s the records that are primary. I’ve seen a lot of amazing performances, but if I love a record and I see the band and they’re terrible, I don’t think that the show exposed the fallacy of the record. The record is the achievement. There are groups whose records are my favorite things ever, but I don’t have much desire in seeing them live. It’s definitely not where I judge bands.

I think there is a legacy of producing with Joe Meek in the 50’s, The Beatles with their relationship with George Martin, even groups like Led Zeppelin -- Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones were products of the studio. The recording of Led Zeppelin IV involved tremendous studio sorcery. With the American equivalent of Led Zeppelin, the record is seen more as the document of the thing rather than the accomplishment. An attempt to capture the live energy. There’s also something about distance in the way British groups come to it. They want to make the records starker. The riff structure in British rock, from Sabbath to Cream all the way through to Glam rock, they write things to sound a bit ... tight. Whereas the American style seems to sound more organic.

bb: Even hip-hop and pop are judged based on the sort of live model. The point you made in that article was that for Nirvana to move forward they had to take up acoustic guitars, but for Radiohead to move forward they had to go further into the studio, further away from the stripped down, live take on authenticity.

SR: Nevermind is actually a very produced record. The live band is in there, but its very glossed up

bb: There’s more Butch Vig on there than anything

SR: I remember Neil Tennant, I think, from the Pet Shop Boys saying he really liked “Smells Like Teen Spirit” but that it sounded more like a dance or techno song than a rock record, because he doesn’t like rock records. I think it’s changed a bit, especially in urban areas. There’s more openness to studio weirdness.

bb: Sure, look at something like that last Outcast record which just sold massively and forever, or Nelly, or any of those huge recent pop and hip-hop records. Something’s changing., maybe just not rock. You aren’t really going to see most of the groups that sell now perform live, so maybe America’s starting to come around.

SR: Ha, there is something to be said for the American way though. I mean, I really like Radiohead, but most other British rock groups are shameful. A band like Coldplay, there’s noting going on in the rhythm section at all. If go someplace here and see band, there’s at least going to be a decent drummer. In Britain there are hardly any decent drummers. There used to be, but I think they all went and picked up drum machines…all the rhythm players.

bb: It seems, though there was a history of independent releases and private pressings and so on, that following the release of The Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch and the birth of Fast Product, the DIY explosion really took off. Why do you think that one record made such a difference?

SR: Why did independent labels seem like a new idea when they weren’t? Previously, most independent labels were run by businessmen. They may have been music-loving businessmen, like Sam Phillips, but businessmen. There were a couple of exceptions to that. There was this label Topic, which claims to be the first independent label ever, started around the end of the second World War, I think, and they were a folk label. It was kind of related to the communist movement because folk music was the people’s music and released records by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and then focused more on British folk music. And it was socialistic in a way like Rough Trade. (Topic Records was founded in 1939 by the Workers’ Musicians Association in the UK. They released a burst of records in the early 1940’s then laid fallow until the later 1950’s and played a major role the UK Folk Revival –ed.) The first real label run by musicians put out a lot of improv and things like Derrick Bailey and that sort of thing -- because there was no label that would spend money on that sort of thing. So when Spiral Scratch came out, that was kind of the first time that a band, or a band and a friend of the band – some art school guy that was friends with them – put out their own record. Then, other bands started doing it too, and loads of people were just putting out their own records. A lot of unbusiness-like people trying to start businesses. There was this ideology of not being business-like about it, employing fair play. The bands would split the money evenly and make decisions together. So, with that ideology, it was a new idea.

bb: There was a lot of imagination too. With companies like Factory or Fast Product, there was artwork and other products and other new ideas. Putting out all sorts of things and giving them catalogue numbers. Saying, “we’re going to put a number on a toothbrush and sell it…”

SR: It was almost like running a record label as a joke, or an art project. For someone like Bob Last, Fast Project was a sort of arty prank.

bb: With labels like Cherry Red or Rough Trade getting involved in distribution, do you think the late-70’s independents changed the marketplace for music? There was the emergence of the independent chart, do you think its had a legacy?

SR: I think so, definitely. I think a lot of genres are effected by those ideas but don’t even know it. I doubt little grime producers know about postpunk, but they’re changing the way music is distributed and created. And there are loads of people now who just produce CD-R’s and use fancy packaging and sell them online or however.

There was a certain idea, with the independent movement, that the labels were going to start up something outside the system, give the majors a run for their money. Then that kind of died away. And so there is the indie chart now, but starting in the mid-80’s the indies started working more with majors and it was as if the indies were the farm team for the majors. It’s a place for bands to grow their audience and develop before signing to a bigger label.

bb: What about something like Creation Records? Though, I guess they had major label distribution.

SR: They’re an inspiring story of an indie that did well, I mean some of those bands were pretty groundbreaking. But those bands are the kinds of bands I talk about as being the kind of end of postpunk. The beginning of the sort of retro-rock -- leather jeans and all of that stuff. I like a lot of things from the sixties and a lot of those bands are quite good, but someone like Spaceman 3 were quite scholarly, doing rewrites of the Stooges or what have you. I was really into those sorts of bands, but it was kind of deflating after postpunk.

bb: It uses a sort of backward trajectory…this band follows that follows that…as opposed to jumping off in new directions, which is how you characterized postpunk…

SR: Right. What kind of music were you first into?

bb: The Beach Boys. The first record I remember wanting and getting was Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry. Was that before Thriller? I remember having Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock’n’Roll” and Van Halen’s “Jump” on 45 when I was young, I listened to top 40 radio, but I liked The Beach Boys and then got into the Beatles. I remember seeing some Beach Boys’ thing on television and thinking it was the Beatles with their drugs that made the Beach Boys get weird and, in my young mind, bad. Which is funny now. In middle school I listened to classic rock and started buying punk stuff…and so on…

SR: See, it may sound weird, but I remember there was a period when I was younger that no one talked about The Beatles. I remember being on a train to Manchester to interview the group 808 State and ran into (its funny that you mentioned him) Alan McGee. He played me the tape of Primal Scream’s “Come Together” and he played me the Andy Weatherall remix and made the mistake of saying “the band don’t even play on that” which I ran back and printed in Melody Maker. But then he turns to me and says, “you know, The Beatles are more relevant now than ever”. It was really the first time I’d heard about the Beatles in years. Then with acid house and the Manchester thing, there was all this strange 60’s stuff as an influence. Ecstasy brought The Beatles back.

bb: What about fanzines or independent magazines? You don’t really mention any in the book.

SR: There were some, but I never really took notice. There was an explosion of fanzines, but at the end and covering things like Primal Scream and that indie stuff. A lot of them were very mournful. They talked a lot about the death of punk or how it had lost its edge and that sort of thing. It was like a cul de sac in that regard. When I first started writing professionally, it was about the same time as the K and Sarah records was happening. So all the bands were saying, “we’re going to sound as horrible as possible because were real punk music”. The other side was this pure pop thing with the mentality of “we’re real pop music, and you Wham, or you Prince, or you Madonna, you’re not real pop. Real pop music sounds like these three songs from the third Velvet Underground record or Love’s Forever Changes”. There was a sense that pop music had strayed from its path and that those bands would sort it out.

bb: And that’s basically how indie-rock remains.

SR: Yeah, and fanzines came in with all of that.

bb: We’re there any major British independent magazines? What about Sniffin’ Glue?

SR: Sniffin’ Glue was really successful. The lasted about twelve to thirteen issues released about once a month; but those guys were probably on speed all the time and had a lot to write about. It looked pretty rough and ready. There were a few other ones, there was Jamming! which became like a regular monthly magazine. That was started by this guy Tony Fletcher, when he was a schoolboy and was really ragged -- copied on the library photocopier, but by the 80’s he’d found some backing for it and it became a real magazine, and quite a good one.

bb: Was there a network, during the postpunk era, of kids looking for other kids to go to shows and things with? I remember that in the back of Select magazine there used to be like, personals, of kids looking for other kids that were into the Manics, Blur and Pulp. When did that start?

SR: I really don’t know. My friends would go to see shows with me, like Adam and the Ants and Killing Joke, but they weren’t quite as into it as I was. They would go. I’m not sure. I know in my town, and it seemed like most suburban towns, there would be a pack of anacro-punks with Crass stenciled on their bags hanging about in front of the town hall or shopping center. But the thing about postpunk was that it didn’t have a style lexicon, where as punk and the subgenres of punk, they all had their own sort of language in terms of clothing. Postpunk didn’t really have a look; it was kind of scruffy. The charity shop look was kind of a thing. There was a thing of not looking Rock’n’Roll. They’d wear suits. PiL kind of started that. The whole “we’re not decadent Rock’n’Roll, we’re not like the Rolling Stones, but we’re not like punk either”.

bb: I liked that you started the book by pointing to the power of the anger in Johnny Rotten’s voice, but then mention how you heard it only later. I’m glad you noted punk’s impact on those that actually missed it and got the message a bit differently.

SR: It’s also shrewd marketing to address those who came too late. There’s a lot more of them. I was aware that I was using a rhetorical approach to kind of stroke the egos of those who missed out. The seminal moments of punk were only a couple hundred people, but the late crowd was hundred of thousands, it was a global thing. It’s also true; I feel like there’s an authenticity to coming into the popular wave. At that point people have their own take of the scene or whatever and its interesting the way things spin out into their own.

bb: Does that explain the popularity of bands in the last few years that have postpunk reference points?

SR: I don’t think that’s what’s happening there. I don’t think most people have the sort of sense of time with music history. I had this experience recently in a bar. I was in the kind of place where hip people go and to transcend the game of hip they play really rocking, All-American tunes. Aerosmith and all this stuff. And this song came on and I recognized it and it was driving me nuts, so I had to go ask the guy at the bar what it was. There was some twenty-five year old guy at the bar and he said it was from the soundtrack to Good Fellas. He said he thought it “might be The Fall or it might be The Alarm and that he was pretty sure it wasn’t The Fixx”. Now, being a rock critic, those three bands sound nothing alike to me. It was also an obviously 70’s sounding song, it was of pre-punk origin. This twenty-five year old kid is typical of people’s musical history; it’s all jumbled up. Punk, postpunk, and stuff that happened in the mid-80’s – its more of a blur. The song I, I found out later, was Nilsen, so definitely pre-punk. With the book, I break down years ’78, ’79. ’80, but I lived through them. I think young people now hear stuff from so many eras at once that they don’t care as much. In the book I try and give some of the context back.

bb: We just don’t hear music historically any more. Personally, I liked the Clash, but I didn’t know about Wire until Elastica showed up. Then I realized I knew Wire songs without ever hearing them or knowing much about them -- except their being mentioned in Lipstick Traces. Now, its even faster and easier to find things. There are so many sources. You have talked about this elsewhere, not just talking about the re-issue industry and records staying in print longer, but the fact that there are so many sources and that things move so very fast now.

SR: Its fascinating to me. Its actually something I’d like to write a book on – time, nostalgia, timelessness… The way things go on now, everything is jumbled up and in some ways it seems like things are going so fast and on the other hand if feels like it did when I was growing up. It felt like we were very much in the present all of the time. We hardly ever thought of the past, and even though we had revivals, they didn’t seem like revivals. There was the ska revival, but that seemed like it’s own thing.

bb: There was also the impact of space at play with that..

SR: Ska was popular in Britain – things like Desmond Decker – but The Special going to that was very different from Oasis revisiting The Beatles. The Specials were ska, but they only referenced certain flavors. I don’t know. I’d like to figure out how it is to grow up so inundated.

bb: I wonder how young people interact with music. The marketplace and the listening mechanisms are so different. I feel like an old curmudgeon.

SR: I can’t help you. It’s funny; it puts people in a very odd predicament. They can have a very large amount of music, so they end up just kind of skipping through it. When I buy an actual album these days I tend to make sure I know damned well if I like it. But I think people that just download things, they can skim over things and throw them away if it doesn’t seem right.

bb: I just have a few quick questions about the book. It’s been out over seas and has drummed up a good amount of discussion. Some critics have said you force the narrative arc too heavily, finding stories where they needn’t be. Other people have said that you use catchall phrases to describe music that deserves deeper inspection. Would it have been better if you spent more time talking concretely about how certain records were made?

SR: I think I go pretty far into that with Throbbing Gristle. I really just didn’t have the space to do that. It’s big discography.

bb: Other people have said you focus too much on the popular groups, but once you start talking about the more experimental or esoteric bands or aspects of records you get into deep waters – there’s a lot to cut through.

SR: Yeah. All the chapters that are about a single band, like PiL or Joy Division or Throbbing Gristle, could have whole books written about them, or already do. You could get lost in aspects of so many of the bands. So I was trying to write generally, to give an awareness of the personality, the context, and some of the artifacts. With someone like The Fall, I only mention like Slates. I had to choose which facets to touch upon. I couldn’t really talk about everything interesting about every band. There are some groups that get past over quite glancingly, and other groups get more. Someone like Scritti gets a lot of time because they started off quite abstract and angular and grow more poppy. They’re kind of a paradigm band and talking about them points to trends in the era as a whole.

bb: What’s your process for laying out a big project like this book? How do you get started?

SR: This music, as I say in the book, was music I was a fan of and I wrote an article for Uncut that just began to spiral into this massive story, as I thought it was meant for the cover. So I drew an initial map and then I over researched. Then I had to find a way to make it readable. I don’t think most people understand how hard it can be to take something like this, a big jumble or puree and make it into a really good consume. I had to leave out a lot to make it readable, so I was constantly trying to get as much in and keep it from being obsessive. I did a lot of pre-editing and my wife helped edit it. She’s a fan but not an obsessive fan, so she helped make it read well. And there are all sorts of material that I cut that will go up on the website. That’s been very helpful. Its good to know, “oh, this won’t make it, but I don’t have to throw it away, it can go on the website”. Which is good for the fanboys. And I’m not the last word on the subject, I just tried to map the thing out. I’m sure now there will be more books. I hope it will be a growth area.

bb: The other criticism, and this gets at what the role of the critic is, is that you take the pop format and use that to investigate groups that may not fit the model.

SR: Well, part of the reason I talk about how well things do or chart position is because it is a measure of impact. Anytime you release a record, and it becomes a commodity, you kind of enter that model. So charts are some sort of measure of how far things go. I think coming out of punk, the most interesting groups wanted to reach out and impact people.

bb: That also seems like a very British thing -- to be intent in that way. I’m thinking of later bands like The Stone Roses or Oasis who came out saying they were going to be the biggest band in the world. You don’t seem to get that as much from American groups. Most indie bands or the sort of outsider bands seem content to be rock bands, they don’t seem to want to start a revolution. Few of them come out and say so, at least.

SR: Part of that is wanting to be exempt from the mainstream and commerce and pop. Pop has never been a dirty word in England, really. There’s always been some kind of weird thing in the charts. Like Bowie or Sparks, who are American but more popular in the UK. There’s the sense that pop is ok, that you can weird it up. It may not be the place to be, but its in reach.

bb: I think we can contrast Radiohead and Nirvana along these lines too. Radiohead made weird rock popular and are ok with it; whereas Nirvana seemed to fight back, appearing on the Rolling Stone with a T-shirt saying “corporate rock still sucks”. There’s a few ways to read that, but it does seem to be the American indie way -- to shun being big or poppy or popular. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

SR: Yeah, I’ve never resolved my feelings about it. There are bands out there that seem to like certain artists because they were failures. I think there’s just the fact that pop is not an oppressive thing to Brits, where it does seem to seem that way to the weirder American groups. The charts in England just seem like a place of opportunity because they do tend to be so diverse and quirky.

bb: There are also the critics who say you use too much critical theory and that you use it badly. What compelled you to start pulling critical theory into rock criticism and what do you think about theory in general?

SR: I read a lot of it on an amateur level. I was very enthusiastic about it at the time. But, I’ve kind of stopped using it. With Rip It Up I barely reference any theory at all. I think I used to use it more to back up what I had to say, but I don’t feel that need as much any longer. I didn’t need to be sanctioned by Deluze and Guattari. Some of the best theorists about music are musicians themselves. Eno is a great thinker about music. I think some people are actually disappointed I didn’t do more of the theory thing with Rip It Up.

bb: There has been a lot of talk about the book, does this mean you’ve now written an “important” book?

SR: I guess so…I ..uh -- I think what I have done is reach an audience I’ve never reached before.

bb: Do you remember what was behind your head when you started writing, why you choose to be that writer?

SR: It seemed appealing. I didn’t want to be in a band. I knew I had no music in me, but I had ideas about music. I guess it was a very postpunk thing. And at the time it felt like you could contribute something. As a wrier you could put ideas out there and bands would pick up on them or you could effect the general culture. Critics contribute, and bands did too, to a general atmosphere of ideas. Then there was the proselytizing of a certain kind of music. There has always been something that I’ve kind of been pushing.

Rip It Up and Start Again is available now from Penguin Books