Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth 9781501321146, 9781501321160, 9781501321153

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COLOSSAL YOUTH

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly The Modern Lovers by Sean Maloney Homogenic by Emily Mackay Uptown Saturday Night by Will Fulton & Patrick Rivers Workbook by Walter Biggins & Daniel Couch Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Rubin Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Peepshow by Samantha Bennett In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony Transformer by Ezra Furman Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti and many more…

Colossal Youth

Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero

Bloomsbury Academic An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-2114-6 ePub: 978-1-5013-2117-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2115-3 Series: 33 13 Cover image © 333sound.com Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Track Listing   1. Searching for Mr. Right (3:04)   2. Include Me Out (2:01)   3. The Taxi (2:07)   4. Eating Noddemix (2:04)   5. Constantly Changing (2:05)   6. N.I.T.A. (3:31)   7. Colossal Youth (1:55)   8. Music for Evenings (3:03)   9. The Man Amplifier (3:15) 10. Choci Loni (2:37) 11. Wurlitzer Jukebox! (2:45) 12. Salad Days (2:01) 13. Credit in the Straight World (2:30) 14. Brand—New—Life (2:55) 15. Wind in the Rigging (2:26)

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Contents

Acknowledgments viii For You are Movement … Eaten Out of House and Home Everything Comes from Chaos Showing the Way to Go The World is Not You Let’s Be a Tree Don’t Label Me Sit at Home and Watch the Tube No Rain Outside Blind as the Fate Decrees The Editors Agree They Were Good, They Were Young … And That is Nothing

1 11 23 31 41 51 65 73 89 99 113 125 139

Notes 143 Permissions 151 Bibliography 157  vii •

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank: Stuart Moxham, Alison Statton, and Spike Williams for providing fascinating and crucial facts and insights; Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, Ally-Jane Grossan, and Michelle Chen at Bloomsbury for making this book a physical reality, with an extra special thanks to Michelle for patiently and productively working through the text with us; and David Beal, Canada Choate, Nick Croggon, Nick Fandos, Emilie Friedlander, Miguel Gallego, Luke Hellwig, Zachary Roberts, Joe Soonthornsawad, Mike Sugarman, and Amy Weiss-Meyer for offering guidance through the typescript-writing process (and for being generally wonderful people). Michael would also like to thank: the Brooklyn Public Library Leonard Branch; Lula Bean coffee shop; the Judgers: Henry, Kevin, and Dylan; Sabine Russ; Mike Blair, Linda Blair, and Jackie Blair; and my best friend and closest confidante, Canada. Joe would like to thank: Mom, Dad, Julia, and Kt.

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For You are Movement …

Colossal statue of a youth c.590 b.c. marble 3’05 m Pit east of Temple of Poseidon, Sounion Athens, National Museum Young marble giants greeted the sailor from Cape Sounion as he entered the home stretch to Athens. Two basic intuitions of Greek art—tensed vitality and geometric structuring—are as yet disunited: the sculptor partly carves, partly maps an abstract concept of human form on to the rectangular block. Richter, Kouroi figs. 33–9.1

In some photographs, the ancient stone faces are halfobliterated: swirls of ornamented ear lobes, geometrically braided hair, flattened foreheads, and deep eye sockets fall down the right side of the face; on the left side, the marble is cracked, giving way to unsculpted jagged rock. The colors, too, are lost to time. Ancient Greek art historian Gisela Richter estimates that these sculptures—massive marble statues depicting nude youths called kouroi—were once splashed with bright hues, but we can only use our imaginations today to construct a full picture: gold, brown, or black locks of hair; midnight black or sunny  1 •

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blue eyes; bracelets and necklaces marked with flourishes of red. When first built, these figures stood guard over the Temple of Poseidon on the promontory of Cape Sounion, a rocky peninsula 43 miles from Athens. The cape has a history of tragic homecomings. In The Odyssey, Kings Menelaus and Nestor are sailing home on their victorious voyage back from Troy when, rounding the corner of Cape Sounion, Apollo strikes down one of Menelaus’s most trusted crew members. The Greek fleet lands to build a funeral pyre, but the funeral is only a harbinger of more bad things to come. The gods cast hurricanes upon the sailors and throw them back out to sea, their long-awaited homecoming delayed again. The sailors are almost there, Homer suggests, but they’re still somewhere else. Sounion is not the Greece of wine-filled homecoming feasts: it’s a cragged pile of rocks at the mercy of the weather and the gods. Over time, as the sculptors of nearby Athens began to scale their figures down to more human proportions, the “colossal,” 10-feet-tall youths who guarded the port would have appeared larger-than-life as sailors passed by, ringing around the cape toward civilization. A few hundred years after the kouroi had been built, artists shifted their attention to the bodies of adult gods rather than unnamed youths; their chisels carved out lifelike veins and muscles, rather than the abstract geometric braids and distended forward-driving legs of the kouroi. All the way out on Sounion, the “young marble giants” would eventually greet civilized Greek sailors with the remnants of a long-gone history, of a time nearly lost to memory.  2 •

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In the mid-1970s, a young songwriter named Stuart Moxham picked up a copy of Richter’s 1942 book Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths, a Study of the Development of the Kouros Type in Greek Sculpture from the shelves of an art school library in Cardiff, Wales. Stuart, who had a wry sense of humor, was likely tickled by the book’s subtitle: “archaic youth,” aptly described his isolated existence in remote Cardiff, a seaport city 150 miles to the west of London. An old soul, he thought of himself as more archaic than anarchic. But he was also a hopeless romantic—something of a teenage spirit, although in his twenties—and his vague, open-ended songs of heartbreak sounded ancient and emotionally oversized compared to the terse political indictments coming from London punks. In the late 1970s, Londoners were the youths of “now,” but Stuart came from Cardiff and, seemingly, from another era. In the library, he found something. The image of the kouroi fit the music Stuart had begun making with his brother, Philip, and Philip’s girlfriend, Alison. Their minimal setup of electric guitar, bass, vocals, and a homemade drum machine was raw and barren in a different way to that of London three-chord anarchist punk bands like the Sex Pistols. And, Stuart, Philip, and Alison’s quiet, seemingly unfinished, gap-filled songs came from someplace else—it was music for those not-yet-home, for youths who tended to turn inward, and even backward, rather than onward into a raucous mosh pit. In Richter’s description of those ancient statues—sculptures that announced the start of Greek civilization to historians, yet were too block-like and ancient to ever fully be a part of it—Stuart, Philip, and  3 •

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COLOSSAL YOUTH

Alison discovered a vocabulary to articulate their newly formed project. The band would be called “Young Marble Giants”; the name of their one major work— released as a full-length album on Rough Trade Records in 1980—Colossal Youth. This link—between the band name, album title, and their origins in a book on ancient Greek sculpture—is a clue: The music can’t be separated from those who make it. From the beginning, the band deliberately chose to merge the sounds of Colossal Youth with the coincidences and contradictions of their everyday lives. Like kouroi, Young Marble Giants and their songs are caught between stillness and motion—rigidly cast in stone, but posed with one foot flexed and stepping forward. Their lyrics are filled with a sense that their Cardiff home is also not quite home. And, like the half-obliterated faces of the colossal youths, their sound blends together a celebration of the mechanical, as well as that of the natural world. It’s easy to point to Richter’s “two basic intuitions of Greek art”— “tensed vitality and geometric structuring”—as hallmarks of the YMG sound. You can hear something like that “tensed vitality” in the muted strikes of Stuart’s supertrebly Rickenbacker guitar, and “geometric structuring” in the interlocking, patterned jabs of both Philip’s bass lines and the ticking beats made by the drum machine. But, as Richter notes of the kouroi, these two intuitions are “disunited”—they’re both there, but they’re also separate. “The sculptor partly carves, partly maps an abstract concept of human form on to the rectangular block.” How do we listen to this music which carves out the moment in front of us, yet also maps a time and place that remains unknown? What do all these contradictions—and the  4 •

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half-formed thoughts and questions they produce—sound like? Halfway through the album, Young Marble Giants say that “Colossal Youth is showing the way to go.” Like the kouroi, the album will point you home. But what of the place where they live—the place we’re only meant to pass through? For the sailor on the way home, the young marble giants of Colossal Youth are only ever seen in relative motion: dotting the horizon, colossal for a moment, and then, as the ship moves on, fading out of view. * * * Young Marble Giants were born out of a Cardiff-based cover band called True Wheel (named after a 1974 Brian Eno song of the same name). Brothers Stuart and Philip Moxham played together on guitar and bass respectively, running through glam rock and proto-punk songs at local venues—at least until Stuart decided he needed a break. He took a brief sojourn to a farm outside the city, and when he came back, True Wheel had a new backup singer: Alison Statton. Alison and Philip started dating, and when Stuart approached his brother to start a new band, one in which they would write and perform their own songs instead of others’, Philip and Alison “presented me with a fait accompli …” Stuart said. “It’s both of us or nothing.”2 Stuart chose “both,” and the newly formed YMG began rehearsing in a Cardiff storefront soon thereafter. In 1979, the close-knit Welsh trio self-recorded and released a cassette; the next year, they contributed two songs to a compilation by local do-it-yourself post-punk label Z Block Records. It was the songs on this compilation  5 •

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that caught the ear of Geoff Travis, founder of London’s Rough Trade, which was at the time the global center of punk and post-punk. “[W]hen I got to track nine, I think it was,” Travis recalls in Neil Taylor’s Rough Trade oral history, Document and Eyewitness, “I just stopped in my tracks, it was so good.”3 So good, in fact, that Travis rang YMG up in Cardiff,* signed them to his label, and brought them to London. There, Travis gave the young musicians free creative reign, and the three decided to record a full-length album rather than test the waters with an EP. When Travis “asked us what we wanted to do,” Stuart told us, “I convinced Phil and Alison, over a cup of tea around the corner, that we should put aside any concerns about spending the label’s money and do our album; after all, Rough Trade was the hippest label on the planet at the time and the impact of coming out of nowhere with an LP would be the greatest we could make.”4 Their decision made, YMG promptly traveled— per Travis’s suggestion—to the pastoral Foel Studio in Llanfair Caereinion, Wales, where they recorded their one and only full-length album, Colossal Youth. ‘Coming out of nowhere,’ as it were, YMG dropped the LP—quiet, sparse, personal—in February of 1980. Successful on the charts (at least by underground rock standards), Colossal Youth was followed by two EPs: Final

Travis used a phone number that he had seen on the back cover of Is the War Over? The number went to a payphone down the street from Z Block’s headquarters. Label co-founder Spike Williams remembers that a young boy knocked on their door after picking up Travis’s call, and asked for “Mr. Z Block.” * 

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Day later that same year and 1981’s instrumental Testcard. Testcard was a posthumous release, though, as YMG had broken up around the turn of 1981 following a brief and tumultuous North American tour that was conducted in a fog of what Stuart has called an “Olympian ganja intake.”5 In the span of less than a year, the group went from unknown to celebrated outsiders in London to marginal figures in the history of post-punk, with their music and its context in some ways forgotten to time. Subsequent artists—such as Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson, Kurt Cobain, and The xx—have counted YMG as an influence, but, ever under-documented, YMG themselves remain tough to pin down. They’re something of an “abstract concept,” as it were, like the austere stone sculptures after which they’re named. Despite the initial success of Colossal Youth and the generations of fans and musicians who’ve bestowed genuine cult status upon the album, most histories of post-punk hardly mention YMG. Both Simon Reynolds’s canonical Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 and Rob Young’s Rough Trade: Labels Unlimited spend less than a page on the Cardiff trio, while some of the band’s peers from London, Manchester, and other English cities receive whole chapters. Reynolds and Young speak of YMG in reverential language, and yet their analyses go no further than briefly recounting the band’s origins, calling Colossal Youth one of the finest documents of the era, and then hurrying on to the band’s early break up. Reynolds went on to write liner notes to the 2007 reissue of Colossal Youth; his text is an invaluable resource for those seeking to learn more about YMG. But still, why, if YMG’s sole LP is so venerated and well-loved,  7 •

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have music historians devoted so little time to writing about it? One answer is that YMG and their thorny history of contradictions and coincidences simply don’t fit neatly into any general recounting of the post-punk age. While they shared qualities with Cardiff peers like Reptile Ranch or British Rough Traders like The Raincoats, they were much quieter and less overtly political than nearly all their contemporaries. They wrote short, tightly composed, densely emotional songs that favored stark silences and gaps over chaotic walls of distorted noise. As soon as you feel like you’ve figured their music out, it writhes out of your grasp, echoing off the wall in some other way, and starts to sound like something else. And, with less than a year in the public eye, there are precious few archives of photos, demos, or artifacts for historians to pore over. As a Welsh band in London, YMG, with their music, clothing, and attitude, stood out even in a Rough Trade world designed to look and sound different in the first place. As outsiders and introverts—as “provincial” people from the boonies of Wales—their music held up a mirror to the society around them: exposing the cultural, musical, and political contradictions of the time, while also exploring them. “Music is more than an object of study,” economist Jacques Attali writes in his influential 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music: “It is a way of perceiving the world.”6 YMG give us a fractured, disjointed way of looking at the world, one full of contradictions and misunderstandings. They provide a framework in which the family and the rebellious spirit of youth, the chaos  8 •

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of the city and the serenity of the countryside, the machine and the tree root, the personal and the political all come together and collide in continually new, fluid ways. They make music which lives right now in any given moment, music that’s “Constantly Changing”—to cite the title of track five of Colossal Youth—rather than sitting comfortably within the confines of any genre or era of music. Without genres, histories, and other classifications to lean on, we’re forced to listen with all the contingencies, subjectivities, and changes that go along with living inside ourselves and in the world. Wherever—and whenever—we are, we’ve no choice but to let the marble giants show us the way to go. And to pay attention to how they look at us. We’re always something different, to each other and even to ourselves. Our pasts are out to sea. And when I see you, they sing, Constantly changing / Never the same as, never remaining.

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Eaten Out of House and Home

Cardiff is a really awful place … It’s industrial, a depressed area … and it’s not only provincial, it’s also Welsh which means it’s also very self important. Stuart Moxham1

Stuart, Philip, and Alison had many reasons to rail against their hometown. In the previous two years, they’d seen it falling into what their friend and fellow Cardiff post-punker Spike Williams called “post-industrial meltdown.”2 Closing factories and shipping docks cost the city thousands of working-class jobs. For YMG, Cardiff really was a “really awful place”—a place in which they had difficulties finding jobs, apartments, and spaces to play live music. Audiences in Cardiff cared for the solo-soaked, hard-driving rock that the quiet trio’s glam and electronic influences explicitly denied. It was their hometown, but it was hard for the band to ever feel at home there—even in the post-punk circle around Z Block Records, founded by Spike and his band Reptile Ranch. Nevertheless, YMG did find a landscape in Cardiff to both react to and, in their own quiet way, reflect and mirror. They may have wanted to get out of the city, but •

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a deep connection to their Cardiff roots shapes Colossal Youth. The songs on YMG’s only full-length album ground themselves in the ambivalent relationship that the band had with the “industrial” yet “provincial” world where they grew up, fell in love, and first started playing together. This world was on the brink of collapse. The closure of the East Moors steelworks in 1978, where Stuart or Philip worked their first job,* cost the city over 3,000 jobs alone, and the Cardiff shipping docks soon shut down in the wake of a monumental loss of steel and coal exports. A blizzard had howled through Cardiff that previous February, and the following winter of 1979 brought an economic freeze—popularly called the “Winter of Discontent”—as union leaders mounted strikes in protest against then Prime Minister and Cardiff native Jim Callaghan’s proposed pay caps on union workers across the UK. This class chaos opened the door for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party to sweep the 1979 elections, and the new regime threatened to outsource whatever industrial jobs the UK had left. Working-class rebellion soon sounded from Cardiff to Manchester to Belfast to London.† They mention this in their interview with RE/Search magazine, and the response is credited simply to YMG, so it’s unclear whether it’s Stuart or Philip. †  Things were even worse in the surrounding countryside, as Philip explained in RE/Search. “There’s no industry really—they’re trying to get foreign industry in, some Japanese company like Sony … Because it’s 70% unemployed & they can get cheap labor. Maybe they’re getting paid by the English government to invest” (RE/Search #1, 9). * 

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Out of these crumbling conditions, YMG started to practice. Tellingly, they first rehearsed in a vacant storefront where the Moxham brothers were also squatting, along with their cousin, Peter Joyce, a telephone engineer and electronics whiz who loved Kraftwerk and Pere Ubu. Cardiff was not an environment where one could easily find (or afford) state-of-the-art electronic musical equipment, so Peter cobbled together a homemade drum machine for YMG from a diagram in Practical Wireless magazine. According to Spike, it “looked like something from WWII.”3 Peter also fashioned a ring modulator and Stylophone synthesizer for his cousins, and his DIY machinery would become a defining characteristic of YMG’s sound and style. Photo prints from a friend’s old contact sheet show the band rehearsing at home—lined up in profile with Alison in a full tweed suit and the Moxhams in sunglasses, the three look like sci-fi detectives in a futuristic film noir. Around the city, Stuart frequented the recently opened Chapter Arts Centre for experimental film screenings, as well as the library at Cardiff Art College where he had initially enrolled as a student and where, according to Spike, he sometimes sat as a life model.* Spike remembers an arty young Stuart with hair dyed bright red—Spike and his friends “would probably have described him as ‘pretentious’ at the time.”4 A few years earlier, at the late age of twenty, Stuart had taught himself to play guitar. As a musician and a listener,

Stuart “dropped out to become a post-punker, de rigueur,” he told us. * 

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Stuart tuned in to a diverse array of records by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Booker T. and The MGs, Devo, and others, many of which he likely found in the bins at the local Virgin Records store where he worked. Alison, meanwhile, remembers nights spent at reggae clubs like the Casablanca, an old church-turned-venue near Tiger Bay, where Cardiff’s international shipping docks welcomed an African and Jamaican community. She recalls True Wheel as “a covers band with a difference, with Phil Moxham doing a cracking rendition of ‘Sweet Jane.’”5 This first group provided her and her bandmates a stage to hone their developing musical communication, one which pointedly side-stepped Cardiff’s preference for macho rock ’n’ roll. “Cardiff is a rhythm and blues town,” Stuart asserted in a 1997 interview. “It’s a town with heavy industry, and … heavy rock and stuff is very popular there.”6 By the time Stuart approached Philip about forming a new band to showcase his original songs, the two brothers had consciously developed a playing style that ran away from Cardiff’s R&B and R&R tendencies toward something quieter and more expansive in its origins. Philip’s picked bass tones took inspiration from dub, funk, American disco, and German electronic music, while Stuart’s muted Rickenbacker sound expressed a musical fondness for reverb-loving guitarists like Steve Cropper and Duane Eddy, and his playing deliberately avoided the panache, excess, and endless soloing of ’70s’ FM hard rock. Alison’s position as a female lead singer was unique in both Cardiff’s hard rock mainstream and its developing DIY underground. The move from True Wheel to YMG also coincided with the darkest moments of Cardiff’s economic fallout. •

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As Spike recalls, “Thatcher’s Tory government had just come to power and we all thought we were going to die in a nuclear holocaust at any moment. Most of us were unemployed, living in poverty you’d find it hard to imagine.” In these drastic times, he and his friends did what seemed like the only thing they could do: they started a band. “For around 3 months, I had 15p* a week to live on because I was paying HP [hire purchase] on my Gibson L6S guitar,” said Spike. “I was skeletal.”7 Reptile Ranch, the name Spike and his bandmates chose for their anarchist post-punk group, virtually created Cardiff’s small DIY scene. They were inspired by The Buzzcocks’ decision, in 1977, to bypass a major label and independently release their first album, as well as by examples set by post-punk groups like the Leedsfounded, London-based Scritti Politti, who self-released their debut single Skank Bloc Bologna in November 1978 before signing to Rough Trade. Spike and Reptile Ranch fled the dead-end, coal-mining jobs awaiting them in the rural Ebbw Valley of Wales and moved to Cardiff. There, in the abandoned industrial wasteland district of Splott, they slowly saved funds to start their own independent label, Z Block—hoping to document and help grow the punk and experimental music scene in Cardiff. “Smash the majors was our rallying cry,” Spike commented.8 Is The War Over?, Z Block’s 1979 local compilation album, featured bands like Addiction, Mad Dog, and

In 2017, Spike’s 15p roughly translates to an inflation-adjusted one US dollar. * 

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The Riotous Brothers, who all emulated the punk rock of New York City in the mid-’70s. Outliers like Test to Destruction played industrial-leaning electronic music, and Reptile Ranch made skeletal, drummer-less post-punk. The sixteen-song Is The War Over? ends with two tracks from YMG who sound otherworldly and strange compared even to the unconventional contributions by Test to Destruction and Reptile Ranch.* Without the pure DIY spirit of Reptile Ranch—who wrote a letter to Scritti Politti in 1978 asking for advice on how to produce a record, and received a homerecording pack and boisterous words of encouragement as a response—Cardiff would have remained totally cut off from regional DIY developments across the UK. In this sense of remoteness, Stuart’s put-downs of Cardiff ring true. For those in England, Wales was truly “provincial,” a barren and unconnected territory filled with coalmines, steel factories, and shipping docks— subject to all the stereotypes and prejudices directed at people from the rural, industrial working class. Cardiffians, too, closed themselves off from other kinds of music. “Because bands like YMG and Reptile Ranch were categorised as ‘new wave’ and no one in Cardiff knew what that meant,” Spike explained, “we were labeled ‘punks’ by the local venues and, even in 1979,

“Ironically, John Peel did not play [YMG’s] tracks when he featured six of the eight bands on Is The War Over? on his show in November 1978,” Spike noted. The influential DJ Peel would feature the band in a live session for BBC Radio 1 shortly thereafter, once Rough Trade released Colossal Youth. * 

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punk bands were not welcome in most Cardiff venues unless they were famous.”9 Excluded both nationally and locally, the Z Blockers set about creating their own small alternative world. They organized shows in the spaces available to them, like trade union halls, political clubs, and even an Indian restaurant. Cardiff Art College also welcomed experimental music, as did the community-led Grassroots Coffee Bar and Youth Centre, where both YMG and Reptile Ranch played their first shows just a few weeks apart. Grassroots had a capacity of just about fifty, and at times the audiences for these types of shows would barely make the double digits. Spike remembers YMG’s first public show in 1978: a friend of Alison and the Moxhams told him that night the band onstage called themselves The Clones.* Even before the music began, those in the audience could tell this new band looked different. “They dressed like 1940s’ Americans,” Spike claimed, “but Phil’s ‘Billy Whiz’ haircut, a ‘number 2’ with a two-inch needle of waxed jet-black hair pointing skyward from his brow supported by a colourful little rubber band, sent them into another time, possibly another planet.” Their music followed suit: the high-pitched organ lines of songs like “The Taxi” or “Colossal Youth” may have at first sounded like 1940s’-era American fairground music, but the addition of Philip’s dub-inflected basslines, Alison’s nursery

YMG had originally toyed around with The Clones as a name, and also The Lumps. * 

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rhyme delivery, and drum machine static pushed the music into something nearly impossible to place. The idiosyncratic combination didn’t go over well. “A lot of Cardiffians just didn’t get YMG,” Spike said. “To be fair,” he continued, “there were a lot of rational reasons to dislike the band’s live performances: the endless tuning of guitars, the stop/start disrespect for the audience, the almost total disregard for the audience by every member of the band.”10 During shows, Philip stood with his back turned to the crowd and, at the end of each song, he dipped down, stopping the cassette player which played the drum track with his knee; Alison kept her gaze fixed up and over the audience, staring at, as Spike put it, “some imaginary horizon, never smiling.”11 The way their placid, motionless demeanor mixed with the quietness and fragility of the music registered as more than just typical punk theatrics. YMG didn’t inspire anarchic moshing or loud calls for rebellion. Instead, their performances had a way of spreading hushed anxiety—a nearly stifling silence. Reptile Ranch, however, heard something others didn’t. “We were so eager for YMG to be on the compilation that we were prepared to abandon our DIY/ anarchist principle of not selecting bands for the LP,” Spike wrote to us. “After all, not having Cardiff’s best (ever) band on the album would be a crime.”12* But YMG continually declined the offer, claiming they had other,

In order to find bands for the compilation without selecting them, Reptile Ranch tacked up a poster at Grassroots inviting bands to contact them if they wanted to record their music. * 

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more personal plans for their music (or alternately, that they were about to break up). At the last minute, another group backed out and a space on the compilation opened back up. After Spike started dating a second cousin of the Moxhams’ and bumped into the brothers at a family birthday party, YMG finally agreed to take what would prove to be the final slot on side B of Is The War Over? They recorded two songs— “Ode to Booker T.” and “Searching for Mr. Right”—in a makeshift studio above Grassroots. A few months earlier, in 1979, YMG had home recorded and self-released a cassette called Colossal Youth. It contained early versions of ten of the fifteen songs that would appear on the following year’s Rough Trade LP of the same name. These first versions have, for the most part, the same lyrics, melodies, and arrangements as the later ones, but they move slowly and more cautiously. The cassette sounds almost physically dusty, with Stuart and Philip’s instruments humming and hissing in the background, and Alison’s distorted vocals sounding faraway and muffled, as if they were coming from across the street. On “N.I.T.A.,” Stuart’s organ is harrowingly loud, pulsing and blinkering as the chords move around like changing radio channels, and Alison’s eerily high-pitched voice gets buried in the background static. Stuart hand-dubbed the cassettes and stocked them at the Virgin Records store, but he made so few of them that the release didn’t make much of an impact around Cardiff. Throughout the band’s existence, YMG remained an enigma to their fellow Cardiffians, though the locals may have learned to embrace the group •

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in a superficial way after their rise to fame. YMG’s homecoming show after the release of the Colossal Youth LP was telling: in numbers, it was a successful trip home, but it didn’t feel right for Z Block or YMG, and Z Block members were sickened to see Cardiff Art College packed with the very same people who had actively snubbed the band just a few months earlier. Despite the size of the crowd, YMG didn’t return to Cardiff for over a year—and only then for a BBC taping set up by Reptile Ranch. * * * Stuart often claimed in interviews that he found nothing Cardiffian or Welsh about YMG, that their music could have come from anywhere. But while YMG never felt at home in Cardiff or found a real audience for their music there, now Stuart maintains that there’s something particularly “Cardiffian” about the band. He told us that the group’s “Cardiffian attitude” remains one of the most under explored and most important aspects of their history. When asked to elaborate, Stuart responded: “Cardiffians are very intolerant of anything they perceive as being bullshit.”13 Sure enough, a no-nonsense sensibility worked its way into YMG’s radically sparse sound (their lack of a drummer, the unadorned vulnerability of Alison’s voice), which was stripped of inessential “bullshit,” leaving only what Stuart calls “the goods.”14 For YMG, a Cardiffian attitude didn’t mean loyalty to their locale, but rather meant doing things differently than those around them, even in Cardiff. Beyond the simple, but profound differences between the •

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straight-ahead punk rock of other Z Block bands and YMG’s unclassifiable stew of styles, Stuart, Philip, and Alison subverted other perceived punk and post-punk social norms. Alison, for instance, held down a steady job as a twenty-year-old in the dire 1970s’ Cardiff economy. “I’d been working at the local dental hospital as a dental surgery assistant,” she said, “nine ’til five, five days a week, up until getting the deal with Rough Trade. I was as far from anarchy as you could get.”15 Possibly the only member of the Z Block world who held a steady job, Alison refuted the idea that being “punk” meant squatting and starving like many of her close friends did. Cardiffian in her own way, Alison didn’t reject the bohemian impulses of her peers, so much as explore them on her own terms. Their music, though not as overtly aggressive as a lot of punk rock, had something of a punk approach and attitude. The harsh gasps of silences embedded in YMG’s music also undeniably mirror the desolation and terror of their crumbling city. Both Alison and Spike cite David Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead as not only an aesthetic influence, but also as a helpful visual tool for communicating a sense of the ravaged terrain of Cardiff’s Splott neighborhood (east of the city center), the site of the destroyed steelworks in addition to the headquarters of Z Block. Splott was “bleak, monochrome, and scary,” Spike said. “In this respect, YMG did reflect the Cardiff landscape.”16 Some of Eraserhead’s more humdrum images— windowpanes and radiators, torn-up bedsheets and old tinny Victrolas—and its sound design of electronic whirrs and drones bring to mind YMG’s earliest and most experimental songs like “The Man Shares His •

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Meal With His Beast,” “Loop The Loop,” and “Hayman” (an improvisation titled after Philip’s pastoral nickname for his bass). These tracks, which appeared on the first cassette release but not on the Rough Trade LP, have a scurrying, all over instrumentation that employs heaps of clattering background noise and dead space—sonically evoking the abandoned industrial landscape of Splott. But the songs on the Colossal Youth LP evoke the landscape in a different way. Amid Cardiff’s post-industrial devastation and outside of both mainstream and underground scenes, the members of YMG made their own kind of family in a hometown that wasn’t quite their home. While the outside world crumbled, Alison and Philip fell in love, and Stuart and his cousin Peter converted their storefront squat into a rehearsal and recording space. And, Spike told us, “Stuart found his legendary dog, Nixon, on the site of the old steelworks. Nixon was the fourth YMG.”17 Alison understood how YMG’s private, family dynamic, coupled with the group’s defiantly “Cardiffian attitude” might have bewildered some of their original audiences. “It felt like I was observing some form of alchemy as Stuart and Phil performed and blended their musical chemistry,” she mentioned, “but it also felt a bit like a family joke, in that you don’t expect anyone else to get it!”18 Perhaps YMG took the Z Block DIY ethic to a whole new, familial level. As a kind of nuclear family themselves, they operated on their own terms, always separate from those around them no matter how much they were adopted by or included in Z Block. Was this secretly the most “Cardiffian” way to go about things? •

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Everything Comes from Chaos

The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. Susan Sontag1

Soon after the whirlwind signing to Rough Trade off the strength of their two Is the War Over? contributions, Stuart, Philip, and Alison were finally able to leave Cardiff. They made the 150-mile move from the Welsh capital to London, their new label’s home base. Like Cardiff, the London that welcomed YMG in 1979 was characterized by the rise of conservative politics in national government, economic tribulations, an imploding working class, and youth subcultures duking it out against both authorities and one another. “London’s drowning,” sang Joe Strummer in The Clash’s epochdefining “London Calling” (1979), “and I live by the river.” However clichéd the line, Strummer’s sentiment reverberated throughout London’s underground. In Document and Eyewitness, Neil Taylor describes the political situation: “The 4th May 1979 changed, of course, a lot of things. For some, the election of Margaret Thatcher, and the concomitant, vigorously encouraged age of selfishness it ushered in, marked •

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the real end to the 1960s, to the values and ideologies upon which Rough Trade had largely been based.”2 1979 was also the year Rough Trade released its first LP, Inflammable Material by Stiff Little Fingers (a group from Belfast, another crumbling city in the provinces). Not long after, in February 1980, came the label’s eighth full-length release, Colossal Youth. How did UK artists respond to these conditions? In one respect, they pivoted their musical styles away from the simple rock ’n’ roll that characterized the pre-Thatcher British counterculture. The Clash’s musical turn on their 1979 album London Calling is indicative. Largely forsaking the bare-bones punk approach of earlier songs like “White Riot” (1977), the band diversified their stylistic palette, incorporating elements of reggae, dub, disco, and funk into their tracks. Many acts on Rough Trade’s roster represented an amplified example of The Clash’s diversification. The Pop Group, for one, infused their politicized post-punk with James Brown guitars and Augustus Pablo echo: their 1979 single “We Are All Prostitutes” has a form both loose and minimalistic, like Brown’s “The Payback”—an adventurous stylistic leap beyond the threechord rock ’n’ roll of London’s first-wave punk bands or the pub rock groups that dominated Cardiff’s scene. By 1979, the musical and revolutionary promise of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” (1976) had faded. The bite of first-wave punk had become commercialized, co-opted by the mainstream. As feminist music critic Susan McClary writes in an afterword to Jacques Attali’s Noise: “The realization that much of their most ardent protest was being consumed as ‘style’ caused a few groups, such as the Sex Pistols, to disband shortly •

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after they achieved local fame.”3 In response, near the end of the ’70s, punk’s aftermath gave birth to “a lot of groups, almost all of them British, standing outside the boundaries of rock ’n’ roll and aiming their sounds inside,” Greil Marcus claimed in May of 1980.4 His article focused on Public Image Ltd., a post-punk band featuring former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon, who had quickly rejected his punk roots. Public Image Ltd. weren’t on Rough Trade themselves, but their sound aligned them with Rough Trade bands like The Pop Group and This Heat. Rough Trade’s London record store had provided an important, eclectic selection of musical inventory that aided this stylistic scattering. The shop stocked forward-thinking music from around the globe and, moreover, fostered a vanguard artistic community. This community cultivated a strident political ethos marked by a DIY attitude and a resistance to anything conservative, traditional, and marginalizing. “Rough Trade’s very existence was political,” said musician and writer Vivien Goldman; “its way of doing things was a statement of inclusion at a time when things were still very stratified. The shop became a haven for les marginals” (an environment that likely appealed to the bohemian Stuart).5 In other words, the movement from rock ’n’ roll wasn’t purely an aesthetic revolt. The intellectually savvy Rough Traders saw various systems of control symbolically (even directly) manifested in rock’s tradition and popular appeal; distance from rock ’n’ roll, then, meant distance from these systems. “The basic theme of rock ’n’ roll is what goes on between men and women,” noted The Raincoats, an all-female •

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Rough Trade group. “Rock ’n’ roll is based on black music. And it’s based in the exclusion of women and the ghettoization of blacks. Which is why we want to put a bit of distance between what we do and the rock ’n’ roll tradition.”6 To establish that distance— and to undo rock’s development—The Pop Group turned to Brown and Pablo, and The Raincoats implemented African and Eastern folk rhythms, both bands embracing the marginalized cultures that rock had excluded or “ghettoized.” Having seen the Sex Pistols fizzle out in early 1978, Rough Trade groups like The Pop Group and The Raincoats avoided the trappings of punk’s digestible “style,” in McClary’s terms, and separated themselves from the more codified subcultures in the UK. There was no easily pinpointed Rough Trade style. In many ways, this incoherence helped Rough Trade be the “haven for les marginals” it sought to be. As other subcultural groups like punks and mods became mainstream, they also became reactionary and exclusive, hostile to outsiders— an attitude that led to widespread misogyny and white supremacy within their circles. More diverse in terms of ideology, look, and demographic make-up, the Rough Traders hoped to create a type of disorder that, even if less immediately legible than the punk “style,” impacted a wider swath of the British population—the type needed to affect real change in an oppressive British system. Approaches included The Raincoats’ politicized lyrics, The Pop Group’s cut-up album art, and This Heat’s freeform compositions. Upon moving to London, then, what impression did YMG, whose music was described in a 1980 Sounds magazine feature as “not at all in •

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keeping with the village idiot’s idea of a Rough Trade group,” make?7 * * * In many ways, YMG did in fact fit in among the Rough Trade crowd. While their music never employed The Pop Group’s improvisatory experimentation, they carried over a similar dissatisfaction with straightforward rock ’n’ roll and imbued Colossal Youth with non-rock influences like, for instance, dub and reggae—sounds they had picked up in Cardiff from what Alison referred to as the “great and infamous reggae clubs and drinking spots” near the city’s docks.8 You can hear their interest in reggae in the spare arrangements, the limited use of vocals, and the foregrounding of the bass.* The album’s first example of Stuart and Philip’s musical interplay— “Searching for Mr. Right”—features a scratchy, upstroke guitar pattern and a deep bass undercurrent that, slowed down and filled with echo, might’ve come from Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark Studios. YMG were clearly welcomed in London, playing half a dozen shows and sharing bills with, among other groups, This Heat at London’s Clarendon Hotel and The Raincoats at The Albany Empire. Stuart, Philip, and Alison would become close friends with This Heat

Stuart, Philip, and their brother Andrew served as the backing band for Liverpool reggae singer Jah Scouse on Scouse’s 1984 single “Merge,” which was engineered by Essential Logic’s Phil Legg and featured a “vegan mix” by This Heat’s Charles Bullen. * 

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and even moved in with The Raincoats during their brief time in London. But no matter the strength of their kinships, or their mutual Rough Trade contracts, YMG still did things their own way. Stuart was known for bringing his dog, Nixon, to gigs—a habit that betrays his comfort in London’s scene, but also his connection to Cardiff, where he found the dog. YMG’s quiet, homey songs suggested interests beyond what was hip in the Rough Trade shop—interests like Welsh choral hymns and local folk music, all of which are woven subtly into Colossal Youth’s fabric. YMG would never sing something as straightforward as “London’s drowning” or even broach the layered, topical ideas that their more forthright Rough Trade peers did. This Heat rattled off pointed lyrics about history, class, government, and foreign conflict, while The Raincoats spun covers of rock songs like The Kinks’ “Lola” and non-Western traditionals like “Puberty Song” in a clear effort to unravel rock ’n’ roll’s hegemony. A likeminded criticality may float within Colossal Youth’s negative space—but it’s never so explicit. The members of YMG—working-class people coming from the degenerating Cardiff—were different, mysterious outsiders in London just as they had been in their hometown. Projecting this sense of outsiderism, Stuart referred to the band’s origins as “provincial” in their Sounds interview, a seemingly self-deprecating claim that reflects his desire to get out of Cardiff. Ultimately, though, YMG both rejected and utilized this provincialism in their music and their overall presentation. Stuart’s comment may have also been a jab at the press, as several reviewers and interviewers, including •

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Dave McCullough in the same article, had used the term as well to describe the band members themselves—as a synonym for “hick” or “naive.” By reclaiming their “provincialism,” YMG take ownership of their music’s source and reception. Speaking in 2010, Stuart noted, “Until very recently, Wales was totally ignored, as were all provincial places, by the mainstream music biz. It was only because Geoff Travis, Rough Trade and their like were music-oriented, as opposed to money-oriented, that bands like us got a break.”9 Throughout YMG’s short existence, they were boxed in by the alternative British music media as “provincial,” “innocent,” “frightened”—always the quiet new band from Wales. The Pop Group’s Gareth Sager, also from Wales, described the condition of Welsh musicians in London: “you felt that ugly arrogance that Thatcher had for anyone not from the south-east of England, and also the brutality that that led to.”10 Even if YMG were accepted by London’s underground, their overall reception betrays that arrogance. Accordingly, they relished their time away when recording Colossal Youth in the countryside, and after short, post-YMG stints playing music in London, they left the city for good.* In London, it was clear that Stuart, Philip, and Alison still weren’t home. The sense of home found in the playful “Choci Loni,” which derives its lyrics from Moxham family in-speak, is a home at odds—linguistically and tonally—with the realities of Cardiff and

Today, Alison and Philip live in Wales, and Stuart lives in southwest England. *

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London around the turn of the ’80s. As a unique brand of Cardiffians, YMG had to find their own appropriate language to communicate the disorder they observed in their surroundings—a “provincial” language, although not Welsh itself,* that spoke to the depressive conditions in Cardiff and London, as well as the ugly arrogance faced by provincial citizens throughout the UK.† If the location of the Young Marble Giants’ home is uncertain, the colossal youths perched near Cape Sounion might show the way to go.

When YMG’s members were growing up, Welsh was out of fashion in Wales, a cultural suppression that only bolsters Stuart’s and Sager’s claims. Welsh indie rock artists like Super Furry Animals and Gwenno have since embraced the Welsh language in their music, foregrounding their “provincialism.” † Their need to establish such a language aligns with the similarly “provincial”—in loosely geographic terms—rock languages developed by labels like K and Flying Nun in fringe settings like Olympia, Washington, and Christchurch, New Zealand (also, the Athens, Georgia, scene that birthed bands like Pylon and Oh-OK). These are bands and scenes that developed in parallel and in response to the dominant strands of punk, rock, and post-punk proffered by bands and scenes in major cities throughout the world. *

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Showing the Way to Go

Despite its atypical style, Colossal Youth was a relative commercial success, sitting comfortably near the top of the UK’s alternative album charts for several weeks.1 With what RE/Search magazine’s V. Vale described as “virtually no promotion,”2 the album quickly sold upwards of 27,000 copies to become, at the time, Rough Trade’s second-highest-selling LP behind Inflammable Material by Stiff Little Fingers. Colossal Youth’s success, even without much marketing, isn’t entirely surprising: it’s poppy and accessible when compared to the Rough Trade records released around the same time.* YMG’s pop sensibilities struck Welsh music critic Nick Fisk later on when he reviewed an August 2015 YMG

The subsequent two Rough Trade LPs were dense and abrasive: For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? by The Pop Group and Totale’s Turns (It’s Now or Never) by The Fall. Charles Hayward of This Heat, meanwhile, remembers Geoff Travis praising YMG because “a lot of people who had listened to This Heat’s music had now paired off, bought flats, and they wanted music to reflect that” (Taylor, 196). *

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performance in Cardiff (one of the band’s last, as of this writing, following a handful of reunion shows from 2007 to 2015). Fisk had an epiphany many others have likely had while listening to Colossal Youth: “You could almost say that the sound was a kind of blueprint for most types of ’80s’ pop music,” he writes. “Not just the indie scene that would follow, but so much other ’80s’ music as well. [YMG’s] sound was like the bare bones of so many styles.”3 “Brand—New—Life” is a restrained tune, but it also possesses the type of driving guitar riff and sing-along chorus that marked much pop music of the time. Simon Reynolds has compared the song to The Police’s “Message in a Bottle,” a power-pop smash which had come out the year before. Perhaps Reynolds hears “Brand—New—Life” as something of a skeleton underneath the fleshed-out pop body of “Message in a Bottle.” It’s easy to imagine someone filling in the gaps between the clicking beats of “Brand—New—Life” by overlaying a synth melody in its instrumental breaks and adding some melismatic vocal flourishes to the pain’s in the chorus. The result could be a catchy, radio-ready pop song in the vein of The Police. This was no coincidence: Stuart claimed that the band wanted to create “really tight, poppy songs.”4 Colossal Youth’s tracks accordingly feature immediate, recognizable riffs; each of the thirteen with singing contains a hummable vocal line as well. Following the Motown and Brill Building pop aesthetics of the 1960s, the songs on Colossal Youth are short—and, to use Stuart’s word, “tight”—with an average length of around two-and-ahalf minutes, the classic pop song sweet spot. (Only four eclipse the three-minute mark, and just one, “N.I.T.A.,” passes 3:30.) •

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If the album sold well, and if it’s “poppy” in these senses, is it “pop” music? Not quite. Besides the band’s rejection of pop overproduction (Stuart disdained “this business of Phil Spectorism,” he once said), none of the quickly recorded fifteen tracks really adheres to a pop formula beyond the superficial traits mentioned above.5 “[On] quite a lot of [the songs] we don’t have any chorus,” Stuart said in 1980, “we just play a riff the whole way through.”6 And while “Brand—New—Life” is one of YMG’s few songs with a memorable chorus, it omits nearly all other building blocks of a pop song: no bridge, pre-chorus, solo, intro, or outro. Indeed, chorus included, the song features more or less the same “riff the whole way through”—the bare bones of a pop structure, arguably even less. Similarly, “Wurlitzer Jukebox!,” “Colossal Youth,” and “Music for Evenings” have brief, catchy hooks but lack full pop structures—they go ABAB, AAAA, and AAAAA, respectively (if you don’t count the extended intro of “Music for Evenings,” at least). If anything, the repetitive structures recall American or British folk ballads more than “Message in a Bottle.” This may be why V. Vale likened YMG to “folk music” in the RE/Search article, yet it would be impossible to cleanly slot the songs on Colossal Youth into the category of folk either, considering the lack of a narrative arc conventional in folk songs. Lyrically, “Choci Loni” (about a made-up cowboy) is the only song on Colossal Youth that threatens to outline a “story”; musically, “Include Me Out” is the only song that possesses anything like a “climax” (70 seconds into the two-minute song, we get a comparatively raucous guitar solo). “Credit in the Straight World” may build tension, but there’s hardly •

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any resolution: the song merely coasts on the same, anxious plane for two-and-a-half minutes. Lyrically, the final words, “Gets you high,” coming after “Won’t you try” and “You won’t die,” suggest a cathartic release— but Alison’s vocal delivery and the Moxhams’ backing doesn’t change from the previous verses. As such, any hope of catharsis remains bottled up, stored within the sonic gaps. Even the experimental Rough Trade acts paid close attention to form, imbuing their music with some drama. Consider the pulled-away denouement in The Pop Group’s “She is Beyond Good and Evil” (1979), or the screaming, climactic devolution in This Heat’s “Paper Hats” (1981). Less overtly avant-garde, YMG nevertheless employed the unusual approach of musical arcs collapsing into flat lines. Listeners looking for a sense of “pop” will be continually disappointed, their attention piqued by the lucid opening riff of “Choci Loni” or the dynamic, palm-muted attack at the beginning of “Constantly Changing,” only to be let down when that opening riff repeats a dozen times unbroken, or when that palm-muted attack merely accumulates potential energy—building but never dissipating. The repetition of a “riff the whole way through” gives YMG’s songs the effect of being a series of purposefully reproducible pop song fragments, especially in the case of “Colossal Youth” or “Music for Evenings.” Such a schematic, or deconstructive, approach found a more explicit echo outside of YMG’s music in Commercial Album, an LP by YMG-approved provocateurs The Residents, released a few months after Colossal Youth. The Residents’ album consists of self-conscious “models” for •

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pop songs: one-minute building blocks, comprised of a verse and a hook, meant to be repeated two or three times to craft a whole pop song (or, in their condensed form, slotted into radio advertisements). Of course, it takes about two seconds to hear how different Colossal Youth and Commercial Album sound, not to mention that The Residents’ absurdist compositions on Commercial Album exist solely as fragments, not complete series like YMG’s songs. In this sense, The Residents absorb but subvert the practice of similarly impish composer Erik Satie, who often wrote pieces—notably 1893’s “Vexations”—as repeatable fragments, partly to call attention to both the restrictions and the recyclability of stale classical and Romantic-era musical forms. “Vexations” comprises a short motif that, depending on how you interpret Satie’s instructions, is meant to be repeated 840 times. Satie’s repetition, which helps his piece comment upon its own form and that of its contemporaries, is ultimately closer to the AAAA structures of Colossal Youth than the implied repetition of Commercial Album. The way “Vexations” unfolds, repeating the same musical phrase carefully (yet still subject to human mistakes), prefigures the way Stuart cautiously states the same bare riff the whole way through songs like “Music for Evenings” or “Choci Loni.” Like those tracks, “Vexations” gives the immediate impression of being a relatively accessible, of-the-times composition—but then, in an apparent act of defiance, goes nowhere. Indeed, Satie’s simple repetition conjures an air of immobility, of containment; as the pianist plays, it’s as though they’re trying to free themselves or to teach themselves new strategies—an autodidactic approach •

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echoed in Stuart’s tense picking, Philip’s short repeating bass patterns, and by YMG’s immobile “search” for Mr. Right (“teaching myself to be / the Young Untold”). This sense of immobility reflected anxiety about the staid compositional approaches that Satie and YMG sought to undo. Satie avoids the fixed, triad-based harmonic movement introduced by Jean-Philippe Rameau in the eighteenth century, and Stuart, in his guitar playing, often forgoes rock guitarists’ penchant for power chords, favoring a simple first-third dyad. Like the songs on Colossal Youth, “Vexations” is also quiet and full of gaps. Satie considered his compositions “furniture music,” meant for the background like a couch or a table. As such, his rebellion may go unregistered—simply changing the status quo subtly, from within its bounds of culturally approved experimentation. Unconsciously following that example, YMG offer a product accessible to a wider audience that nevertheless flouts formal conventions by exposing pop’s “bare bones,” or its “furniture,” ultimately revealing what Greil Marcus calls the “seductive conservatism of pop itself”— and repeating everything until you notice.7* * * *

Rough Trade post-punk “was music in which critical energy was directed not only at the powers that be,” Greil Marcus argues, “but also at the seductive conservatism of pop itself: a symbolically crucial institution based on passive audiences, sexist role models, racist categories, banal ambitions, the hegemony of the charts” (Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom, 175). * 

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Sometimes “new” and “subversive” don’t need to be formless, messy, or caustic; they can also be—in the case of “Vexations” or, say, minimalist painting—somewhat blank, a “blank slate.”* Even in 1980, YMG, whose sound sometimes resembled a quieter version of The Raincoats or Birmingham post-punks The Au Pairs, still felt like some kind of fresh start. “We’ve tried to go against every possible grain at once and still come up with something,” Stuart told Sounds in 1980. “[T]hat’s an essence of what we’re trying to do … you know, not conform to anything at all …”8 Many critics, both upon Colossal Youth’s original release as well as its reissue in 2007, have suggested that, if YMG went against the grain, they did so primarily with quietude. While this reading is somewhat accurate, it limits our ability to hear the music’s dynamism, formal ingenuity, and subtle subversive streak. In Stuart’s mind, YMG’s newness comes across in their musical “atmosphere.” The “criteria for a great album,” he said—“there’s really two things. One is atmosphere … The other thing is detail.”9 As simple as YMG’s songs are, and as untethered as they are to narratives, they have the ability to create truly singular atmospheres using clever David Toop suggests that blankness pervades the daily experience of modern mass culture: “The trance of blankness can invade us in supermarket aisles,” he writes, “waiting in queues, stuck in traffic, driving fast on a motorway, watching television, working a dull job, talking on the telephone, eating in restaurants, even making love” (Toop, Ocean of Sound, 12). Do YMG foreground “the trance of blankness” in an effort to expose pop’s “seductive conservatism” or something like it? * 

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details—the surprising dispatch at the end of “The Taxi,” the disorienting bass pulse of “Choci Loni,” the one-off handclaps that strike through “Salad Days”—that, given the space in the compositions, can be heard with unique clarity. When we asked Stuart about his criteria, he offered, poetically: “like emotion itself, music is a fleeting thing.”10 Stuart’s description materializes in the void left by the final click on any of Colossal Youth’s songs. When “Wind in the Rigging,” especially, hits its last beat, the atmosphere and emotions contained within the space of the album vanish: fleeting indeed. The fleeting nature of emotion—and music—is built into the album’s atmosphere, percolating amid its details, even into its production (the brisk, cost-effective recording process). A self-contained series of fragments, each track leaves sharp memories and fully realized environments in its wake. As the listener rounds the cape, watching and listening for directions from the broadcasted radio static, the song is already gone. YMG’s singularity made its mark despite its “atmospheric” ineffability. “Like Swell Maps were to d.i.y. last year,” Dave McCullough writes near the end of the Sounds feature, “Young Marble Giants are a splinter representation of ‘how else it can be done,’ of new (and really not so new) ways of communicating through music. By mellow subtlety. By extravagant sparsity. By not pushing it too hard.”11 Swell Maps, a Birmingham group that had released their debut LP on Rough Trade in 1979, had developed one new model for “punk” music—a manic one that drew inspiration from freeform rock groups like Can and playful art music ensembles like the self-taught •

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Portsmouth Sinfonia. Swell Maps took three-chord punk and, processing avant-garde influences, pushed it to its musical limits. YMG developed a concurrent model for “punk” music; as McCullough identified, their model was both new and “not so new”—youthful and archaic, without proper time or definition. It was one which, rather than push everything to its limits, pulled everything away, tightened it up, didn’t push too hard. In the United Kingdom in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the government was pushing—so the youth, in a variety of different guises and subcultures, rather than dropping out, began pushing back. YMG dropped Colossal Youth— subtle and sparse—in the middle of all this pushing. Maybe Colossal Youth, coming from a complementary mindset, was meant as respite: something quiet in a time of noise, in a time of decidedly political, even didactic, music like The Clash’s “White Riot” or The Pop Group’s “We Are All Prostitutes.” Colossal Youth is productive, not pushy; it offers (anti-)pop-as-pedagogy. By turning the listener’s attention, every now and then, to the surface of the issues at hand—impinged-upon freedom on “Music For Evenings,” for example—but refusing to straightforwardly comment upon these issues, YMG open up their critique to wider interpretation. In between the gaps, the listener has to fill out the polemic. The final verse of Colossal Youth’s title track goes: “If you think the world is a clutter of existence / Falling through the air with minimal resistance / You could be right / How would I know? / Colossal youth is showing the way to go.” If Colossal Youth itself is “showing the way to go,” this turn toward the analytical, the productive, is YMG’s “way.” Avant-garde composer John Cage once •

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said, “I think the history of art is simply a history of getting rid of the ugly by entering into it, and using it.” Moving to London in 1979, YMG undeniably entered into the ugly. For Cage, dismantling the ugly through silence had a purpose: “What we’re trying to do is to get [our minds] to open,” he continued, “so that we don’t see things as being ugly, or beautiful, but we see them just as they are.”12 Rather than layering noise on top of the “ugly” landscape that surrounded them, YMG atmospherically opened up the mix, letting listeners see their surroundings “just as they are.” Do you see a “clutter of existence”? You could be right. How would they know?

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The World is Not You

John Cage premiered 4’33’’ on a rainy summer night in 1952 in upstate New York. When audiences shuffled up to the open-air Maverick Theater earlier that evening, it’s likely they would have been dressed for the weather—rain boots, caps, umbrellas—especially the half of the crowd sitting behind the barn-like enclave, directly underneath the night sky. But it’s safe to assume that no one expected to be asked, even forced, to aurally accommodate the weather—to listen to the sounds of the natural environment. Near the end of the program, the pianist David Tudor sat silently on the rustic wooden stage for four minutes and thirtythree seconds, opening and closing the lid of a piano, while glancing at a stopwatch and a musical score with no notes. “What [the audience] thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was actually full of accidental sounds,” Cage later recalled. “You could hear the stirring of the wind outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering on the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as •

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they talked or walked out.”1 These “accidental sounds” that Cage found so fascinating mixed up natural and bodily environments, making equal room for noises of pastoral grandeur and human squabbling. According to Cage, the audience “didn’t know how to listen” to 4’33”, but it was precisely their refusal to listen quietly that created all the noises that Cage found so interesting, and that effectively comprised the piece. Some members of the audience didn’t find Cage’s invitation to listen so entertaining. In the discussion with Cage and Tudor, following the program, someone yelled from the audience, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s run these people out of town.”2 In Cardiff in 1979, as the steelworks crumbled and workers started to strike, as Thatcher and the new Tory government drained the Welsh reservoirs dry, Stuart Moxham turned twenty-four with a broken heart, and Alison Statton arrived every morning at the dental hospital at nine and left every evening at five, running out of town seemed like the only option imaginable for an aspiring punk band—but also a nearly unattainable one. Where could you go? “We were all kind of desperate to make it and get out of Cardiff,” Stuart explained. “This music had to achieve a lot for us, basically.”3 If Stuart, Philip, and Alison were to free themselves from Cardiff, they needed to provoke a reaction as intense as the one Cage had inspired years earlier in Woodstock.4 They did this in part by “coming out of nowhere with an LP,” as Stuart put it—releasing a fulllength before any singles or tours. Even more, though, like Cage, YMG took up quietness and openness as a way of grabbing their listeners’ attentions by the collars. “We •

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were quiet and minimal; these are two massive things to be the only people doing,” Stuart argued. “The music business is surprisingly conservative at all levels … it embraces certain givens. YMG deliberately went against these conventions in order to shake things up, see what could be done outside of them and to get noticed in Wales in the late ’70s.”5 Quiet and minimal, YMG bucked conventions that rock, pop, and even punk all shared. Rather than assume that music gained complexity by adding elements— volume, instrumentation, technical flourishes, or lengthy lyrics—YMG began subtracting them. Chain-smoking on stage and sporting buzz cuts and leather jackets, they certainly looked punk. But by plugging in their small cassette player and turning down the volume knobs on their amps after sets by Reptile Ranch in Cardiff or Essential Logic in London had left audiences’ ears ringing, YMG’s music asked those same people to listen in a different way. “Accidental noises” like clinking glasses, stomping boots, or muttered conversations mixed with amplified vocals and guitars in spaces where anything not plugged in usually got drowned out. Interested in “seeing what could be done outside” of the conventions of the time, YMG also looked for new physical spaces where they could perform, speaking in interviews of their interest in playing “chamber-music places,” churches, and “rural places.”6 Today, it seems only natural for indie bands to play gigs at churches or classical music halls, but such a proposition was a radical one in 1980 for a group on the noisy, politicized Rough Trade. Who would YMG be playing for in these new spaces? Would leftist Londoners intent on destroying traditional •

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structures really follow them out to the countryside? Would their music even be loud enough to listen to in a field? These questions remain unanswered: in their short career, YMG never had the chance to experiment with playing in these alternate settings. Nor did they ever write anything as quiet as 4’33”. But the band did offer their audiences music that left room to listen—songs that don’t say too much, but can nevertheless provoke a big reaction. Their quiet and minimal music leaves space open to experience noises, attitudes, feelings, and sensations previously excluded or ignored by traditional punk and post-punk. By stripping everything down so starkly, by refusing and denying so much of that key element of loudness that’s supposed to make punk truly punk, Colossal Youth opens up a new, constantly changing landscape that hovers around and beside the center of the punk stage. * * * “You write the gaps as much as you write the music,” said Philip Moxham.7 The gaps—the repetitive, stop–start silences between bass plucks on “Eating Noddemix” and “Colossal Youth”—are like startled breaths suspending the forward motion of the melody. While the drum machine often keeps a regulated beat, Stuart and Philip poke holes in its orderliness by falling the slightest bit behind or in front of each electronic hit. For a listener, these spaces between the drumbeat and the beat of the guitars can keep you nervously on your toes, lurching forward and backward in surprise each time the beat skips and cuts forward in time. Or they can send you •

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off into pensive reverie, like on “Salad Days,” where Alison’s yearning lyrics are matched by the gaps between her off-key, wavering inflection and the “correct” note. These spaces in between the right note and the wrong one, or between the beat and the offbeat, make cliffs and gullies that a listener must hop over themselves in order to keep up with the music. Even on songs without silence or open space, static and accidental noises come surging through an otherwise evenly composed track. On “N.I.T.A.,” for example, the ominous, low-level rumblings of a ring modulator reveal themselves in the moments right before Stuart’s uncharacteristically consistent organ melody begins and right after it stops— nuclear white noise oozing out of the background at the beginning and end of the track. But if YMG were seriously interested in writing and then playing the gaps in unconventional or rural areas, how would these silences sound out in the open? How does music actually “open up” to its environment and its audience? Everything about Young Marble Giants— their Greek sculpture name, their infamous lack of stage presence, their songs with titles like “Include Me Out,” their solitary LP—seems to suggest a band that’s closedoff, final. But then you hear the static radio noise cutting through the sails of “Wind in the Rigging”: the crackle comes at the end of an album filled with composed, evenly structured songs. As a counterpart to the sixteen seconds of silence that begin the album on “Searching for Mr. Right,” the noise at the end of “Wind in the Rigging” troubles the “silence” we thought we heard in the gaps of the songs in between. Like in Cage’s 4’33’’, you can’t help but notice the intrusive bursts of •

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“accidental” noise. And then, perhaps, you can’t help but notice yourself noticing. “The songs on Colossal Youth are almost like sketches or haikus,” Alison told us, “which leaves space for the listener’s imagination, allowing them to make it a personal experience.”8 Much like the spaces in between the notes of the songs or the geometric shape of the Greek kouroi, Alison’s delivery of YMG’s sparse lyrics is abstract and open-ended—refusing to offer commentary or singular meaning to any one phrase, character, or moment. Yet the lyrics themselves are arrestingly personal, and the combination of emotion and abstraction makes space for listeners’ own personal experiences. According to Alison, this connection has encouraged “countless individuals” to “come up to us at gigs in different countries, telling us how important the album was in their lives.”9 What has this album meant for each of these individuals? How did they hear it and when? What did they think about as the fifteen songs played from start to finish? And what kinds of sounds did they make while listening? Although he had conceived of the possibility of a completely silent work in the late 1940s, John Cage writes that seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings—completely white canvases—in 1951 gave him the permission and inspiration he needed to write 4’33’’ and present it in front of an audience in Woodstock. “Everything is so much the same,” he wrote of Rauschenberg’s work, “one becomes acutely aware of the differences, and quickly.”10 In confronting the sameness of Rauschenberg’s paintings, Cage found a way of constantly seeing something different, and he •

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transported this idea over to his own composition. In his music, Cage suggests that each person might be considered both musician and listener, that an embrace of everything accidental or imperfect dissolves what separates those two, that living itself is way of filling in the gaps between us and everything else. Art historian Branden Joseph writes that Cage’s 4’33’’ and Rauschenberg’s White Paintings—and the ways in which the two interacted with each other—came to be situated as “the beginning of an aesthetic paradigm in which difference is conceived not in terms of negation at all, but rather as an ontological first principle.”11 For Rauschenberg and Cage, Joseph says, differences are positive forces. Their blank canvases and silent compositions don’t negate in the same way previous modernist experiments in monochrome and silence did—they aren’t returning to point zero, but instead opening up to everything that’s there at any given instant. People are sounds and textures, too, and they’re as much a part of a work of art as a part of the atmosphere. Cage’s and Rauschenberg’s works present a kind of artistic anarchism, where no silence or gap is the same, where no viewer or listener ever sees or hears the same thing. Is it possible to say the same of YMG? Do open-ended, quiet songs like “Salad Days” not just present a vision of good old memories, but suggest something different— different salad days—for each listener in each location and at each time? While some of their contemporaries in both Cardiff and London, like Reptile Ranch and Crass, proudly broadcasted their anarchism (and while the Sex Pistols shouted their own point-zero negation of “No Future”), YMG kept quiet, making a space where others •

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could find a way to live inside their songs. As Stuart claimed, their turn to minimal instrumentation and intimate scale was intended to provoke a reaction from other people, and to provide a way for three musicians living in faraway Wales to somehow get noticed. “I did like the raw energy of punk rock at live gigs,” Alison said, “but I was more inspired by less urgent, quieter music—less ‘masculine’ sounds if you like.”12 When asked about YMG’s use of quietness and silence, she elaborated: It’s the space in a sound, taste, visual field, physical sensation or aroma that draws us in and keeps us engaged. Whether it be a pleasant experience or otherwise, it lets us know we’re alive. When listening to music I want there to be space around the sound in order to appreciate what’s there, whether it be simple, complex, rough or smooth. I want to hear an honest, human vulnerability coming through somewhere and a sense of its true nature.13

According to Alison, Colossal Youth’s quiet gaps and hushed silences let in everything that punk’s walls of masculine rhetoric, distorted guitars, and crash cymbals had previously negated or forbidden—vulnerability, fragileness, nostalgia, loss, uncertainty. YMG’s music makes space for others by opening up itself—sonically in terms of writing the gaps but also, and most importantly, emotionally in its human vulnerability. People take the music with them wherever they go, making their own accidental sounds and their own meaning. Alison and her bandmates’ music reminds us that it’s •

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the space around these things that “lets us know we’re alive.”14 When her voice first cuts through on “Salad Days”— almost halfway through the song—she picks up the rhythms stated by Stuart’s guitar and adds a melody. In the second-long gap between the end of the guitar and the beginning of the vocals, though, a burst of four handclaps surges through—as rhythmic as Stuart’s chords and as human as Alison’s voice—and then, as if an accident, they’re gone before you can tell where they came from, or who made them.

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Let’s Be a Tree

We knit a web to catch one tiny fly For our world without sound Brian Eno, “Spider and I”1

What were the accidental sounds that Young Marble Giants let in to Colossal Youth? They recorded their debut full-length album at Foel Studio in the rural mid-Wales town of Llanfair Caereinion. Stuart described the studio at Foel as “a stone barn overlooking a wide rural valley”—a countryside setting that gave YMG space and time they couldn’t find in Cardiff or London. “There is a large window in the control room,” Stuart explained, “and there was plenty of weather and fresh air—we actually saw ball lightning in the yard one night … a completely wild, beautiful, and familiar context for us folks who had been raised on weekend trips and holidays in Wales.”2 Nestled in the Welsh countryside, Foel had a simple and functional atmosphere—the perfect setting for the group’s pared-back approach. Owner and engineer Dave Anderson—who had previously played with West German collective Amon Düül II and engineered Rough Trade records by The Pop Group and Essential •

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Logic—arranged the recording of Colossal Youth so that each track could be recorded completely live.* The entire album was recorded in just five days, and each track took around twenty minutes to mix.† The barn window at Foel opened onto a landscape filled with natural, “accidental” sounds. For Stuart, the surrounding Welsh hills felt both familiar and strange, homey yet filled with the magic of ball lightning— a moving and glowing orb of light that’s so rare its properties are still unknown to scientists. YMG’s songs do something similar: they’re direct and abstract, assured and vulnerable, machine-like and homemade, springing out of the everyday world of Cardiff, but also making space for the sounds of other places, other times, and other people. Simon Reynolds writes, “The individual songs have something of the ‘rightness’ of things found in nature—leaves, snowflakes, pebbles, sea-shells—that are at once miraculous yet commonplace, marvelous and unassuming.”3 Some of this “rightness” came from

“When we were finished doing all the mixes,” Stuart recalled, “we turned all the lights out and listened to it really loud. It was all I could do to stop crying” (Reynolds, “Liner Notes”). It was the first time the group could hear what they actually sounded like, as Stuart told us, “at volume—crucially without distortion.” †  “None of us had had any studio experience before,” Alison said, “and I think we pretty much treated the experience a little like the reel to reel home recording we’d done in Cardiff, with very little interference on the original production.” Save for Stuart’s beloved reverb, there are few to no effects present on the album. The sole overdub is a brief guitar solo on “Include Me Out,” credited as “Naive Slide” and played by Cardiff guitarsmith Dave Dearnaley. * 

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the group’s time at Foel, and from the simple miracles that can only come from recording an album totally live. Other parts of this “marvelous and unassuming” effect came built into the songs already, springing out of YMG’s childhoods in Cardiff in the 1950s and ’60s. In the years before the economic collapse of the ’70s, Cardiff was a prosperous industrial city filled with parks and other natural wonders; sounds and memories of a more comfortable childhood color the songs on Colossal Youth. On a 2013 spoken-word piece called “Faction,” Stuart—recording simply under his own name, which he has done since the early ’90s—poetically recites over a strummed acoustic guitar: “I grew up in a corner house deep amongst the rigid rows of terraces which line up, like the sheep on the surrounding hills, with their backs to the Biblical rain. This was Cardiff, in the mid-1950s,” where the “thin gaps” between the Moxhams’ garden fence and the railway tracks behind it “offered disconnected glimpses of the perpetual activity beyond.”4 Like Foel Studio, Stuart’s backyard offered a warm, domestic place from which to look out—through the gaps in the fence—to the outside world. The world outside teemed with “perpetual activity,” but Stuart took it all in through “disconnected glimpses.” It’s a fitting description of the way listeners confront the stop-start sounds that make up Colossal Youth, jumping from beat to beat as if peering through the slats of a fence. Evoking these gaps in between one sound and the next, Stuart called the near telepathic interlocking patterns created by his muted guitar and Philip’s trebly bass “knitting”—a “strikingly un-rock ’n’ roll and non-macho •

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metaphor,” as Simon Reynolds notes, “that speaks volumes about the low-key radicalism of YMG music.”5 You can hear a bit of “knitting” on display in “Wurlitzer Jukebox!,” when Stuart’s big open-chords weave perfectly in and out of Philip’s syncopated movements from one octave to the next: the bass’s choppy busyness adds weight and movement to the guitar’s more restrained and meditative plucks. The first minute of “Searching for Mr. Right” is a lesson in musical “knitting”: Stuart’s strums carry on with Alison’s vocal melody for a measure before Philip’s root notes begin to plop down in between each guitar strike. Adding to the musical intertwining, Reynolds writes, was the fact that “Philip played his bass high, such that it was frequently mistaken by listeners for another guitar.”6 More than just interlocking patterns, “knitting” suggests a music which is natural, non-masculine, and domestic—words almost never associated with punk or post-punk but which YMG nonetheless embraced. A key part of YMG’s “low-key radicalism” came from their interest in sourcing melodies, chords, and lyrics from their childhoods, their families, and the sights and sounds of their Welsh hometown—places no other band who called themselves “punk” would ever claim. Growing up in Cardiff, Stuart and Philip were “raised by a Welsh Mum who sang and read to [them] from the get go.”7 It’s from these Welsh baby sing-alongs that Stuart pulled the lyrics for “Choci Loni,” about a bandolier-toting cowboy who’s “eaten out of house and home.” From his mom, Stuart also picked up an appreciation for old Welsh choral hymns like “There Is A Green Hill Far Away,” which may have seeped into the organ •

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melodies on “Colossal Youth” and “The Taxi” that sweep like a church pipe organ while retaining the jingling brightness of a child’s toy piano. Stuart also listened closely to the ambient noises of television testcard music coming from his grandmother’s TV set—memories that would find an explicit expression on the brothers’ instrumental Testcard EP years later. Stuart searched for any sound coming from outside the mainstream currents. “Any kind of ambient music just isn’t listened to seriously but it has a lot of merits,” he told NME. “We’ve been influenced by testcard music, by nursery rhymes, by popular classical music—all that light, fringe stuff. The sound of those great big cinema organs, fairground music … I don’t listen to it as much as, say, Radio One but I enjoy it a lot more.”8 They listened to pop music (Radio One), and it’s apparent in their catchy songs; but it’s the other sounds that set YMG apart. These sounds all seemed to come from another era—from the earliest memories of childhood to stories told by family members or pulled from dusty old books about silent-era movie theaters and fairground vaudeville sing-alongs. Alison also delved deep into ambient and fringe music. While earlier reviewers, and even Stuart, disparagingly characterized Alison’s voice as sounding like she was sitting at home or waiting for the bus, her approach was actually steeped in the music she listened to growing up: an expansive mixture of choral hymns, experimental electronic music, nursery rhymes, big band crooners, disco, and the Scottish folk music passed down to her from her parents. And, much like Stuart and Philip’s “knitting,” Alison’s interest in these sounds sprung out of her Cardiffian childhood. •

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Alison’s mother was a “quiet and cautious” woman from the Orkney Islands, a group of sparsely populated isles at the northernmost tip of Scotland where human settlement dates back before recorded history. A record of traditional Orkney folk music released by Smithsonian Folkways just a year before Colossal Youth doesn’t sound too dissimilar from YMG in the way that clear, singsong voices stand in front of intricately woven mandolin and guitar parts. Alison’s father, who was partially sighted and attended a local school for the blind as a child, encouraged an appreciation for all the senses. “It was just the little things like being taught to know when you’ve filled a kettle to the right level by the changing pitch or to wash up by feel rather than using my vision to check if a plate or pot was clean,” Alison remembered.9 Alison took this appreciation for working by “feel” to her vocal approach in YMG: less concerned with training to hit every single note, she worked instead to let the feel of the song speak for itself. Growing up in a working-class family with little pocket money or time for travel, Alison never had the chance to take the weekend family trips to places like Llanfair Caereinion that Stuart remembered so fondly. Alison instead found nature within Cardiff’s local parks, and her memories brim with the sounds of the natural landscape. “I loved the sounds of the breeze in the poplar trees,” she said, “babble of the stream, bird calls and occasional plane passing overhead. Games with others often involved rhymes, clapping or the rhythm of a skipping rope. When the wind was in the right direction the gentle knocking of bowls from the local bowling green would carry across the road.”10 •

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Why not let the clapped rhythms of childhood games and the knocking of bowls by the wind into a punk song? Alison and YMG present these memories without adornment or explanation, opening up the melodies to the passing sounds, lost thoughts, and the slight sensations that live in every moment: the instances when a sound or a smell can steal upon you and catch you totally by surprise. * * * In January 1975, Brian Eno had an accident. “I was not seriously hurt,” he narrates in the liner notes of Discreet Music: but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th-century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.11

Following this revelation in bed, Eno composed “Discreet Music”—thirty minutes of synthesizers gradually repeating and echoing the same melodic phrase—which he hoped “could be listened to yet could be ignored.”12 •

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Like the church hymns and nursery rhymes that YMG plucked from their lives in Cardiff, Eno’s discovery of the qualities of what he would later call “ambient music” came from normal life—where the nearly inaudible sounds of harp music were free to mix with the sounds of wind and rain rattling the windowpane. In turning his ears to the sounds of the outside environment, Eno likely looked toward a Welsh musician, John Cale, with whom he had collaborated on his previous album, Another Green World (1975). By the early ’70s, Cale, who had played with John Cage, performing Satie’s “Vexations” in New York in 1963, before cofounding The Velvet Underground, found himself pulled toward conventional folk and rock forms. Cale’s 1973 album Paris 1919 combines open-tuned acoustic guitars with full string orchestras and lush Protestant church organs, nodding specifically to his Welsh upbringing with songs like “A Child’s Christmas In Wales,” a twisted, apocalyptic adaptation of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s prose poem of the same name. Songs like “Hanky Panky Nohow” and “Andalucia” likewise evoke bygone scenes of rural, domestic Welsh warmth, channeling a laid-back sincerity in tone and practicing a bit of “knitting” in the mixing of electric guitar, organ, and high-pitched melodic basslines. But there’s also a haunting undertow to the songs of Paris 1919—an obsession with the fallout of the first World War, not to mention the incessant violence visited upon Cale’s characters—that points back to the coal-burning nightmare that Cale had escaped in Wales. Eno’s Another Green World synthesized his burgeoning developments in ambient sounds and the pop sensibility of 1974’s “The True Wheel.” Catchy, •

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drum-machine led songs like “St. Elmo’s Fire” sat comfortably alongside atmospheric instrumentals like the title track. Following this lead, YMG developed a similar, though less straightforward, mixture of ambient and pop music. Like Cale more than Eno, though, YMG dug around familiar song forms and melodies from television testcard music, nursery rhymes, and hymns to find frightening and unfamiliar resonances living just off to the side of them. Whereas Eno’s music began to experiment with the special techniques afforded by contemporary studio equipment, YMG’s music looked out onto settings beyond the studio window—places like the TV room at home (on “Brand—New—Life”), the taxi cab (“The Taxi”), and the police car on patrol (“Eating Noddemix”). And YMG were portable in a way other ambient musicians and bands weren’t: they could take their cassette recording of the drum machine with them wherever they went, performing their songs live exactly as they sounded on the record—with a changing audience and location making for the slightest variations in tone and register from performance to performance. When Simon Reynolds asked Alison about the source of her interest in non-rock ’n’ roll sounds, she took his question far beyond the evolving studio techniques of Eno or Cale or Kraftwerk. “I can remember being mesmerised by the church organ in the Scottish Presbyterian church on a Sunday and can still hear the detail of a dropped hymn book echoing or a stifled cough when it stopped and silence fell once again…” she recalled. “It’s always been the points of sound in silence that get my attention most of all—the ticking of the clock and crackle of the •

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fire in Mr. Morgan’s parlour, the rain on a window pane or an owl at night. Those are the sounds that have an exquisite intensity for me.”13 “Wurlitzer Jukebox!” and “Salad Days”—two of the last songs on Colossal Youth to be written—are perhaps the best examples of the “exquisite intensity” that Alison finds in the “points of sound in silence.” “Wurlitzer Jukebox!” takes its name from old 1930s jukeboxes, the kinds found in grandparents’ homes or the lobbies of old movie houses or stuck in the mud next to fairgrounds tents. Yet the song tells a seemingly unconnected story—about someone named Parrish dancing, his feet blurry on the floor, as the singer asks him a question he can’t hear. As Philip’s bassline locks into the syncopated drum machine beat, it’s as if the words “wurlitzer” and “jukebox” turn into sounds, too, whirling out of the silence toward the movement of Parrish’s feet and the lockstep ticking of Philip’s bassline— as if time, lost time, memories of a golden era have become sounds themselves, questions that can’t be heard. “Words fly around me,” Alison sings, in the center of the sound. In the opening seconds of “Salad Days,” meanwhile, you can hear the serrated edge of Stuart’s pick cut directly into his guitar—a bit like the ticking of a clock or the crackling of a fire. It’s a sound made not just from striking the strings, but also from the electric pickup which sits behind them. A few moments later, handclaps take the guitar’s place, and then Alison’s voice emerges out of the silence: Think of salad days They were folly and fun They were good, they were young •

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The first line is an instruction: she’s proposing that we meditate on the past. And as she leans forward into the last line, you can also hear her traveling back, searching for some time before the grief and uncertainty her voice carries now. Yet her tone is also resonant, bright, fortifying. It’s like Simon Reynolds’s sense of YMG’s “rightness of things in nature”: Alison’s voice is as indifferent and as open as the landscape which surrounds it. As Graham Lock observed of the group in NME in 1980, YMG create “the pop equivalent of a Zen painter’s landscape—a few casual strokes and the rest is implied.”14 V. Vale picked up on this natural, ancient quality when he described YMG as “haunting, minimalist ‘folk music’” in the pages of RE/Search.15 For American listeners like Vale, the group’s Welsh background must have carried an air of impossibly rural remoteness. The twentieth-century poet George MacKay Brown spent his entire life on the Orkney Islands of Alison’s ancestry and devoted his poetry to its ragged and silent landscape. One of his final poems, “A Work for Poets,” ends on a command fit for the sculpted and silent sounds of Young Marble Giants: “Here’s a work for poets— / Carve the runes / Then be content with silence.”16 * * * In the early twentieth century, the Irish writer J. M. Synge lived on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. Like George MacKay Brown and Brian Eno after him, Synge paid particular attention to the way sounds—particularly those of the spoken Irish language—lived in the natural landscape and connected •

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people to a certain place. “I am in Aran Moor,” he writes in the opening sentences of his 1906 travelogue The Aran Islands, “sitting over a turf fire, listening to a murmur of Gaelic that is rising from a little public-house under my room.”17 For Synge, it’s enough simply to state where he is, what he hears, and that he’s listening—for a description of a place to take on resonance. By paring back, by restraining emotion and judgment, by paying attention to the most minute details of rhythm, inflection, and tone, he seems not to picture the landscape around him so much as create it in language. The islands brim with noises—plaintive birdsongs, waves slamming on wet rock—but the rare sound of another human voice expresses Alison’s sense of the “points of sound in silence.” YMG craft songs—as Synge writes sentences—with specific, unadorned details. Like the “detail of a dropped hymn book,” bursts of sound in silence can make you sit up straight right now, but they also cause you to wonder what happened in the half-second before you heard the sound—what you just missed or what you might always have missed. In the liner notes to a 1986 reissue of his 1982 album Ambient 4: On Land, Eno embraces a connection between the particular details of a place and memory. “In using the term landscape,” he writes, “I am thinking of places, times, climates and the moods that they evoke. And of expanded moments of memory too …”18 More than simply reflecting the landscape which surrounds them, YMG’s music creates its own specific landscape that listeners then carve and sculpt with memories, moods, feelings. By latching onto the “points of sound in silence,” YMG ask us to remember •

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places and times before these sounds, and also to imagine what might come after them. Their music opens up the place that surrounds each moment: natural, industrial, childlike, long lost, maybe forgotten, someday imagined, then again, right now.

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Don’t Label Me

Taken by their friend Patrick Graham “in the backyard of the house on Broadway in a poorer part of Cardiff, where YMG all began,” Alison explained, the image on the cover of Colossal Youth is—like the music itself—stark, bare.1 The three faces featured are dark, fuzzy, anonymous, asking you to focus on details: What do you see? Who are they? There are two names on the sleeve, written in opposing typefaces: “Young Marble Giants,” scribbled up top in curly cue letters, and “Colossal Youth,” printed in capitalized, sans-serif type below. Which better describes the faces? With neither sufficient marketing for the album, nor a previous commercial release to the band’s name, the likenesses on Colossal Youth must have born a defiantly anonymous character to the average record store browser. Stuart told us that the cover was inspired by two others—With the Beatles (1963) and Ultravox! (1977), both of which also feature dark band photos (the former showing just its band members’ faces half-cloaked in shadows; the latter full-body and full-color). But the similarities soon come to a halt. Although Colossal Youth technically introduced YMG to the world, the other two albums, both self-titled more or less, aimed to •

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introduce and highlight their bands more emphatically. Consumers could find themselves “with” The Beatles, or be enchanted by not just “Ultravox,” but the exclamatory Ultravox!.* Not to mention, The Beatles’ album portrays faces that—even when cloaked in shadows— were, or were soon to become, recognizable across the globe. Lit more brightly than Alison and the Moxham brothers, The Beatles stare into the camera at the would-be listener, whereas the hazy YMG faces stare off into the distance—shy or pretentious, it’s unclear. Aloof with regard to typical “pop” presentation, Colossal Youth’s cover functions like a subtler version of Meet the Residents, the 1974 Residents’ LP, which has a sleeve that outright parodies With the Beatles. Indeed, Colossal Youth sets up the potential for a “pop” band portrait and, in an atmospheric and rebellious gesture, removes all the public-friendly appeal of “pop.” Ultravox! likewise fosters a clearer, more personal relationship between the band and the public. While the group’s members may not be as individually known as The Beatles’, their clothing—patent leather, cut-up— “pops” so to speak, and roots the photo in a particular era, place, scene. It allows viewers to better guess the music’s style. By contrast, an uninformed viewer looking at Colossal Youth would have no idea what type of music was contained within, where the photo was taken, when the album was made, or what type of people these were.

Ultravox!, which derived its exclamation point from the canonical Krautrock album Neu! (1972), inspired YMG’s punctuation of the track “Wurlitzer Jukebox!” * 

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Were they young? Were they giants? Stuart, who “was already in [his] 20s by then … over the hill compared to all the punk bands around,” viewed “youth” and “young” as, on one level, simple amusing disjunctions, like that between the silly font up top and the more rigid one down below.2 The appreciation of playful disjunction manifested itself, too, in a quiet, “provincial” band whom no one in London had heard of introducing themselves with uncharacteristic (though still understated) bravado as “giants.” Colossal Youth’s cover signals YMG’s resistance to being pinned down, to being fully understood— neither young nor old; immature nor mature; serious and austere, but with a subtle sense of humor. Like the silence YMG employ in their music, the cover’s open-ended composition is ambiguous and amorphous, allowing the viewer space for contemplation, for filling in the gaps. In Lipstick Traces (1989), Greil Marcus attributes a similar sense of blankness to the punk movement at large, and traces it all back to the Dadaists of the early twentieth century. Dada’s roots spread widely, infiltrating the practices of Satie, Cage, first-wave punks, and postpunks. Dick Hebdige likewise draws a line between Dada and punk, using a quote by Dadaist George Grosz as an epigraph in a chapter in his 1979 sociological book Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Hebdige introduces a text that otherwise concerns the dynamics and styles of punks and British subcultures of the ’70s with Grosz’s claim that, “Our symbol was nothingness, a vacuum, a void.”3 Due in part to the vogue of existentialist, nihilist, and anarchist literature among Britain’s youth subcultures, punks were often described as, and •

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thought of themselves as, nihilistic—as promoting such nothingness. Per Richard Hell’s famous song, they styled themselves the “blank generation.” Hell’s “Blank Generation” (1976) plays on Bob McFadden’s popular song “Beat Generation” (1959), substituting a “blank” space for the once countercultural, then mainstream term “Beat”—in a way, like YMG’s “blank” approach to The Beatles’ album cover. Throughout his song, Hell describes his somewhat gleeful apathy at being part of a controlling post-Beat era marked by Medicare, mass media, and more—a recognition of the world’s absurdity that resonated with British punks, for whom Hell was a noted influence. Blankness and anonymity quietly greet anyone new to YMG, from the cover into the music: the long, silent fade-in that opens into a “search” for the everanonymous “Mr. Right.” Like Hell, Alison recognizes her diminutive, subjective place in the world. “Blind as the fate decrees,” she sings, underscoring the darkness and blankness that abound. Aligning themselves with the unknown Mr. Right, Stuart, Philip, and Alison— expressionless, lost against the light—could rightly be anyone. Marcus concludes in his analysis of punk that “anonymity means that the music sounds like a conversation in which everyone is actually taking part: in which the most obvious facts of life are worth questioning, in which every speaker deserves listeners and a reply … Each day no longer quite seems like a natural fact.”4 For YMG, as per “N.I.T.A.”—“Nature Intended the Abstract”—a “natural fact” is hard to pin down. Nature works in incomprehensible, abstract ways; accordingly, the band members’ natural, human faces on the cover •

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fade into abstract masses (like the “abstract concept of human form” that Richter ascribes to kouroi sculptures).* All we can tell is that each member looks out to their right, into the “nothingness, vacuum, void” of whatever lies beyond and obscured by the overwhelming blackness of the cover. Although figurative and not completely blank, Colossal Youth’s cover becomes more and more abstract the more you look at it. “The monochrome design was a conscious money saving ploy,” Stuart told us—a pragmatic decision that in itself underscores the socio-economic urgency of YMG’s blankness amid the DIY spirit of the Rough Trade era. But a monochrome cover also serves Colossal Youth’s openness, its invocation for participation. Even if it’s representational and inscribed with lines of text, the cover brings to mind the White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg with its chromatic neutrality. “The white paintings caught whatever fell on them,” John Cage noted; “why did I not look at them with my magnifying glass?”5 By “catching” aspects of the environment that go largely unnoticed—lights, shadows, particles— Rauschenberg’s paintings highlight their contingency upon the viewers’ viewing in time. Each panel, draped Marcus also suggests that in post-punk, anonymity served to avoid “star cults”—an avoidance clearly articulated by Stuart, Philip, and Alison’s faces sitting evenly on the same plane. The star-making culture of rock ’n’ roll mimicked the hierarchies in the UK, anointing kings, like Bryan Ferry or Sid Vicious, above their lowly bands. In fostering a sense of anonymity on their cover, YMG broke down the hierarchical organization of rock ’n’ roll and spread it horizontally. No one is in the foreground; no one is the star. * 

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in ephemeral outside matter, is, as Cage mentions, “a painting constantly changing.”6 As such, Rauschenberg challenges the cultural fixity that likewise causes Stuart anxiety: “I cannot fix you / In a position,” wrote Stuart on a monotonic tune called, well, “Constantly Changing.” “For you are movement,” goes that song’s final phrase—“and that is nothing.” In a world full of “white riots” and economic overturn, of mods and punks, YMG turn to “nothing” as a means of unsettling the rigid classifications that map onto class, subculture, patriarchy, and other systems of reduction and control. What appears blank or overly austere on the surface carries within it an entire conversation—expressed through suggestion and connotation—and a prompt for viewers to investigate what could lie in the composition’s negative space. T. J. Clark, a leftist art historian who taught members of Gang of Four, The Mekons, and Scritti Politti at the University of Leeds, identifies similar subtle upheavals in late nineteenth-century France, a time and place known, like London in the ’70s, for its burst of artistic innovation alongside unrest in the status quo. In 1982’s The Painting of Modern Life, Clark sets the stakes: “What else do we usually mean by the word ‘society’ but a set of means for solidarity, distance, belonging, and exclusion?” he asks—things that “fix an order in which men and women can make their living and have some confidence that they will continue to do so.”7 The “fixed” order that YMG experienced, entrenched in new economic plans put forth by Thatcher’s government, was breaking apart, pixelating, like the dots in the Impressionist paintings about which Clark writes. Note the visual similarities, •

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too, between Colossal Youth’s cover and the fuzzy blackand-white pointillist portraits by Georges Seurat. But Colossal Youth’s connection to pointillism may run deeper than just the similarities between the band members’ faces and those of Seurat’s subjects. Alison “[soaked] up the wonderful collection of Impressionist paintings” at the Cardiff Museum as a teenager. (The museum’s Impressionist collection had, she said, grown significantly between 1951 and 1963.)8 You can see the influence on the Monet-esque cover of Drumbeat for Baby, a 1982 single by Alison’s post-YMG band, Weekend. Alison’s vocals, calm and wavering, are themselves a bit impressionistic with Weekend and YMG alike. Beyond just Alison’s influences, you can hear each drum machine click on Colossal Youth as a Seuratian dot of paint—useless on its own but, taken in concert with its surroundings, drawing a bigger picture. Jean Ajalbert, a French critic active in the late 1800s, notes, “Monsieur Seurat paints in little measured touches … He leaves out the affectations, the accessories, and the frills, and gives us a schema—a very suggestive one.”9 Colossal Youth is an album of models for pop songs; these songs are likewise suggestive “schema,” composed of “measured” musical “touches.” Composed of disjointed “touches”—the two decidedly different fonts, the band members’ faces, the vacuous background—the cover coalesces into a self-contradicting picture that speaks to contemporary conditions of pop music and British youth. Clark concludes that in Seurat’s painting the modern life depicted is “intense” even if it appears calm, because •

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“each separate shape is so sharp and clear and yet boxed in by others, touching and intersecting them, as if the picture was hardly big enough to contain them.”10 Similarly, the separate, solitary space that each track on Colossal Youth occupies, coupled with the stark production and sometimes foreboding lyrics, give the music a tension—an intensity—that casts an omnipresent shadow across the otherwise sedate music. It’s a tension clearly cognizant of its chaotic surroundings, and YMG know that their “picture [is] hardly big enough to contain them.” The cover is a void: the members stare off into infinity, expanding the picture.

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Sit at Home and Watch the Tube

Entering an intense modern world of political and musical upheaval, YMG also existed during a transition period for technology and mass media. Part of the first generation to have grown up with TV sets (having been born in the mid-to-late 1950s), YMG’s members would watch (and listen) in the years around Colossal Youth as television greatly expanded its reach and programming, FM radio began to take over AM, musicians increasingly employed electronic instruments, and the dawn of the computer age came into view. Welsh historian Kenneth O. Morgan characterized the Cold War era by its “[h]igh-tech industries, based on computer software and the like.”1 Even the Welsh countryside was affected, when, according to Philip, “some Japanese company like Sony” set up shop there in the mid-1970s.2 From the factories and hospitals where they worked to the music world they inhabited, YMG were surrounded by technological noise. They absorbed the innovations wide-eyed and open eared: they used drum machines and electronic organs at the cusp of New Wave; they sang of “Radio Silents,” jukeboxes and televisions, and a robot called “The Man Amplifier.” •

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Writing on Robert Rauschenberg’s work from the early 1960s, art historian Leo Steinberg notes that Rauschenberg fostered a relationship between “noise and meaning on the same wavelength.”3 Steinberg uses the term “wavelength” figuratively, but a literal reading of his quote applies to YMG. As we listen closer to Colossal Youth, we begin to hear the technological noise of the late ’70s—whether from television, radio, or any number of emergent devices—emanating on the same wavelength as the music itself. * * * In an April 1954 Peanuts comic, Schroeder happens upon Charlie Brown smiling while listening to radio fuzz (imagined pictorially by jagged lines in a speech bubble). “Do you want me to fix that for you, Charlie Brown?” Schroeder asks, gesturing toward Charlie’s device. “You keep your hands off this radio!” Charlie retorts. Then he grins broadly and proclaims: “I like to listen to static!”4 Schroeder, a skilled pianist, hears the radio’s “noise” and reaches to “fix” it. Charlie, arguably naive but nonetheless open-minded, sees what Schroeder, a trained musician, can’t: that static itself can be a musical instrument. The relationship between technology and music has a history that long predates the twentieth century—consider anything from Athanasius Kircher’s seventeenth-century speaking tubes to the phonautograph of the 1850s. But the proliferation of technological apparatuses following the Industrial Revolution made it so that, by the onset of the twentieth-century, artists •

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found themselves surrounded by technological objects at much closer distances, holding them in their hands like Charlie Brown and his radio. Given the sounds that these objects can make, musicians and composers often sought to imbue their music with the soundscapes of the modern world. A variety of aesthetic approaches followed: from Stravinsky’s propulsive, industrial-sounding ballet scores in the 1910s to the Italian Futurists’ adoption of electronic “noise” as a musical tool that same decade; from John Cage’s earliest compositional implementation of radios and turntables beginning in the ’30s to the development of synthesizers and other electronic instruments in the ’50s, ’60s, and beyond.* Where Stravinsky used traditional musical material (strings, woodwinds, et al.) to recall the sounds of industry and technology, Cage—and Charlie Brown, for that matter—broke from tradition by using technological noise itself. Cage and Charlie celebrated technology, not just for its intended function, but also for its existence and, importantly, for its newness. Technological noise is in a way “accidental” music; it necessarily disregards accepted musical methods, whether they are the notation and orchestration of twentieth-century neoclassical music or Schroeder’s slick, studied piano playing. Likewise set on dismantling previous musical traditions, punk and post-punk artists celebrated the sounds of technology, often inserting radio static and station-surfing into their

Not to be outdone, Satie wrote “for typewriter, pistol shots, steamship whistle and siren alongside more conventional instruments” in his 1917 ballet Parade (Toop, Ocean of Sound, 196). *

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songs. Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Burn It Down,” the first track on Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (released five months after Colossal Youth), begins with nearly a minute of dial-tuning before launching into an album full of blistering R&B. There, the jolting radio static is an apt preface to the chaotic music that follows. But other songs from that time more fluidly integrate the fuzzy, disorienting effects of technology: “Radio Prague” (1981) by This Heat and Pere Ubu’s “Real World” (1978) come to mind. Both of these tracks mix massmedia noise with post-punk grooves. But radio isn’t just sound, it’s also a means of communication. As such, its influence manifested itself in other ways, too, like in the emergence of pop songs about the radio. While artists from Harry Nilsson in “Turn on Your Radio” (1971) to Crash Crew in “On the Radio” (1983) praised radio’s powers of musical and social connection, others, especially punks, found the apparatus problematic. The chaos enacted in “Radio Prague” or “Real World” signals that, while radio is an exciting medium for aural transmission, it also projects a powerful, disruptive wave of noise, sonically and ideologically speaking. Those artists more critical of the establishment specifically identified radio—the BBC in the UK—as a stratifying government institution. Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio” (1978) satirizes the stock listeners put in mass media, suggesting that radio ultimately regulates the status quo. The Clash underlines a similar idea in “This is Radio Clash” (1981), mimicking radio’s proselytizing rhetoric to highlight its rigidity—and suggesting subversive revolt by commanding “Radio Clash,” or pirate radio. Is this less a denunciation of radio and more a call to take •

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it back? To celebrate its technological advancement (or, to accept its ubiquity) but repurpose that for populist goals? The Residents offered another strategy, going as far as to place the short songs on Commercial Album into actual radio advertisement slots as a means of parody or, maybe, reclamation. YMG employ static noise in “The Taxi” and “Wind in the Rigging,” but their only song that directly addresses the radio isn’t on Colossal Youth: “Radio Silents,” the second track on the Final Day EP (and, in earlier form, second-to-last on the Colossal Youth cassette). Unlike the aforementioned songs, its lyrics don’t clearly posit anything about radio. It reads as an interchange between two lovers struggling to communicate, presumably from afar. Like Nilsson in “Turn on Your Radio,” YMG acknowledge radio’s power to connect people across distances; instead of communicating through song, though, as Nilsson does, the characters in “Radio Silents” take advantage of the gaps between the songs. “Silents,” though not a real word, functions on multiple levels: as a plural noun, suggesting that each silent gap is a discrete space worth probing, and as a verb, in that while radio “silents” us (as in “silences”), it also provides opportunities for communication within the course of each “silent.” The communication between the song’s characters depends on silence: on quietly knowing what a smile might mean, on not writing letters to one another despite their distance, on being “polite”—a trait that usually entails quietude. Individual “silents” pervade the song musically and lyrically, causing alternating senses of calm and anxiety. Jacques Attali argues that mass media produced silence—not a Cage-ian silence, but the stifling silence of •

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containment that one might hear in “Radio Silents,” the unnervingly long and silent introduction of “Searching for Mr. Right,” or simply the exaggerated sonic distance between drum machine taps in “Eating Noddemix.” Society was once consumed by an energetic layer of noise, Attali suggests, but now silence has taken over: “Carnival is fading into Lent,” he writes, “and silence is setting in everywhere.” This is a factor, in part, of new technological devices—the very things that excited Cage and Charlie Brown. “A programmed, anonymous, depersonalized workplace,” continues Attali, “[mass production] imposes a silence, a domination of men by organization.”5 By hearing the radio “silents”—technology’s silencing ability—we as listeners pick up Attali’s depersonalization and anonymity clearly. In “Radio Silents,” YMG quietly place a mirror in front of the world around them, forcing us to hear that sense of “domination” hidden in silence. But, they refuse to manifest Attali’s statements in full and to abandon silence’s appeal. By privileging radio over pre-industrial methods of communication (letterwriting), YMG nevertheless suggest in Cage-ian fashion that radio—even when silent, or static—is worth paying attention to. That, to quote Cage on the noise of the world, “when we ignore it, it disturbs us,” but “when we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”6 Stuart once noted, “I remember saying in one interview that what I wanted the album to do was to sound like a radio that’s between stations, and you’re listening to it under the bed-clothes at 4-AM, and you’re getting these fantastic short wave sounds and snatches of modulated sound.”7 His statement comes through in the brevity of the songs, •

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which cut off abruptly, as though the station has been changed; it also manifests itself in the surprising walls of static noise that enter the mixes of “The Taxi” and “Wind in the Rigging.” Colossal Youth is an album “between stations”—neither one thing nor the other, existing in the gaps. While many media theorists, following Marshall McLuhan’s lead, often view new media as “extensions of man,” Friedrich Kittler embraces the autonomy of media, their ability to make their own sights and sounds apart from man. “From the beginning …,” he writes, “media were engulfed by the noise of the real—the fuzziness of cinematic pictures, the hissing of tape recordings.”8 On “Burn it Down,” Dexy’s recreate the “noise of the real” mimetically by broadcasting radio static. Elvis Costello considers radio’s cultural implications as communication, not as technology. Colossal Youth does both, ultimately mirroring the radio as a device in itself—as a contradictory conglomeration of silence, noise, pop music, and commentary, both informed by and part of the background. In “Radio Silents,” as in other songs, YMG don’t recreate the “noise of the real” so much as open our ears to its existence and effects. * * * Was radio passé by the time of Colossal Youth, though? YMG came about at a mass-media turning point. 1979 brought us The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and MTV was on the air two years later: television was proving to be music’s new medium of choice. But to punks, television, though exciting, signaled yet another •

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system of control. “Many British punk songs attack the institution of TV,” the artist and writer Dan Graham noted in 1979, “because, as the Clash put it in ‘London’s Burning,’ ‘everybody’s drowning in a sea of television.’” The band, in Graham’s words, viewed “television as a condition of working-class acquiescence.”9 In “Brand—New—Life,” the speaker is caught in a push-pull with TV while they “sit at home and watch the tube.” Portrayed as a passive gesture, this act nevertheless undergirds the deep pain coursing through the song. The tube is a means of escape in the wake of emotional tumult, but, as The Clash had suggested, it also sinks the narrator into a circuit of immobility or “acquiescence.” The repetition of the chorus suggests the narrator’s inability to move on. The “brand new life” is “fashioned out of brand new strife,” a feedback loop that reflects technology’s circuitous stream of wonders (new life) and horrors (new strife). “Make the tears come out of me,” the speaker beckons, almost as if they’ve lost their humanity and become a machine: the effects of what Attali calls “autosurveillance.” Fredric Jameson writes in the foreword to Attali’s Noise that “under autosurveillance, capital and the state no longer have to do anything to you, because you have learned to do it to yourself. But ‘doing it to yourself’ also implies knowing how to ‘do it for yourself,’ and the new technology is at least neutral to the degree that it could also, conceivably, be used for a collective political project of emancipation.”10 Locked in their home, the tube provides respite not only after a break up, but also for the wider conditions—failing industry, numbness—it helps create. The chorus’s repetition carries within it the painful sound •

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of “doing it to yourself” over and over, but also sounds like an attempt to “do it for yourself”—to work through circumstance, toward emancipation in concert with a neutral TV set. The multi-pronged influence of television on YMG would make its presence felt later on. In 1981, Rough Trade put out the Testcard EP, YMG’s final release. The EP consists of six short instrumentals recorded by Stuart and Philip, without Alison. The songs are rhythmic, energized, funky: they take their inspiration from television testcard music. “In those days, there were extended periods during the day when British TV ceased programming and instead broadcast just the Testcard …” Stuart said, referring to the colored bars (visualized on Testcard’s cover) that allowed viewers to gauge their TV set’s coloring during the gaps between shows. “This static image was accompanied by a peculiar sort of lite-jazzy Muzak whose crisp definition and detailed arrangements lent itself to similar fine-tuning of the TV’s sound reproduction.”11 Like testcard images, testcard music helps viewers determine if the television was working properly. The music’s detail and familiarity allow any technological imperfections to make themselves clearly audible, as long as you’re paying attention. Testcard’s sleeve proclaims that the songs are “in praise and celebration” of the television music at hand.12 Praiseworthy, it seems, because testcard music is subtly activating—it’s a prompt to get up, move between the gaps in the TV schedule and interact with the technology one-on-one (turning its dials, shifting its antennae). “It was apparently just Muzak,” Stuart •

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elaborated to us, referring to the testcard music, “but, when listened to closely, actually had quiet radicalism.” It sharpens the faculty of listening and highlights what Kittler calls “the noise of the real”—in this case, medium-specific distortion coursing through the television’s speakers.* Engaged in its time, YMG’s “real” is likewise rooted in memory. It was Stuart and Philip’s grandmother who “kept the TV on constantly as a sort of hearthwarming ambient presence,” inspiring their investigation of television music.13 This appeal to media as a means of reflection, of accessing memories, finds an echo in the “Hypnagogic pop” of the 2000s. In his 2009 genredefining article, David Keenan, referring to artists like The Skaters and Emeralds, outlines a trend in the American underground: ’80s-influenced music propelled by DIY recording and distribution. For Keenan, Hypnagogic pop embraces technological constraints as a means, in part, of traversing complex psychological ground in relation to nostalgia. He explains that “the magic of Hypnagogic pop is its combination of innocence and experience, its drive to restore the circumstances of early youthful epiphanies while reframing them as present realities, possible futures.”14 In their electronic simplicity, Testcard and Colossal Youth sonically prefigure

This Heat bookended their 1979 debut with pieces called “Testcard.” Comprising subdued electronic sounds, these orient listeners to This Heat’s version of “real life”: the songs in between the “testcards,” which are radical, often harrowing. *

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Hypnagogic pop while also bearing that quality of sideby-side innocence and experience. Whereas punk and post-punk wore their adolescence proudly, Colossal Youth comes at once from the perspective of the pre-adolescent “young” and “youth,” and from the post-adolescent adults who have settled down. The young Stuart and Philip with their grandmother, listening to the ambient sounds of the television is an image that resonates throughout not just the Testcard EP but YMG’s entire output, beholden as it is to old technologies and days long gone—the interplay between, in Keenan’s (and William Blake’s) terms, innocence and experience. Indeed, mostly written by Stuart, who was slightly older than most punks, YMG’s songs are at once playful and world-weary. His memories are channeled into sound, all coming from the TV’s “ambient presence,” from being able to hear its “quiet radicalism”—a radicalism engaged in and reframing “present realities,” making room for “possible futures,” albeit uncertain ones. * * * YMG’s relationship with new media and technology proves an important theme in their music; and their embrace of technology and the new is rendered even more powerful by their unique use of electronic instruments and sounds—a minimalist, “primitive,” yet prescient approach. By using the electronics their cousin Peter Joyce built—ring modulator, drum machine— YMG not only predicted the incoming onslaught of drum machines in ’80s’ pop music but also outlined a •

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subtle commentary on nature and technology, man and machine, and the permeable boundaries between each entity.* Fading in on “Searching for Mr. Right,” the drum machine is the first sound we hear on the album. It sets the pace, the tone; it signals that the music to follow is spare, simple, a little different. On the next track, “Include Me Out,” the machine plays a suggestive role: drenched in reverb, it recalls the ticking of a Geiger counter, directing the listener to the oblique atomic paranoia at play in the song. By using a drum machine, YMG separate themselves from the propulsive bombast of rock ’n’ roll. Propelled forward by inhumanly precise clicks, YMG’s music sounds linked into the mainframe, hurling across wires, not arenas. This use of the drum machine finds precedence in Kraftwerk, a German electronic group YMG that revered. Like the Rough Trade bands that followed in their footsteps, Kraftwerk viewed rock ’n’ roll as a controlling, outmoded institution and used drum machines and synthesizers to help distance themselves from that tradition. Eventually, Kraftwerk went as far as to posit themselves as machines. Their album The Man Machine, released in 1978 in the early days of YMG, envisioned musically and ideologically what

The ring modulator “had two inputs and an output, and you could put any two things together and they’d blend into each other,” Stuart said poetically in a 1993 interview with Neil Strauss for Option. “This was pre-samplers and pre-cassettes, we’re talking 1979, 1980. Synthesizers were practically unheard of ” (Strauss, Option). * 

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Marshall McLuhan had posited a decade earlier: electronic media had become physical extensions of man. Synthesizers and drum machines were so integral to Kraftwerk’s music that the group’s members “transformed” into machines by virtue of playing these instruments. YMG hint at such hybridity with their “replacement” of a drummer with a drum machine (something the British post-punk band Wire would do as well). The drum machine kept YMG’s tight compositions perfectly timed. Often, as if to boast of its machinic regularity, the drum machine counts out at least three of a given measure’s four beats, working as a pseudo-metronome. Coupled with this precision, “The Man Amplifier”’s prominent use of electronic organ—which takes on a human role of “singing” the melody—suggests that YMG might promote the same futuristic vision as Kraftwerk. But it quickly becomes clear that “The Man Amplifier” is no Man Machine, and that YMG’s vision of a technological future is hardly utopian. Philip’s bass playing is clean and precise, but Stuart’s organ carries within its shrill tones the sound of technological limitation, while Alison’s imperfect pitch undermines what could otherwise be considered her “robotic” indifference. Where Kraftwerk are man-machines concerned chiefly with their own circuits and movement through European urban landscapes, “The Man Amplifier” finds YMG questioning the utility and possibility of a robotic man, as well as its humanistic implications. The song’s irregular use of the drum machine creates an uneasy tension between natural and mechanical: it clicks on only the one and the two, with the three and the four •

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filled in by an airy, swooshing noise. The noise, more open and organic than the tight drum ticks (not to mention more frequently sounded), unsettles the rigid order the drum machine usually brings. “Lubricate the inner man,” Alison sings at the end of the song. For Kraftwerk, there may have been a machinic quality to man, but for YMG, there’s a mannish quality to machine, and it’s the “inner man” that drives their vision. “Philip wrote [‘The Man Amplifier’] after seeing a programme about a robot you strap yourself into and it amplified your movements,” Stuart explained to Sounds, “so that if you want to pick your nose and it isn’t programmed to do it, it’ll pull your head off. It’s a really primitive American idea … that song always sounds as though it’s just about to fall apart, and that’s what I imagine the Man Amp to be like, a kind of prototype, a primitive thing.”15 The electric drum machine and organ, Philip’s bass playing, Alison’s imperfect pitch— the machine and the human cohere imperfectly like the Man Amplifier itself, with a tension that threatens to break it all apart. The song and concept recall “Mechanical Man” (1978), an early recording by YMG’s beloved Devo. Devo’s cyborg character is undoubtedly “primitive,” to use Stuart’s word, mumbling like a caveman. The music, jagged and unhinged, suggests that Devo’s vision of a robotic future is bleak—a portent of de-evolution. Similarly, throughout “The Man Amplifier,” YMG are wary of robotic technology: “Take a walk, he’s always near,” they warn, the drum machine beating like encroaching footsteps. “Like a shadow, never fear while we’re singing.” The lines certainly sound more paranoid •

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than celebratory, and the next lines—“Like a tower in the dark / He can leave you feeling stark”—only add to the tension. But “The Man Amplifier” also acknowledges the technological limits that make robots endearing. His “fingers fall away.” He “has everything but desire.” YMG’s man-machine isn’t a pristine, Kraftwerk-ian robot. “He’s a robot when he should,” they say. Ultimately, this new, yet “primitive” technology fulfills its role as a source for constant entertainment: “Never tires, ever good, and we’re singing.” The title’s double meaning becomes apparent—the technology may “amplify” man’s capabilities, but it’s also an “amplifier,” a simple piece of musical equipment.

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As a kid, Stuart listened to music on a pair of high-tech headphones gifted to him by his eldest brother. “That’s the ultimate way of getting inside the music and cutting off the world,” Stuart said. “You’re not available, you’re inside the headphones, dedicated to listening.”1 This kind of dedicated listening specifically influenced Stuart’s own criteria for great music—atmosphere and detail— and it shows up in his approach to the writing and recording of Colossal Youth, an album quiet enough to catch the smallest of sounds and details.2 It’s music to get inside of, to dedicate yourself to listening to with eyes closed, alone in bed, on an airplane, or in the backseat on a long car ride—an album “for introverts, by introverts,” as Simon Reynolds noted in his 2005 book Rip It Up and Start Again.3 Stuart’s headphone remarks put forth a way of listening to Colossal Youth that runs counter to others already suggested—one which aims to cut off the outside world rather than let it in, and privileges private and personal listening over public and shared experience. Stuart’s comments suggest that all of those miraculous “accidental sounds” from the outside world can best •

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be heard when you’re cut off, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, listening closely to the details living beside and behind each sound. In many of Stuart’s songs, there’s both a you and an I (almost never a he or she), but they’re rarely linked— never speaking directly or sitting in the same room. Instead, the speaker of the songs often wishes to get away, to close off, to separate, for the you to leave the me alone. “Take your body from by me / be yourself over there,” Stuart writes on “Music for Evenings.” Other times, the scene takes place after implied explosions of rage and dismissal, after the separation between two people has already happened—like in “Brand—New—Life,” where the narrator sits at home watching television: “When I hear the doorbell ring,” the person in front of the TV says, “I can never let them in to me.” In those moments, words twist back toward a scene of connection that’s either lost or still yet to come. “How can I hope to be,” writes Stuart on “Searching for Mr. Right,” “someone for you to see?” These gaps—misspoken words and blocked glances, the thick silence sitting in between two people—burden the music with the weight of the unsaid and unseen. The songs, Stuart said in 1980, “are all based on things that happened to me with my girlfriend [Wendy Smith]. That’s the most important thing that’s happened to me in years, meeting this particular girl and what we’ve been through.”4 While Stuart’s remarks help paint a picture of who and what might have inspired the writing of Colossal Youth, it’s still impossible to categorize the music simply as an album of love songs. Stuart’s dense and opaque lyrics don’t carry a single message or •

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meaning, and they often veer from initial depictions of personal hurt toward abstract and surreal images which aim to evoke the feeling of pain more than describe what might have caused it. On “N.I.T.A.,” for example, the narrator starts by addressing the you explicitly—“it’s nice to hear you’re having a good time / but it still hurts ’cause you used to be mine”—but ends up alone on a rooftop for an unexplained surprise in the rain. Alison’s plainspoken delivery further abstracts Stuart’s words, her tone refusing to add explanation by way of vocal embellishment. As Simon Reynolds notes, “listening to Colossal Youth … often feels like you’re eavesdropping on someone’s private thoughts: you don’t catch all the references, the meaning is often cloudy, but the aura of intimacy and inwardness is unmistakable.”5 The inwardness of the music points back to Stuart’s advocacy for headphone listening—his urge to become “not available.” Yet his desire to pull away was nevertheless matched by an intense need to express himself and a conviction that songwriting was his only way of reckoning with the intense depression from which he suffered. “I was afraid of my future,” Stuart said of his early twenties. “I had no idea or desire about what to do with my life. Learning the guitar was my epiphany and songwriting became my raison d’etre.”6 Some of Stuart’s songwriter heroes like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young similarly presented songwriting as a way of being in the world, and dealing with depression and anxiety head on. One of Young’s earliest songs, “The Loner” (1968), helped create a songwriter mold in which quiet characters like Stuart could hear their way of living voiced out loud. Young’s 1970 album After the Gold •

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Rush—released the year Stuart turned fifteen—perfected the same combination of extreme intimacy and densely ambiguous lyrics that Stuart later drew on when writing the songs on Colossal Youth. A quick glance at some of the song titles on Young’s album—“Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” “I Believe in You”—suggests the same “aura of intimacy” of an undefined you and I dealing with deep but unexplained conflict. “It is frustrating not to sing the things,” Stuart said in an interview in 1980. “I’m not writing songs ’cos I want to be a musician, I’m writing them ’cos that’s the only way I’ve got to express myself.”7 While Stuart’s desperation certainly added to the urgency of his writing, it also a created a kind of roadblock in the group’s dynamics—if Stuart couldn’t sing the songs, he thought, then he couldn’t communicate to anyone at all. If he had his way, YMG would have been a project of two brothers with his voice shining out front. Alison’s inclusion in the band had been Philip’s ultimatum, and the “seed of resentment” it lodged in Stuart’s heart only grew as they gained in popularity.8 Throughout Colossal Youth, Stuart’s voice only appears twice—first, buried in the muffled radio dispatch static on “The Taxi” and second, backing Alison on the chorus of “Brand—New—Life” (“I’ve been hurt before, sorrow knocking on my door / Pain”). In each instance, his voice, obscured by radio static or sitting behind Alison’s louder and clearer intonation, is not totally intelligible. Longing, sadness, anger, and fear in the songs are never fully articulated or spelled out, but simmer behind Alison’s vocals and Philip’s bass. You can imagine this •

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kind of musical repression acting out in Stuart’s tense guitar triplets on “Music For Evenings.” Alison gets to deliver the kinds of lines Stuart must have labored over—“Keep you music for evenings / and your coffee for crullers”—but her voice takes whatever meaning the lines might have had for Stuart and places the task of interpretation on the listener instead. In YMG, Stuart’s guitar and vocal sound is one of displacement between where he’d like to be and where he stands. Like the ambiguous relationship between the you and I in his lyrics, Stuart’s pent-up presence in the music always hovers in the dead space behind the words and chords. If Alison gets to sing the vocal melodies and Philip’s high-pitched bass gets to play many of the instrumental ones, Stuart’s guitar supplies the lessnoticeable rhythm behind these melodies. While this role is somewhat ineffable and hard to hear, it also grants Stuart a certain kind of agency in the periphery of the YMG sound. Playing alongside the minimally expressive drum machine allows him to treat his guitar percussively, adding gusts of reverb-filled “atmosphere and detail” that reward the most dedicated headphone listening. And playing the organ in front of a simple beat and bassline pushes the sounds of an instrument often buried deepest in a recording back to the front. On organ in particular, Stuart looked to American soul music like the kind made by Booker T. and The MGs as inspiration—a connection made explicit when he titled one of YMG’s earliest songs “Ode to Booker T.” The MGs’ leader, Booker T. Jones, played so expressively on the Hammond B–3 organ and the rotating Leslie speaker that listeners often mistook its sounds for a human voice. •

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On “Green Onions” (1962), Jones’s soulful, vocal-like melody is echoed by the MGs’ minimal and pared-back combination of electric guitar, bass, and drums—nearly the same lineup YMG employed sixteen years later. Especially on Colossal Youth’s two instrumentals—“The Taxi” and “Wind in the Rigging”—Stuart’s trebly punchiness on the organ and Philip’s steady, almost bluesy bass bring to mind the MGs’ minimalist groove. When asked about his particular approach to employing the Leslie speaker (whose rotating speaker moves amplified sound through the air to create a whoosh of tremolo and vibrato), Jones replied: “My philosophy is … similar to the philosophy of silence and sound. I don’t think you appreciate sound until you hear the silence, and I think you don’t really appreciate the movement of a tone until it doesn’t move. So I like the straight tone first for a period, and then I like to introduce the movement.”9 While Stuart’s small, portable keyboard didn’t have a rotating speaker, his organ sound as well as his guitar and lyrics all share Jones’s preference for starting with the simplest straight melody or phrase and then moving from there—in Stuart’s case, allowing the listener to appreciate the melody on “Wind in the Rigging” before static noise cuts through, or to hear, on “Searching for Mr. Right,” how the narrator waits up half the night before they learn to become the abstract “Young Untold.”*

Perhaps, too, Stuart found musical kinship in the MGs’ role as the ever-adaptable studio band for Stax Records in Memphis, quietly adding their arrangements to recordings by bigger stars like Otis * 

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* * * In 2006, the Portuguese film director Pedro Costa released Juventude em Marcha, and chose to title the English-language version of the film Colossal Youth. The title is an homage to YMG, but Costa’s Colossal Youth makes no other explicit references to the band—any connection to YMG is left to the gaps between shots. The film follows an elderly Cape Verdean refugee named Ventura across a poverty-stricken Lisbon, where his children and friends, alongside other refugees, find themselves in a continual process of relocation: first, from Cape Verde to Portugal after a bloody war for independence; and next, from crumbling stone apartments in one Lisbon neighborhood to high-rise, white-walled public housing in another. All this displacement is seen through the eyes of one person, who often walks through streets in silence, spends nights sleeping on cracked cement and days sitting in slashed-open chairs, and composes a letter aloud to his lover who left him for reasons unknown. “I’m still waiting,” Ventura recites as he cranes his back over a kitchen table, looking out the window. “Every day, every minute, I learn beautiful new words just for you and me. Still no word from you. Maybe soon.”10

Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla and Rufus Thomas, and Eddie Floyd. Stuart might have discovered a metaphor for his own existence in YMG—as a kind of studio band in the background, inhabiting the space just behind the melody and vocals, adding layers of distinctive sounds and grooves and little details to the atmosphere of the music. •

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Ventura’s face is constantly framed in harsh light, and his body is cramped in between all the black space this light fails to catch. Behind him, gray walls are crumbling and stained, shadowed by cracks and raked light. In one scene, Ventura stands in front of the walls in a tattered black suit, slowly crumpling up a plastic shopping bag. In another, he sits on a bed in a white-walled room, drinking a beer while his daughter tells him slowly, horrifically, how she may be too sick to care for her newborn child. Ventura’s quietness in the face of such grief sometimes registers as discomfort and estrangement, other times as tenderness and resolve. Since Costa titled his movie after YMG’s only LP, it’s only natural to try to find points of connection between the two. But their stories and circumstances are so vastly different that the similarities can only be found in the background of each work: the tone of Costa’s static shots and cracked monochrome walls echoing not so much the story of a song like “Brand—New—Life” as the feeling of it. While making a movie dealing with a completely separate set of people, ideas, history, and geography, Costa still found something in the sounds of YMG’s Colossal Youth to chase after and echo in his own work decades and languages apart. Juventude em Marcha is not an adaptation, and it only shares a title with YMG when shown in translation. But like YMG, Costa calls attention to how the most intense connections between people’s lives can come launching unexpectedly out of the background. Lives can connect through the shape of a wall or the tone of a voice, coursing through everything that’s somehow lacking, that’s implied but unsaid, that’s trying desperately to speak to someone else. •

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In YMG, Stuart hoped to somehow pull himself away from the immediate world, yet also still connect to others—to have his voice be heard. He has claimed that “Art needs to be experienced in the flesh.”11 For Stuart at the time of Colossal Youth, songwriting was his only way of connecting to those around him. He aimed to not just reflect on his life and on his lost romance, but to find a form that could present his confusion in all its opacity and abstraction—not pushing toward revelation but conversation, toward reaching out in the flesh to those around him or even those who have simply heard his music. What’s better than being understood, perhaps, is being listened to.

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These are dangerous times—more dangerous than you’d suspect from the surface. Kaplowie! But it’s also the Golden Age, isn’t it, Paul? Kroner, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano1

In the late 1970s, nuclear paranoia cast a wide shadow across the United Kingdom. Then, in 1980, “CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] organised massive anti-nuclear rallies in the UK to protest the deployment of American Trident missiles in the UK,” writes Simon Reynolds in the Colossal Youth reissue liner notes—“a move, its critics argued, that would turn Britain into a client state cum launching pad for American and Target #1 for Soviet warheads in any full-blown nuclear exchange.”2 Nuclear anxiety had a major effect on everyday life as well as music, particularly in punk and post-punk circles. “The Cold War was always in one’s mind,” Stuart told us: “the ‘Three-Minute Warning’—world destruction in the time it takes to listen to a classic Pop single—how could that not determine everything?”3 One could hear this plainly in songs like The Clash’s “Stop the World” or “Armagideon Time” (both 1981), the latter of which •

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is a cover of a 1978 song by reggae artist Willi Williams.* YMG’s music is much more oblique—could it contain the same apocalyptic thrust as The Clash’s? Stuart continued by referring to one of his favorite authors, noting that, “in a Vonnegutian way, we humans expertly ‘disappeared’ such concerns in order to live, to have hope, plans, children, fun.” YMG’s “Final Day” is more straightforward in its concerns; it sounds good-natured with its bright melody, suggesting a sort of “disappearance.” But while Stuart’s lyrics mention family and fun, they also refer to noise, heat, dying, all on the “final day.” Rampant in the years around 1980, widespread nuclear paranoia reflected the continuing aftershock of the Second World War in international culture and policy, an impact elucidated in British songs like the Sex Pistols’ “Belsen was a Gas” (1977), Crass’s “Nagasaki Nightmare” (1982), or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Enola Gay” (1980). By the late ’70s, the after-effects of the “Great War” hadn’t worn off in the UK. Invoking Leni Riefenstahl’s celebratory Nazi film, Kenneth O. Morgan writes that in the wake of fascism, “the nation offered not a triumph of the will,† but a suspicion of change and the paralysis of self-doubt.”4 Throughout the period between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1980s, the UK government was characterized by disarray— by scandals, uprisings, alternating blasts of leftism and

Reggae, long fetishized by hip Britons, often concerns itself with the apocalypse and proved itself a powerful late-’70s influence both sonically and thematically. †  Emphasis added by authors. * 

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rightism. New systems of control were established, from factories that created jobs and then took them away, to radio and TV, to Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism. To the left, Morgan writes, Thatcherism came “at the cost of both social cohesion and personal liberty. It penetrated the very substructure of national culture, with the message of traditional capitalism proclaimed in an unusually explicit and aggressive form.”5 Stricken by widespread postwar paralysis and a flailing economy, government systems in the UK were unable to please anyone. Punks tried to shock these paralyzed systems back into motion, with an equally “explicit and aggressive form.” The Clash, Sex Pistols, or Crass clearly demonstrate this, but what about YMG? While the lyrics of “Final Day,” which depict class strife amid a nuclear apocalypse, are more straightforwardly paranoiac than any of the lyrics of the tracks on Colossal Youth, the song still lacks both the historical specificity of “Nagasaki Nightmare” or the assertive rabble-rousing of The Clash’s “Stop the World” and “White Riot,” a sonically violent comment on the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival race riots. YMG’s music is quiet; Stuart’s lyrics often project an introverted, deeply personal sensibility interested in, as he said, “hope, plans, children, fun.” But “Final Day” orients our attention to the external anxiety of YMG’s time—anxiety caused by both status quo struggles and the potential for global catastrophe—and clues us into its quiet pervasiveness throughout their music.*

YMG’s 1940s’ outfits as well as Spike Williams’s insistence that their drum machine looked like it came from World War II further underlines the Welsh musicians’ fascination with this particular history. *

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(The Geiger-counter plunks of “Include Me Out” and “Colossal Youth” clue us in even further.) Even if it never sparked any riots, could Colossal Youth, in spite of—or perhaps because of—its subtlety, offer not just a revolutionary approach to music but a revolutionary approach to socio-political action during the Cold War and beyond? * * * The groups in Rough Trade’s orbit staked defiantly political positions that, though different from band to band, always sat on the left side of the spectrum, opposing racism, sexism, war, and burgeoning Thatcherism in ways both more aggressive and more nuanced than The Clash or Sex Pistols. “The Only Rebellion Around” stated a Rough Trade advertisement in RE/Search #1, near articles about The Slits and YMG. Late-’70s’ radicals in the UK offered what Morgan calls a “rejection of a style of leadership.” But their main target wasn’t the pervasiveness of “old norms” and “cherished institutions,” Morgan maintains— “not the aristocratic leadership of the Victorian age, nor again the business corporatists of the First World War, but the planning technocracy of post-1945.”6 Songs like Gang of Four’s “Paralysed” (1981) clearly articulated this frustrated rebellion against the stagnant “planning technocracy.” Although the Leeds-bred Gang of Four weren’t on Rough Trade (having, peculiarly enough, signed to the major label EMI), the band played alongside many of Rough Trade’s signature groups in London; with their debut LP Entertainment! (1979), they established themselves as arguably the fiercest and most cogent leftists in the scene. With a spare, silence-filled,  102 •

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dub- and funk-informed attack and a name sourced from a group of Chinese Communist Party officials, Gang of Four leveled scathing critiques on the violence, consumerism, and conservatism they saw tearing through England in the ’70s. At the time, everything was proving itself to be a construct: the monarchy, gender, rock ’n’ roll, even nature itself. “The attitudes and beliefs that people take as natural and given have been inherited through the social structure they’re brought up in …” said singer Jon King in an interview, “and unless you have an awareness of your views as political manifestations, you won’t believe you can change them.”7 King’s views provided a model for Colossal Youth to simultaneously follow and push against. For both YMG and Gang of Four, the commonplace is no longer natural. Both groups suggest the incomprehensibility of “nature” in a media-saturated, government-controlled society. Yet, while the “punkier” Gang of Four reject (“Natural’s Not In It”), YMG abstract (“N.I.T.A.”); whereas Gang of Four get violent, YMG remain calm. YMG act out their paranoia, their frustration, and their rebellion by watching and listening. Operating at different volumes, the two groups still shared fragments of an aesthetic platform. “Narrative is abandoned, in the music no less than in the lyrics,” Greil Marcus writes about Gang of Four, although it could easily be about YMG. “The tunes are constructed out of jarring off-beats, crooked frames from [Andy] Gill’s guitar—and the process is full of gaps.”8 The slivers of silence between the guitar and the bass at the outset of Gang of Four’s “Damaged Goods” or “Natural’s Not In It” serve much the same purpose as the slivers that dot  103 •

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Colossal Youth. “Eating Noddemix” in particular features a similar interplay: “jarring off-beats, crooked frames … full of gaps,” one could say. Like singer Jon King in many of the songs on Entertainment!, Alison and Philip’s lyrics set a scene that shows a young character minding her business (putting on makeup, etc.) and consuming massproduced goods (Noddemix, a type of candy bar). Then, the song slips into an ambiguous narrative that portrays violence, authority, crumbling infrastructures, and gory voyeurism. At the end of “Eating Noddemix,” Alison introduces a new character—someone at a crime scene, speaking to a partner. For both the new character and the first, younger one, observation is key: the first looks into the mirror as if to understand her place in the world around her, while the second sounds as though she may be part of either the media or law enforcement, scoping out the scene. No matter how observant, though, both characters demonstrate a distance from the horrors of reality. The first projects a naive understanding of urban violence: in every verse, she sits innocently at home before noticing something horrific; rather than act on it, she, like many civilians, sits back and lets the media cover it. This second character heads to the scene of the crime, meanwhile, not naive but jaded. Confronted with violence, she turns to the media too, thinking she should go home to casually drink wine and watch TV. By including the perspectives of two characters—one ignorant of the outside violence, one immune to it—YMG emphasize the numbing effects of contemporary society and media. Gang of Four pull a similar trick on Entertainment!’s “At Home He’s a Tourist,” describing the alienating  104 •

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effects of culture on young people. In his 33⅓ book on the album, Kevin J. H. Dettmar describes the song’s damning seduction in a way that also applies to “Eating Noddemix.” “Feeling unhomed in one’s own home,” writes Dettmar: “it’s a perfect, visceral picture of the alienation that characterizes late consumer capitalism… in which we passively observe, rather than engage with or even take control of, our own lives.”9 In other words, the quiet musical conversation that opens “Eating Noddemix” draws us close, the first line literally brings us into the home—then the rest of the song alternately summons and repels us, a trampoline for the mind and ears. But by passively observing, here, we learn the modern dangers of passive observation and the importance of active engagement, active listening—analyzing the testcard and getting up to change the picture. * * * Gang of Four were far from the most violent of politically inclined bands. By the time Entertainment! came out, more abrasive music was bubbling up from the same British underground. Groups like Throbbing Gristle had paired highly politicized lyrics with hellish electronic noise since 1976. The year 1979, in addition to Entertainment!, saw the release of the first LP by British noise group Nurse With Wound; one year later, power electronics pioneers Whitehouse released their brutal debut. Whitehouse’s founder, William Bennett, presents an interesting case in himself. Previously a member of Essential Logic, whose music fit in closer with Rough Trade’s prevailing post-punk sound, Bennett  105 •

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turned Whitehouse into an exercise in extremity. The band’s music is rife with violent, objectionable imagery and formless, eardrum-shattering sonic assaults. Had Essential Logic’s rebellion been too casual? In any case, violent, confrontational art is often contingent on its time and, as such, loses its power at a distance. Whitehouse’s music is still abrasive, yet less shocking than it once was, and their lyrics often register as more misogynistic than rebellious. Susan Sontag describes the retrospective effects of extremity in “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967): “With the passage of time and the intervention of newer, more difficult works,” she writes, “the artist’s transgression becomes ingratiating, even legitimate.”10 In “Periodizing the 60s” (1984), Fredric Jameson notes that even if postmodern culture, such as punk or pornography, is “offensive,” “it is no longer at all ‘oppositional’ in that sense; indeed, it constitutes the very dominant or hegemonic aesthetic of consumer society itself and significantly serves the latter’s commodity production as a virtual laboratory of new forms and fashions.”11 Consider the Sex Pistols: the band’s music as well as their politics, in reality designed by Malcolm McLaren to sell clothes and merchandise from the get-go, went from seemingly radical to entirely commercial. The same phenomenon happened more recently, when, in the mid- to late 2000s, “indie” rock began soundtracking advertisements and Hollywood movies. The ’60s’ hippie movement also saw radical and commercial impulses become, for a time, strange bedfellows. “The history of the sixties strongly suggests … the mass media helped to spread rebellion,” Ellen  106 •

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Willis writes, “and the system obligingly marketed products that encouraged it, for the simple reason that there was money to be made from rebels who were also consumers.”12 By the time Rough Trade came around, the promise of the ’60s had dissolved into anxiety. Geoff Travis, himself a bit of a hippie before founding Rough Trade, may have sought to utilize the exciting radical impulses of the ’60s without falling into the same traps. “The Only Rebellion Around” was taken from a popular 1959 LIFE magazine article about the Beats; Rough Trade’s use of the slogan served as a subversive comment on the codification of countercultural movements starting with the Beats, leading into the hippies. Even YMG criticized the failures of the ’60s: when Alison addresses the freedom of the earlier decade on “Include Me Out,” listeners should detect an uncharacteristically strong bite. But, like hippies in the late ’60s, punks in the mid-’70s were still the uncomfortable benefactors of mass media’s “system.” Accordingly, YMG and their peers sought to absorb the rebellious and DIY impulses of their immediate predecessors while questioning the relationship between consumption and rebellion. Circumscribed by paralyzed systems, post-punks like Gang of Four and YMG knew they couldn’t escape their surroundings. How could they acknowledge their place within these systems and still rebel against them? Other radical and subversive acts like The Slits noticed that UK artists and citizens were running out of ideas by 1980. In an interview with RE/Search (from the same issue that features YMG), The Slits tell a story about The Pop Group acting out anti-government, anti-nuclear politics at a CND rally. “I told my 95-year-old grandmother  107 •

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about it,” one of the Slits noted, “and she said, ‘Well all you can do is just GET OUT THERE—show that there’s a number of people AGAINST IT.’ But in this day and age I don’t know how much effect it has …”13 The band’s discontent with their government is clear: “it’s fuckin’ pathetic,” they lamented earlier in the conversation. But how to change it? The strategies of the ’60s—student rebellions, “getting out there”—didn’t work “in this day and age,” said The Slits. They were bent on approaching revolutionary action from another angle. Did YMG already have an angle? Some might reasonably find the trio’s approach to be too passive; but, in a Cage-ian fashion, it can be seen as constructive. 4’33” urges listeners to create, to make music from their surroundings. A like-minded constructive impulse served YMG’s purpose of re-ordering listeners’ perceptions of the outside world as well. In the liner notes to Colossal Youth’s 1994 reissue, Stuart reflects on the music’s openness and promotion of such subjective relationships with the audience: It felt as though, while trying to be original, we were somehow responsible for re-assembling something that already existed in a collective unconscious—plucking components from the ether by instinct and using our artistry to put them in the “right” order. It’s as though artists are people who have a template for transmitting information between a dimension we all sense, and the understood world.14

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articulating post-’60s’ disenchantment in “Include Me Out,” forecasting nuclear dread in “Final Day,” mocking reliance on technology in “The Man Amplifier,” and straightforwardly picking apart the “straight world” in “Credit in the Straight World.” They show these things—facts of life for a young person in the UK in 1980—and insist, albeit reluctantly, on being part of it: “Include Me Out,” they say, not “Exclude Me.” By understanding the inside perspective, they more ably re-order their surrounding context. Then they ask the listener to create, quickly and spontaneously, within the short gaps and using the raw material provided. If, as Jacques Attali suggested in 1977, “What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power,” then YMG present a subtly oppositional music that exposes that disguise.15 * * * Perhaps YMG, silent and muted, don’t make the radical impact we’d like them to—but perhaps they don’t need to. “One thing [left intellectuals] may be good for”, argues T. J. Clark, a leftist activist himself in ’60s’ and ’70s’ England, in his 2012 essay “For a Left with No Future”: “they are sometimes the bassists in the back row whose groaning establishes the key of politics for a moment, and even points to a possible new one.”16 Clark wrote this in the wake of 2008’s global financial crisis—a collapse of neoliberal delusions. Although the left faced different crises in the late ’70s, the apparently failing promise of punk (which Clark may refer to in his use of “no future,” previously a Sex Pistols lyric) suggested that  109 •

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new forms of action were needed. Did YMG provide those forms? A clean, rounded bass tone sets Colossal Youth on its path; when it enters, deep into “Searching for Mr. Right,” it adds necessary urgency and movement to the quiet music. Are YMG the “bassists in the back row” who establish the “key” Clark implies? Do they point to a “new one,” as per not only Clark but also Jacques Attali’s conception of music as a prophetic tool? YMG’s “key” is marked by its tone of observation and creation, certainly, but it is cast likewise as anxious and fearful. No matter how calm Alison’s vocal take on “Searching for Mr. Right” sounds, the lyrics ooze selfdoubt and anguish: “Am I in vain tonight? / Lose you against the light / Who can you be, Mr. Right?” The impersonal tone Alison projects could suggest indifference, but it could also be a façade—an attempt on her part to play it cool amid the ambient threat of loss and disaster. The ticking drum machine that fades in more and more begins to suggest, given the historical context, the ticking of a bomb and the widespread fear of nuclear power one might interpret in the lyrics becomes, despite the minimalistic composition, intensely palpable. What do YMG envision for the future? Attali describes a then current “renaissance of violence in our societies, which the pop music of the 1960s so prophetically announced.” His vision of modern-day violence recalls ’70s’ subcultural in-fighting in the UK and the picture drawn by The Clash in “White Riot.” “Today’s violence is not the violence of people separated by a gulf,” Attali argues, “but rather the final confrontation of copies cut from the same mold, who, animated by the same desires, are unable to satisfy them except  110 •

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by mutual extermination.”17 Keen cultural observers, YMG separate themselves from the dominant subcultural “styles,” and their music exposes the “molds” that drive ’80s’ European youth, like rabbits running, toward “mutual extermination.” “Art may express and encourage our subversive impulses,” Ellen Willis writes, “but it can’t analyze or organize them. Subversion begins to be radical only when we ask what we really want or think we should have, who or what is obstructing us, and what to do about it.”18 YMG provide a sonic framework—one that places us in the world, that cloaks itself in ambiguity so as to promote interrogation, one that’s frustrated with what Stuart terms the “bullshit of modern life” but wants you to voice your own frustration first.

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Sounds magazine usually featured eye-catching photos of rockstars like John Lydon or Whitesnake’s David Coverdale on its cover. On May 17, 1980, however, the magazine looked peculiarly understated: the cover was mostly black, with an inset photograph framed like a humble snapshot in the center that depicted a smiling Alison Statton. Rather than display her or the band’s name, the photo was captioned “Jolly Marble Giant.” In the magazine’s celebratory, yet somewhat condescending feature, Dave McCullough didn’t describe YMG as “jolly,” per se. He wrote that the trio “looked provincial and slightly wholesome and innocent … with Alison in particular looking wide-eyed and straight out of a Girl’s Own story, as the heroine, of course. You get the impression she’s going to fall over any minute in the big-city smog, and that’s [sic] she’s been brought up on fresh cow’s milk and healthy Girl Guide’s rambles through Welsh valleys. She looks frighteningly innocent.”1 McCullough’s characterization embodies the London air of superiority that helped to maintain YMG’s “provincial status,” even if they came from urban Cardiff—a town full of “big-city smog” and certainly  113 •

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not an idyllic setting of “Welsh valleys.” Beyond the geographical elitism, McCullough’s description of Alison as “wide-eyed” and “innocent” glibly manifests the patriarchal attitude of rock criticism and the punk movement as well. In fairness, among punks at least, Alison was selfadmittedly “innocent,” having spent her teenage years in Cardiff hanging out at the local art museum and working at a dental hospital—not very “punk.” When YMG arrived in London, “I felt totally out of my depth,” Alison said. “I was the complete opposite of a punk vocalist, politically naive, and still felt like a girl, not a woman at that point.”2 Geoff Travis discerned that as well: “They were wonderful,” he said of YMG, “but I think Alison Statton found performing live a bit terrifying”—not at all, Travis might’ve been thinking, like the in-control image that her female peers The Slits or The Raincoats projected on stage.3 Alison certainly didn’t command the attention that the members of those groups did. Nor did she consciously channel the feminist discourse popular in ’70s’ England like The Slits and The Raincoats. Alison was different: quiet, “politically naive,” she says. But listening to Colossal Youth—with thick tension coursing through the music and Alison’s vocals—and watching her perform with cool detachment and cigarette in hand, one also suspects that she’s less “naive” than she seems at first. How did Alison—a female in not only a male-dominated musical community, but also a male-dominated band—fit in amongst her peers? * * *  114 •

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The last four years have seen an explosion of female voices into pop music—Poly Styrene of X-ray Spex, Vanessa Ellison of Pylon, the Slits, the Raincoats, Deborah Harry, Exene of X, Debora Iyall of Romeo Void, the Anemic Boyfriends, Eve Libertine of Crass, Marianne Faithfull, Chrissie Hynde, Alison Stratton [sic] of Young Marble Giants, Delta 5, scores and scores more. They’ve remade the terms of pop with cattiness, rage, sarcasm, nagging, squeals, sly asides, impatience, pain, acrid dismissals, shouts, anti-feminine noise. They’ve slipped all pop female roles and chipped away at the very idea of what it means to be a woman in public.—Greil Marcus, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” California, October 1981.4

Although women like Janis Joplin and Grace Slick made their mark on rock ’n’ roll in the late ’60s, it really wasn’t until a decade later that a notable plurality of female voices and personae—like those Greil Marcus mentions above—began to exist in rock’s wider cultural landscape. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press state plainly in The Sex Revolts (1995) that, “In the official history of rock, punk is regarded as a liberating time for women.”5 Still, punk was overwhelmingly male; Dick Hebdige’s incisive book Subculture focuses on male youths, ignoring women altogether. “Hebdige’s usage of ‘style’ structurally excludes women …,” argues British sociologist Angela McRobbie in her 1980 response essay. “The attractions of a subculture—its fluidity, the shifts in the minutiae of its styles, the details of its combative bricolage—are offset by an unchanging and exploitative view of women.”6 Not culturally afforded the same rebellious opportunities as males—drinking, doing drugs, gender-bending, making noise—female youth of the 1970s got pushed out of  115 •

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subcultural narratives. Vanguard female figures at the end of the decade thus put themselves forward, interrogating this disparity and exploitation, and broaching feminism in new, fluid ways. Marcus, Dan Graham, and other critics often pinpointed The Raincoats and The Slits in particular as establishing new roles and images for women in rock (whom Marcus describes with gendered, stereotyped terms like “cattiness” and “nagging,” exposing the latent patriarchy of music criticism). Punk had not been a totally “liberating time for women”; that said, it set certain wheels in motion for women of the era. Vivien Goldman notes, “When I started writing in the rock press in the mid-1970s, girl musicians were so rare that, in what may have been the first Women in Rock article, I described a long-haired female guitarist as if she were a unicorn …” Before punk kicked in, Goldman laments, “we could only look to Heart and Suzi Quatro. They were good rockers but, musically, they styled themselves after the very lads who were trying to block us.”7* So, through new forms and discourses that upset rock’s patriarchy, the vanguard female groups in Goldman’s orbit sought to make good on punk’s unfulfilled promise—to offer a way out and up for women on their own terms, not those of men. These

“The first generation punkettes really were something new,” Goldman continues. “Rock was a real laddist boystown right before punk. Editorial meetings could be a minefield for me, even when I was Features Editor at Sounds, with scribes snarling, ‘Why write about women? Women aren’t interested in music. Women don’t make music. Women don’t buy music.’” * 

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bands resisted the tight compositions proffered by Gang of Four or Scritti Politti, favoring the non-rock rhythms of Jamaican, African, and Indian musics. They mocked constructed notions of feminine love (The Raincoats’ “In Love”) and desire (The Slits’ “Typical Girls”), and they clothed their female bodies in thrift-store fashions or bared them provocatively (like The Slits on the cover of their 1979 LP, Cut). In resisting accepted forms, roles, and images, they resisted the Western artistic tradition molded by patriarchy. No matter the differences in style between YMG and their feminist peers, Simon Reynolds writes that The Raincoats “virtually adopted the wide-eyed provincials” when they came to London.8 The Raincoats “took us under their wing like feisty aunties or something,” Stuart said. “On one level they were kind of frighteningly feminist and that was new to us. They didn’t shave their legs, for instance. On another level, they were very kind to us.”9 “Feisty aunties” and “frighteningly feminist” align Stuart’s point-of-view with Marcus’s gendered description above, and with Hebdige’s malecentrism; in other words, Stuart, sensitive and intelligent, was still in many ways a man of his “laddist” time and place. Whereas The Raincoats’ feminism alienated him, though, it enlivened Alison, who had a decidedly different reaction—one that proves that, no matter how “innocent” her veneer, she was a rebellious agent. “The Raincoats made me feel like running away and forming a girl band,” she told us.10 The disconnect between their responses mirrors the general rift between the two bandmates, caused first by Stuart’s reluctance to let Alison join YMG and second  117 •

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by her vocals. Stuart once dismissed Alison by claiming that she wasn’t even a singer at all: “She’s someone who sings,” he said to the NME. “Alison sings as if she was at the bus-stop or something.”11 In “The Gender of Sound” (1995), poet and theorist Anne Carson points to instances when “the radical otherness of the female is experienced … in the form of women’s voices uttering sounds that men find bad to hear. Why,” Carson asks, taking in man’s historically defensive aversion to woman’s voice, “is female sound bad to hear?”12 For Stuart, it seems Alison was, at least at times, “bad to hear.” * * * Looking to philosopher Julia Kristeva, whose writing on language and speech influenced countless postmodern artists, Dan Graham suggests in “New Wave Rock and the Feminine” (1982) that female punk and post-punk groups like The Raincoats and The Slits dismantle rock’s in-band hierarchies and “create a place ‘where the social code is destroyed.’”13 Consider the paranoiac social coding in The Raincoats’ “Fairytale in the Supermarket”—but also in YMG’s “Eating Noddemix,” one of Alison’s two writing credits on Colossal Youth. Both songs detail the dangers of women accepting traditional, domestic roles: in the former, cups of tea and reading a book turn to paranoid self-interrogation, and in the latter, putting on makeup turns to an image of crumbling buildings. Through their engagement of “feminine” activities, woman musicians of the late ’70s and early ’80s exposed the inherent violence of everyday life—the network  118 •

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of control that connected rock with consumer culture (the supermarket, candy bars), mass media (watching TV), and traditional gender roles (shopping, putting on makeup): a network that, as Ellen Willis pointed out, grew from the ’60s’ counterculture and seeped quietly into the punk mainstream. Greil Marcus lists Alison as one of the new crop of great female vocalists, yet he spells her name wrong—a nominal typo, but also an indication of YMG’s marginal status and of Alison’s difference. Even if her songs contain a hidden violence, she vocally resists the turn toward what Marcus calls “anti-feminine noise.” “Performance and review wise,” she told us, “my worry was how the vocals would be received, as I wasn’t shouting out a political message or singing a polished, melodic vocal.” Vocally, one might equate Alison more closely with the folky, laid-back Tracey Thorn of Marine Girls (whose 1983 LP Lazy Ways was produced by Stuart) than with The Raincoats. As a result, Alison said, “I felt exposed and vocally uncomfortable and it really is quite perverse that I ever got any enjoyment out of being in that position.”14 Her politics come out abstractly, then, in the “perverse” tension she vocalizes between enjoyment and discomfort. Describing “Eating Noddemix,” Alison said, “Death comes without warning… people who face these realities on a daily basis adopt a matter-of-fact, hardened distance to it all. We can’t stay in that vital space for long without anaesthetizing ourselves in some way.”15 Anaesthetized, anonymous: what appear as untrained, “bus-stop” vocals reveal themselves to portend the evils of the quotidian.  119 •

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Alison’s vocals, like “The Man Amplifier,” are human, yet somewhat robotic in that they might be called cold or indifferent. Her monotonic approach could be a means of avoiding the evils of mankind, its imposing “naturalness,” in a sense like feminist critic Donna Haraway’s vision of the cyborg from the mid-’80s. Apart from such theoretical formulations, though, Alison retains the attack and appeal of a regular girl singing to herself in the bedroom or the bathroom (where “Eating Noddemix” takes place) or even the church (where YMG’s members sang as children), which lets her make these darker implications of detachment duly powerful. On “Credit in the Straight World,” Alison’s voice, usually quiet and light, doesn’t hide the hints of violence, sex, and power that ooze from the lyrics. Further, she inserts her body (damage done to her leg and eye) into the equation, highlighting the violence that she faces as a woman in the “straight world.” Had Stuart, who wrote the song, sung these lyrics about bodily harm, “Credit in the Straight World” would register like the countless male-fronted punk and post-punk songs that depict violence. As it stands, with Alison delivering the words with dueling anger and vulnerability, the song is a different type of unsettling. Susan McClary writes that, in the twentieth century, “if the noise of classical music … is no longer audible, it is because it has been contained by a higher act of violence”—the violence of “Fairytale in the Supermarket” and “Eating Noddemix.” “To refuse to enact the ruptures of a discontinuous musical surface,” McClary continues, “is to silence forcibly, to stifle the human voice, to render docile by means of lobotomy … It leads us to believe  120 •

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that there never was meaning, that music always has been nothing but pretty, orderly sound.”16 Alison’s first words on Colossal Youth are timid, unsure: “searching for Mr. Right,” she sings. It’s “pretty, orderly”—a female sound that, in Anne Carson’s formulation, is good to hear. By “Credit in the Straight World,” near the end of the album, with anxiety having built up for twenty-odd minutes, Alison “enact[s] the ruptures of a discontinuous musical surface,” puncturing the gap-filled compositions with a disorderly voice. If the album’s previous track, “Salad Days,” had given impressions of prettiness, wistfulness, or some type of graspable meaning, “Credit in the Straight World” should easily shatter them. * * * Alison’s nuanced approach to femininity might get lost in Colossal Youth’s confusing overall presentation of gender. Lyrically, the album is conspicuously genderless, almost without gendered pronouns. The sole female present is in “Eating Noddemix,” and males only crop up obliquely: in “The Man Amplifier” (as a cyborg), in “Wurlitzer Jukebox!” (the anonymous “Parrish”), and as the absent “Mr. Right.” To complicate things further, Alison occupied an indeterminate position in her own band as a female singing male lyrics. As noted about “Credit in the Straight World,” Colossal Youth projects a “feminine” voice (Alison’s) delivering “masculine” words (Stuart’s) without ever being particularly “feminine” or “masculine” in any direct, traditional social mode. The disconnect bothered Stuart. “It’s really weird,” he told Sounds, “because what happens is I write the melody  121 •

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and sing it, and then Alison sings it back. But when I sing it, it tends to be emotional because the lyrics are mine. Alison on the other hand is really laid back and unemotional sounding. It’s a strange paradox, a disinterested voice singing about something emotional.”17 Stuart may resent the “strange paradox” of Alison singing his lyrics, but the disjunction bolsters Colossal Youth’s existing internal contradictions, and, moreover, helps the album present gender in a characteristically ambiguous manner. In her perceived disinterest, Alison may relate to Gang of Four’s Jon King, whose voice, Greil Marcus writes, “is a voice that through worry, sarcasm, irony, panic, or humor is manifestly trying to figure things out. It’s a distanced voice, antinaturalistic, almost never direct—the voice of an observer or of one observing oneself. Most strikingly, it is an anonymous voice.”18 Because Alison plays up anonymity and observation, listeners are forced to search rapidly for their own place within the music and within the open-ended narratives she delivers. Especially given the song’s lack of gender pronouns, listening to Stuart’s voice passively blend into Alison’s on “Brand—New—Life,” one could almost hear Colossal Youth as somewhat androgynous, like the kouroi statues that inspired the names of both YMG and Colossal Youth. (The statues depict young Greek boys that are boy-ish but also—with their long hair, wide chests, and thin legs—could, at a glance, depict females as well as males.) Certainly anonymous, is Colossal Youth also androgynous? Then-contemporary mixed-gender groups like the Delta 5 and The Au Pairs called attention to the innovation and fluidity of their line-ups through  122 •

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lyrics depicting the physical, emotional, mechanical, and violent aspects of sex itself, but YMG keep it quiet—in a way foreshadowing the fuzzy male-female dynamics in the music of Beat Happening* and other K Records artists; of New Zealand bands like The Spies and Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos; and of shoegaze groups like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. (My Bloody Valentine in particular abolish gender signifiers and fuse male and female voices in a midst of unprecedented aural fuzz.) Ultimately, though, by sounding her voice, Alison presents herself, a female, as a force in the group; as the “star” even, posing solo on the cover of Sounds. Her own type of feminism inserts itself seamlessly into Colossal Youth, without fanfare or lyrical agency, but in a way that both bolsters and unsettles the band’s vision from within. Not as assertive as her peers, Alison quietly upsets punk’s patriarchy. Her presence is a threat to Stuart’s masculine, punk-ish energy. Without projecting feminist rhetoric, it’s precisely this perplexing interplay of decentered gender dynamics that articulates a tension indicative of the wider social landscape. In refusing late-’70s archetypes of female behavior, Alison opens up new modes of being a “Woman in Rock.” Angela McRobbie argues that by the late ’90s, the “binary opposition” she attributed to the ’70s was “no longer an accurate way of conceptualising young female experience (maybe it never was).”19 For women in the Thatcher-era UK, McRobbie sees

Coming full circle, Stuart produced some of the songs on Beat Happening’s 1992 album You Turn Me On. * 

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“neither a narrative of progress nor one of backlash, but instead… a dramatic ‘unfixing’ of young women in British society over the last fifteen years which has been effected in the social institutions and can be seen in the field of commercial mass culture and in the various youth subcultures. There is now a greater fluidity about what femininity means and how exactly it is anchored in social reality.”20 When Alison sings in a high-pitched monotone voice, “I cannot fix you / In a position,” she gives voice to McRobbie’s sense of “unfixing.”

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At a November 1980 show at The Western Front Lodge in Vancouver, Alison starts to sing “Final Day,” the band’s second-to-last song of the night. She wears a graystriped sweater dress, black tights, and a black, waxed army surplus jacket. A cigarette burns in her left hand, resting at her side. Philip is in a plaid wool tie, tucked-in collared shirt, and bulging, windy trousers. He’s playing organ for the first time all night, having switched spots with Stuart after “Include Me Out.” As Alison sings, she looks straight ahead, a bit upwards, leaning back into the words “as the light goes out on the final day, for the people who never had a say,” and swaying slightly as Philip’s organ swoops, drops, then rises. When the song ends, Philip seems to breathe a huge sigh and smiles quickly at his girlfriend; seconds later, Stuart joins them in a quick huddle, whispering a few instructions. Just two months after this Vancouver performance, in January 1981, the band would officially announce their break up. At the end of 1980, Alison and Philip broke up as a couple; so did Stuart and Wendy Smith. Then,  125 •

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Alison fell ill for the final portion of the band’s North American tour. The final blow allegedly occurred one morning when Alison sat in a hotel room and flipped the channels on the radio, only to unexpectedly hear Philip and Stuart on a local radio show. They claimed they planned to start recording music without her—which they actually did on the Testcard EP—and the band called it quits by the end of the tour. After YMG’s break up, Stuart formed a solo project called The Gist, where he not only wrote the songs, but finally sang them too. The band released one fulllength, also on Rough Trade, in 1982. Alison developed her own songwriting as the leader of Weekend, a band including their old friend Spike Williams that released a studio LP, a live album, and three EPs, all on Rough Trade. Weekend’s blend of FM lite jazz, laid-back pop, and Senegalese soukous guitar reflected Alison’s interest in sounds sourced from outside rock ’n’ roll; the back cover of their 1982 album La Varieté can be read as the band’s mission statement: “La Varieté: —the French term for popular radio, everything that’s not heavy rock; music drawing on diversity and depth.”1 Philip, meanwhile, went on to add his signature funk-inflected bass to David Thomas of Pere Ubu’s 1981 solo album, The Sound Of The Sand And Other Songs Of The Pedestrian, receiving partial writing credits on “The Birds Are Good Ideas” and “Sound of the Sand.” In 1984, he joined the pop group Everything but the Girl and toured across Europe.*

Interestingly, YMG’s members continued to collaborate with one another in the immediate aftermath of their break up, despite their * 

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While these initial post-break up projects display certain similarities to YMG, they diverge from each other in telling ways. The differences between The Gist’s disco-influenced lounge music and Weekend’s global pop suggest that Stuart and Alison now had the freedom to explore their own ideas and experiment. But it’s clear from the way Stuart described his position in The Gist that this freedom from YMG also added a new set of questions and uncertainties. After YMG broke up, he said, “I kind of went careering off like a misguided missile as The Gist, I didn’t really have any idea. I was absolutely terrified, because suddenly, from having this really strong formula, this kind of secure basis to work from, I had no idea artistically what to do at all.”2 Stuart’s intense discomfort outside of the “strong formula” of YMG suggests that their break up had as much to do with the unraveling messiness of their personal lives as their diverging artistic plans. While it’s certainly exciting to think about what might have been (Alison and Stuart themselves have admitted to thinking about the same prospects), YMG was just too fragile of an enterprise to last longer than a few short years before disintegrating. The same personal rifts that made the music so intense ended up pulling the band apart before

artistic and personal differences. Philip played bass on releases by The Gist and Weekend; Alison sang on “Clean Bridges,” from The Gist’s first album; Stuart wrote an early Weekend song. They would continue to play together on and off, in different configurations, basically up until the present—but they would never again release new music as Young Marble Giants.  127 •

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they could release another full album. Mimicking the tone of heartbreak songs like “Brand—New—Life” and “Searching for Mr. Right,” the band’s break up left a lot unresolved and unsaid between its members (and to its audience). * * * What happens when an artist deliberately stops creating work? How does it change our understanding of what they made? In “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag takes up these questions, wondering if renouncing artmaking only adds to the power and heft of the work that’s left behind. Writing in 1967, Sontag focuses on a wide range of culture—everything from the writings of Samuel Beckett to visual art movements like Pop and Minimalism, to European art films and Hollywood slapstick alike. If the modernists of the early twentieth century offered increasingly shocking transgressions, Sontag argued that the artists following them tended toward something else—silence, stillness, and renunciation. Perhaps the greatest gesture an artist could make, Sontag reasoned, was to abandon making art altogether. “The choice of permanent silence doesn’t negate their work,” Sontag writes. “On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority once it was broken off—disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of its unchallengeable seriousness.”3 In their apparent lack of interest in making artworks, artists who stop creating work and move on to another vocation actually only add a greater importance to the work they leave behind.  128 •

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As with Sontag’s renouncers, YMG’s abrupt break up has only increased the interest in their one fulllength album. Simon Reynolds writes in his liner notes that “the name Young Marble Giants itself retains a kind of immaculateness—there’s no after-trail of legenddisgracing lesser material, precious little in the way of demos, basement tapes, out-takes, and the like. For once, the Collected Works = the Best of.”4 It’s perhaps this “immaculateness” that gave YMG their cult appeal to later generations of indie rock bands. Without much context or material to go on, musicians felt pulled into the mystery of YMG and inspired by the still unexplored possibilities suggested by their sound. Sifting through the stories and songs today, what’s left behind is a YMG legacy that feels both totally complete and also filled with holes, questions, missed chances, and broken hearts. It’s hard to reckon with the immaculate status of their one album while also acknowledging the band members as something more than just enigmatic props in the story of Colossal Youth. In Sontag’s terms, the choice of an artist to give up their career is a deliberate one. But could YMG’s short history really be considered completely deliberate? All of the uncertainties, tensions, and conflicts that made YMG’s music unique also seemed to guarantee that their intense and fragile sound was never meant to last. One clue in trying to understand the band’s end might be to reconsider their beginnings. Spike noted: “It is strange. Right from the start, YMG seemed to be a completed project. There didn’t seem to be a plan to write more material once they’d started gigging. It’s almost as if it wouldn’t be necessary, like that was  129 •

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the plan.”5 On the band’s home-recorded demos, the songs are fully formed, with nearly the same exact drum machine parts, words, melodies, and arrangements that would appear on the Colossal Youth LP a year later. Stuart explained his plan for the release of Colossal Youth: “I planned for failure and, in order not to waste any time, decided that we should make one hour of music.”6 At gigs, they often played the same songs night after night. When YMG first took the stage at Grassroots Coffee Bar in 1978, Spike claimed, their songs sounded almost exactly the same as when they returned to Cardiff to play after Colossal Youth had been released. Even before then, though, when Spike and Reptile Ranch had relentlessly courted YMG to take part in their compilation, Stuart, Philip, and Alison had replied that the band had already broken up. The combination of the band’s grand conceptual framework and the disagreements between the members all but ensured that their first songs ended up being their only ones. Despite Stuart’s resentment toward Alison, the two managed to collaborate on a few new songs after they recorded their cassette. “Salad Days,” for example, was one of the last songs on Colossal Youth to be written (after not appearing on the demo cassette) and featured lyrics written by Alison and music composed by Stuart. The Final Day EP contained new songs as well, and its release in June of 1980 was a breath of “fresh air” for everyone in Cardiff who had heard the same live sets over and over again.7 But the Final Day cover still explicitly linked the band to their origins. Reproducing Gisela Richter’s image of a Greek kouroi statue on the front and pasting her text about “young marble giants”  130 •

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on the back suggests that even Final Day was part of the brief, yet still ongoing project that began with the Colossal Youth cassette. These links between the albums stitched together YMG’s history as intricately as Stuart and Philip’s knitted rhythms, presenting YMG as a kind of self-operating engine. A quick reading of Gisela Richter’s analysis on the back of the EP reminded listeners of YMG’s ever-present combination of “tensed vitality” and “geometric structuring”—music that could be both carved in the moment, yet was mapped out from the get-go. Later in “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Sontag explores more generally the types of effects that different uses of silence can produce. Rather than simply renounce artmaking, some artists embed silences and gaps into their works—leaving things open for their audiences. She writes, “The notions of silence, emptiness, and reduction sketch out new prescriptions for looking, hearing, etc.—which either promote a more immediate, sensuous experience of art or confront the artwork in a more conscious, conceptual way.”8 YMG’s open-ended and reduced songs do both of these things: they disclose and share with their listeners the most intimate surfaces and shapes of their sound, and they also demand to be heard in a highly formal and conceptual manner. YMG’s concept stemmed from their initial courage to insist, on stage and on record, that songs that sounded incomplete (written with “gaps”) and still in development (like sketches or models) were actually in their final form. Listeners would have to do the work in order to connect to the emotion and sound laid so bare; they would even have to do some sketching to complete a  131 •

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picture. Colossal Youth’s release made this explicit. Even when offered the time and money for overdubs, rewrites, or fancier electronics, YMG insisted on recording— documenting—the songs as they always were. Can the origins of YMG really be chalked up to anything so formally perfect as a pre-determined, conceptual art project? According to Spike: [Stuart] didn’t see that YMG success was actually due to a ridiculously rare set of unplanned circumstances which would be impossible to replicate. Many of the elements that made that album work just came together by chance, like Peter constructing the drum machine, like Alison becoming the singer—without these two random events Colossal Youth would not be anything like the gem it is. Stuart never realised that the actual song-writing was only one part of a complex phenomenon and I don’t think he has ever really acknowledged the vital role Alison’s voice played.9

Like the legacy their break up left behind, the “complex phenomenon” of YMG that Spike outlines is one that’s rigorously sketched and stubbornly repeated over performances and on record, yet still the product of an unknowable collection of sounds, personalities, and events that could never have been planned. This YMG history runs slightly counter to the constellation of silent artists that Susan Sontag presents in “The Aesthetics of Silence.” Sontag’s silence can take many forms—abandoning art, registering ambivalence to the audience, speaking and babbling endlessly—but it always suggests a spiritual urge, a kind of “other-worldly  132 •

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gesture.”10 Sontag argues that “the advocacy of silence expresses a mythic project of total liberation. What’s envisaged is nothing less than the liberation of the artist from himself, of art from the particular artwork, of art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations.”11 For Sontag, the silent artist is really searching for something spiritual more than artistic, and is prepared to abandon art on their quest for something greater. While much of the writing about Colossal Youth often embodies these spiritual terms—otherworldly, enigmatic, ghostly—YMG’s use of silence points to something that’s not mythic but ordinary. Rather than heroically break with the everyday world and approach a limitless ceiling, YMG’s history and music show that they never really left their origins or circumstances behind but instead incorporated their lives into their work—that they found a musical form that, if only for or a short time, they could live in. The story of YMG suggests that ordinary people can speak however they wish, without explanation or permission; that even the most rule-bound works of art come from ordinary places and are therefore stuffed with coincidences, with chances, with unplanned circumstances.* “Final Day,” one of the last songs YMG recorded,

Like Stuart’s muffled unintelligible voice on “The Taxi” or Alison’s police car walkie-talkie correspondence on “Eating Noddemix,” their songs are not so much stories, prayers, or manifestos as they are quick dispatches—intermediate moments between an event and its response. When the crime scene is closed-off with tape or the * 

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presents a vision of the last seconds of human life on the last day on Earth.* On the last day ever, the rich buy the ultimate luxury: getting to die last, “like rabbits running from a lucky past,” as Alison sings. Delivering these lines, her voice sounds so fragile, so exposed, so skeletal, it’s as if the ring modulator drone shines an X-Ray light directly upon her. Stuart’s guitar pick repeatedly cuts back against the melodic organ line—not so much driving the beat forward as digging into it, pushing dirt out of ground. With its whizzing nuclear alarm tone and its abrupt end after less than two minutes, “Final Day” is hushed and hurried, a sketch of a song that was never meant to be anything else. Despite its comparatively urgent lyrics, the song is as uninflected in its tone as any other by YMG: Alison allows her voice to simply follow the nursery rhyme melody up and down the scale, never pausing or adding emphasis on any particular image or phrase. There’s no build-up, grand summation, or chorus; instead, there are three verses all of exactly the same length, all sung with exactly the same emphasis. And even in a scene of total destruction—the final scene ever imaginable—YMG

passenger is picked up, the dispatcher fades away. The “reporters pick up their pads and pens and rush to the scene”—as Alison and Philip write on “Eating Noddemix”—but, by then, YMG have already left it. *  Sontag writes of the end of the world too: “After the end, what supervenes (for a while) is silence.” Here, she explores how silent artists destroy our sense of continuity by “traveling to the end of a thought or idea.” On “Final Day,” however, YMG travel to the end of human life but act the same as they do on any other day—does this destroy continuity or protect it?  134 •

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present an ordinary image in light of a horrifying event. While they prepare for the blast of a nuclear bomb, they sing and play with the same calm with which they walked across the stage in Vancouver. “Put a blanket up on the window pane,” Alison sings in the second verse, “when the baby cries lullaby again / As the light goes out on the final day / For the people who never had a say.” Are YMG the people who never had a say? Or, do the details of their un-theatrical, unmannered, and uninflected songs and career suggest some alternate route away from stardom and wealth but also away from total voiceless-ness? “If she can be a pop star, why can’t I?” a pop-up blurb asks during a taped 1980 BBC performance of “Wurlitzer Jukebox!” This is the question that listeners must ask themselves when they first hear Colossal Youth—it’s an album that’s so personal, so particular, and so peculiar that it could have never been made in any kind of pre-planned commercial genre or even as part of any widespread underground or DIY movement. “When I hear a YMG track played on the radio,” Alison told us, “it never quite fits in with the tracks either side of it, so you can’t help but notice it, as there’s no smooth transition.”12 YMG’s music is unique— there’s “no smooth transition” between their songs and others’. For this same reason, histories of post-punk and Rough Trade often praise Colossal Youth as a masterpiece, yet fail to find a way to incorporate their sound or their story into the major narrative arc of their argument. “The tenacity of the modern publicity apparatus often makes artists’ personalities more familiar than their work,” Ellen Willis wrote in an essay on Bob Dylan (the same year that Susan Sontag wrote on silence), “while  135 •

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its pervasiveness obscures the work of those who can’t or won’t be personalities.”13 In the early ’60s, Dylan masked his public persona with enigmatic half-truths until, in true Sontag fashion, he totally disappeared from the public eye in 1966. YMG never attempted to make themselves into personalities, nor did they attempt to subvert that apparatus—as Dylan did—through masking or reinventing themselves. Their career as a band wasn’t meant to last, and they knew their music might fade away into obscurity. As such, they fashioned their own music outside of all existing structures and apparatuses. “When you got to know them,” Spike recalled after being mesmerized by the group’s 1940s-era outfits on stage in Cardiff, “you realised that there was no ‘act’, no costumes, what you saw was what you got. They were for real. They always dressed like that. The charity shop was the only choice for people like us in those days of mass unemployment. It is just a testament to their ingenuity that they managed to turn second-hand clothes into an identity.”14 From the beginning, YMG refused to become “personalities” as a way of staying ordinary, even anonymous in the face of a system which—even on the brink of its own annihilation—still protected those with privilege and money and silenced those without it, sending them off to the charity shop. But when the world lights up for the final day, YMG sing a lullaby to a baby. On “Final Day,” YMG aren’t speaking for those who never had a say so much as showing us how these people would speak if they ever had the chance to, how they do speak when the curtain’s closed and the concert’s over and the audience has stopped clapping and the band’s finally broken up.  136 •

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Today, each member of YMG still makes music, though not always publicly. Stuart plays acoustic guitar and sings in the duo Moxham & Halliday, and Alison works with guitarist Ian Devine on folky ballads. Philip appeared at the twenty-first-century YMG reunion shows, and guested throughout the ’90s on both Alison’s and Stuart’s projects. But each member of YMG also never left their place in the ordinary world behind, and their work there says something about their ongoing impulse to help people, one person at a time: Alison is a chiropractor, Stuart a taxi driver, and Philip a handyman at a veterinary hospital as well as a foster caregiver. In these vocations, they are mostly silent, listening to the people they take care of.

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The artist’s activity is the creating or establishing of silence; the efficacious art work leaves silence in its wake. Susan Sontag1

The incredibly long fade-in that begins “Searching for Mr. Right” aligns Colossal Youth at its outset with Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, which similarly rises slowly from silence and remains quiet for its duration. For Eno, the fade-in is a crucial trait of ambient music—it lets the music gradually become one with its surroundings. Accordingly, Eno lets ambient pieces like Discreet Music’s title track fade out as well; the recording thereby sounds as though it was simply passing through the environment, like an afternoon rainstorm. Simon Reynolds notes that Colossal Youth is “an album of great songs, but also, in a way, an ambient record.”2 But Colossal Youth isn’t ambient like a weather pattern—it doesn’t cleanly fade out of its environment. Instead, at the end of “Wind in the Rigging”—as at the end of all fifteen songs—the drum machine turns off conclusively. One final click and that’s it. In his 33⅓ entry about Sigur Rós’ emphatically openended ( ), an album without titles or lyrics, Ethan Hayden  139 •

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notes that, “in [lead singer] Jónsi’s words, ( ) is ‘unfinished,’ and the listeners ‘have to finish it themselves.’”3 It’s a quality that ( ) shares with John Cage’s 4’33”: these works, Hayden observes, are unfinished because they require the subjective input of the listener to become complete. Colossal Youth certainly asks for its listeners’ input, but considering the way it ends so finitely, it’s difficult to call the LP “unfinished.” Colossal Youth simply isn’t ambient in the way that Discreet Music is, silent in the way 4’33” is, open-ended in the way (  ) is. It asserts its existence, albeit quietly, in this world—constantly changing but still complete. As Alison’s police dispatcher states at the end of “Eating Noddemix,” “Okay, that’s all for now.” Stuart had told Sounds that the group had “tried to go against every possible grain at once and still come up with something.” YMG existed as a beacon for refusal, renunciation, and negation of ideals, strictures, sounds. They developed a style that conversed with those of numerous other artists and movements, from the Dadaists to the minimalists to the glam rockers to the post-punks. But, in interacting so intimately with both their unique context and history in Cardiff and London, and with generations of enraptured listeners, YMG left a musical wake all their own—one which goes against the grain and turns the soil underneath. The wake falls into a “minor” tradition, taken up by “provincial” non-movements like K Records and Flying Nun; in each instance, a new music materialized as a means of negating the impositions of the status quo by suggesting new, alternate methods of rebellion and connecting with a wider community of listeners. “Minor,” unfixed, and open, Colossal Youth “is showing the way to go.”  140 •

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… A nd T hat is N othing

And then it goes away. Walkie-talkie static fills the mix as “Wind in the Rigging” nears its end, as if a sailor out to sea were coming back into range. “Young marble giants greeted the sailor from Cape Sounion as he entered the home stretch to Athens.” Nearly home, all of the sounds—already quiet—grow quieter. All that remains is a drum machine that has tapped out hundreds of beats in the previous thirty-nine minutes. And then, seconds later, nothing. We take off our headphones and greet the world.

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Notes

For You are Movement...   1. Young Marble Giants, Final Day, quoting Richter, Kouroi.   2. Danielle Bacher, “Q&A with Stuart Moxham,” Magnet online.   3. Neil Taylor, Document and Eyewitness, 164.   4. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors, July 2015.   5. Bacher, “Q&A with Stuart Moxham.”   6. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 4.

Eaten Out of House and Home   1. Dave McCullough, Sounds, 16.   2. Spike Williams, email to the authors, January 2016.   3. Spike Williams, email to the authors.   4. Ibid.   5. Alison Statton, email to the authors, December 2015.   6. Richie Unterberger, “Stuart Moxham,” richieunterberger.com.   7. Spike Williams, email to the authors.   8. Ibid.  143 •

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  9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors, July 2015. 14. Ibid. 15. Alison Statton, email to the authors. 16. Spike Williams, email to the authors. 17. Ibid. 18. Alison Statton, email to the authors.

Everything Comes from Chaos   1. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Styles of Radical Will, 12.   2. Taylor, 20.   3. Susan McClary, “The Politics of Silence and Sound,” in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 157.   4. Greil Marcus, “Plague Disco,” In the Fascist Bathroom, 99.   5. Taylor, 126.   6. Marcus, “It’s Fab, It’s Passionate …” In the Fascist Bathroom, 113.   7. McCullough, 16.   8. Alison Statton, email to the authors.   9. Bacher, “Q&A with Stuart Moxham.” 10. Taylor, 163.

Showing the Way to Go   1. Sounds charts, May 1980.

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  2. V. Vale and Andrea Juno, “Young Marble Giants,” RE/ Search #1, 9.   3. Nick Fisk, “Young Marble Giants: The Globe, Cardiff— Live Review,” Louder than War.   4. Unterberger, “Stuart Moxham.”   5. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   6. Everett True, “The First Interview I Ever Did,” Plan B, published on Collapsed Board.   7. Marcus, “Songs of Random Terror,” In the Fascist Bathroom, 175.   8. McCullough, 17.   9. Unterberger, “Stuart Moxham.” 10. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors. 11. McCullough, 16. 12. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 226.

The World Is Not You   1. Cage quoted in Kyle Gann, No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, 4.   2. Gann, 8.   3. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors.   4. Spike Williams, email to the authors.   5. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors.   6. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   7. Ibid.   8. Alison Statton, email to the authors.   9. Ibid. 10. Cage, Silence, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and His Work,” Silence, 102. 11. Branden Joseph, “White on White,” 113. 12. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.” 13. Alison Statton, email to the authors.  145 •

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14. Ibid.

Let’s Be a Tree   1. Brian Eno, Before and After Science.   2. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors.   3. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   4. Stuart Moxham, “Faction.”   5. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   6. Ibid.   7. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors.   8. Ibid.   9. Alison Statton, email to the authors. 10. Ibid. 11. Brian Eno, “Liner Notes,” Discreet Music. 12. Ibid. 13. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.” 14. Graham Lock, “How Green Was My Minimalism.” 15. Vale and Juno, “Young Marble Giants,” 9. 16. George Mackay Brown, “A Work for Poets.” 17. J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands, 5. 18. Brian Eno, “Liner Notes,” Ambient 4: On Land.

Don’t Label Me   1. Alison Statton, email to the authors.   2. Steve Tucker, “They Might Be Giants Again!” South Wales Echo.   3. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 106.   4. Marcus, “Ideal Home Noise,” In the Fascist Bathroom, 180.   5. Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 108.  146 •

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  6. Ibid., 103.   7. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 6.   8. Alison Statton, email to the authors.   9. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 264. 10. Ibid., 265.

Sit at Home and Watch the Tube   1. Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace, 467.   2. Vale and Juno, RE/Search, 9.   3. Steinberg, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” October Files, 29.   4. Charles Schultz, Peanuts, April 6, 1954.   5. Attali, 126.   6. Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” 3.   7. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   8. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone Film Typewriter, 14.   9. Dan Graham, “Punk as Propaganda,” Rock/Music Writings, 79. 10. Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” Noise: The Political Economy of Music, xiii. 11. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.” 12. Young Marble Giants, Testcard. 13. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.” 14. David Keenan, “Childhood’s End,” The Wire, 26. 15. McCullough, 17.

No Rain Outside   1. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   2. Ibid.   3. Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 194.  147 •

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  4. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   5. Ibid.   6. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors.   7. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   8. Ibid.   9. NAMM Oral History Program, Booker T. Jones, 2013. 10. Pedro Costa, Colossal Youth. 11. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors.

Blind as the Fate Decrees   1. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, 127.   2. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   3. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors.   4. Morgan, 28.   5. Ibid., 438.   6. Ibid., 396.   7. Marcus, “It’s Fab, It’s Passionate…” 118.   8. Marcus, “Gang of Four,” In the Fascist Bathroom, 51.   9. Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Entertainment!, 91. 10. Sontag, 7. 11. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text, 196. 12. Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light, xvi. 13. Vale, “The Slits,” RE/Search #1, 5. 14. Stuart Moxham, “Liner Notes,” Colossal Youth (1994). 15. Attali, 8–9. 16. T. J. Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” New Left Review, 53. 17. Attali, 130–1. 18. Willis, xviii.

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The Editors Agree   1.   2.   3.   4.

McCullough, 16. Alison Statton, email to the authors. Taylor, 164. Marcus, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” In the Fascist Bathroom, 197.   5. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts, 33.   6. Angela McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique,” Screen Education, 43.   7. Vivien Goldman, “The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs,” Pitchfork.   8. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   9. Ibid. 10. Alison Statton, email to the authors. 11. Reynolds, “Liner notes.” 12. Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” Glass, Irony and God, 124. 13. Dan Graham, “New Wave Rock and the Feminine,” 137–8. 14. Alison Statton, email to the authors. 15. Reynolds, Totally Wired. 16. McClary, 152. 17. McCullough, 17. 18. Marcus, “Ideal Home Noise,” 178. 19. Angela McRobbie, “Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity,” Young, 15–16. 20. Ibid, 14–15.

They Were Good, They Were Young   1. Weekend, La Varieté back cover, 1982, Rough Trade Records.  149 •

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  2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Unterberger, “Stuart Moxham.” Sontag, 5–6. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.” Spike Williams, email to the authors. Stuart Moxham, email to the authors. Spike Williams, email to the authors. Sontag, 13. Spike Williams, email to the authors. Sontag, 6. Ibid., 17–18. Alison Statton, email to the authors. Willis, “Dylan,” Beginning To See The Light, 5. Spike Williams, email to the authors.

… And That is Nothing   1. Sontag, 23.   2. Reynolds, “Liner Notes.”   3. Ethan Hayden, ( ), 5.

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North America Salad Days Words and Music by Stuart Moxham and Alison Statton © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC Brand New Life Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC The Man Amplifier Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC  151 •

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Music For Evenings Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC Searching For Mr. Right Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC N.I.T.A. Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC Colossal Youth Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC Final Day Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered  152 •

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by Universal Music – MGB Songs International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC Constantly Changing Words and Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 by Complete Music Ltd. All Rights in the United States and Canada Administered by Universal Music – MGB Songs International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC

Rest of World Searching For Mr. Right Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited. Constantly Changing Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited. Colossal Youth Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited.  153 •

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The Man Amplifier Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited. Salad Days Words & Music by Stuart Moxham & Alison Statton © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited. Final Day Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited. Brand—New—Life Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited. Music For Evenings Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited.

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N.I.T.A. Words & Music by Stuart Moxham © 1980 Complete Music Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited.

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Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Bacher, Danielle. “Q&A with Young Marble Giants’ Stuart Moxham.” Magnet Magazine, 2010. Brown, George MacKay. “A Work for Poets.” The Collected Poems of George MacKay Brown, ed. Archie Bevan and Brian Murray. London: John Murray, 2006. Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, 1961. Carson, Anne. “The Gender of Sound.” Glass, Irony and God. New York: New Directions, 1995: 119–42. Clark, T. J. “For a Left with No Future.” New Left Review, 74 (March/April 2012): 53–75. Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Costa, Pedro. Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth). Paris: Memento Films, 2006. Dettmar, Kevin J. H. Entertainment! New York: Bloosmbury Academic, 2014. Eno, Brian. “Liner Notes.” In Ambient 4: On Land. London: EG Records, 1986. Eno, Brian. “Liner Notes.” In Discreet Music. London: EG Records, 1975.  157 •

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Eno, Brian. “Spider and I.” In Before and After Science. London: Polydor, 1977. Fisk, Nick. “Young Marble Giants: The Globe, Cardiff—Live Review.” Louder Than War, August 10, 2015. Gann, Kyle. There’s No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Goldman, Vivien. “The Story of Feminist Punk in 33 Songs.” Pitchfork (August 8, 2016). Graham, Dan. Rock/Music Writings. New York: Primary Information, 2009. Hayden, Ethan. ( ). New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Jameson, Fredric. “Periodizing the 60s.” Social Text 9/10 (Spring– Summer 1984): 178–209. Joseph, Branden W. “White on White.” Critical Inquiry 27 (1) (2000): 90–121. Keenan, David. “Childhood’s End: Hypnagogic Pop.” The Wire 306 (August 2009): 26–31. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone Film Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. London: Routledge, 2003. Lock, Graham. “How Green was My Minimalism.” NME (June 14, 1980). Marcus, Greil. In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Twentieth Anniversary Edition). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. McCullough, Dave. “Let’s Hear it For Quiet Music.” Sounds (May 17, 1980): 16–17. McRobbie, Angela. “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique.” Screen Education 34 (1980): 37–49.  158 •

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McRobbie, Angela. “Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity.” Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research, 1 (2) (May 1993): 13–31. Morgan, Kenneth O. The People’s Peace: Britain Since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Moxham, Stuart. “Faction.” Faction/A Minor Piece. Shaftesbury: Stuart Moxham Bandcamp, 2013. Moxham, Stuart. “Liner Notes.” In Colossal Youth. Brussels: Les Disques du Crépuscule, 1994. National Association of Music Merchants. Booker T. Jones. NAMM Oral History Program: September 9, 2013. Reynolds, Simon and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Reynolds, Simon. “Liner Notes.” In Colossal Youth. London: Domino, 2007. Reynolds, Simon. Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–1984. New York: Penguin, 2006. Reynolds, Simon. Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2010. Richter, Gisela M. A. Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942. Richter, Gisela M.A. Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths. 3rd edn. New York: Phaidon Press, 1970. Schultz, Charles. Peanuts. April 6, 1954. Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Picador, 2002. Steinberg, Leo. “Reflections on the State of Criticism.” In Robert Rauschenberg (October Files), ed. Branden W. Joseph. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Strauss, Neil. “The Invisible Man: Stuart Moxham’s Minimalist Pop.” Option, 1993. Synge, J. M. The Aran Islands. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Taylor, Neil. Document and Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade. London: Orion, 2010. Toop, David. Ocean of Sound. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995.  159 •

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True, Everett. “The First Interview I Ever Did (Originally Printed in Plan B Magazine).” Collapse Board, February 17, 2011. Tucker, Steve. “They Might Be Giants Again!” South Wales Echo, December 19, 2003. Unterberger, Richie. “Stuart Moxham.” Richie Unterberger, n.d. (1997). Vale, V. and Andrea Juno. “Young Marble Giants.” RE/Search #1 (1980): 9. Vale, V. “The Slits.” RE/Search #1 (1980): 5. Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. New York: Delta, 1999. Weekend. La Varieté. London: Rough Trade, 1982 Willis, Ellen. Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock & Roll. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Young Marble Giants. Final Day. London: Rough Trade, 1980. Young Marble Giants. Testcard. London: Rough Trade, 1981.

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Also available in the series:

   1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes    2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans    3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis    4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller    5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice    6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh   7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli    8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry    9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

  10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos   11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard   12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo   13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk   14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore   15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths   16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy   17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis   18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz

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  19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli   20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes   21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno   22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi   23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks   24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder   25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese   26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken   27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes   28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven   29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper   30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy   31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario   32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis   33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green

  34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar   35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti   36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal   37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan   38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth   39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns   40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson   41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard   42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy   43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck   44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier   45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier   46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt

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  47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor   48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz   49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite   50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef   51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich   52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson   53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay   54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel   55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw   56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle   57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris   58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs   59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron

  60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen   61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl   62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate   63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay   64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier   65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton   66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards   67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal   68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson   69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol   70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois   71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

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  72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles   73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo   74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson   75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent   76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin   77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks   78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr   79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer   80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost   81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell   82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield   83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman   84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen   85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton

  86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem   87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson   88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer   89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall   90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum   91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar   92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor   93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson   94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez   95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven   96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold   97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves   98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

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A lso a v ailable in the series

  99. Sigur Rós’s ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetablesby Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr.

111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

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