Amrik Rai hears how Modern English joined the new pop cash race
article published in NME, 29th May 1982
Modern English | The Language Of Compromise | MODERN ENGLISH might just get rich quick . . . but they’ll never be hip.
“That’s not true. Modern English can be hip and rich. We can build a category of our own. For years now people have been trying to bracket us with Joy Division and Wire simply because they don’t realise what we’re about.”
The Modern English lesson in hip starts here. Robbie Grey is the English voice, Gary McDowell plays the very Modern guitar. Mick Conroy (bass), Stephen Walker (keyboards) and Richard Brown (drums) complete 4AD Records’ pet ensemble, of spotty English kids in Modern spotted trousers, currently touring to promote their new LP ‘After The Snow’. So let’s promote.
Magic, murder and the weather are not even last year’s thing. The harsh hard edges of experimentation and deviation are being rapidly discarded by everyone from Modern English to Cabaret Voltaire. It’s a mad mad mad mad steeple-chase to accessibility and sometimes nauseating panderism with a crock of gold, a crack of the financial whip, for the winners. So let’s hear the smart grey suit in the corner (Robbie Grey) sum up the situation.
“We could easily have carried on with the ‘Mesh And Lace’ (first album) formula. We could have played the ‘barren landscape, the heavy drumming, distorted guitar and wailing vocals’ game for six or seven albums if we’d wanted to. But the point is, we’ve moved on. Now more than ever we’re in a bracket of our own. There’s songs on the new album crying out to be played on Radio One.”
The modern sound is slickly professional. Sparse, spacey rhythms slide out of the cage in an occasional glib tribute to contemporary trends. But, just often enough, Modern English bend their sound into a shape without a patent already slapped on it. An occurrence rare enough, in these plagiaristic times, to warrant closer inspection. ‘
Modern English | The Language Of Compromise
After The Snow’ is a concentration of disturbing synth melodies warped with pumping riffs. As Gary, the Modern English version of Victor Victoria, points out:
“Our aim at the moment has to be to expand our audience in Britain. It’s really going well for us abroad but we’re on a comparatively low level over here. That’s why we’ve brought in producer Hugh Jones, to try and channel the Modern English sound towards the charts. Like, we’ve used a lot more vocal melodies on the new album and left out the effects to get away from the obscure side of ‘Mesh And Lace’.”
“Yeah but it’s not a conscious thing,” Robbie cuts in. “We used to think ‘God, we’ll never make a pop record — we’re artists’, but things don’t always turn out as you planned. And when you actually create a pop record, it’s so much more of a thrill than anything else.”
Mick Conroy, the spectacled youth bassman, adds: “It’s good though in that the English public are being a bit more educated by the really good production on pop records these days. People are actually realising what a good snare drum sounds like . . . or whatever.”
The British record-buying public have been less than sympathetic to the Modern English cause during the past two years, pushing them indiscriminately into various ill fitting boxes. From the Some Bizzare club to the hip-creek cultish 4AD clan via Joy Division neophytes and the friends of Wire league. Why is it suddenly going to be so different?
Modern English | The Language Of Compromise
Robbie: “We’re not saying it is, but all that bracketing is just so much crap really. Like the Some Bizzare thing. We were asked to play on the album and do the tour with Naked Lunch and Stevo but we wanted no part of that electronic indoctrination phase. And yet people still tagged us with that label.”
“And the reason for Joy Division and Wire,” Mick continues, a little angrily, “is that people always try to relate you to great bands for some sort of comparison. Another thing is that what little press we’ve had has always tended to present people with too rigid preconceptions of the Modern English sound. . .”
“And the main thing is” —Robbie again — “that we just don’t adhere to any set formulas. We’ve gone into the John Peel studio and done 10 minutes of pure noise or, alternatively, three minutes of pure pop as and when we’ve felt like it. I think the press really thought we’d be banging bits of wood together this year.”
Apart from the public, the press have been kind(ish) in small doses to the Modern English doctrine. Yet their publicity handout refers to ‘the fickle British press’.
“We’ve never gone out of our way to ‘find’ space in the press. It’s always been a case of hoping that the music was enough, but obviously it wasn’t. It seems that (for the British press) you need a bit more than just music. It’s all about image and colour and the easy-sell. And the lack of press wasn’t really depressing but . . . a lot of people just didn’t know that Modern English were around anymore. They thought we’d just split up or something.”
Modern English? Oh yeah! They’re still around . . .
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