Dave Rimmer – The Post-Punk Professor

Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (1985)
Dave Rimmer

This book has a provocative title, one that I read for the first time in an article I’d come across by a former professor, Neil Nehring. The phrase “like punk never happened” was used as a jab against Duran Duran and how their existence belied the disruptive presence of punk just a few years before. What was the point of punk if it begat Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet? While making this point, Nehring cited Dave Rimmer’s book. I knew I had to track it down, particularly because I took the charge against Duran Duran and Spandau very, very seriously!

Like Punk Never Happened was published in 1985 and is a mash up of Rimmer tracing the development of the genre known as New Pop and a tour diary written while he was in Japan with Culture Club during their 1984 tour. Rimmer’s bio on the back of the book notes that he was a “freelance writer” for Smash Hits magazine and he thanks Neil Tennant (yes, from the Pet Shop Boys) for being his “agent, editor, and collaborator” on this book. A the editor of Smash Hits, Tennant undoubtedly has a ton of amazing pre-Pet Shop Boys stories and thus I declare that he needs to write his autobiography!

As I discussed in my post on Adam Ant’s autobiography, Rimmer traces the beginning of New Pop to Ant, declaring him a “monomaniacal success robot” with some affection, actually (11). Rimmer stresses that the point of the book is to explore New Pop, not to judge it, and so he writes about Adam’s arc toward stardom with an anthropological curiosity, using Ant as the ur-popstar on which all other 80s popstars are built. Adam’s roots were in punk and as most people already know, he was mentored by and then stolen from by Malcom McClaren (who lured Adam’s original Ants away to form Bow Wow Wow), a figure Rimmer sees as another harbinger of New Pop. McClaren always wanted to be a success and he always wanted the Sex Pistols to be famous. Their look and attitude was punk but McClaren’s desire was pure “imaginative entrepreneur” who wanted “to make the most of an easily manipulable music industry” (14). Rimmer, like Simon Reynolds, sees punk as germinating from pop music, destroying the boundary between the radio friendly hit and the sneering, tuneless punk song. Both pop and punk are used as delineating lines between those “in” and those “out”, and once punk blew itself up, pop merely shuffled back in to fill in the void. Rimmer argues:

The irony of the situation is this: to those who cling on to the spirit of punk, everything about the New Pop is utterly abhorrent and devoid of heir precious ‘credibility’. The New Pop isn’t rebellious. It embraces the star system. It conflates art, business and entertainment. It cares more about sales and royalties and the strength of the dollar than anything else and to make matters worse, it isn’t the least bit guilty about it. (13)

Beyond Adam Ant, Rimmer sees the New Romantics as ushering in the age of New Pop. He says in the first chapter of the book that Culture Club “were the perfect New Pop” group: “Colour by Numbers was the nearest thing to a perfect pop album the decade has produced. ‘Karma Chameleon” was the nearest thing to a perfect pop single: pretty and sickly, complex and singalong, meaningless and meaningful all at the same time” (5). After he theorizes about the transformation of punk into New Pop, Rimmer spends the rest of the book detailing Culture Club’s 1984 tour. The tour tales are interesting, though they mostly focus on Boy George and Jon Moss constantly fighting, breaking up, and making back up. Boy George discusses their relationship in his autobiography if you’re interested in the details of their volatile love affair. It’s quite a story!

culture club

Something I found really helpful in Rimmer’s book is his discussion of money and New Popstars’ desire for success. Money and success comes up frequently when writers attempt to define what New Pop was. The music that came after punk was a lot of things: Postpunk, New Wave, New Romantic, and New Pop. It’s difficult to define what exactly makes each one of those categories because there are overlaps, slips, splits, and fissures among all of them. In a 2005 Pitchfork article, “Now That’s What I Call New Pop” by Jess Harvell provides a useful definition of New Pop which focuses both on sound and desire:

New pop, the UK post-post-punk movement, is too porous to be rigidly defined. It contains everything from ABC’s Arcadian soul-disco, to Orange Juice’s Byrds/Buzzcocks jangle, to the Human League’s supersonic Abba update. Much of it could also be called post-punk or synth-pop or leftover glam. There was no shared manifesto; many of the bands couldn’t be more different.

If anything defined it, it was a strange mix of DIY (spurred by punk) and ambition– to make the charts, make TV appearances, make newspaper headlines. Sometimes this was for money; sometimes just to see if it could be done; sometimes simply to reach as many people as possible. But clearly, for many bands, merely selling a few 7″s was no longer an option.

Rimmer reflects Harvell’s emphasis on ambition when he critiques the charge that New Pop was “Thatcherite” or “Falklands Pop”. He continues, “In some was that’s a profoundly stupid description. Culture Club aside, the consensus among today’s pop musicians is broadly left of centre. Even Andy Taylor of Duran Duran – the group most usually lumbered with the ‘Thatcherite’ tag – was recently heard remarking that it made him ‘sick to watch what she’s doing to the country.’” In other ways, however, Rimmer confirms the connection between New Pop and Thatcher in that New Pop’s orientation toward success mirrors “the Thatcherite ideal of how to revitalize the economy” (76). The connection to Thatcher always sits uncomfortably with me, particularly given the working class background of almost all of the New Romantics as well as a large swath of New Popstars. I loved this quote from Jon Moss in the book: “Duran Duran reflect what people can’t have in life. We reflect what they can have” (121). What can they have, though? Not Culture Club’s money but perhaps an audience could have their multicultural, gender bending approach to life? Along with how to define New Pop via success, Rimmer clarifies New Pop’s connection to Black dance music and he investigates the issue of sex, seemingly important because of Boy George’s (at times unexpressed) sexuality.

Like Punk Never Happened ends with Rimmer arguing that 1985 is year New Pop’s bubble burst. With increased fame, New Popstars had steadily increased the space between themselves and their fans. Additionally, fame obliterated the original philosophy that underpinned bands like Spandau Ballet or Culture Club. Along with Band Aid and general chart success, Rimmer also pins the blame on Wham! who “aimed to be nothing more than they seemed to be: two nice middle-class boys busy making a fortune. After their first couple of singles, their songs didn’t even seem to spring from their own experiences. It was all just George Michael playing with imaginary emotions and situations. Scratch the suburban surface of Wham! and you’d find nothing beneath but nagging delusion” (185). Poor Wham!! I do remember, though, in Graham Smith’s book on the New Romantics, We Can Be Heroes, that several New Romantics lamented that Wham! stole their fashion (seen in “Wham Rap”, “Young Guns” and “Bad Boys”) from the “Hard Times” look (as the New Romantics called it) after visiting the Blitz one night and seeing patrons sporting rolled jeans and greased-up pompadours. It seems even in a movement that eventually jettisoned credibility, the illusion of cred was still important!

Boy George hated the video for “Karma Chameleon” so I decided to post a live version of it (complete with a dig at Siouxsie Sioux at the beginning!)

Here’s Wham in all of their stolen Hard Times glory:

Stand and Deliver (2006)
Adam Ant

In September, I’m heading to Reading, England to participate in a conference on music subcultures. Participants will present papers on how one writes, investigates, thinks of, and defines what subcultures are and who participates in them. Here’s my abstract:

Though his ruffled shirts, working class background, and appeal to “wild nobility” would seemingly mark him as a New Romantic, Adam Ant rejects that he was ever was one. In his autobiography, Ant adamantly states, in fact, “I really did not want anything to do with them” (151). Considering Spandau Ballet and others as elitist and obsessed with celebrating the upper class, Ant saw himself as part of a wholly separate tribe, even if his songs referenced kings and looking flash, and his style evinced a historically rich, cash poor aesthetic favored by the New Romantics. If Adam Ant rejects his membership, is he still part of the subculture? Moving away from the generative core of Visage and Spandau Ballet, writing about New Romanticism becomes a complicated game of “who belongs?” as Blitz kids become bands and outliers like Duran Duran claim to have been New Romantics only long enough to make fun of them. Ant’s autobiographical rejection of membership is accompanied by Steve Strange, Boy George, Gary Kemp and others alternately placing themselves or others within or outside of New Romantic boundaries. Nearly anything can move those boundaries: belonging to the wrong social class, visiting the Blitz and failing the fashion standards, or more generally not being “authentic”. Ant’s rejection of membership, then, reads more like an admission of being part of a fast moving, complicated, highly stratified scene which saw fashion as an agent of political change and beauty as a destroyer of class and social differences. Using autobiographies, songs, photos, music videos, and interviews, this paper will consider who makes the New Romantic cut and who doesn’t (spoiler alert: “[he] may not like the things [I] say”, but Adam Ant is decidedly in).

Ant’s autobiography is interesting because he clearly anticipates what people want from it: a discussion of his mental health issues. Since it was published in 2006, the book doesn’t include his most recent struggles, though within the last few years he’s stabilized and done a series of successful revival tours. Throughout the book, Ant looks back at behavior like his hyper-busy work ethic and his obsessive need to control every facet of the visual aspects of his performance and ascribes it to his not-yet-diagnosed mental illness. He is frank about his behavior and the way it affected others, including friends, lovers, and family.

I read this book, however, for Ant’s take on his career and his potential role in the New Romantic movement. I say “potential” because as I’ve began to piece together who and what is/was this thing called “New Romantic”, Ant presents a particularly difficult case. He, like, Billy Idol was thought to be a sellout, someone who hungered for fame and abandoned a series of subcultures in his pursuit of money and recognition. Admittedly, “Puss ‘n Boots” is a long way from “Stand and Deliver” (Though Ant’s fashion in each is similar – that lip gloss remains on point, too! Check out the videos for these songs at the end of the post) but Spandau Ballet traveled a long distance between “Chant No. 1” and “Highly Strung” as well. Adam and the Ants (to distinguish the band from his later solo output), Spandau, Duran Duran, and Culture Club all were bands that started deep within a subculture and who moved out into making what was dubbed by Dave Rimmer in his book Like Punk Never Happened, “New Pop”. Rimmer’s book (I’ll do a post on it soon) is invaluable in understanding the movement from punk to New Romantic to New Pop. Published in 1984, the book represents one of the earliest meditations on the movement of the alternative music scene to the mainstream in the 1980s. Rimmer targets Ant as the one who truly began the trend:

In his rapid rise to the status of first teen idol of the 1980s, he mapped out all the moves for those who came after. Though the Human League and the Thompson Twins would later pull it off too, he was the first to engineer a self-conscious move from margins to mainstream, from cult to conqueror. He didn’t seem to have even the tiniest prick of conscience about ‘selling out’ (an old hippie concept which the punks had adopted), he just made damn sure someone was buying. (8-9)

Ant readily admits his willingness to move from “margins to mainstream” in his book as he sees all of his incarnations as just “show business”, whether he was a punk singing “Plastic Surgery” or a dreamboat being taunted by the moniker “Goody Two Shoes”. It was all the same to Adam Ant.

Midway through his autobiography, Ant reflects on his decision to go solo by noting:

I started a promo tour of personal appearance I Manchester, and the next day Friend or Foe the LP made number 5 in the charts, which was a good beginning, I thought. Unfortunately, that was the best it would do. Interviewers were asking me if I thought that it was all over for me, if my bubble had burst, and shouldn’t I have kept the Ants? Fuck you all, I thought. I will succeed. (203)

The desire for fame and fortune is what sets Ant within the New Romantics, not outside of the subculture. They, too, were using their fashion, beauty, and music as a way to pry open the Top 40. They made being “upper class” a performative event, one in which they mocked the very class they were seemingly trying to join. Ant misreads this desire as wanting to be upper class, while he was firmly entrenching himself in the working class status he was born into. Ant, however, used fashion in the same way the New Romantics did: as a way to create disorder within the class system and as a way to reflect what it might look like to be a working class kid who disrupts history.

Adam ant

Throughout his book, Ant discusses his fashion choices, describing his thought processes behind the feathers, makeup, and leather pants. Though he wore some Vivienne Westwood fashion early in his career, he insists that by the time he was wearing his “Apache/gypsy warrior look” (he’s sporting the “dandy highwayman” in the photo above) he was creating the looks on his own (146). This doesn’t, however, set him apart from the New Romantics as much as he thinks it does. Those earliest in the scene were famous for cobbling together looks from a number of sources, bypassing designer clothing because of the price and because they preferred to do things on their own.

I think that Ant rejects the possibility of being part of the New Romantics because he didn’t really hang out at The Blitz or pal around with others on the scene. He also isn’t one much for labels as he sees himself simply responding to what he likes and acting accordingly. So, if someone refuses to see themselves as part of a subculture, could they still be considered part of that subculture? I say yes! Ant was a punk, a New Romantic, and a New Popper. (He also uses the phrase “making love” far too often in his book but I suppose that’s a different point altogether. Also: he dated Jamie Lee Curtis and Heather Graham!) Rimmer argues that,

With a single-mindedness bordering on obsession – in itself as characteristic of the New Pop as anything else Adam got up to – he became the first artist since the Sex Pistols successfully to sell, not just an unmistakable ‘look’ (as he always put it’) and an unmistakable ‘sound’ (ditto) but also a half-baked set of theories and attitudes that pinned the two together […] Adam was the punk who grew up wanting to own or control everything he did [… His] explanation: ‘That’s business.’ And so it was. (9-10)

Ant’s book is a good look into the way he approached the business of himself, whether he was playing a punk in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee or singing with Diana Ross at Motown’s 25^th Birthday Concert. It has most helpfully aided me in thinking about what to do with someone who stubbornly refuses to agree with my point of view on musical subcultures.

In case you’re interested in Ant’s fashion evolution, below you’ll find “Stand & Deliver” from 1981 and “Puss ‘n Boots” from 1983. The latter of which involves a little joke about his earlier look in the form of a sexy video vixen.