Associates - The New Pop of Decadence

The missing link between post-punk and the synthetic visions of the early '80s has a name (Associates) and two faces: those of Billy MacKenzie and Alan Rankine, dandies raised in the shadow of the Scottish underground, soon seduced by the call of Albion's new pop and ultimately landing, as a final stage, on the oblique syntax of synth-pop. To be pragmatic, the humanoid Gary Numan had already set about shaping, in flesh and electric wires, the symbiotic ideal between human and artificial impulses. But while the "Numanian" imagery of "1984" (itself borrowed, in some of its elements, from late-glam nuances) secretes an evident emotional anaemia, that of Associates pulses with passion - albeit a chilly one, straight out of the pocket manual of the perfect dandy - and vital tension. It's partly to fill this affective gap that our company stepped onto the field and, thanks to the work of its two founding partners, embarked on a path aimed at distilling the essence from every major branch of the "new wave," as if to sum up within itself the polymorphous nature of the entire movement.

During their brief golden period, Associates managed to have their say on the more typically post-punk side of things (the debut The Affectionate Punch), to commit to tape one of the most heart-wrenching anthems to creative freedom ever heard (Fourth Drawer Down), and finally to edge toward pop's more hedonistic (though never purely playful) side, conceiving with Sulk a seductive (and devious) form of psychedelic hallucination coated in glamour, the ultimate synthesis of the clash between their melodic songbook and the "underwater torture" of the recording studio.

Yet, despite so much ingenuity and undeniable foresight, MacKenzie and Rankine reaped little of what they sowed, falling short of that long-coveted mass success which, aside from the brief window of March-October 1982 (just enough time for a taste of caviar and a glass of champagne), they always saw only through a telescope. A fact that speaks volumes about the ever-fraught relationship between art and business, but which, above all, explains far better than words could the ambiguous quality of the music the combo put forward.

Ambiguity, precisely. The Associates' sound is an arty triumph in which the syntax of Anglo post-punk collides with the schizoid cabaret of Sparks, the epic sweep of Kraftwerk, and the existentialist abyss of guru Scott Walker. A refined intrigue of sound and vision (the “Sound & Vision” of Bowie-esque memory), able to combine theatrical gesture with sheer indecipherability of message. Even the duo's double-faced image seems designed to cultivate this play of opposites: on one side, the dark, introverted charm of Rankine, a brown bear with a magnetic stare who pulls the musical strings; on the other, the pale androgyny of MacKenzie, the “Beefheart-like personality” (in the words of Paul Lester in “Uncut”), who speaks in impenetrable metaphors and flaunts the manners of a young aristocratic scion.

Two classic sides of the same coin, then; as enigmatic as their entire system of expressive codes, perpetually poised - as was also the case with the timeless night-club sound of Roxy Music - between classicism and modernist urgency, that is, between the European and American singer-songwriter tradition of the interwar years, as a bastion of expressive rigor, and new wave as the zero degree of rock's drift. It is between these stylistic extremes - summarized here in rough hermeneutic categories - that the Scottish duo's game is played out, and in parallel, the singer's peculiar poetic world takes shape.

With that soul-drenched voice, the epitome of suffering as a Dionysian transport through music, MacKenzie rereads and transfigures the tradition of the “torch song,” channeling joys, grievances, and lovesick pains into a lyrical hermeticism of total virulence. There's no trick (beyond the obvious one, at least) and no deception: the elective affinities with the likes of Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, and Sarah Vaughan are plain for all to see, yet they slip from view, much like the Frank Sinatra lineage - once again filtered through the voices of Walker and Bowie - which our man proudly flaunts. But the shopping list hardly ends there: where do we place the Teutonic bite and the Brechtian emphasis? And the psychotic falsetto worthy of the best Tim Buckley? And the ringing tenor with effeminate undertones that booms fire and brimstone at full volume, painting a remarkable hybrid of the Wagnerian mensch and the Marlene Dietrich of “The Blue Angel” fanning herself with an ostrich feather? Everything's fair game, in short, as long as it guarantees the uniqueness of this bipolar knot: “I like the kitsch of visual artists like Jeff Koons or Pierre et Gilles,” MacKenzie would confirm. “Things shouldn't be too serious or kept under control. After all, kitsch is the realm of the working class, and that side of things needs to be explored.”

Incredibly, this clotting of styles and techniques produces an effect quite opposite to mere pantomime, and instead becomes the vehicle for a feeling so sincere and authentic that, for a moment, it seems to shake the spun-sugar scaffolding of the band's later music. In the end, the vocal truth MacKenzie chooses to communicate borders on a childlike aplomb far removed from the “sexual” delirium of a Marc Almond, and, in a sense, even from the still fundamentally “aestheticizing” conception to which Bowie's recovery of crooning stylistics remained anchored.

Hungry for fame and recognition but, at the same time, too proud to taint himself with the philosophy of compromise and “Fantozzi-esque promotions,” MacKenzie is the cherub who looks down on the world from the heights of his acquired purity, a Prince Myshkin whom not even the corruption of original sin (his gargantuan sexual appetites are well known) could strip of his inner, blinding candor. “Another contradiction,” one might object; nothing could be truer: the man, like his music, lived by wallowing in paradox and gratuitous extravagance.

Let's not forget that it was precisely his mood swings that first brought the Associates enterprise crashing down, and then his own existence, which ended tragically in 1996, by suicide. An act of madness that, far from elevating him to the rank of romantic heroes on which rock mythology feeds, instead placed him among the sad, middle-aged Pierrots unable to come to terms with their own past and squandered opportunities. A portrait, once again, quite far removed from the burst of exuberance MacKenzie was in life: an artist who always saw success more as a chance to be in the spotlight (preferably by overdoing it with the kind of harebrained behavior he so relished, like strolling on trains dressed as a woman with his poodles on a leash, or getting drunk on liters of whisky cream) than as a means of carefully managing image and substance. In other words: exhibitionism and managerial savvy don't always go hand in hand (thankfully!).

In fact, in one of his last interviews, asked how he felt about those who had achieved success thanks to the Associates' influence, he replied with Olympian calm: “Clearly they wanted success far more than I did. I certainly had much more to learn backstage. They were movie stars, I was always more drawn to theater.” Well, who would have guessed?

20,000 Years of Mental Torture

When he decided to leave his native Dundee to seek fame abroad as a singer, Billy MacKenzie was only sixteen, but he was a very different teenager from the spineless “Sixteen, clumsy and shy” that future friend Morrissey would elevate into his own alter ego in the “Dickensian” parable of “Half A Person.”

A volcanic firstborn in a brood of six siblings, our man nursed, from a tender age, a creative spark that was hard to tame and, above all, hard to channel into any finished form. “They used to call me Billy Whizz (little wizard, ed.),” he would recall years later. “Sometimes it's tough to keep up with all the energy running through your being.” At just eleven years old, he announced to his mother his burning desire to become a pop star: “I'm warning you: I want to become a 'pop' type of person, and you'll have to give me the clothes and everything else I need to become that kind of person, otherwise I'll throw myself down the stairs,” he barked arrogantly at her. It was impossible for the caring Lily not to indulge her little son's whims, whether it meant enriching his wardrobe with flamboyant outfits or, in the worst case, sitting through his at-home performances, during which he would shrilly warble the top ten best-selling singles.

Meanwhile, the years went by and that beardless little voice grew ever deeper and more combative: a voice proud to proclaim its own “difference” within a barren ecosystem, populated by middle-aged masks and a flat, aimless youth. The only way out was escape, plotted precisely in 1973: the young man used the prize money won at a local singing contest to set sail for New Zealand - where he lived for a few months with two hippie uncles - before eventually settling in the United States, the ideal place to play at being an imaginary rock star and scatter a few children here and there like parsley (quite peculiar, given that he already tended toward being gay).

Called back home two years later, following his mother's illness, the budding dandy reinvented himself as manager of the art deco-style clothing boutique “The Crypt” (whose macabre peculiarity was having coffins in place of changing rooms!) until the day he boldly showed up for an audition with the cabaret band Mental Torture and won the favor of their talented guitarist.

A truly epiphanic moment: that's the only way to describe the first meeting with Alan Rankine, in Edinburgh, in 1976. Despite their negligible differences in “social” background (“Alan came from the upper class, from the residential area. I grew up in the rough part of Dundee, the kind of place where if you accidentally left your shoes outside overnight, you could be sure they'd be gone by morning!”, he would be keen to point out), the two instantly clicked on a musical level, discovering they were not only fans of “kraut” rock and glam, but also great enthusiasts of soul, easy listening, film scores, and disco music (all influences that would echo, in varying proportions, throughout the Associates' music). No two ways about it: MacKenzie had finally found his artistic twin.

Eighteen months of grueling apprenticeship followed in hotel lobbies, playing for crowds of tourists and distracted middle-aged patrons (imagine what a drag it must have been for the singer - who, as Rankine would point out, “was 90% gay at the time” - to turn down all the indecent propositions from the aging Mrs. Robinsons in the audience!). The high point of the show was a bossa nova version of “The Fool On The Hill” (good heavens...), but the two had the most fun mangling popular songs and reworking them in a comic key, like “The Shadow Of Your Lung,” their take on the famous “The Shadow Of Your Smile.” Soon enough, the tailor-made dilettantism meant to earn them their daily bread gave way to the urge to get serious and commit to a far more ambitious project. That's when the name Associates was born.

It's 1977. In perfect coincidence with the apex/crisis of punk and the simultaneous sprouting of the sounds that would soon be filed under the "post-" prefix, MacKenzie packs up and moves into Rankine's "monochrome orange" flat. Wild, toxic and incredibly creative days await him, during which, thanks above all to his host's technical know-how, he finally manages to put his ideas in order and sketch out the essential traits of a brand-new musical grammar. It's from this very period that the drafts of future hits like "Party Fears Two" and "Club Country" date, but it takes until the end of '79 for the first single to appear under the Associates name – fittingly, a cover of the Thin White Duke's "Boys Keep Swinging" – released on Double Hip, a brand-new label the pair set up for the occasion. Fitting into the new "Scottish" ferment whose leading names include Orange Juice, Positive Noise, Altered Images, Fire Engines and Josef K, the band catches the interest of Fiction, a Polydor subsidiary, who take them onto their roster.

In August of the following year comes the powerful yet caressing right hook of The Affectionate Punch (Fiction, 1980): a lump of rusted iron wrapped in blue velvet, the kind branded by Lynch's cigarette burn; "music of decadence", as an enthusiastic Paul Morley calls it in "NME", pinpointing the subtle link between the moral and ontological decline of contemporary civilization and the longing for a lost ideal of virtus (for now confined to care of the body, physical exercise as the counterpart to the health of the soul) that informs the band's poetics from the very start.

The ideas are simple but highly effective: obsessive rhythms in the Joy Division mould, a bass that's full-bodied and front and centre, a piano suspended over the ocean exhaling intoxicating Roxy-ish aromas, and occasional intrusions of cheap, decidedly unpretentious keyboards, straight out of the Magazine school ("Would I…Bounce Back" and the moving "Deeply Concerned" sound as if they'd stepped straight off "Real Life"). A decidedly post-punk sound, in short, with Rankine using his guitar to prick, dissect or numb the memorable melodic lines (the "shoegaze" vortex that sucks in the fabric of "Transport To Central", the razor-sharp slashes of "A Matter Of Gender"), often taking on the guise of a slightly more lyrical, introverted Keith Levene, as in the sulphurous spirals of "Amused As Always".

MacKenzie, for his part, dominates the entire album with an imperious, operatic register, able to glide nonchalantly from Scott Walker's silky crooning to the stammer of a Howard Devoto (the collagen of "A", musically akin to early U2), reaching peaks of passion on the elegy "Logan Time".

What's most striking, though, is the astonishing quality of the songwriting, as well as the ability to combine attention to melody with free-wheeling imagination in the arrangements: "Paper House" is a vaguely lounge rhythm box, dotted with Sparks-style keyboard flourishes and intricate six-string fingerwork; the title track flirts admirably with the schematism of "Station To Station", while it's even a "Morricone-esque" whistle that duels with the ghost of Kurt Weill turned glam-rock in the magnificent "Even Dogs In The Wild".

The sounds are clean and well-defined, almost spartan compared to the "three-dimensionality" of future productions; precisely for this reason, the ever-dissatisfied MacKenzie would later have scathing words for the record, calling it "just rubbish, a glorified demo". In truth, through its surgical grafting of an "antiquated" sensibility onto the sharp structures of post-punk, The Affectionate Punch is already an ambitious work, one that holds within it the "Nietzschean" vehemence (good-natured, all things considered) of the two athletes immortalized on the cover, ready for a headlong dash towards the Olympus of pop. Blissful naivety… They don't yet know, in fact, that the road ahead will be somewhat longer, and above all far more tortuous, than expected.

"Singles: Success Is a Game"

Despite the raves from the music press, The Affectionate Punch sells precious little, even when set against the hardly stratospheric numbers of Factory or Rough Trade releases. That's enough to send MacKenzie and Rankine into a fit of apoplexy: are they destined to share the fate of the many (too many) "cult" bands confined to some critic's golden list and largely ignored by the masses? The fear is great (too great), so the pair hastily leave Fiction and Scotland behind to settle in London, within the walls of Situation Two (a sub-label of Beggars Banquet). There they lay out, on the drawing board, the battle plan that's been brewing in their minds for a while, one that should finally bring the Associates name to the public's attention.

The idea is to devote themselves entirely to singles, releasing a series of them to break through in the independent market and from there edge onto the national charts. For MacKenzie, though, burning the standard rock-band agenda (album, tour, and round again) remains the real priority: "We tried to demolish that side of things, and that's one of the reasons we came up with the singles idea," the singer confirms. "We want to show people that you don't necessarily have to rely on a disgusting formula, because that's one of the reasons the music business is on its last legs." Rankine's version is even juicier: "In 1980 we were a rock band, four lads, same old backing tracks, playing all the usual venues. But Billy wanted a different routine, he wanted to play in gay discos! And that's because rock'n'roll is a very 'macho' thing, and that whole iconography disgusted him. If you told him, 'We're off on a 48-date tour', he'd say 'Naah'."

These are still incredibly creative days, and perhaps even more toxic ones. Milking Situation Two's trust to scrape together a bit of extra cash to pay bassist Mike Dempsey (ex-Cure) and drummer John Murphy, they record only on weekends, and at night to boot, in a kind of "Saturday Night Fever" that often blurs into hallucinogenic delirium.

True studio animals, MacKenzie, Rankine and producer Mike Hedges use the mixing desk creatively and tinker with tools turned into improvised instruments (drums filled with water, McKenzie singing into a vacuum-cleaner tube, primitive forms of sampling achieved by tapping the "Return" key of a typewriter in time…), following a playful approach descended from Pierre Schaeffer's "musique concrète" and a combative tension vaguely reminiscent of the sonic futurism of the early twentieth century. The word "vaguely" is essential here, though, since Marinetti's motto "Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute", written in silvery letters across the faces of the first synth-poppers, sits awkwardly with a sensibility as ambiguous as the Associates'.

The tracks pulled out of the hat in that glorious 1981 don't lie about the experimental fever enveloping the sessions: while McKenzie plays fast and loose with the stave, ranging with alien fury across every register humanly conceivable, from psychotic falsetto to baritone and back again, Rankine follows suit, thickening the sonic weave and pushing the timbral distortion of the sounds to the point of paroxysm, so that they now appear denatured (listen to the crackling keyboard on "The Associate") and fixed to tape like streaks of lithium. The process, in the end, brings the band quite close to "synth" syntax without disowning its "organic" roots. Case in point: "Kissing" (the B-side of the gleaming "Tell Me Easter's On Friday") is pervaded by a swarm of electronic frequencies that looks at least a decade ahead and brushes up against the techno isolationism of early Autechre, yet its "sonic outfit" also sports a sandpapered little guitar that winks at the recent past. What emerges is a kind of "Play For Today" (Cure) told from a robot's point of view, if you'll forgive the comparison, but it's precisely in this "keeping one foot in two shoes" that, paradoxically, the Associates sound's great potential lies.

The run of singles continues relentlessly through to October and is gathered on the band's second and pivotal album. Fourth Drawer Down (Situation Two, 1981) is a germ that grew in the already bloodless body of "Low", a cancer that feeds on the same anxieties but exacerbates their deviant traits. The pilgrimage through the post-war ruins of "Teutonic" Bowie is evoked from the very first seconds of "White Car In Germany", where a carpet of industrial wails raises the curtain on a Düsseldorf turned pure idealization, a microcosm devastated by Rankine's glacial synths and McKenzie's impossible octaves. A triumph of lost (almost archaeological) epic grandeur, reaffirmed by the instrumental coda "Another White Car" amid the clangour of presses, timpani and tubular bells: a "Crimson-esque" epitaph for a Habsburg empire now consigned to oblivion.

Rather than in the gilded cradle of the "superman", the Associates' laboured journey now seeks relief in that pietas chosen as the signature code of a nature that is fleeting, yes, but ultimately profoundly human. In this sense, one can only agree with Richard Cook of "Melody Maker" when he states that "in trying to dismantle established notions of organized performance and rebuilding them with irreverent contempt for accessibility (…), the Associates reaffirm their humanity within electric music".

Hence the pulsing guitars of "A Girl Named Property" transfigured into epilepsies of marbled feeling, emotional circuits with sublime European framing. Hence the deeply hidden disco undertones of "Tell Me Easter's On Friday" (the white skeleton of Chic's "I Want Your Love" dunked in the chrome plating of the most martial Human League) bringing deathly well-being to a desert that has traded the sun's warmth for the dry ice of neon light. Hence the Russian dance of "Q Quarters" proceeding in slow motion along the tracks of a hypnotic minimalism, absorbing the icy striations of rain, footsteps and coughs looped into place (the Faust of "Miss Fortune" strike again…).

And now for a few rhetorical questions: how can anyone resist a dynamite-stick of a “Kitchen Person” that forgets all about the bass and bets everything on tribal toms worthy of Virgin Prunes, a crushingly heavy Rankine riff, marimba ticking away, and a Farfisa organ that sounds like it's been violated by Sun Ra himself? How do you react in the face of Fripp-style guitar digressions ⟦set into the metal of D.A.F.⟧ and a Peter Hammill-esque chorus (the most progressive MacKenzie you could possibly imagine) on “Message Oblique Speech”? And what, finally, to make of the instrumental merry-go-round “The Associate”, other than that it feels like watching a hysterical glide that marries David Thomas's “alienated” screams to the high energy debris of Giorgio Moroder? Chills, ladies and gentlemen. Real chills.

However you want to frame it – whether as a post-punk already veering off into synthetic territory or as an adulterated, overly arty synth-pop – Fourth Drawer Down remains the Associates' masterpiece, as well as one of the most eccentric works in all of new wave.

Pity that, amid all the clattering of vacuum cleaners and typewriters, the singles game turns out to be only a partial success. The big words lavished by critics already won over aren't enough to secure the unanimous public acclaim that – who knows how realistically – the pair were expecting, and so the Associates find themselves forced, once again, into the role of outsiders in a world they'd actually love to belong to fully.

The truth is, let's be honest, they're asking for it. Rankine can say all he wants when he admits that the "wet" look sported on the cover of Fourth Drawer Down (the title refers to the drawer where the two loving junkies kept the natural sedatives used to "evaporate" the effects of acid) was engineered to please the gay audience and thus attract as many wallets as possible... The image isn't the "problem", and it never was; the music, if anything, is: how can you expect to conquer the pop world with an album as magnificently obscure as this one? The melodic hooks are there, however rare, but the sound stings the eyes like chlorine (perhaps the very chlorine of the swimming pool the two Adonises are emerging from on the cover) and the whole thing is just too extraordinarily abrasive. The record's real merit, if anything, is reaffirming with sheer force the group's nature as an "anomaly" within a post-punk landscape where, faced with such blatant stylistic heterogeneity, it's all too easy to overreact with hasty (and pointless) pigeonholing.

By mocking the routine of "accountant musicians" and pushing the pact between synthetic theorems and post-modernist yearning to the extreme, the Associates managed to play a sordid yet rewarding game, out of which a landmark record was born. It hardly matters that sales still don't back them up: that will come soon enough. Sadly, it won't last long either.

The New (Pop) on the march…

Truth be told, the harvest of singles did have one concrete upshot: it's thanks to the crop of '81 that a none-too-enthusiastic Wea does them a favour and offers the Associates the long-dreamed-of major-label contract. The dream isn't lost yet, after all, and the Scottish duo are keen to play every card they have before waving the white flag. What's more, the majors' sensors are picking up shifting conditions on British soil, now finally receptive to the "spectacular" flair and the glamorous image that MacKenzie and Rankine have been pushing hard from the very start.

Their prayers seem to have been answered: the long-awaited art-rock reflux towards the charts is now the order of the day (a "softening" path that even Joy Division may have started to weigh up, as shown by the whistleable hooks of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and the sublime feats of the New Order metamorphosis), while celebrity suddenly becomes cool again, after years spent systematically trying to dismantle its inner logic.

Now you have to show yourself, not hide. Visibility and availability become indispensable virtues for escaping an underground reality dominated by a "preaching to the converted" mindset that has worn out even the most fervent disciples of British (sonic and otherwise) anarchy. In a word, the whole sense of shame around success fades away, and a "new" (?) mindset blossoms, quite willing to exploit the media power of popular music (the ecstasy of the masses) to erode the very concept of the mainstream from within.

After all, as early as 1980 Green Gartside of Scritti Politti had gone so far as to theorise – who knows how sincerely – the hit parade as a yardstick for what's "culturally relevant" (?): so why not see this gold rush as the fuel to reignite the creative flame? In the end, the chart itself isn't the problem, but rather who decides it, and the times seem ripe for the mass legitimisation of the new British pop army of clear/blurred/non-existent post-punk lineage, promptly christened "new pop" by an inexhaustible Paul Morley, in the grip of sheer exaltation.

Either way, painting everyone with the same brush gets us nowhere, because while it's true that many of the universally derided new-pop acts (i.e. those who would wallow in it during dubious times, like Culture Club and Wham!) remain thoroughly deserving of scorn, it also can't be denied that there's good stuff in the mix too, not to say exquisite: the Abc "directed" by Trevor Horn, for instance, or the final incarnations of Human League and of Scritti Politti themselves, who are anything but mere projects set up to cash in. Or rather: they're that too, but not only that.

For the Associates, the right key to entering – even through the back door – the pantheon of new pop is called “Party Fears Two”, that little gem written way back in 1977, then shelved (though not, mind you, in the "fourth drawer down"), brought back to life thanks to the tectonic jolts of Mike Hedges's "underwater production", and finally paraded with swagger on "Top Of The Pops" in March '82. A true ruby-veined diadem, this acid-tinged "new pop" stuns with its concentric-circle construction, built entirely around a luminous piano fanfare and tenor vocals that, in the finale, dissolve into a little purple cloud somewhere between a stadium chant and a celestial warble. Something essential; for the heart, I mean.

In the flirtatious abandon of that screamed-at-the-top-of-his-lungs "Awake Me!" you can feel real liberation in the air, emancipation from years of deliberate, stubborn solitude. As if we were waking limbs numbed by the "emotional" winter of post-punk and discovering that outside it's spring, the birds are singing, the meadows are in bloom, and, deep down, it's not so bad after all. There's the full urgency of proudly declaring one's own disengagement (I can't help thinking of the "I Don't Give a Damn" philosophy of the late, forgettable Csi), of intoning the supreme delight that comes from forgetting, just for a moment, one's own pain or that of others, and simply enjoying life. And mind you, this attitude has nothing to do with yuppie indifference, but rather with the serene acceptance of one's own transient nature, refusing to let the world's troubles rob us of the beauty of the journey.

“Party Fears Two” shoots up to number nine on the national chart and, for anyone still in doubt, remains one of the definitive pop songs of the '80s.

The long playing Sulk (Wea, 14 May 1982) hit record shops with a cover steeped in a curious "futuristic-decadent" tropicalism: a maze of lights and bright hues, plasticky plants, bristly living-room greenery, the "associates" comfortably sprawled on little sofas draped in alabaster sheets… all that's missing is the jewel-encrusted tortoise from “Des Essentes” and the catalogue of refinements would be complete. Such visual extravagance can only be the prelude to an even more overflowing sonic luxury: rhythmic fragments scattered across the two channels, clusters of instruments isolated from the mass and then blended back together, voices multiplying at different altitudes, timbres so artificial they give everything an off-key flavour, too (magnificently) bold to ignore.

McKenzie begs Hedges to make the album sound "as expensive as possible," and the producer takes him at his word, working like a master jeweller to lend grandeur and prestige to every second of music. The singer's instructions are rather singular, not to say cryptic ("This needs to sound like ABBA meeting Bet Lynch on acid" or "This other one needs to sound like after the rain, as the sun is coming out"), but the rapport between the two is always perfect, at least in Hedges's view: "It really was a rewarding period. On one hand you had Billy, the best singer of the last twenty years, on the other his and Alan's songs, which were avant-garde and pop at the same time, radical without ever trying to be..."

The result of such productive effort is a mother-of-pearl-and-emerald variegated synth-pop, built on precarious structures and gracefully suspended between the desire to possess form and the anxiety to elude it. A feigned vitality is on display right from the opening instrumental "Arrogance Gave Him Up", which kicks things off in a whirlwind of exploding snare rolls and carnival pinwheels, like a gentle hand placing a flower (an orchid, perhaps) in the hair of the extraterrestrial Bowie of "Speed Of Life".

The idea is precisely to insist on colours and materials, trying to give the songs the glimmer of the precious: "Skipping" is thus a dusky amethyst, an all-curves feline slinking through the shadow of an acoustic arpeggio, a funky bass, faint impressionistic brushstrokes of a Parisian café and the vocals of a Jacques Brel exiled in time; "It's Better This Way" is fine-grained onyx, with keyboard touches already pointing towards the noir accents of Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration"; "Club Country" is a dusting of purest topaz with metallic streaks, so infectious is that chorus which, duetting with the staccato of the semi-amplified guitar and the synthesizer's intrusions, spreads out into a malign game of mirrors.

Unfortunately, amid so many precious stones lurks also the costume jewellery of "Bap De La Bap" and "Nude Spoons", rather weak episodes that reveal how this sonic layering, when not backed by orderly songwriting, only leads to a constant overlapping of perspectives and, ultimately, to the loss of any centre of gravity. It's no accident that these very tracks would vanish from the tracklist on the German and American editions of the album, replaced by two songs salvaged from Fourth Drawer Down (the evergreen "White Car In Germany" and "The Associate").

"No", on the other hand, ends up being "the" masterpiece: a de-pigmented dub incredibly paired with a Balkan melody, in whose DNA you can trace the Massive Attack that would come (the piano chimes so heavy with reverb, the swarm of dying voices in the background, the bass levelled off at abyssal frequencies). As seductive as a bloodied lip.

Attention to songwriting (and especially melody) runs high, but ultimately it's the sound that is the true protagonist of Sulk. A sound that, like a gentler version of the maelstrom of Fourth Drawer Down, programmatically spills over the boundaries meant to contain it and scatters rose petals on the crimson carpet of a fame only ever dreamed of. A sound in which, nonetheless, something unresolved lingers, a weight of clouds casting its threatening shadow over an otherwise lavish, harlequin-coloured canvas. This is why Sulk can be seen, in a way, as the Associates' baroque period, the decadence of an Empire beneath whose gaudy make-up the crisis can already be glimpsed. And it's well known that, when a crisis is at the door, it often chooses the least opportune moment to reveal itself in all its harshness. As if on cue, for the Associates the point of no return would coincide, in full, with their moment of greatest glory.

…And Then They Were…One?!

October 1982: with the second single "Country Club" fresh off sensational sales and the third, "18 Carat Love Affair", settling for a more modest number twenty-one on the charts but still potentially promising commercial satisfaction, the band really seems on the verge of making the great leap, at least in quantitative terms. Alcohol flows in rivers, heroin too; money is also starting to pile up, but it gets squandered on frivolities, it's not an issue. What really starts to worry people is MacKenzie's behaviour: the former hundred-metre sprinter is now almost reluctant to summon the strength for the final dash, and even less ready to face an imminent, exhausting UK tour. Further complicating matters is Warner's almighty supremo, Seymour Stein, who appears out of nowhere and waves a six-figure cheque under Rankine's nose to convince the band to relocate to the States.

Faced with all this turmoil, the sphinx-like MacKenzie makes a drastic choice: like a wounded general (and presumably disgusted by the very business he had until then courted obsessively), he suddenly backtracks and flatly refuses to play live (which, in plain terms, means withdrawing from the battle for chart conquest). Rankine, unable to believe his eyes, slams the door and walks out. The Associates – the real ones – no longer exist.

Meanwhile, "Melody Maker" names Sulk album of the year and pumps up no end the sense of bewilderment felt in watching, incredulous, the collapse of one of the era's most prolific partnerships. "I still think very highly of Alan as a musician," MacKenzie would confess in 1983. "What he didn't understand, though, was that it was his talent that should have given him security, not the money or the perks we got because of it. He was insecure and completely consumed by money." Words that sound a bit odd coming from someone who, until a few months earlier, craved success just as much as his departed partner, but which manage to capture the soul of this all-too-volatile, capricious street urchin.

A question: is it possible that, in his fifteen minutes of glory, the dandy from Dundee caught a glimpse of his own face reflected in the mirror ("Even the greatest stars see themselves in the looking glass", Kraftwerk would remark impassively) and recognized himself as part of that merciless food chain in which the artist is just one link, and not even the most important one? Possible, certainly. The fact remains that "Billy didn't want to become part of what Joni Mitchell called the 'star-making machinery' behind pop success," explains Max Hole, former head of A&R at Warner. "What's more, he delighted in chaos. He was capable of disappearing for a week and holing up in Dundee, which obviously drove Alan absolutely mad."

Be that as it may, until 1984 the singer stays on the sidelines of the business, watching from his living room as the New Pop crowd marches on unstoppably with their parties running till dawn. In the end, though, he can't resist and, overwhelmed by a crowd loudly demanding an Associates comeback, puts the band back together with guitarist Steve Reid and keyboardist L. Howard Hughes. The singles "Those First Impressions" and "Waiting For The Loveboat" follow in quick succession, poised between siren-like swaying and syrupy chanting, with cloying sax flourishes and bubbly rhythms. Deep down, they're not even that bad, taken in small doses.

The new LP Perhaps (Wea, 9 February 1985) completes the "synth" metamorphosis and comes across as a fairly discreet artistic flop compared to the two previous works. Several producers take turns at the console, but, with a few exceptions, the sonic richness of Sulk remains a distant mirage. For its part, the festering abscess of Fourth Drawer Down has by now fully healed, giving way to the rapt contemplation of aseptic surfaces (the title track), although in a few episodes faint touches of light and shade persist (the epic "Thirteen Feelings", the Devo-like cybernetic ruckus of "Helicopter Helicopter"), capable of bringing back to the nostrils faint traces of the good old days.

No longer able to rely on Rankine's talent as an arranger and multi-instrumentalist, MacKenzie leans entirely on his melodic gift and crafts ballads that reveal, once again, his latent operatic soul ("Breakfast"); all things considered, though, the most successful moments are those in which he tries to echo "Party Fears Two", as in the moving "The Stranger In Your Voice", which follows its structure to the letter, or in the desolate bla bla of "Don't Give Me That I Told You So Look" and that "treated" piano weeping its sad, inconsolable refrain. Thoroughly infectious, on the other hand, is the bass-drums pairing of "The Best Of You": a tense, dramatic number, all synthesized strings dancing at the edges of the sonic spectrum and vaguely black-inflected female vocal inserts – as new pop convention dictated – that wouldn't have been out of place on Sulk. A piece of advice: put just these last three tracks on loop and forget about (almost) everything else.

Five whole years pass between Perhaps and Wild And Lonely (Circa, 24 March 1990), but aside from a lost album that wouldn't see the light of day until 2002 (the aptly titled The Glamour Chase) and an inevitable label change, what emanates from the grooves is only the laboured breathing of a man now floundering both in art and in life (reports tell of a MacKenzie by now broke and increasingly hooked on heroin).

The tracks glide along, polished and stretched out for far too long, especially given the evident lack of inspiration, while every attempt to work on the sound is thrown out the window in favour of a production flatness enough to make your hair stand on end. "Just Can't Say Goodbye" and "Something's Got To Give", two of the more listenable tracks, sound like ugly copies of Pet Shop Boys from the "Introspective" era; the rest settles for anonymous melodies ("When There's Love", "People We Meet"), with the inevitable melodramatic interludes of "Strasbourg Square" and the title track making clear once more the maudit nature of our man.

Sales of this record and of the following album Outernational (Circa, 1992), credited to MacKenzie alone, are disastrous to say the least, plunging the frontman into an even darker despair: "I don't consider myself a tortured artist like Nick Cave, but sometimes the weight of suffering manages to obliterate everything exhilarating there is in life", he confides in one of the rare interviews he granted during this period. Need we say more?

International Loner(s)

While MacKenzie drags himself, heavy-footed, into the artistic abyss, the other half of Associates is certainly not faring any better. Holed up in Belgium, where he recorded three albums that were more or less ignored by everyone – The World Begins To Look Her Age (Crepuscule, 1986), She Loves Me Not (Virgin, 1987) and the instrumental The Big Picture Sucks (Crepuscule, 1989) – Rankine struggles to get back on track and stumbles along on outdated ideas and themes. That said, at least his debut, though unresolved and lacking in songwriting, manages to radiate rare flashes of talent in the form of romantic instrumentals (the Berlin-era Lou Reed feel of the pianistic "Love In Adversity", or that unlikely blend of Leo Kottke, Ennio Morricone and Vangelis that is "Elephant's Walk In The Morning") and soft pop-rock songs ("The Sandman", "The Best In Me") that aren't especially inspired, but aren't dreadful either. As a singer, Rankine isn't a tenth of what MacKenzie was, but he doesn't embarrass himself, and that's already a lot.

At one point rumours circulate of a reunion with his old partner, backed up by the fact that the two did indeed get back together in '93 to record around twenty tracks. There's even a new record deal put on the table, but MacKenzie doesn't take kindly to the restrictions Rankine imposes on the agreement ("Alan wanted it to be just the two of us and no one else, while I couldn't accept that. He didn't like that I was also working with Paul Haig, he saw it as a kind of betrayal"), and so the whole project goes up in smoke. A film we've already seen, one might say. Some of the tracks recorded during those sessions would end up on the forgettable compilation Associates: Double Hipness (V2, 2000), which mostly gathers demos dating back to the 1977-80 period. Strictly for fans.

Having shelved this latest misadventure too, Rankine has little choice but to reinvent himself as a writer of teen hits for boy bands, while occasionally teaching a "Music Business" course at Stow College in Glasgow. Ironically, it will be he who, indirectly, provides the foothold that lets Stuart Murdoch and his Belle And Sebastian break through (thanks Alan). Poor guy... who knows how many times he must have bitten his nails just thinking about what he and MacKenzie could have achieved, had the magic alchemy only lasted and had his former business partner not been so fickle. I can already picture Rankine, like a latter-day Gene Wilder in that sublime "Brooksian" vision, tossing in bed plagued by nightmares, screaming "Fate is fate, there's no escape for me now...". But then again, when fate has already been written for you...

Disappointed by the behaviour of his "businessman" counterpart, MacKenzie rolls up his sleeves and tries to save/rebuild his career: he records new material, signs to Nude Records (the label run by Suede) and, while waiting to give full shape to his plans, reconnects with the press. The artist is a river in full flood, unstoppable; a thousand ideas, a thousand projects. Then, suddenly, darkness: following his mother's death, a severe depressive crisis wipes the spark of enthusiasm from our man's eyes, and now he doubts everything, even himself.

At Christmas 1996, tail between his legs and a self-help book under his arm, he returns to Dundee and reconciles with his father: evidently he doesn't want to leave anything unresolved. "The night he arrived I noticed he couldn't sleep", his father James would recall. "He talked to me for hours, saying he loved his family, his brothers and sisters. He said he was tired and had no motivation left. He couldn't even watch TV, which wasn't like him at all. He'd hit rock bottom, but I didn't realise what he meant to do at that point".

On 22 January 1997, thirty-nine-year-old William MacArthur MacKenzie took his own life with a mix of alcohol and antidepressants. His body would be found by his father himself, lying on the veranda beside the kennels of his beloved dogs; next to the body, a note bearing his final words: "Sorry".

Released posthumously, Beyond The Sun (Nude, 1997) is the renewed gesture of an Icarus who never learned to fly low, even though his wax wings had melted on numerous occasions. The demos recorded (some completed by Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins) reveal a seasoned entertainer leaning mostly on piano ballads and acoustic-guitar pieces like "Blue It Is" or the gorgeous "Winter Academy", both steeped in a classicism somewhere between Jacques Brel and Bing Crosby, finally free of filters or impairments. This is a MacKenzie in evening dress, sitting composed, a cursed artist basking in gloomy tonalities and diminished chords, sometimes immersing himself in an alluring liturgical aura (the almost ambient keyboards of "At The Edge Of The World") or absorbing faint echoes of the trip-hop then sweeping across Europe ("Give Me Time"), while always keeping his gaze fixed on a musical world radically changed from the happy days of Associates.

"He was obsessive in the studio, but he was never satisfied with the results", his collaborator Steve Sutherland would recall. "He was eternally dissatisfied, a bit like Brian Wilson. What these people hold in their minds is unattainable: to them, everything sounds like a failure." Yes, a failure... it's truly impossible not to confront this burden. Who knows whether MacKenzie really felt like a failure as he returned home to his beloved/hated Dundee, a defeated son going back to seek comfort in the hearth he'd abandoned so early. Perhaps too maudlin an image, one he himself would have hated, I presume.

In the years that followed, nonetheless, a modest revival of interest in the band and its late frontman would emerge, as shown by various anthologies and live material released throughout the '90s and into the following decade (the interesting Radio One sessions, the collection of MacKenzie's final, unreleased recordings, split evenly by One Little Indian between the two compilations Auchtermatic and Transmission Impossible, etc.). It's the first sign of that "Eighties" revival that would rage at the dawn of the new millennium and allow the Scottish duo to resurface as a period souvenir, commonly linked to an aesthetic perhaps excessively maligned, but one in which, on the other hand, it's extremely easy to get trapped like flies in treacle.

Now that Associates are held at a safe temporal distance (as if before they were bothersome or unsettling, precisely because they were so "different"), it seems those exquisitely musical qualities that, more than twenty-five years ago, had much of the specialist press crying miracle, are also starting to resurface. The path seems the right one: all it would take is to adjust the aim slightly and remember that beyond Sulk there's also a certain Fourth Drawer Down crying out for revenge at not yet being hailed as it deserves. Never mind, time will prove it right. Or at least that's the hope.

Words (Between the lines of age)

Allow me to close this long piece with a quick – but, unfortunately, not entirely painless – look at one of the most evident and unjustly ignored traits of that ambiguity which I have elected (perhaps arbitrarily, who can say...) as the summa of the Scottish duo's entire poetics: the lyrics. Too many articles from that era prefer to skirt around the issue, limiting themselves to a passing mention of those "barely decipherable lyrics" which, as such, seem destined for the scrapheap in a society that demands clarity and clear-cut positions. Faced with this general lack of interest, it would be easy to give in to temptation and load an area, where play (in its highest and most fruitful sense) often reigns supreme, with disproportionate meaning, but that too, of course, would not be right.

So how should one approach the lyrics of Associates conscientiously but, at the same time, without getting carried away? Well, a good starting point is to avoid hiding behind unintelligibility as a pretext for ruling out any attempt at analysis from the outset: "If Associates are finding the flaws in human mechanisms and then exposing them, then I think that's our purpose" is the (very vague) suggestion MacKenzie offers up on a silver platter for the benefit of whichever fool (ahem...) intends to set out on this undertaking.

An undertaking that smacks of a challenge, a genuine duel between the listener and a refined language that likes to exhume archaic terms and, passing through the "virtual" symbolism of a T.S. Eliot ("Fourth Drawer Down" is the equivalent of his famous wasteland, but without the regenerative optimism of the ending), revel in the swaying rapture of remembrance. It's no coincidence that, whenever people have struggled to get past the dualisms of Associates' music, they've spoken of a fascination with an apocalyptic imagery that clashes irreversibly with nostalgia for something lost, something remote: an "ideal" past that chains us to a sad reflection on the present. It's a very useful shortcut (and an accurate one, it seems to me), but it doesn't capture the magmatic quality and disorder of something that, more often than not, degenerates into a Burroughs-school cut-up, prone to running on for miles before realising the limits of its own engine (that is, of language itself).

"What do you want, the moon?", MacKenzie might shriek in the face of such a barrage of stentorian statements. After all, his words could seem like a mere escamotage, an escapist trick not so far, on a formal level, from the dogged pursuit of nonsense carried out by the old lions of Canterbury (the phonetic poetry of "A" seems like a blend of the Soft Machine's "Coincise British Alphabet" and Hatfield & The North's "Alphabet Song": “Leave out U the leave out V keep W, Y because of Z/ Zed is the black sheep of the alphabet/ Zed is the masculine letter”).

In truth, it seems to me that the defining trait of the Associates' writing is the mimicry of feelings, if not the fallible (though no less interesting for that) attempt to become the expression - and indirect investigation - of a "fantastical" collective subconscious of old, stern Europe. As it happens, in those very same years, on the other side of the Atlantic, a certain Michael Stipe was carrying out an analogous operation, drawing on a different imaginary - rural, pioneer America, etc. - but with the same intent of reinventing history, breaking it down, deforming it at will through the creative engine of fantasy and imagination.

In this new light, such sibylline verses appear as coded messages cunningly devised to throw the exegete off the scent (“Tell me Easter’s on Friday and I’ll splint my hips/ Tell me Easter’s on Friday and I’ll bruise my lips/ And if I must be frank well I must be tone deaf”... But what on earth does that mean?) or as confessions that drag on tirelessly amid second thoughts and internal metamorphoses.

If the language of The Affectionate Punch is plain but fragmentary, confined to circular movements of verbs and images (the utterly fascinating "His jawline's not perfect but that can be altered" from "Transport To Central", "The affectionate punch draws blood" repeated to the point of exhaustion in the title track) or to snapshots of marsupial life firmly rooted in its own habitat ("Logan Time", "Paper House"), on Fourth Drawer Down it is instead dominated by strategic puzzles worthy of Brian Eno or fibrous sculptures born from the mind of a slightly less excessive Matthew Barney (“Hypothermic ice cubes are melting down/ With prisoners from BSA and the Royal Crown/ A fertilising agent for the parasitic fool/ Well, he drinks double hernias and spits out wooden stools” from "Message Oblique Speech"). A sooty universe in which director MacKenzie, like a curious hybrid of the most noir Orson Welles and the most "existenzialist" David Cronenberg, steers the camera and manages space through sudden flashes of light, pursuing a kind of emotional genealogy among places drained of life (“Aberdeen’s an old place/ Dusseldorf’s a cold place, cold as spice/ Slide your way through Zurich/ Walk on eggs in Munich (…)/ I’m not the one for surgery/ Premature senility/ White car in Germany/ Anonymous like bathrooms (…)” from "White Car In Germany") or veering into verses rich with visual predicates (consider the tragic body count of "Q Quarters", one of the cruellest examples of the leader's "visual" skill: “Obsolete children/ Their populations died en masse/ Concrete civilians/ Statues to the house of rest/ Washing down bodies/ Seems to me a dead-end chore/ Floors me completely/ Beauty drips from every pore”).

The realization of emotional emptiness becomes gradually more intricate, and abandonment is torn apart by incongruous voices: here are the shards of a finished relationship scattered across the ballroom - we won't say dancefloor, no - of "Party Fears Two". Sulk, as a result, softens the graininess of Fourth Drawer Down, but not the violence of its imagery (“Tore my hair out from the roots/ Planted them in someone’s garden/ Then I waited for the shoots/ Then I waited for the shoots” from "No"), nor the vanity of conceptual flourishes that recall the frail incompleteness of a Syd Barrett (“At all’s two words, could they be soldered as one/ Therein lies the pseudonim/ You think you’ve learned to know someone and find/ That you don’t know, don’t know all’s at all” from "Club Country"). Having abandoned obscurity, the fog now swells with flesh and clothing, taking on the appearance of showroom dummies staring at us from shop windows or part-time clerks lost in the Sunday dens of the new romantics (“…We’re always sickening at the Country Club/ Your limitations are our every care/ Every breath you breathe belongs to someone there”).

The illusion of fame, however, pushes him to overreach, and our would-be prophet, blinded by the spotlights, soon runs short of ammunition and (anti)slogans. As the music fades, the vocabulary grows poorer too, reduced to the bare statement of his own pleasure/pain, with no veils, no game. And if the game disappears, along with the taste for strategy and "altered" paths, then the fragile appeal of the verses loses substance as well. There's just enough time for one last verse of stripped-down emotion (“The stranger in your voice sings songs/ You’ve never heard before/ The shadow of a legionnaire/ Who’s here to even score/ Exiled in a dreamworld/ North south east and west/ From where I’m standing I can see/ Love triumphs by request/ Where all you need is disappointment/ To end all your disappointments” from "The Stranger In Your Voice") before the Associates chapter closes under the banner of sloppiness. What remains are MacKenzie's tousled curls and his stylish hats, that way he had of hiding emotions behind a mocking little smile. His titanic voice, above all.

Of course, this reading may seem confused or contradictory, and for that I ask forgiveness, but what isn't, in the test-tube world of the Associates (and even in our own reality)? What we're allowed to do is try to challenge its limits and thus attempt to pierce its shell, quietly relishing every tiny success. It's a challenge, as I said, exactly like confronting their music. There's no master key. Open one door, and a hundred others close. Some "let you in and out, but never open" (here Yorke & co. come to my rescue). It demands far more patience than would seem necessary, but always less than you'll have needed to reach (hopefully) the end of this piece, whose sole purpose is to make you want to listen. Always remembering that trying to solve the Associates puzzle is a bit like setting off in search of the Hortensia celebrated by Rimbaud: a tangle of paths that seem to lead everywhere but which, in the end, elude the vanishing point and lead nowhere, since true mysteries remain such even, and especially, when one sets out to solve them.

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