Rip Rig + Panic

“If you really have something to express,
you'll find a way to do it”
(Gareth Sager)

“All I want is freedom and power.
I want the freedom to live as I want,
and the power to preserve that freedom”
(Rahsaan Roland Kirk)

Emerging in the thick of the punk explosion, the Pop Group quickly cut loose from its conventions, absorbing funk, dub, free jazz and hints of European avant-garde. Their music was a permanent collision between political agitation and sonic experimentation, in which the influence of radical thinkers, situationism, Marxist critique and the countercultures that had spread after the fateful 1968 coexisted with an ecstasy of noise and a wholesale rhythmic destructuring that was, nonetheless, far from immune to the hypnotic lure of groove. Yet it was precisely the extreme tension underpinning their sound that ended up consuming the band from within, already undermined as it was by deep internal rifts. On one side stood the increasingly dominant personality of Mark Stewart, intent on turning music into an openly political and ideological vehicle; on the other, musicians like Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith wanted to push the sonic exploration toward even more abstract territory, giving jazz-derived improvisation an ever greater role.

Gareth Sager and Mark Stewart in the Pop Group days

These artistic tensions were compounded by exhausting tours, poor earnings, drug abuse and the pressure of a music scene that was constantly raising the bar of radicalism. And so, in 1980, the group finally collapsed, having played the concert staged at Trafalgar Square in London as part of the huge Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) rally, which drew hundreds of thousands of people.
The Pop Group's split marked the end of an unrepeatable experience, but it didn't halt the creative path of its musicians. To understand how a project that was in some ways even more experimental, Rip Rig + Panic, could rise from those ashes, though, we need to go back to Bristol, the environment in which that musical vision had first taken shape. By the late Seventies, the city — an important port in southwest England — was marked by a strong multicultural identity and an intense artistic life. Its streets, small venues and community centres were meeting points for musicians, artists and students united by the desire to push past the boundaries of traditional musical genres. Out of this climate of constant experimentation grew a creative scene distinct from both London's and Manchester's.

Stokes Croft, Bristol, 1981

While elsewhere punk kept its more aggressive, direct character, in Bristol it became the starting point for a far broader musical exploration. Musicians absorbed the sounds of reggae and dub, spread by the large Caribbean community, as well as those of funk, jazz, electronics and the avant-garde. In the city's clubs — particularly those in the Stokes Croft and St Pauls areas (the latter sadly notorious for the riot of 2 April 1980) — it was quite normal to see, on the same night, punk bands, reggae sound systems and DJs busy experimenting with synthesizers and new technology all sharing the bill. As Melissa Chemam recalls in “What Underground Culture Has Given Bristol”, the DIY ethic, the lack of cultural infrastructure and the coexistence of reggae, post-punk and hip-hop created an environment in that city where artists were forced to invent their own spaces, venues and ways of collaborating. Out of this cross-pollination came music marked by more complex rhythms, deep basslines, electronic effects and an expressive freedom unknown to traditional rock. Songs increasingly abandoned conventional structures, alternating tension and improvisation, dark atmospheres and sudden melodic openings.
Bristol thus became a genuine sonic laboratory, where every influence was reworked into something new. As Geoff Barrow of Portishead would recall many years later, “I've always been wary of the idea of a 'Bristol scene', but before us there were already bands like Rip Rig + Panic: there really was something in the air moving everyone.” Label aside, what united those musicians was a natural inclination toward cross-pollination and experimentation, fostered both by their isolation from London and by the city's multicultural character.

Even after moving to London, Sager and Smith kept their ties to Bristol and its artistic community very much alive. In forming Rip Rig + Panic, however, they chose to shed the more rigidly political component of the Pop Group, which had channelled into its music, in radical and disruptive form, the strong social tensions that had run through the city throughout the Seventies. They instead envisioned a band in which criticism of the capitalist world would no longer be voiced through direct denunciation, but would manifest itself in the radicalism of the experimentation itself, turning sonic exploration into a genuinely subversive act.
Their musical influences shifted too: militant funk and dub remained part of their toolkit, but were joined by, and gradually gave way in importance to, free jazz — above all that of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Sun Ra and, last but not least, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, from whose album “Rip, Rig And Panic” they took their name. The choice was no accident: Kirk was practically a mythological figure for that generation of British musicians, fusing virtuosity — he could play three saxophones at once! — theatricality, African-American militancy and a total rejection of musical convention. The very title of his 1965 album evoked a music ready to tear apart settled forms, dismantle their structures and turn disorder into a creative principle.
Kirk had also included liner notes on that album which Sager and Smith surely appreciated: “'Rip' alludes to Rip Van Winkle (or to Rest in Peace): it's the condition of one who lives asleep. 'Rig' recalls rigor mortis, mental rigidity. 'Panic' is the reaction of someone confronted with something they believed impossible.”
As for Ornette Coleman, Sager loved the “funky, electric looseness” of “Dancing In Your Head”, released right in the middle of the punk explosion, and “the lightness of touch on 'The Shape Of Jazz To Come' and 'Change Of The Century'”, records that helped him discover “the wonders of improvised jazz.” One line of Ornette's stuck in his mind ever after: “When I found out I could make mistakes, I knew I was onto something.”
As for Sun Ra and Don Cherry, Sager had the chance to see them, alongside Smith, at the 1979 North Sea Jazz Festival, which convinced him that such stylistic freedom was the only road worth taking.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-1977) and the cover of the album “Rip, Rig And Panic” (1965)

Gareth Sager was one of the chief creative engines of Rip Rig + Panic. A central figure on the Bristol scene, he possessed a vast musical culture: he'd grown up listening to free jazz, kraut-rock, American funk, musique concrète, Jamaican dub and the European avant-garde, but a special place in his heart was reserved for Erik Satie, Frédéric Chopin and Claude Debussy. A pianist since the age of five and a saxophonist because he was struck, at thirteen, by “a photo of Andy Mackay with his saxophone on the inner sleeve of the first Roxy Music LP”, Sager had then discovered the guitar, developing an almost anti-rock approach in which what mattered was the idea of the “rhythmic racket” — a rhythmic din rooted in the conviction, borrowed from his beloved John Cage, that there are no fixed rules and that any means is valid if it achieves the maximum effect.
Bruce Smith, for his part, had cut his teeth listening to both the funk of James Brown and the electric jazz of Miles Davis, above all the epoch-making Bitches Brew. The architect of a dynamic, unstable drumming style marked by syncopated, irregular rhythms, Smith tended to constantly interact with the other instruments, generating a sense of controlled instability.

From left to right: Mark Springer, Bruce Smith, Sean Oliver, Gareth Sager and Neneh Cherry

The core lineup of Rip Rig + Panic was rounded out by Sean Oliver and Mark Springer.
Of Caribbean descent, Oliver was a bassist of remarkably open training, equally at home in funk groove and the hypnotic constructions of Jamaican dub. Sager had first seen him play at the Tottenham Court Road tube stop, on his way to a Pop Group show at the Leicester Square Ballroom. Realising the guy knew what he was doing (he had a fluid, hypnotic style), he invited him to play a couple of tunes before the band took the stage, and later asked him to take part in the group's final concert, held as part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally.
Raised between Germany and the United States, pianist, saxophonist and clarinettist Mark Springer came instead from a background steeped in both classical music and jazz (Keith Tippett and Cecil Taylor were his two greatest mentors), and had already crossed paths with Sager and Smith back in the Pop Group days, even landing a track of his own (bluntly titled “Springer”) on the compilation the band released in 1980 under the title “We Are Time”.

Although they had a clear idea of what they wanted to do, Rip Rig + Panic only found their definitive shape once Neneh Cherry joined the lineup; Sager and the others had come to appreciate her vocal qualities after seeing her perform with the Slits. The young singer (barely 16 at the time!) could already boast an artistic and personal path completely outside the norm. The biological daughter of African musician Ahmadu Jah and raised by trumpeter Don Cherry, Neneh had lived between the United States, Sweden and international artistic circles deeply tied to the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. In that environment she'd absorbed an idea of art as an open space, with no boundaries between music, performance and experimentation.
Having moved to London as a teenager, she quickly found her place within the post-punk and squat scene, moving through circles where punk, reggae, performance art and underground culture all coexisted. This background made her a presence utterly unlike the traditional rock singers of the day: on stage, her voice and her presence weren't confined to mere interpretation, but seemed like an ongoing improvisation of identity itself, blending physical energy, theatricality, spontaneity and a strong instinctive streak.
For Neneh, encountering Rip Rig + Panic was a revelation: “I realised straight away there were no rules, and that everything I'd listened to and experienced musically growing up could come into play. Before that I'd been on a sort of obsessive quest, but playing with them made me understand that music was about renewal and reinvention, that you could draw inspiration from anything and truly do whatever you wanted.”
Before her arrival, the band had limited itself to writing instrumental music, at most leaving room for the odd scattered vocal flourish from Sager and Springer.

Signed by Virgin, Rip Rig + Panic released their debut single, “Go! Go! Go! This Is It”/“The Ultimate In Fun (Is Going To The Disco With My Baby)”, in August 1981. They then recorded most of the material for their first album between Bury Street Studios in Clerkenwell, in the London Borough of Islington, and the Manor Studio, which Richard Branson had built in 1971 at Shipton-on-Cherwell, a village in Oxfordshire. Aiming to make their sound ever more “open”, akin to “a kind of collective contemporary orchestra” (in Springer's words), the band brought in David de Fries on trumpet, Ari Up of the Slits on backing vocals, saxophonist and, when needed, vocalist Dave "Flash" Wright, Susan Woo Honeymoon on violin, Sarah Sarhandi on viola, Alf Waite on trombone and Debbie Holmes on cello for the sessions.

The album came out on 3 September 1981 as a double set of 12" 45 rpm records, its cover featuring a detail from a nature photograph (“Leopard and Baboon”) by American photographer John Dominis, taken in Botswana in 1966 during a celebrated assignment that would first be published in January 1967 in “Life” magazine under the title “The Great Cats Of Africa”. Dominis's original photo (he would go on, in 1968, to capture the iconic shot of African-American 200m runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists on the podium at the Mexico City Olympics in protest against racial discrimination) shows a leopard about to attack a terrified baboon in the middle of the Kalahari desert. The original caption reads: “...this lone baboon cannot escape his pursuer... and turns to face him with one last terrified snarl...”.
Rip Rig + Panic cropped the photo down to just the portion showing the baboon, turning a snapshot of imminent death into an open, mysterious image — a move very much in keeping with post-punk aesthetics, whereby the meaning of an image, through cropping or montage, underwent a process of decontextualisation and, therefore, recoding.
The choice of such a cover, credited to Jill Mumford, was probably linked to the band's wish to highlight that predator-prey relationship reflecting the raw, instinctive energy underlying life itself — an energy also found in the music of Rip Rig + Panic. In that sense, the album's very title, “God”, might refer not to some undefined religious deity, but to the impersonal force of Nature, in which life and death are inextricably bound together.

If the cover anticipates, through images, some of the conceptual cores of “God”, it's the music that brings them fully to life. From the very first tracks, Rip Rig + Panic clearly outline a sonic language and an aesthetic-political vision also shaped by the band's cosmopolitan identity. As Bruce Smith recalled in the pages of Record Mirror, “Neneh is half-Swedish, half-African, and lived in New York for a long time; Bruce is from California, Gareth is Scottish, Springer is half-German, half-Jewish, and all three of us live in Bristol. These different experiences merge in the music. And that's a good thing, in the sense that we try to explore what we still don't know. All the different possibilities, without passively accepting what's imposed on us. Without just settling for what you hear on the radio. The fact is that music can communicate a form of freedom. A kind of spirit that's sorely lacking.”
The punk-funk groove of “Constant Drudgery Is Harmful To SOUL, SPIRIT & HEALTH” is rock-solid in setting up and/or confirming the listener's horizon of expectation, amid free-jazz flurries of sax and clarinet, piano slaps and assorted skewed flourishes. A manifesto of the band's chameleonic vision of music (and, ultimately, of their exploratory free-punk), the track takes a stand against the alienating mechanics of everyday life and wage labour, shouting to the world that “Constant drudgery is harmful to SOUL, SPIRIT and HEALTH”, almost paraphrasing what Karl Marx wrote in his "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844".

“WILHELM Show Me The Diagram (Function Of The Orgasm)” veers toward American minimalism, layering multiple piano lines to create a brief, surreal interlude in which, appropriating the theories of Wilhelm Reich (the psychoanalyst, a pupil of Freud, according to whom orgasm is not merely a reproductive act but a fundamental expression of vital energy), the band shows it can also “play” with highbrow avant-garde and with the driving forces of Sixties counterculture.
The Rip Rig + Panic “fusion” reaches a point of sublime evocative power on “Through Nomad Eyeballs”, a track that conjures a hallucinated caravan advancing under the relentless desert sun. The spirit of Frank Zappa hovers over the whole piece, though it's as if he were constantly needled by the pataphysical charm of David Thomas, who that very same 1981 would give voice, on his solo debut, to the “sound of sand” — and their “meeting of loving minds” still resonates on the joyous “Totally Naked (Without Lock Or Key)”.

On the sun-drenched “Change Your Life” (likely also inspired by Keith Jarrett's output in the Seventies), the percussion moves within territory bounded by Africa and the Caribbean, while Ari Up's voice takes on an almost ritual tone. If “God” as a whole can be read through the lens of the organic music theorised by Don Cherry, this track in particular can be said to embody its very essence. For the great trumpeter from Oklahoma City, organic music wasn't the individual expression of a single musician, but a collective process in constant transformation. In his vision, jazz could freely converse with African, Indian, Middle Eastern or European traditions, just as music could merge with theatre, the visual arts, education and family life. Together with his wife Moki, Don Cherry — convinced that music arose above all from one's relationship with others — constantly sought to break down the boundaries between art and life, turning his own home into a creative space and the concert into a genuine communal ritual.

In "Knee Deep In Shit", the fusion of disparate styles (hard rock guitars, hammering percussion, declamations somewhere between the caricatural and the austere, and the freely roaming jazz piano of an extraordinary Springer) conjures the idea of a society fully immersed in contradiction.
By this point it's clear that Rip Rig + Panic simply couldn't stand labels or the urge to pigeonhole genres and styles. Evidently following the ideas of John Cage, who - playing also on the very meaning of his surname - urged people not to shut themselves in prefabricated cages, nor to build new ones, however personal they might be, the English band already signals its vision of music in constant motion through the choice of song titles. Hence the nocturnal Middle Eastern suggestions of "Try Box Out Of This", with Sager's sax betraying an aching metaphysical pathos, but also the abrasive free-funk of "Howl! Caged Bird", repeatedly gashed by the organ's anarchic slashes. Not to mention "Shadows Only There Because Of The Sun", an invitation not to forget the deep relationship between darkness and light, from which one might infer that nothing can truly be itself unless it opens up to difference.

After lending her expressive scat to the feverish sketch of "Need (Do School You)", Neneh marks her final performance on "Those Eskimo Women Speak Frankly", which evokes the "street" proto-rap of Last Poets.
Solo (save for submerged scribbles of Japanese marimba), Springer then proves his great lyricism on "The Blue Blue Third", which, moving between jazz tradition and European impressionism, marks a moment of calm and introspection after so many sonic adventures.
With "Beware (Our Leaders Love The Smell Of Napalm)" we instead penetrate the mysteries and sounds of an imaginary Vietnamese jungle. Reading the title of this track, which could be interpreted as their own take on "fourth world music" by Jon Hassell, one can't help but notice the echo of the famous line delivered by Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece, "Apocalypse Now": "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".
Preceded by the humorous trifle "Miss Pib", "It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Brrod" closes the album by building an unstable structure, in which Cecil Taylor is set loose on the trail of Duke Ellington, who in 1931 wrote "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", reaffirming that what keeps music alive, beyond forms and conventions, is a matter of (rhythmic!) energy, risk and above all freedom - the very same freedom that led Rip Rig + Panic to transfigure "swing" into "brrod", a term essentially devoid of codified meaning, yet capable of embodying, precisely through its indeterminacy, the idea of a music freed from any preset rule.

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12/07/2026