Chameleons

Progenitors of countless dark-tinged offspring, the Chameleons were born in Middleton, which they ironically nicknamed "Monkey Town", a small town just a stone's throw from central Manchester. The decay of the urban centre seeped deep into the sound of bands such as Joy Division and Fall, as well as other players on the post-punk scene, who found their essential meeting point at the Hacienda, the nerve centre and prime mover of a revolution that spread through a kaleidoscopic sound, one that would project a new musical world previously only vaguely imagined in the minds of a chosen few.

By the late Seventies, Middleton had already become a dull, limiting place to live; the grim buildings and grey fumes of a post-industrial civilisation perfectly embodied the spleen of decay these people were used to dealing with day to day. Yet a faint light seemed to be gilding the town's walls. A new artistic vision, a kind of dying black hole, flickering intermittently with rays of progress, of deep and soothing humanity. The "No Future" howled at the top of his lungs by John Lydon seemed to belong to a distant past. A new kind of music, rich in introspection and sounds inconceivable until then, seemed poised to take root in those cramped, claustrophobic spaces, destined to become one of the contemporary epicentres of international pop-rock.

The Chameleons - who, on Reg Smithies' suggestion, were almost named Up The Down Escalator - formed in 1981. On the verge of signing to Cbs, the band walked away from a substantial payout in order to hold on to their own musical vision. Mark Burgess's words on the matter were telling: "They promised us a dream, but we wanted to stick to our sound, our ideas. We felt like one single, unique thing".

The power and immediacy of many of the tracks on "Script Of The Bridge" make the album's modest success almost incomprehensible, unreasonable even, especially when compared to contemporaries such as Echo And The Bunnymen, Cure or U2, who probably only had better timing on their side.

Take "Don't Fall", which opens "Script Of The Bridge". The massive, hammering rhythm section, the unsettling, menacing, hypnotic guitar riff, Burgess's voice seeming to rise from the deep darkness of a cave. Try not to mouth along to its killer refrain, or not to quiver with anticipation when the darting guitar arpeggios are gripped in the suffocating vice of the flanger. The rational explanation for why a post-punk classic like this, or the even more granite-solid "Monkeyland" (which boasts another chorus as recognisable as it is irresistible), isn't remembered alongside the likes of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "The Killing Moon" probably lies more in Burgess's lesser charisma as a frontman than in any shortcoming in the music itself.

As often happens, though, the quietest records - and "Script Of The Bridge" certainly is one, given the scant recognition it received - are the most revolutionary, capable of scattering seeds amid general indifference that are destined to sprout where no one expects them to. The quiet revolution of "Script Of The Bridge", which for this writer begins with "Here Today" (which, rather than building its drum rolls towards the usual epic chorus, sinks eternally into dreamlike arpeggios instead), has a reach as impalpable as it is far-ranging.

The ethereal keyboards that suspend "Second Skin" and the delicate guitar crackle that opens "Less The Human" would leave an indelible mark on dream-pop, just as it's hard to imagine that the gentle reverbs applied to the guitars on "Up The Down Escalator" had no influence on shoegaze, especially its more blurred, celestial strand (think of "Ferment" by Catherine Wheel or Slowdive).

The Horrors must have picked up a thing or two as well, to name a modern band, from the textures, the shaded timbres and the chiaroscuro at work on the Chameleons' debut album, of which their "Primary Colours" and "Skying" are direct descendants. Sticking with the more typically new wave shades that nonetheless shape most of the songs, it's no secret that "Script Of The Bridge" is among the favourite records of many bands from the post-punk revival of the 2000s, Killers and Editors above all.

Starting out as raw, rough-edged post-punk, "A Person Isn't Safe Anywhere These Days" gradually sheds its more thunderous guitars and ventures, on nothing but a sturdy rhythmic backbone, into an enchanted place, a boundless limbo without barriers where the arpeggios radiate outward like supple ripples on water. The Chameleons' instrumental skill in shifting from one register to another is immeasurable, and this song is a striking example of it, with the extraordinary Reg Smithies playing guitar the way a Romantic-Symbolist painter would paint.

"Up The Down Escalator" (which we might translate as "climbing an escalator that's heading downward") is a breathless dash between clashing moods. On one side, the joyous guitars and the overexcited rhythm section create a celestial, jubilant sound; on the other, Burgess notices something is wrong, a sour note, has a bad premonition, finds himself surrounded by blank stares, crowds pressing in, feels dizzy. But the song's energy is unstoppable, destined for eternity to fill the most discerning, darkest dancefloors.

"Less Than Human" (originally released as the B-side of "In Shreds" in 1982) was re-recorded for the album; the circular sound we hear in the background comes from a toy instrument called the "whirly pipe", a corrugated plastic tube open at both ends: one end is wider, the other narrower, and the faster it's swung, the higher the pitch of the note produced. We had already encountered it on "Monkeyland".

The noises that pave the way for "Pleasure And Pain" are a strange cross between the massive echoes of Big Ben's gears and the toll of a hollowed-out ghost bell. The track is rigid, every corner chipped away by a kind of timelessness that clears the slate-grey sky of the world's first industrial city. "Thursday Child" is a hymn to lost youth, a magnetic question mark hanging over one's own future, over one's condition as a human being. "Paper Tigers" tells of a furious row with a well-known band of the time that the Chameleons were due to support, though without naming them. Burgess's words on the matter are telling: "It's a paranoid lyric, but it's the kind of paranoia rooted in a real and violent vibe, almost imagined. Like being in a bar and knowing something unexpected could happen at any moment, but you're unable to do anything about it and you just let yourself be swept along by that current".

The majestic close of "View From A Hill" leaves no room for misunderstanding, it is the total essence of "Script Of The Bridge". Burgess recounts taking acid with the rest of the band and climbing Tandle Hill to look out over Manchester's sprawling suburbs. The first part of the track, in fact, aims to evoke that hallucinated experience through music as well, via a psychedelia that's off-kilter yet ethereal at the same time. A metaphysical track in its use of language, in which the imagination can do nothing but lose itself in the depths of a vital dream, a hope. It is the sulphurous warning of a generation, it is simply the bridge to one of the infinite possibilities of the future.

The cover artwork, designed by Smithies himself, on one hand anticipates the dissolves of dream-pop (overlapping landscapes, a sad and lost face, a pale rainbow barely emerging from cold yet peaceful shades of blue), while on the other it nods to the surrealism of progressive rock (a genre also evoked, moreover, by tracks like "Second Skin" and "A View From The Hill", with their multi-part structures).

Thanks to Federico Romagnoli for his consultancy.

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29/03/2020