Magazine

Shot by both sides. That's exactly how he felt, caught in the crossfire, Howard Trafford “Devoto” in the England of 1978, a country still consumed by punk fever, yet already prey to new suggestions and fascinations. He'd certainly done something drastic: quitting the Buzzcocks at the peak of their success, abjuring the dictates of punk. Prescient – given how things would turn out – opportunistic, or simply curious? Easy to say now, with hindsight; at the time it was, for almost everyone, a betrayal. “I don't like movements, I'm a capricious type,” he'd confided to the NME. And with the British press he'd gone further still, calling the vandalistic attitude of punks “silly” and declaring himself “tired of the noise and short of breath.” That maelstrom of distorted, ultra-fast guitars was clouding his words. And words – as we know – matter. All the more so if you're a former philosophy and literature student with a passion for Dostoevsky, who enjoys writing lyrics rather more cerebral than the period's average. Reconciling academia and punk isn't impossible, as the Wire of that same year's towering “Chairs Missing” would also prove. Especially when it happens by way of hybridization scientists like Brian Eno and David Bowie. From them, as well as from the debunking liturgies of the early Stooges, Devoto caught the spark. Berlin's 1977, the year of “Low” and “Heroes”, couldn't leave someone like him indifferent – restless and bored by definition, forever chasing new stimuli and new goals. “Bowie's and Iggy's albums had an enormous impact on me,” the former Buzzcocks leader would later admit. But there's no discontinuity here: the engine is still “negative energy,” the same force that had spawned the “no future” revolution and that, as Simon Reynolds recounts, for Devoto translated into a “culture of constant change.”

The itch, after all, was also infecting other punk forerunners like Stranglers and Ultravox!, determined to shake off the rote formula and open up to keyboards and sophisticated arrangements: precisely those prog fetishes that Sex Pistols and company had banned outright. Devoto thought the same way, dreaming of a new frontier capable of turning nihilism into decadent poetry and blending punk's jagged edges with the glam eccentricity of Bowie and Roxy Music, but also with the paranoia of kraut-rock and the more "glacial" side of funk and soul. So, while "God Save The Queen" had yet to rattle Buckingham Palace, in Manchester Devoto had already quit the band. The new one, Magazine, was born from an ad posted in Manchester's Virgin store: "Musicians wanted to perform and record fast and slow music. Punk mentality not essential." The prefix post- was already there in those lines; critics just had to slap it on.

This is how a quintet came together: alongside Devoto, Scotsman John McGeoch (guitar and saxophone), Barry Adamson, future Bad Seed, on bass, Martin Jackson on drums and Bob Dickinson on keyboards, soon replaced by Dave Formula. The latter, a seasoned musician with a past playing in a cabaret trio at the Ritz hotel, is the key element, destined to form a tightly-knit tandem with Devoto, compositionally too. Formula can claim the copyright on much of the following decade's sound: his dizzying, labyrinthine keyboard runs would become a constant reference point for wavers like Simple Minds, Ultravox and Japan.

"Shot By Both Sides" couldn't be anything but this debut's anthem. Crossfire, indeed, since on one side there was the risk of getting slapped with epithets like "Punk Floyd" — good-naturedly pinned on Wire by the hardline press of the day — while on the other there was also the risk of sounding pretentious to the ears of aficionados of that art-prog-rock which Buzzcocks had scalped and which Magazine, by contrast, would flirt with unreservedly, especially on the following album, "Secondhand Daylight". Paradoxically, it's "Shot By Both Sides" itself that stays stuck in the middle: still punk in spirit — not by chance it's credited to Devoto along with Pete Shelley, his former Buzzcocks bandmate — with that irresistible pop refrain steeped in a paranoid atmosphere, amid knockout guitar riffs, shifting tempos and increasingly neurotic vocals, right up to McGeoch's liberating solo, one of new wave's signature guitar parts, with its layered, colourful shadings that would later serve Siouxsie & The Banshees so well. The title's spark actually came from a trivial political argument between Devoto and his girlfriend ("Oh, you'll end up shot by both sides," she snapped), but according to Reynolds' compelling reading, it ties back to "the art-rock principle that what really matters is the individual effort to stand apart." A bold stance, in times of rampant ideology and political polarisation. "Shot By Both Sides" is Magazine's icebreaker: it climbs to No. 41 on the UK Chart and wins over John Peel, who would list it among his all-time favourite singles. The only thing to spoil the party is Devoto's unsettling performance on Top Of The Pops (see video alongside): caked in white face paint, he stays virtually motionless at centre stage in protest against miming, to Virgin's despair, as they watch the historic opportunity go to waste.

On the back of that blazing start comes "Real Life", manifesto of a new era, that of the synth-wave that would dominate both sides of the Atlantic for almost the entire following decade.

Four-to-five-minute songs replace punk's short bursts, the arrangements swell, with piano, synth and sax lending a hand to a guitar that — believe it or not — even indulges in solos. The opening notes of the album's opener, "Definitive Gaze", are an early synthesis of everything to come: funk bass, organ and sci-fi keyboards set up a convoluted dance for vampires, in which the guitar sound seems almost imperceptible, right up to the final crescendo, with the synths modulating at ever greater speed as the melody fades away. The shadow of pioneer Eno looms large, but it's above all a masterclass from Formula, now a latter-day Mike Garson with his surreal lounge pianism, now a celestial organist, now a man-machine with his android-like synthetic riffs. "My Tulpa" brings the guitars back to the fore, with a distorted lead scarring an organ part steeped in funky odours, before a blazing sax solo in the style of Mackay; Devoto slips in one of his delirious lyrics, where "Tulpa" is children's imaginary friend, invoked on the brink of a nervous breakdown ("I want to see you, dont you want to see me?... I've lost my way in my feelings").

The former Buzzcocks tearaway completes his transformation into a dandy — a surreal one, mind you, with that angular, receding-hairline face, like a possessed sprite smeared in eyeliner — giving life to songs unashamed to sound pompous, like the languidly Bowie-esque "Burst", or the tour de force of "Motorcade", nearly six minutes split between icy downpours of keyboards, frantic tempo changes and an almost glam-metal guitar solo (with lyrics that seem to allude to the assassination of John F. Kennedy). Even his singing, though not backed by any great technical skill, grows ever more incisive, deviant, paranoid.

Yet a typically British irony always underpins the operation, as in the mechanical ballet for bass, organ and synth of the splendid "The Great Beautician In The Sky", as sumptuous in its sound as it is sardonic in its lyrics, with Devoto declaiming lines like "I don't care to dance/ I don't want to dance/ I'm not going to dance" or "roses are red, violets are blue".

And while "The Light Pours Out Of Me" showcases McGeoch above all, playing a kind of acid-fried Manzanera, the closing "Parade" lets a bluesy sax glide over dense walls of keyboards and soft piano lines, turning out to be the closest thing to a ballad, with its hook "Sometimes I forget that we're supposed to be in love". Little is left to anchor them to punk, aside from the single, perhaps only "Recoil": two minutes of taut nerves, amid buzzing drones, hyperkinetic refrains and irreverent lines ("You scratch my back and I grow claws, falling in love awkwardly").

"Real Life" is post-punk's ground zero. It's the passing of the torch from the masters of art(glam)-rock (Bowie, Eno, Roxy Music) to a new generation of musicians, just as brilliant and narcissistic, eager to modernise rock using the most advanced know-how available. Magazine's trajectory would burn out within a few years, only to experience the most unpredictable of reunions in 2011, with the excellent "No Thyself". But even once the crossfire stopped, it would be too late for due recognition, although many — from Morrissey to Jarvis Cocker and Thom Yorke — would pay heartfelt tribute. As the late McGeoch would recall before passing away in 2004, "with Magazine we opened up a new frontier, we set the tone for the next 20-30 years, but we never made much money." The cruel fate of pioneers.

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18/01/2015