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SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK
By Pepsi Sheen |
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"Love & Rockets, Pink Guitars, Here's Your Passport To The Stars..." -S.S.S. "Someday! Someday! Dominion! Some Say Prayers and Some Say Prayers and I Say Mine! -Sisters Of Mercy
 Putting
aside my deep rooted resentments of my most cherished old friends, teenage
idols, and sentimental favorites all selling out and the icy, empty,
arctic distances, misunderstandings, severed alliances, and wasted
potential created by these senseless class divisions, I can sometimes
really still appreciate a good half hour or so of "FLAUNT IT",
the epic, superfuturistic debut of SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK, the only
techno band I'll likely ever be nostalgic for. They were a fabulous
disaster flash metal suicide rock opera for the "greed is good" 80's- the
decade this era makes look like the sixties, in spite of Dallas, Dynasty,
and Robyn Leach.Yana Yaya and Magenta Devine! Tony J - the snide twat pompous $paceboss Donald Trump/Malcolm McClaren Wannabe pushbutton supervillain in the Armani suit with the potted palm on his head getting back at Billy for breaking all those "Promises, Promises", with his Bill Aucoin (mgr. 70's KISS) and Keith Forsey (Simple Minds producer, wrote Breakfast Club theme) masterminded sell out disco "Mony Mony/Vital Idol" shite remixes by hiring in a whole room full of disposable Billy Idol lookalikes. Lead vocalist/Elvis 1990, DIRTY DEG spawned from the same clique of British clubkid kooks as Marilyn and Boy George, a 12 foot tall transvestite Rocky Horror on pyro-spewing roller skates! A lobster-faced space cowboy with a pineapple on his head. SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK and Texas Billy Idol spinoff, CHARLIE SEXTON (also produced by Forsey) were the post new wave, commercialized punk pop late 80's stars that first made the unloved likes of me seem attractive to all the pleasant valley sundae, cherries and cream skinned, "Frankie Say Relax" fishnet wearing, midwestern, Madonna wannabes at my suburban high school. The Cramps, and Suicide, and T.Rex and the Sex Pistols all discofied for the BANK generation of material girls and Miami Vice dorks. The $paceboss teams with Georgio Moroder and a bunch of Doktor Avalanche drumbeats to make all I loathe-disco crap, marketing, image purchasing, money mongering, crass commercialization of our most sacred rock'n'roll iconography, all seem really fun and positive for five minutes, when they made the cover of every single teeny bopper magazine in the world. I've always maintained some frayed old SMASH HITS pin-up on the wall of almost every nasty squat or riverside bed-sit I've ever ended up briefly rooming in. If I had to recommend some SPUTNIK related product to the unwashed, up and coming, sleaze legionnaires of today, it'd be to look for their campy videos with the oversized cell phones, helicopters, and Marvel comic books superhero silhouettes from some pirate video operation, or check E-BAY for the beautiful, glossy "Regeneration" photo book I picked up from Tower records 10 or 12 years ago. Sputnik were like Hanoi Rocks and "Too Fast For Love" put in a blender with really bad, redundant electronica, "Lost In Space", "Shogun Warriors", "Clockwork Orange", Micronauts and Power Rangers, "Lifestyles Of The Rich & Famous", Japanese anime, the Village People, the gay pride parade, Wigstock, Studio 54, the X-Men comic books, and Andy Warhol's Factory holding court in the back room of Max's Kansas City, and preceded all the soulless, vapid, unlistenable disco shite as well as all the decadent glamdustrial that was to follow from My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult to Stalking Alyssa. Also worth seeking out for kicks and giggles is the ROIR cassette, "First Generation"-alla Sputnik's raw four track demos. Both "Flaunt It" and "Dress For Excess" are awesome to still own on vinyl if you were there, but I wouldn't expect many youngbloods who've grown up in the sadly post-post-punk D.J. happy Fat Boy Slim dance music era to appreciate all the tedious "Shut Up Shut Ups" and Ferris Bueller's Dated F-1 elevenings. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ ATARI BABY... |
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Before FRANCOIS, NEAL X had the Greatest Hair in Rock. Sputnik were the original haircuts that killed. The pompadours that ate Tokyo. Neal's giant 'do outclassed Idol, Sexton, and all three Stray Cats with it's vulgar ambition and sheer audacity. He wore silver lame' suit jackets, ice cream pink tuxedo shirts, and Colonel Sanders ties, and had a great big hollowbody guitar with a hammer and sickle on it. He could only seem to play one or two tawdry Bolan/Thunders riffs with like, decades of slapback echo added on-alot like Andy Taylor from Duran Duran, but with a contemptuous, switchblade attitude too nasty for the champagne swigging, bubblegum smacking Durannies. My idea of the ultimate guitar hero, circa 1986, was Neal X, Andy Taylor, or Charlie Sexton. Just play Bang A Gong, legs splayed, with great hair and a sneer on yer kisser. Jagger lips, Mike Monroe cheekbones, Elvis on steroids outfits and a devil may care stray cat strut. Malcolm McClaren's red patent leather on rockabilly rent boys that Tony mighta ordered outta some catalogue, rebel by the hour. What a cynical bastard that TJ was. The Mark Kostabi ("They'll Paint In A Cage For Minimum Wage") of glam shock. A prophet without honor in his own land. Turned out, he was right about all of it, though, wasn't he? |
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The heartbreaking part of all this snide, jiveass Colonel Tom Parkering is
that much of it seemed to have started out as pained parody,
self-deprecating, brutally honest, obnoxious, highbrow satire for the
wounded Old Romantics set, but the prevailing ethos has so utterly
assimilated the audio advertisements gags and shameless Super Crook Blues
cavalier, unapologetically imperialist attitudes, to the point where
nearly everyone I ever thought was half-assed cool just wants to get rich
or die trying. But if you ain't insulated like old TJ in some swank London
mansion ordering in geishas and designer drugs and Chinese food and yukkin'
it up on-line with all your virtual friends from the Japanese Fan Clubs,
that joke just isn't funny anymore. Not to the rest of us, who are still
stuck outside here, in the mean spirited, life imitates reality show,
static tundra with the Beyonce's and No Doubts and Nellys, and Diddys, and
Ushers, and R.Kellys and "my humps, my humps, my lovely lady
lumps" on super saturation, shelling out for a $20 Clash t-shirt from
K-Mart, while wondering what the fuck ever happened to love and friendship
and heart and soul and road trips and bonfires and motel weekends and
drinking and dancing, and
real relationships and real experiences, and real emotions, and real songs
that had emotional resonance like all those sincerely beautiful tunes that
Tony James was once so instrumental in co-creating with and for the Lords
of The New Church, Generation X, Sisters Of Mercy, and Whores Of Babylon.
Bring back the heart, Tony. Like the insufferable Black Eyed Peas recently
rapped, "Where Is The Love?" (Cue Stiv's:) "Do you believe, do you
believe, do you believe in magic?" FLEECE THE WORLD... |
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I guess it must be said here that the songs themselves were horrendous crap. S.S.S. were the ultimate triumph, at the time, anyway, of smirking decadence, hedonistic opulence and flimsy facades over any kind of substance or sentiment. Everybody bought the t-shirts, nobody listened to the music, a lot like that band CRASS, come to think of it. Tony James rejected Annie Lennox of Eurythmics fame when he was assembling the Sputniks cos they weren't looking for a girl singer and I bet she's glad now. It's a shame that Tony quit writing real songs, cos this is the cat that wrote "Russian Roulette" and co-authored all those vintage Generation X songs that have soundtracked my whole life, so we KNOW he's got it in him. When I was corresponding with him a few years back, right around the release of that Gen X "Sweet Revenge" album, he was fairly dismissive of GEN X, preferring to keep flogging this Sputnik concept 20 years on, having long lost Chris Kavanaugh to B.A.D., nobody knows where Roy Mayhew went, and one assumes Martin Degville quit over money squabbles, as presumably, James owns all the publishing and I kinda doubt their live appearances in odd parts of the world generate enough in ticket sales or merchandise to pay the bills. |
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From what I
understand, DEGVILLE left after "Pirate Space", their third "album"
flopped in the mid-90's, James pushed guitar hero Neal X into the
spotlight, and now, he's down to warbling a "special version" of the much
cherished Gen X classic, "KISS ME DEADLY", himself. It's kinda sad,
really. I mean, SPUTNIK were never taken that seriously by anyone but Tony
James, but back in the 80's, we didn't care about substance, we were kids,
just thrilled to play along.
TEENAGE THUNDER... Back then, I
still believed in magic and was not afraid to die, and that naiveté got me
places. One night, I was watching Night Tracks on WTBS cos we didn't have
MTV yet and as I was soaking-in all those video images of Dexy's Midnight
Runners, and Culture Club, and Hall & Oates, and Human League, or whoever,
I guess I started thinking more and more about Duran Duran frolicking
around with all those exotic beauties and the fruity tropical drinks, and
Prince and Billy Idol and Adam Ant, and knew I had to get away, like when
the Beatles split for Hamburg. I guess I Always felt a calling for
rock'n'roll since my Gram used to dress me up like Elvis as a small child,
and then I started watching those old Monkees reruns, got in to the
Beatles. By the time I got hipped to Keith Richards and Jim Morrison, it
was really all over for me. Eyeliner was my golden ticket out of
dullsville, daddies! I may have been from nowhere and gone home to no one,
but by the time I'd turned 15, I figured I'd learned everything I ever
needed to know from David Bowie's "Scary Monsters & Super Creeps", and the
video for "White Wedding". Pick it up! Take Me Back Home, Yeah! BIG IN JAPAN... |
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SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK were like the original, phony pretty boy 80's rock group for kids who'd graduated from Duran Duran. The in-joke among all the gender bending, 120 Minutes watching, leopardskin creeper wearing, glossy music magazine buying, gothic cutter crowd. The metal dudes scoffed, wanted to fight you for having a picture of 'em on your person, but all the velvet draped, panda eyed little Siouxsie Sioux sorceresses seemed to understand! Who was YOUR favorite SPUTNIK? The Spaceboss or Neal? Roy looked the most like Billy, but Michelle says Chris was the cutest, etc., etc. SPUTNIK. Gene Loves Jezebel, the Cure, Bauhaus, Jesus & Mary Chain, the Alarm, Sisters Of Mercy, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Flesh ForLulu, New Order, then, later, Depeche Mode, those were the beloved bands in the circles I traveled. I was mostly into the Cult once I heard "She Sells Sanctuary", and the Dream Academy, and Billy Idol. The enigmatic
Tony James has been a part of almost all our fave groups from the Flash
Metal Renaissance. GENERATION X. SPUTNIK. JOHNNY THUNDERS. |
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I still miss real rock'n'roll, just like Ian Hunter. I guess I'm getting old. Wasn't Tony James supposed to form some grandiose comeback band with his best mate MICK JONES after STRUMMER died? I wish they would play rock again. No more key-tar space basses! GOOD SONGS! Joe Strummer's last few records employed loads of trendy gadgets and world music dance gimmickry, but they were still the best real rock'n'roll albums since Ian Hunter's "Rant", cos he bothered to write some great tunes and put much beat poet heart into the lyrics! Meanwhile, Billy Idol's "DEVIL'SPLAYGROUND" was not only more consistently great than either his solo debut or "Rebel Yell", but chock full of heartfelt songs that remind one of the untouchably brilliant GEN X!!!! How vindicating, that the much mocked cartoon playboy of the 70's Bromley contingent whom Johnny Lydon memorably referred to as, "Head Without A Brain", is at his all-time, post GEN X creative peak, while the rest of his class are boring us with old fart cash-in, milk the past, rehash, and radio shows phoned in from their L.A. tanning beds! |
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Listen here, wolf child, if it ain't got no real heart in it, it ain't worth your time. That's why I don't suffer to be in one of these jive so-called bands no more, cos nobody's willing to put their heart in it. They all think it's baseball. Sports. Competition. Even like, five or six years ago, I still had a ragged army of mangy old hold-outs who despised what we called "band whoring", which meant you'd gladly compromise one's loudly trumpeted ideology, or at least their preferred plastic punk image, to get with the band that's got a paycheck coming, slavishly chasing music trends, jumping on bandwagons, lowering one's standards, etc. Anymore, my former gang of heartbroken and weather-beaten associates are so desperate for any excuse to squeeze into their old Danzig belts, and apply some make-up one more time, that they'd play gladly jump at the offer to play behind any laughing stock mediocrity, so long as there's the promise of a free beer, or some time onstage, in front of young girls is being offered, and I can't really say I blame them. |
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There's nowhere to
go, no reward to be had even if you do create something fresh and alive,
what can you get I want nothing to
do with anything that whiffs of mercenary, mediocre, or crass social
angling. Have a ball, lads, but leave me out. I'd rather stick to my guns
alone here with my three day old coffee and cigarette butts and CLASH
books than pay-to-play 1987's old excrement to super rich 21 year old Hot
Topic wearers. Slick marketing and jet set lifestyle pimping just ain't
that funny no more. -Frankie
Teardrop |
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