Magazine - Real Life
"You always collect your fists
When my shadow falls upon your hands
You're just giving body heat away
But they say you're a nice enough young man"
Tulsa
Lightning, in the Manchester sky, is a miraculous artifice, a malaise that inhabits thousands of lonelinesses, establishing a discontent that generates a conspicuous sense of satisfaction: where there is light, geniuses come out, like mushrooms on a September day. In 1977 Punk was an opaque, heavy, indigestible, annoying flash that had nothing to do with the introverted symptoms of the Cotton City. The working classes had depressed voices, the school was living on momentary stratagems, and, rather than the No Future, people were thinking about the present.
Magazine were the first true Post-Punk group, a fact to be considered totally alienating, since the very Mancunian sphere, was the major punk workshop in all of England. But the British musical Establishment had not reckoned with Howard Devoto, who, after forced coexistence with the punk engines of the Buzzcocks, could not remain anchored to a practice that had nothing brilliant, constructive, that was windowless under the gloomy sky of an urban agglomeration totally tilted toward depression. His departure from Pete Shelley's band was a refreshing birth, a fountain of fresh air in free fall within his swaggering, cunning, free and unhappy mind. Genius always lives surrounded by ordinary beings in order to reveal itself.
A group was born that stretched the minute length of songs, broadening the possibilities of expression, inserting talent as the starting point of a whole that was only partly to be referred to music.
Real Life: in the title all the force of those who live, of those who of pessimism do not know what to do with it, a revealing imprint of descriptive intentions, not photographs but x-rays: Howard wanted to enter the envelopes of the aspects of a city less and less succumbed to the London overpower. The sounds, in Punk, are a spurt of vomit with emptiness as spectator, where the soul dwells for two/three minutes and then dies, with no farewell. Devoto wanted to attend to the most important part of the music by injecting innovative patterns, rivers of hypnotic beer, cues born of yawns because he found that aforementioned musical form boring, useless, effervescent but ultimately incapable of galvanizing.
Nine spies, nine glaciers shifted near the equator, nine flare-ups (sometimes slow, sometimes not, but in each track the rhythm changes are a necessity rather than a mode), nine paintings, nine agglomerations where instincts are just a guess, not a dogma.
Only XTC’s White Music (will it be a coincidence that they have the same producer? I don't think so!) will know how to play with the thrust of a corpse like the one that had already breathed its last breaths in early 1977. Yes, no doubt about it: knowing how to mock the greatest musical deceptive form of the recent past was the greatest merit of these five swaggering souls, a brave, stubborn, and above all, mindless ensemble. Songs as question marks, shifting Western beams, limpid observations through lyrics that suddenly shifted the center of gravity of arguments, shrinking the illusion of people accustomed to criticizing and criticizing themselves. Words that flew over the discomfort of the city to sit in the vicinity of new uprisings, not instigating or sneering, but caring for the detritus. Only The Fall would do the same, and in fact the producer of this album would work with Mark E. Smith and co. in 1985.
John Leckie, who has worked as an assistant for John Lennon, Pink Floyd and many others, starts right from the Magazines to produce music, changing the role, the meaning, becoming a real thermometer of moods, propensities, compacting talent and project in order to be able to give the compositions dignity, sense and endurance. That's right: starting with this album we see Post-Punk side by side with Art Rock, in order to, I would say finally, remove the shackles from this new musical genre that would have risked a Punk-like drift. Here, necessarily, was the need to put new structures side by side, a Progressive embryo not in form but in its substance. There was a need to cross the line and let the music take the helm.
To do this, the band rummaged through the three cylinders, the three engines, the three expressive terminals-Devoto, Formula, McGeogh.
Outliers, anarchists but with nerves of steel, holders of intentions that tended toward patience where Punk preferred explosion. Every single track on this debut involves, on the listener's part, understanding the rivers of this quality that had been lost track of. These are metallic chills, skin excoriations, mental abrasions that need escapes and setbacks, trouble to be solved, strong personalities that decide to howl instead of scream.
Toxic, schematic music set toward coldness, where impetuses are governed to keep attention from dying. Without any doubt this is the most relevant, mighty, absurd, effective record to offer Post-Punk the one-way ticket to a much-needed stomach pumping. From rock, to glam, to Kraut Rock, to classical music, to funky, everything enters the clownish circus of a very stinging but necessary operation. Songs that do not cure, and that offer the temperature of an existence that in this specific art does not find benefit, interest, diluting any possibility of enriching the everyday.
Howard's ungainly voice is a blessing, a stimulus, a term of comparison for future singers: he never gave a damn about judgment (right Mark E. Smith? Right Doctor John Cooper Clarke?), he instead took care to give the words a place of residence, not in search of slogans, not wanting to convince anyone but with the intention of dialoguing with the psychiatrist who lived inside him: both his friends and his enemies were all in his skull... What is striking about this album?
The gestation, the time and place where everything was conceived and given birth; the sounds that did not attempt agglomeration where references were brief and inconspicuous; the conduct of the race: no victory, no draw, no defeat. Only the great determination to make this debut meaningful to those who had conceived it. Only The Fall will do the same, once again....
The Manchester that is seen in this project has wrenches in its fingers, no guns, no firing on wealth, preserving, for every social class, the right to existence, to be able to offer a new window: not to build but to not destroy...
Roxy Music and David Bowie are the backbone of every idea, which then finds a way to take leave of them, but it is undeniable that the most performing band in this incredible city could not fail to turn a glance toward the two greatest influences of the first five years of a decade that after Punk could only perish.
Instead. Instead, Real Life oxygenates, dusts off, chases away fears, and creates the right tensions: although pop elements are present, nothing is really comfortable, and an inevitable annoyance continually buzzes in listeners' ears. Hence its importance, beauty, relevance, with a cruel fate in store: few would trust this album, almost no one would want to become famous. Devoted, like Ultravox's John Foxx, like then ,sorry, again Mark E. Smith, he did not set his sights on success, caught up in constructing new forms of expression, with the imprint of decadence living the steps of his certainly lively but at the same time twisted mind.
Barry Adamson revolutionized the approach to the bass guitar.
Dave Formula made keyboards an analytical laboratory, twisting history with his approach full of new methods.
Martin Jackson, with his rotating, angular, dry, swelling drumming, slapped all punk drummers in the face.
John McGeogh is the only musician on the album to play three instruments and make adjustments, arrangements, supporting Devoto's volcanicity.
Howard Devoto is Howard Devoto. Period. The sense of terror that the Damned practiced, landing on the shores of cabaret, here visits introspection and indifference, as well as arrogance, for a result that highlights the uniqueness of the format, of the musical spices that make the listening taste more varied. Madness lives in every pore of this record, as the five turn their backs on history by writing a new one.
Real Life is a dictionary of the unknown, of the misunderstood, of that which is reluctant to show itself but which when it reveals itself sweeps away all confrontation. A blue-collar work written by geniuses and individuals with pronounced egos, held at bay by John Leckie, to seed the future with new perspectives, solutions.
Investigating, spending time within these articulate artistic flare-ups, one comes across the volume of riches perfectly compacted but, mind you, that had not had time to be tested as they were immediately thrown into the music market.
Deaths suffered as they were abandoned, resurrected immediately through the subsequent second album, revisited, corrected, bain-marie of their madness, all that lies within is a lucid unrebellious neurotic form, a stethoscope, a beacon, a mental click that describes and paints the deprivations, the depravities, the upheaval of a city sitting on hot coals, waiting to turn into a smiling corpse...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
6th October 2023
https://spotify.link/8cxkrTEUFDb
