"what the hell is HE doing with THEM??" - Band members who seem out of place

What the hell is he doing with them?

Perhaps the only band ever where every single member of the group seems to be out of step with every single other member!

Then again, that might just be adding confusion to this thread.

Or it might indicate showing off in front of the Guardian readers... ;)

Musically, of course, some bands are more paradigmatic than others. For instance, an a capella group in which everybody sings is clearly more paradigmatic than a rock band with a bassist, drummer, guitarist, vocalist. Paradigmatic groups please us -- think of all those Beat Boom bands in their matching suits -- but also make us anxious. It's almost as though we sniff fascism or communism in groups who all look alike. So when you get a group that's already looking like everybody's equal and the same, you often find attempts to distinguish them visually. A girl band svengali will make sure there's a mix of races and hair colours going on in his product, and the a capella group will add a very tall man with a beard.

This only works if you remove Colin from the equation, but there was no bass in the Addams Family anyway.

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This [ie incongruity] is actually a good thing in most ways.

There's some nervousness about that, some uncertainty, which interests me. It does point straight to that place where we have mixed feelings, somewhere in between 'the nail that sticks out must be hammered in' and 'it takes all sorts to make a world'. And I wonder whether our sense of justice is at odds with our sense of aesthetics here. We like colour-co-ordination, but we want a fair world in which nobody is excluded. But can we learn to love incongruity and complexity on purely aesthetic grounds too?

I suspect the only member of The Damned who ever saw himself as an Addams Family style "Gothic Freak" is Dave!

Brian deperately wanted to be an archetypal rocker; The Captain was (and still is) using the whole thing as an excuse to act the fool; Ratty was just a chancer.

What's more, their musical tastes were as different as their appearences.

I think there was however an element of them being together because none of them fitted in anywhere else and that in itself, perversely, not only gave them an identity as a band but gave them an audience of all the kids who felt they too didn't fit in anywhere else (especially once The 'Pistols had gone and The Clash's gang image was starting to look increasingly like just another uniform).

Subsequently I think the remaining members of the band (Dave and The Captain) have emphasised their differences more and more over the years as a way of simultaneously indulging themselves and promoting the image of the band.

Anyway, this relates strongly to another theme dear to my heart, high density and the value of the inner city. We investigated high density on an ILE thread and my conclusion was that people have mostly only embraced high density urban living in a 'making do' and 'let's make the best of a bad deal' kind of way. It's very hard to make people see it as a desireable goal. Give them the chance to spread out in suburbs with people just like themselves, and they take it.

In the same way, we could see the natural tendency of audiences as a desire for totally uniform (and even uniformed) bands, with visual incongruity embraced only if it's heavily idealised (the multi-ethnic girlband) and much-repeated -- in the spirit of 'let's make the best of a bad deal'.

Aren't we likely to just naturally gravitate towards (the bands that represent) the point on that continuum where each of us individually feels most comfortable?

LOL! I have done several times myself (on the floor or in the back of the van in the car park 'though usually!) but indeed that's exactly what I was trying to get at - "the only thing we've got in common is that we're not like anyone else".

Even when they're staying in holiday camps full of punks and members of punk bands, Dave and The Captain still stand out from the crowd - and (perhaps to the point) they stand out even more when they're together.

Don't you feel that's to do with people wanting to enjoy their own space on their own terms rather than having other people's (most frequently the lowest common denominator too, it would sadly appear) standards forced upon them, as is inevitably the case when you have more significant "communal" areas (stairs, lifts, landings, corridors) to share?

What I immediately picked up on in Ham on Rye's post was, of course, the outrageous claim (inserted, clearly, to avoid accusations of racism) that the incongruity in the Watts Band was stylistic, not racial. The reason this is 'a pc lie' is that race, alas, continues to trump style in our culture as an identifying mark. Only a lunatic, alas, would look at the cut of the band's pants before he looked at the colour of their skins.

The band themselves were clearly completely aware of the effect their line-up and sleeve would have -- surely the title 'Together' alludes to the unlikely triumph of music overcoming racial segregation? (And 103rd Street, hmm, isn't that where Morningside Heights ends and Harlem begins?) The dreamed-of, ideal moment when the aesthetic eclipses the sociological? When we are truly 'together'?

But Ham has a point (repeated later by Stewart), which is that we're all entitled to slice and dice the visual meanings of bands in the ways we want. Take ABBA, for instance. They were, depending on your preference, congruous and 'paradigmatic':

All Swedes.
All 30something.
All middle class.
All dressed in leisurewear.
All resembling schoolteachers.
All extremely 70s.

Or, if you prefer, 'sytagmatic':

Different sexes.
Different facial hair.
Some blondes, some brunettes.
Different colours of clothes.
Play different instruments.

Etc. The slicing and dicing, mixing and matching, are up to you in the end. But I'll bet if there had been a black guy in ABBA it would have trumped all the minor differences and become the over-riding visual element -- not for purely visual reasons, but for moral / sociological ones.

Ethnicity is certainly a factor - probably (sadly) quite a major factor - but it's by no means the only factor.

Valuing diversity is obviously a wonderful and desirable thing - having someone else's values forced upon you against your will is unpleasant and undesirable.

Sadly integration frequently seems to lead to friction and segregation frequently seems to lead to ghettoisation.

Yes, I'm not saying it's the only factor, just that it trumps others. Most bands which mix black and white do so in a very self-conscious and almost 'social-workerly' way. When The Specials did it, for instance, it increasingly became the main theme of the group's work (cf 'Free Nelson Mandela'). Then again, there are countless bands who've said 'It doesn't matter if you're black or white because music trumps that'. There's UB40 and Massive Attack saying, respectively, that unemployment and alienation trump race. And there's Michael Jackson, saying that melotonin trumps... oh, wait.

Sean Moore never looked like he belonged in the Manic Street Preachers. On the flipside of that, I once saw him in a Sainsbury's car park on a Sunday afternoon putting shopping in his volvo estate and it looked like the role he was born to play in life.

Hmmmm. Cause or effect?

Do you think the Specials were always self-conscious about it or did they become self-conscious about it because of the peculiar contrariness of a highly visible element of their fan-base?

I'd have said they were probably always conscious of being muti-racial (i.e. it was just another attribute of the band) but it didn't become a major issue (i.e. probably THE single most significant defining characteristic of the band) for them until they started being followed 'round by a bunch of seig-heiling imbeciles who seemed to think that Specials gigs were good places to hold National Front rallies and that they were somehow showing their affection for the band being beating up all their other fans and smashing up every venue they tried to play at.

By comparison, there were no black members of Sham 69; but having attracted (largely through their own stupidity, it must be said) approximately the same fan-base as The Specials, they began trying to play reggae and writing songs about why it was so important that "The Kids" (patronising twat!) should be united; in what appeared to me to be an extremely self-conscious way (i.e. the thing that they became most concerned with was visibly distancing themselves from the most highly visible part of their own fan base!).

If they had suddenly attracted an audience of NF skinheads - somehow interpreting "The Correct Use Of Soap" as a call for ethnic cleansing perhaps - I'm sure their consciousness of the fact would have increased dramatically.

Sham 69, on the other hand, only applied reggae (I'm taking your word for this!) as a late-career corrective. It wasn't part of their blueprint.

Yes, Magazine were truly extraordinary because they didn't play the race card at all. Perhaps if they had, they'd've made more of a mark on the public of the time. Interesting that Barry Adamson went on to call one of his solo albums 'The Negro', as if he wanted that underlined.

Which I guess also counts for the Cure and Big Country, two bands of mixed race who played what is surely the whitest music ever created.

LOL! The first thing is suggests to me is an old Phil Lynott chat-up line!

"I think the whole blueprint of The Specials was about race. You can't understand them without a racial understanding."

Hmmmm. Would you say the same of The Clash?

Again I think effect rather than cause - as I recall it, punk was largely responsible for raising the profile of Rock Against Racism rather than it being responsible for raising punk's awareness of the issues.

I'd even say the late resurgence of punk in the US came out of white suburbs and was a way for white kids to be 'hardcore' without having to deal with the black values of gansta rap.

**Yes, Magazine were truly extraordinary because they didn't play the race card at all**

Exactly how *could* they have played the 'race card'.? They had a black bass-player. So what?

**ACR. Essential Logic. The Blockheads**

Social workerly? Yeah, right.

Fear of a black Clash!

Give'em Enough Rope-a-Dope

Again I think you're confusing cause with effect.

My recollection / belief is that was the massed influx of elements into the scene who missed the entire point of what punk was about (variously believing it to be a musical movement with a single definable "sound"; fundamentally un-intelligent (as opposed to fundamentally anti-intellectual?); and somehow compatible with extreme-right politics); thereby reducing it to the lobotomised level of "Oi!"; which led the likes of Strummer, Lydon and Forster to disown the monster they had inadvertently had a hand in creating.

In fairness to Mr. Currie, I'm sure you'll recall that there was a period in the early '80's when espousing any sort of (self-)righteous political allegiance (whether it was Rock Against Racism, Red Wedge or the Crass followers' vision of anarchy as achieving-world-peace-through-eating-vegetables) seemed to be an automatic key to raising your band's profile.

So Momus point is that Magazine never attempted to jump on any of those bandwagons, despite the fact that having a black bass-player might have given them a few easy marks in the facile scoring systems that seemed to be in operation at the time.

More importantly however, can we please stop knocking Social Workers? I've got to go home to one in a few minutes!

Ha, beat this!

Not in Watts it ain't!

Also:
http://www.ianfleming.org/007news/images/garbage-top2.jpg

The bass player looks like he belongs in a different band.

"YES! WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!"

My apologies for offending your sensibilities, I have failed =/