An unremarked phenomenon unique to the year 1982 was the seemingly accidental preoccupation, among many of the surviving groups that had emerged out of punk, with that most precious of precious metals, gold. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but although I don't believe in coincidences I'm struggling to explain the phenomenon. Perhaps, as the alchemical process views the auric metal as a symbol of completion, it was a subconscious acknowledgement that the punk vector had reached its denouement, that all its possibilities had been fulfilled. Certainly, it was downhill all the way for (almost) all of its protagonists.
When you think about it, gold is a fairly rare subject for pop music, despite its deep metaphysical significance, and its emergence seems particularly odd in the context of the Britain of the early '80's, which was experiencing another of its regular post-war step-changes into deeper decline, with unemployment rocketing and urban youth expressing its disquiet in regular rioting. And yet, this music, and the Klimt-esque artwork that encased it, evoked a halcyon feeling.
Actually the paintings of Gustav Klimt may give us a clue. After all, he produced his work during the decline of another empire, that of Austria-Hungary. The products of decline are not only poverty and misery, but a corresponding decadence, an aimless luxe. Punk always wavered ambivalently between them both, transmuting supposed street urchins into little princes and princesses.
Gold, with its imperviousness to adulteration, is also the tradtional nemesis of the financiers, who were at this very moment waiting in the wings to give Britain its final false boom, a thirty-year odyssey of delusion and waste. It would perhaps be a stretch to suggest that these evocations of gold, far from being celebrations of consumption, were attempts to project "wealth" as having a psycho-spiritual component. But in lieu of any better explanations, I'm tempted to go with it....
During the final decades of the Soviet Union, the failure of Soviet agricultural policy, which was the ultimate cause of its demise, led to it enacting a series of reciprocal trade agreements with Western nations in which much-needed grain and agricultural products were exchanged for Soviet oil, minerals, and even scientists and technical specialists (the real "Brain Drain").
One of the most intriguing deals was the one that the USSR struck with the British government, in which agricultural diesel engines for use in tractors were exchanged for cultural products. Included in the deal was part of the output from The Upper Volga Corngrowers Co-operative Association Choral Dance Troop Ensemble, including their great morality tale concerning Vladimir Andropyornosin, a sub-nucleonic particle physicist who struggles to be a model Soviet citizen despite definite tendencies toward incorrect thinking and incorrect actions.
The Foreign Office, unclear about the best way to distribute this great work, managed, through contacts with their propaganda arm the BBC, to persuade the disgraced, decadent "pop" band The Stranglers to host the Ensemble's work on their b-sides and side projects. Quite what the deal with the band consisted of is still obscure, but we do know that the band gained access to the previously off-limits "Cheggars Plays Pop", and saw their music utilised as ambient music for various cookery programmes.
Vladimir's struggles with illicit substances, sailors, camels and Cuban bar owners are meant to offer an instructive discourse on the perils that await even the most sincere citizen when encountering backwards and corrupt elements both at home and abroad. The seriousness of the work's message cannot be understated, and, despite the demise of the Soviet Union, offers us profound insight even today.
For me, "La Folie" is the very greatest of all The Stranglers’ singles. The album of the same name, from which it was taken, and of which great things had been expected by their record company, had yielded two flop singles before the unexpected success of "Golden Brown", which itself had been tardily released almost as an afterthought. Presumably selected under the notion that pot luck was proving a more reliable guide than their own instincts, the record’s chances were effectively killed off by the refusal of Radio 1 to playlist it, their reasoning being that nobody wanted to buy records that weren’t sung in English.
The inspiration for the song came from a particularly gruesome murder that had happened earlier in the year that it was recorded, 1981. Issei Sagawa, a Japanese student of French Literature at the Sorbonne, had killed a beautiful Dutch fellow student, Renée Hartevelt, and then had sex with her corpse, before cutting pieces off it and eating them. When caught attempting to dump the mutiliated remains, he explained to the French police that he not unreasonably felt himself to be a "weak, ugly, and small man", and had hoped to acquire some of Hartevelt’s health and beauty by consuming her flesh.
Despite their name and ominous reputation, The Stranglers generally avoided the subjects of rape and murder, their misanthropy usually being more everyday, more mundane, more realistic. Instead of approaching the subject matter with the sort of priapic glee typical of some of their (oddly more acceptable) punk peers, they instead evoked a stately European grandeur - what Ultravox had attempted and failed to achieve with the camp fiasco that was "Vienna"
"La Folie" isn’t an attempt to glorify or condemn, but rather to understand. The tension within the song is that between the solemn, dignified flow of the synthesized melody, signifying the gravity of a young life taken, and Burnel’s lyrical attempt to summon within himself the kind of personal and social stresses that might provoke such madness; to understand, and perhaps identify, by feeling. The record resigns itself to failure - madness is inherent within the flow of life, perhaps within us all. But then again, perhaps not. We shrug our shoulders and look to the night sky.
Good Evening Your vehicle doesn’t seem to have an occupant Could you, would you let me in? Or would that be too much trouble? My boots won’t echo too much in your passageway No noise accompanies my parting No wasted moments for us Waiting for an uncertain reunion Because I’m mad, yes it is madness
There once was a student Who had a great desire, as they say in books His girlfriend was so sweet that by eating her, He was able to reject all vices, repulse all evil, Destroy everything beautiful Which up until then, had never been known to him Because he was mad, yes it is madness
And if sometimes you can confess to it To whom can you reveal all? even God himself has deserted us
Another life, another place And of course, another story But to whom can you open your heart In the shadows of the night? At dawn, at dusk How may crimes have been committed Against the deceits and so-called laws of the heart? How many are here because of madness? Because they are mad?
