Where the books were found by the Golden Ones…
One of the more welcome band reformations of recent years, to these ears at least, has to be the quite brilliant
Originally at the epicentre of the UK punk rock explosion, Howard Devoto became the singer of The Buzzcocks, but left the band early in 1977 after releasing just one record with them: the Spiral Scratch EP.
Disillusioned with the limitations of punk rock and inspired by David Bowie’s recently-released Low and Iggy Pop‘s The Idiot, he formed Magazine.
Though perhaps closer to a hybrid of early Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols than Bowie and Iggy’s ‘Berlin’ sound, Magazine were a breath of fresh air when they released their debut album Real Life in 1978, in much the same way that Ultravox were around the same time, pre-Midge.
Four albums later they split sometime in the early 1980s and their current UK tour is the first time the band have played together in over 25 years.
Devoto has been doing interviews ahead of the sold out shows including one with Ian Shuttleworth of
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One of Devoto?s achievements, I suggest to him, was combining literacy with harder-edged music. Until Magazine came along, ?serious? music fans largely had to content themselves with various bedsit singer-songwriters, and it was pioneering to put that kind of literary awareness in harness with music that rocked.
Devoto disagrees: ?David Bowie rocked! And he did chuck a bit of intellectual baggage around, don?t you think?? Yes, I argue, but he never turned Dostoevsky into a song or had an extract from Proust read over the intro to a song.
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Well, that last point may be true, but Dostoevsky‘s The Idiot was the inspiration for the title of the aforementioned Iggy Pop album and only a fool could fail to recognise the point that Devoto makes about Bowie.
His music has been littered with literary references from Khalil Gibran (in the lyric to the very rocking The Width Of A Circle) via Orwell and Burroughs right up to the works pictured on the inner sleeve of the Heathen album…and many, many points in-between, too many to list here. Anyway, nice to have you back Howard.
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