The Sound Of Muzik
This month’s slept-on selection: Cold War bubblegum for seditionary executives.
M New York-LondonParis-Munich MCA, 1979
ONE OF 1979’s signature smashes was M’s Pop Muzik, a conceptual, metronomic, new wave disco mantra which topped charts from Australia to the US, and lived on in covers by U2, Tricky, James Last and more. “It’s very flattering that it still keeps banging out there,” says its urbane creator Robin Scott today, “but there is lots more besides.”
Scott’s stor y began in Croydon in 1947. He attended the town’s art school, where he and fellow conspirators Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid took part in a six-day protest during the tumultuous summer of 1968. In 1969, Scott released his singer-songwriter debut Woman From The Warm Grass, partly backed by Mighty Baby. 1970s activities included recording electronic pieces, the musical Heartaches And Teardrops, managing and producing Roogalator, and setting up Do It Records. In January 1978 he went to film The Slits in Paris with Julien Temple and stayed, working as a producer for the Barclay label.
At this point, he says, his interest in Stockhausen and Edgard Varèse, plus Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk, intersected with the everyone’s-invited disco sounds soundtracking the world’s dancefloors. “I decided it was time to get on the other side of the glass, so to speak,” he says. “Pop Muzik was sort of Andy Warhol’s take on mainstream pop music… my expectations were quite high in terms of trying to generate a ver y fresh, different-sounding record that fitted into the commercial pop context. I wanted to develop the ultimate ear-worm.”
Pop Muzik started life in a variety of incarnations, including funk and R&B takes. Scott’s friend John Lewis helped him record a more electronic version at his 8-track, Radiophonic Workshop-affiliated Electrophon studio in Covent Garden. Scott took it to Paris’s Studio Aquarium, bounced it onto 24-track, and made the fortuitous acquaintance of keyboardist Wally Badarou, a regular Barclay sessioneer with a discreet sideline in blue movie soundtracks. “Wally was kind of pivotal,” says Scott. “He gave it something special so I wanted to keep him involved. It was a bit of a drawback that it didn’t emerge as a live band, but there was a unit I could call on to develop the ideas.”
With a name chosen after glancing at a Paris Metro sign during a Jean-Baptiste Mondino photoshoot, Scott adopted the guise of a corporate executive. After Pop Muzik’s success across the globe (a Number 2 in Britain, Danny Baker called the song’s first Top Of The Pops performance “my favourite ever… more than Bowie, more than T. Rex”), an album was required. New York-London-Paris-Munich
was mainly recorded in one month at Mountain Studios in Montreux, which was founded by Anita Kerr and had recently been acquired by Queen.
“We were doing this TV tour around Europe – miming, which used to do my head in – and I bumped into Roger Taylor in Munich,” says Scott. “I asked him whether he knew of any interesting studios.” Another eminent encounter involved then-Swiss resident David Bowie. “I knew him going back to the folk circuit and The Arts Lab in Beckenham,” says Scott. “I think Phil Gould [drummer, later of Level 42] was slightly blown away when David came to the studio… [Bowie] was ver y fragile and tr ying to, I suppose, unload anxieties. I don’t think too much got done – a few drinks and things got a bit silly. There were some other recordings actually, but I don’t know what became of them.”
Taking its title from a lyric in Pop Muzik, the album was an upbeat record preoccupied with complex subjects. As European as it was transatlantic, it envisaged a consumerist 1980s where the punk promise – “I was kind of watching it implode on the inside,” says Scott – was absorbed by capital (“For me, disco is the heartbeat of totalitarianism,” he told Melody Maker in May ’79). After Pop Muzik’s irresistible commandment to dance, adroit synth-pop narratives addressed feminism (Woman Make Man), casino capitalism (That’s The Way The Money Goes) and border-free utopias (Unite Your Nation). The segued Moderne Man/Satisfy Your Lust – a rocking 1978 single orchestrally re-imagined in a way ABC would do a few years later – juxtaposes finance, libido and ennui. Throughout, Scott’s partner Brigit Vinchon lends enigmatic Esperanto doo-wop vocals: “That was also fortuitous,” he says. “She had that unusual accent, that tonality.”
Released at the end of the year, the LP failed to chart, and Pop Muzik’s belated follow-up Moonlight And Muzak – which reputedly featured handclaps from Bowie – peaked at 33 in December. M’s The Official Secrets Act (1980) and Famous Last Words (1982) followed, the latter recorded with Barry Adamson, Andy Gill, Yukihiro Takahashi, Tony Levin, Thomas Dolby and Mark King, who was by then collaborating with Gould in Level 42. Having parted company with MCA, the album went unreleased in the UK. The early ’80s also saw Scott collaborate with Ryuichi Sakamoto on the joint album Left Handed
Dream, and then with South African and Zairean musicians for the unreleased’til-1998 Jive Shikisha!.
“I think I could have perhaps achieved a bit more and in a more relaxed way if I’d had someone I felt comfortable to delegate to,” says Scott, whose recent albums include Emotional DNA and Wing & A Prayer. “I had too many balls in the air, to be honest. I didn’t have management – it was a lot to take on.”
That said, he’s in the fortunate position of owning his masters, and has a positive relationship with the BMG label. Consequently, unreleased M material will appear for a future Record Store Day, with other tempting documents including 1980 documentary Here Today, Gone Tomorrow ready for restoration and release. “It would hopefully raise awareness or whatever,” says Scott. “I think I’ve got enough material now for probably one more album, which is in the pipeline. So it’s kind of wake-up time.”
“I wanted to develop the ultimate ear-worm.” ROBIN SCOTT