Down Is Up discusses music that falls slightly under the radar of our usual coverage: demos and self-releases, as well as output from small or overlooked labels and communities. This week, Jenn Pelly looks at two recent reissues of music from the late 1970s and early 1980s, including first-wave Portland punk band Neo Boys and British anarcho-punk experimentalists Androids of Mu.
Neo Boys: "Give Me the Message" on SoundCloud.
01 Neo Boys - Sooner or Later - Neo Boys were contemporaries of first-wave Portland punk bands like Wipers and the Rats, but their sound was also rooted in the skinny elemental riffs and the outsider spirit of New York punk. In 1978, four years after Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, and Billy Ficca had disbanded their Downtown proto-punk band, Neon Boys, and formed Television, teenage sisters K.T. (vox) and Kim Kincaid (bass) began Neo Boys on the other side of the country. (They eventually opened for Television, an impressive first gig.) Kim's smart, poetic singing was gruff and expressive in a way that sometimes recalled a more direct Patti Smith. Also comprising drummer Pat Baum and guitarist Jennifer Labianco, who later left and was replaced by the more proficient Meg Hentges, Neo Boys were a pioneering all-female punk group in the region and challenged the conventional notion that girls could only be singers.
For 20 years, K Records founder Calvin Johnson has been digging up the band's material for Sooner or Later, a (somewhat overwhelming) 45-track survey of their recorded output, demos, and live sessions. It includes their 1980 EP, recorded by Wipers' Greg Sage and released via his own Trap Records, as well as 1982's Crumbling Myths. Over their five-year run (they disbanded in 1983) the band was primarily an opening act, playing makeshift venues like houses, colleges, galleries, and their practice space. "It was definitely DIY before that was even considered a huge concept," K.T. told The Oregonian. "We just didn't know any other way."
Kim's lyrics had political overtones—Neo Boys weren't interested in love songs—and her words were especially sophisticated for a teenage writer. They were true rebels with a cause, in fact many of them, from gender politics to economic inequity. The twangy bounce of "Poor Man's Jungle", for example, unloads frustration regarding systemic oppression of the poor. Meanwhile the wonderfully apathetic "Abnormal Chick" is as biting as its title suggests: "I don't really care who I go to bed with," Kim sings, audibly bored, between indecipherable lines and rough, rudimentary cymbal crashes. "Makes no difference to me/ Get away/ Don't you touch me." And whether or not Patti Smith was actually an influence, similarities abound on songs like "I Don't Belong" or their version of "I'm Free", on which these could-be icons of early D.I.Y. punk embodied their own definition of freedom.
02 Androids of Mu - Blood Robots (1980) - Meanwhile, overseas, Androids of Mu were taking shape in the West London squatter scene. Androids (Suze the Blooz, Corrina, Cozmis and Bess) fused the combustible art-punk aesthetic of the Raincoats—once called "scratchy-collapsy" by Scritti Politti's Green Gartside—with the anarcho-punk spirit and energy of Crass. (Androids apparently turned down an offer to do a split single with Crass, who insisted they use a different drummer.) Under the new conservative rule of Thatcher, Androids of Mu released only one LP, the blissfully noisy and at times nonsensical Blood Robots, through Fuck Off Records in 1980. Water Wing Records in Portland, Oregon (distributed through Mississippi Records) has finally reissued it earlier this year.
Androids of Mu sang of atomic explosions and radiation and bored housewives and drag queens; they hollered and shrieked and sang sweet. They laced their psychedelic guitars with scrappy synth parts, and occassionally wove in a ska undertone or mesmeric dreamscape. Their sound was unmistakably post-punk, but the artists had roots in more of a 1970s hippie scene surrounding the Stonehenge Free Festival. Suze, the singer and primary songwriter, was previously a member of Hendrix and Zappa-inspired bands Here & Now and Planet Gong, which explored psychedelic music and spacerock. (She started out as a dancer before switching to singing.) I was interested to discover that Suze—also a clothing designer, visual artist, and astrologer—was 30 and had two children by the time Blood Robots was released in 1980. That year, Androids of Mu embarked on a "free tour" with peace-punk bands the Mob and Zounds, in which all shows were free and everyone lost money. They were attemping to change attitudes about the worth of music; if a showgoer paid anyway, this person might realize something about how he or she supported the entire of idea of the event.
Androids of Mu considered most of their songs to be protest songs, and they primarily played benefit gigs, with no intentions of earning a profit for themselves. Their feminism also came through: Corrina, the guitarist and singer, was an engineer at the lo-fi underground Street Level studio, where she recorded obscure female bands from London and eventually released an all-female compilation called Making Waves. But, like Neo Boys, their radical intentions seemed to lean towards something broader, more inclusive, and human. "The most important thing about the Androids is that we wanna break down barriers, particularly between nationalities and this sort of tribalism that really separates young people," Corrina said, speaking with the fanzine No Class. "We wanna accent the things we all share and the grounds upon which people can relate, rather than reinforce the differences, and the separatism. I feel it’s one of the most political things that this band is putting out. That is our main point."