ROAD OF THE LAW

Terminal Gods

Masculinity 2.0: Terminal Gods Re-route Pop Culture in their own Boys-Club Boot Camp.

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The history of pop music is unashamedly revisionist: re-instating the cultural prerogative of those with the most power and annexing the legacy of the more marginalized. And so, even today, there is a preference for Anglo-American accounts of rock ‘n’ roll: with emphasis placed on white men playing guitar and romanticised facsimiles of the Blues. What chance black and female artists? Less-so Goths with drum machines…

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But, in the post-digital age, the opportunity for reimagining that history is less restricted. For the Millennial-generation, who grew up at the vanguard of online culture – learning to navigate chat-rooms and MySpace in their teenage years - traditional gatekeepers like record labels and other bastions of patriarchal authority have been far less important. And, as a consequence, the rule of the father has arguably not been so influential upon the way in which pop music history is conceptualised.

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Terminal Gods are a product of this. Lead singer Robert Cowlin and guitarist Robert Maisey met as teenagers on a Sisters of Mercy fan forum. Born long after the Eighties Goth scene had reached its crescendo, the story of their musical education has been a tunnel-vision digital odyssey: the lineage of rock’s dark side, framed by the perfectly fractured aperture of their teenage obsession. No need for officially endorsed Top 100 lists or re-released Best-of anthologies. They conform to the belief that pop music is always essentially about finding out about yourself, or rather how to produce (multiple) versions of that self.

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“If rock culture can still be considered as an ‘outsider’ culture (and I think one could argue fairly convincingly either way on this) or to represent ‘outsider’ values, then it’s important that it is allowed to exist as a space where alternate versions of masculinity can continue to be explored and allowed to co-exist.”

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Jonathon Campbell Ratcliffe – Bass and Programming

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From the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop to The Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim, Terminal Gods musical journey has not been impinged upon by concessions to mainstream notions of taste or received thinking on rock history. In their world Coldplay probably don’t even exist. And, unlike previous generations - schooled by intermediaries like the music press - their engagement with rock and roll as “Millennials” has been much more immersive: a kind of first-hand digital anthropology.

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Of course, if history exists at all, it exists in a hall of mirrors: its reflection and meaning continually shifting, eliding capture and certainty. And so, for this generation of pop kids, the opportunity to engage in archive footage from the video vault has manifest itself in a verisimilitude, whereby they are able to remember the Eighties far better than those who actually lived through them. To this end, the ability to recall the dates of specific gigs and performances is perspicacity unique to the Millennials: those raised in the digital antiquarian.

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"Because of the enormous rise of disposable pop music in the 21st Century, Pop as Art has been considered a relic of a more romantic past by contemporary music fans such as myself”

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Robert Maisey – Lead Guitar

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The hothousing of culture, however, does not, come without its risks. Most pressing is that of anachronistic misinterpretation: failure to understand the text in the context of its production and consumption. For example, based on the chart stats alone, it would be very easy to assume that Goth was poised to storm the mainstream at the start of the Nineties. With a top five single and best selling album, the Sisters of Mercy were arguably at the zenith of their commercial viability in 1992. But of course this is misleading. 

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The commercial success of the Sisters in the early Nineties, like a number of other Eighties throwbacks (Eurythmics, OMD, Tears for Fears, Erasure etc) was but a momentary aberration: an Indian summer in which the drum machine enjoyed a chart revival courtesy of slickly packaged greatest hits sets. Not so much a yearning for the kind of Vision Thing Andrew Eldridge was offering; but more an anomalous shift in consumer behavior cohered around the CD and the wholesale branding of pop heritage. Let’s not forget this was the decade in which Abba Gold was the best selling album.

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But what of that now? What relevance does it have on the pop landscape of 2015 in which Sam Smith and Adele are feted as the icons of the day? Arguably very little. Pop as Entertainment may be mainstream, but Pop as Art is a much more fringe proposition. The space dust of decadence, which characterized rock culture in the 70s and 80s, has been scattered to the wind, in a cleaned up, sanitized version. Pop Lite may be for the masses, but that is not say that Pop as a Serious Cultural Form does not exist; rather it has become a more high-end and rarefied phenomenon.

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Enter stage-right Terminal Gods: the London-based quartet, who blend rock ‘n’ roll swagger with machine beats and an unerring pop sensibility. Nowhere is this combination exemplified more neatly than in the video for their latest release: ‘Road of the Law’. Assembled from the fragments of rock ‘n’ roll debris it offers a (re) vision of pop music that is as historically coherent as it is compelling. A version of what rock might have looked like in the 1990s if Heavy Leather Sex had swept the mainstream instead of the plaid shirts, Grunge and the tinny beats of Brit Pop.

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Working once again with Screen 3 Director Andy Oxley, the promo was shot on location in the unlikely setting of Bournemouth - coincidently where lead singer Robert Cowlin spent many of his childhood holidays. Filmed on a Saturday night in August, the clip sees the band driven round the town’s infamous “Westover Loop” in a 1971 Vauxhall Viva, against a backdrop of vernacular seaside architecture and nighttime revelry. Like naughty children, the boys in the band play on the backseat, while Cowlin stares down the camera behind triplex glass and the safety of his shades.

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“The concept of the video is fairly simple really, I said to the band I had a video idea which heavily involved a friend's 1971 Vauxhall Viva, and they said that their next single was going to be called

Road Of The Law. Roads, cars? Perfect. So I decided to try and create a world where Terminal Gods had made it huge, a sort of different dimension where 80s Goth rock had gone mainstream and Terminal Gods were the pioneers. So I wanted them to really play up to it in this video because the whole idea is that they've made it and they rule the world (or in this case, Bournemouth).”

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Andy Oxley - Director

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Of course, the iconography of Faded Seaside Glamour is a common trope in the aesthetics of indie-pop. Morrisey, St Etienne and The Delays have all used it as a touchstone of melancholia, regret and cultural degeneration. However, the vision invoked by Oxley is much more vital: a nocturnal world of neon-signs, flashing lights, and nightclubs. The only concession to the past is in the 50s Riviera chic of the opening shots, as the band descend the steps of the landmark Carlton Hotel.

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To this end, the world of ‘Road of the Law’ is The World of the Terminal Gods. A world in which nostalgia no longer exists and the Sisters of Mercy are the biggest band of the Nineties: a revisionist account of pop history, in which Cowlin plays Eldridge on the silver screen and makes the depressingly retrospective sensibility of that decade seem pale in comparison. More significantly, it is a version of rock ‘n’ roll that sees the drum machine embedded as firmly as the guitar in folklore and mythology: reconciling once and for all the impasse that occurred between dance music and rock.

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“Retro-futurism” is a phrase that’s been banded about since the early 1980s and it is perhaps the watchword here: a yearning for an age that never came to fruition. A world of non-ironic, leather-clad, rock ‘n’ roll posturing; reacquainting rock with the kind of nuanced sense of fun and theatricality that Spinal Tap never quite understood; a world where Bono never needed to happen. The sledgehammer of post-modernism is after all a redundant tool in nailing the romance and modernism of the perfect pop song.

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The central motif for this in the video is Oxley’s use of billboards and the bricolage of tongue-in-cheek references to lyrics and song titles from the band’s back-catalogue: ‘Snakebite Smile’ is rendered as a soft drink; ‘Wheels of Love’ becomes a brand of tyre; while ‘Heavy Leather’ is a clothing line; and ‘A New Dusk’ a fragrance. This Warholian paean to the visual landscape of consumer culture is further interspersed with modified shots of cinema hoardings and shop window displays that encode a secret world of corporatized fandom and band trivia.

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For all its humour, however, the band’s appropriation of rock ‘n’ roll iconography is neither parody nor cliché, but rather habilitation: embodying imagery more powerfully than just evoking it. Smoke, leather, sunglasses all connect rock with the heterocamp sensibility of its past, harking back to the 1950s and the visual semantics of the male pin-up. It is perhaps telling that sunglasses shield the band from the objectifying gaze of the onlooker.

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“I think with Terminal Gods, there's licence for a tiny little spoonful of spoof, because they're so knowingly dedicated to that genre of 80s music, and they play up to it so brilliantly with their sunglasses and smoke machines.Yet for all the fun in their aesthetic, they are a very serious rock band. For some reason, for me they can do as much rock 'n roll posturing, smoking and leather jacket wearing as they like and they totally get away with it, it still feels authentic because that's just who they are, they're not putting anything on.”

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Andy Oxley - Director

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The star is, of course, also the car. And the Viva embodies a range of aesthetic and cultural contradictions that make its inclusion pertinent. Never lionized in popular culture like Ford’s Capri or Cortina, it is a rejoinder to the lost visual culture of Seventies and Eighties. Once a familiar sight on our roads, everybody knew somebody who had a Viva. On the other hand, through the fractured lens of the Millennial-gaze, the Viva symbolizes something quite different.

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Like the billboards, it is a slice of Americana: the lines of the HC Viva are all pint-sized muscle car - the kind of vehicles immortalized in the Dukes of Hazard and Starksy and Hutch. To this end, its prominence in the video harks back to Oxley’s previous work with the band on the videos for ‘Lessons in Fire’ and ‘Wheels of Love’, in which US adverts from the Sixties are spliced against footage of the band performing. Ironic then that the Viva should also be the last truly British Vauxhall.

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Of course, Oxley has a track record of exploring this kind of subject matter. Most notably in his short films, which focus on the ephemeral pleasures of British life: Sunday afternoons and a good slice of cake. What the Viva means in ‘Road of Law ‘is no less subtle. Yes, it is a celebration of a forgotten motoring institution: an icon of the everyman. But is also reconfigures that visual grammar into an articulation of something that transcends its inauthenticity: the glamour of polished chrome, its American-style speedo and the pointless vinyl roof.

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In essence, the way Oxley reimagines the Viva is a metaphor for the way in which the Terminal Gods re-envision pop history: taking a fragment of something that resonates beyond its rightful trajectory as a consumer product and creating new meaning. In doing so it vindicates the propensity of Millennials to mine cultural history: nuggets passed over in the industrial scale processing of heritage are recycled into something brilliant and shiny. 

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That this process is political is incontrovertible. The Gods ere an outsider band and their music is an act of cultural resistance. But it is not the kind of resistance that is manifest in sloganeering and rhetoric. Rather by configuring themselves in the image of rock ‘n’ roll they call into question the invisible hegemony of middlebrow taste that defines what is legitimate culture.

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They are Situationists at heart: using the medium of being in a rock band as vehicle for critiquing mainstream culture. Oxley’s masterstroke is his ability to curate this. Capitalism is not the only thing being parodied. Singular codes of masculinity are called into question as Maisey, Cooper and Ratcliffe roll around on the back seat of the Viva. Women are noticeably absent in the bromantic, homosocial world of the Gods.

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“We’ve always liked looking a bit like a gang, but only because that’s what being in Terminal Gods feels like. We are in our own little gang. Knowing that even day-to-day, the band was still always being represented by that uniform is probably the best exposure we could get at the beginning.”

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Josh Cooper - Rhythm Guitar

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To this end, the drum machine comes to embody something more powerful than just the substitution of one half of the rhythm section. As its origins in disco and dance music attest, it is symbolic of much wider discourses in gender and cultural order. And, in this sense, just as their music embodies a more reconstructive sensibility, so too is the version of patriarchal order on offer here more plural and all-encompassing: history becomes histories. 

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“For a band like Terminal Gods, with a serious leather fetish and a reliance on programmed and sampled drums, with their implied links to disco or Detroit house music, I think we would be naive at best to not see ourselves fitting into this discourse somehow.”

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Jonathon Campbell Ratcliffe – Bass and Programming

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Moreover, in reimagining the recent past they undertake the greatest challenge posed to any historian. As Irwin says in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: ‘there is no period so remote as the recent past’. It is this prerogative that belongs to the Millennials, with their panoptical vision of pop history. Befittingly, in the case of Terminal Gods, it also part of the inclusive fluidity of Masculinity 2.0: a boys-club for post-feminist men, rewriting pop history and reshaping its future with élan.

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