TERMINAL GODS

Could these London Rock Gods be the Saviour of the UK mainstream?

Radio 1, Top of the Pops, Melody Maker, Smash Hits, MTV and the Chart Show… Terminal Gods belong to the mainstream, which is perhaps a surprising thing to say about a band invoking the spirit of Goth: a genre that has been missing in action since The Sisters Of Mercy last grazed the top-five with a re-recording of ‘Temple of Love’ in 1992. Twenty-one years on, and the pop-mainstream is a different place. No-one seems to know who’s in the hit-parade, MTV doesn’t play music videos; and Smash Hits, Melody Maker, and the Chart Show are all long-gone. If you listen to radio and watch TV, someone called Adele seems to be quite popular, but everyone who loves music listens to what they really like on Spotify and Groove Shark.

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THINKING BIG...

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For Terminal Gods, the ‘Death of the Mainstream’ is a moot point. They’re carrying on regardless: behaving – outrageously - like a band about to enter its ‘Imperial Phase’… but in 1984. If you imagine Ian Astbury (without the American-Indian wolf-child nonsense), with Annie Lennox’s hair, fronting Duran Duran, but with Depeche-Mode era Vince Clark producing, then you’re kind of in the right ball-park. Befittingly for a band carrying the mantel of an electro-pop super group, bassist Katie Haley-Halinski is clear that Terminal Gods want to be big:

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“I think there's been a concerted band effort on being a kind of 'whole package'. It's not just music. If you want to get noticed, the music and the video need to grab and hold the bored dude on his laptop at five in the morning, as well as any promoters/music industry types surfing around. Waiting for a fan somewhere to upload a cover-art-and-mp3 thing isn't enough.” (Halinski)

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Reference points, however, are irrelevant. Everyone knows that the “New Gold Dream” of Eighties pop has been shattered, not because the records don’t still sound great, but by association. Asda, B+Q, Homebase: so many of the records from that era have become the soundtrack to the kind of Sunday morning suburban hell to which they were once the antithesis.

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Production is a big problem too. Everyone remembers the Eighties as a golden-era of electro pop, but try to play all but a few of those tunes on the dance-floor today, and too often the bass sounds lumpen and the beats wooden. While rock music stood still in the 1990s, dance music moved on and any band that wants to forge the two together today has to play catch-up; for all its good intentions, no-one wants to replicate the arthritic rhythms of ‘Girls and Boys’, Blur’s best song. In channelling Goth, Terminal Gods genius is that - with the exception of the occasional one-off ‘novelty hit’ - the genre never really troubled the mainstream. Instead it lurked in the shadows: a distorted looking-glass reflection of 80s pop-culture, involving dry-ice and drum machines, which has since been pretty much written out of pop history.

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For video director Andy Oxley, what sets Terminal Gods apart from “80s Revivalists,” like Metronomy, is their ability to channel, not just the local-boy- done-good synth funk that characterised bands like Imagination or Heaven 17, but the lost outsider spirit of the era:

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“For me, they are the perfect blend of the 80s bands I love with a sort of modern twist. They somehow sound nostalgic as well as new. I grew up being played bands like The Cure, The Chameleons, Joy Division, etc. and I really like the sounds of The Cult and The Sisters Of Mercy. What I love about Terminal Gods is their total lack of fear in indulging in the sounds they love, and whole-heartedly going for it without caring about musical trends and scenes.” (Oxley)

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While the band may be influenced by groups like The Mission and The Cult, their use of the drum machine is a key difference. However, as lead guitarist (and the person responsible for the programming) Robert Maisey is quick to point out, in the current climate this is controversial: “Cocteau Twins, The Sisters Of Mercy and the early incarnation of Echo & The Bunnymen all had drum machines, but using one today instantly opens you up to cries of plagiarism and is therefore often avoided”. (Robert Maisey)

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Bringing that sound back, however, is perhaps a master stroke: not just because it challenges received thinking about the way in which technology should be used in rock music, but because it reacquaints pop music culture with the direction the mainstream should have gone in the 1990s, had fin de siècle pre-Millennium tension not taken over and insisted rock audiences listen to fazed Grunge guitar, MTV Unplugged and tinny Brit Pop. The bigger challenge is bringing back the mainstream…

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MORE THAN JUST A GOTH BAND

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For Terminal Gods, their timing might be just perfect. The last five years has seen a renaissance in the carnivalesque aesthetic of British pop music culture: a playfulness that is manifest in the hybridised styles of some very mainstream acts who really want to be stars. Florence Welch, Dizzee Rascal, Taio Cruz, Metronomy etc. would all be great on Top of the Pops and in Smash Hits if only someone would see the sense to bring them back. For Oxley it is this playful pop sensibility that attracted him to Terminal Gods and something he has tried to bring to the fore in his video production for the single, ‘Lessons in Fire’:

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“It's true that they have a large Goth following, but I don't really see them as a Goth band. They have their dark influences and there's a lot of leather going on, but their tunes have a real pop quality to them that I think could be loved by a wide range of people - even, dare I say it, the mainstream. I'd love to see a band like Terminal Gods hit the big time!

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I see it like I see The Cure - they are seen as a Goth band, but so many of their songs are such good pop songs that if you heard them without seeing the band you probably wouldn't say they were a Goth band. Whilst Terminal Gods are serious about what they do, they are not afraid to be playful and don't take themselves too seriously. This is what I love about them - sunglasses, smoke machines and loads of reverb – it is great fun”. (Oxley)

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Unlike established pop protégé what Terminal Gods have up their sleeve is the secret weapon that has been the defining force in British popular music culture over the past fifty years: the Art School Aesthetic. A force that had been hanging its head in shame since Alex James and Damien Hirst disabused England of its national pride in the build-up to last World Cup of the Twentieth Century under the guise of Fat Les with their proletariat baiting faux-football anthem ‘Vindaloo’.

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THE ART SCHOOL AESTHETIC

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The legacy of British art schools can of course be traced in the work of any number of musicians who have framed and shaped the way society has thought about popular music since the 1960s: The Beatles, David Bowie, and Roxy Music all sought to apply high art thinking to a mass culture product, and as such bestowed upon pop a Warholian quality that, at its very best, defines it: the plastic barometer of exploding inevitability with which pop brilliance must always be measured. In Terminal Gods' case, as Halinski is quick to point out, the band were fortunate in that they found in Oxley, someone who could realise their very televisual aesthetic:

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“It was a stroke of luck that we found someone who clicked with us quite early on. Screen 3 Productions have done all our official videos, and it's been a great partnership on an artistic level and in terms of just being very easy and enjoyable to work with. I think they really capture the whole "make an impression" thing, and capture that part of the music and performance very well”.(Halinski)

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Nowhere is the symmetry of this creative project realised more successfully than on the video for the recent single, ‘Lessons in Fire’. As Robert Cowlin explains, the song began life as a semi-ironic commentary on the London 2012 Olympics:

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“I find the vast majority of 'political songs', certainly those of the present, to be quite lousy and obvious in terms of their lyrics. It's really easy to complain about the failings of 'the big society', and a lot of the time it just sounds embarrassing and poorly thought out. However, it just so happens that TG experienced the Olympics first-hand when we played at one of the torch relay points.

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At that point, I had already drafted something to the music that would become 'Lessons in Fire' but I wasn't very satisfied with it. The day after playing at this flame event I wrote 'Lessons' in about twenty minutes. I didn't loathe the Olympics, but I, like many others, thought the money could have been better used elsewhere, which is the main gist of the song.It's not all political though, (though the political bits are fairly obvious - hence my reluctance to address politics!) I tend to merge a number of stories/ideas into one song. Consequently it's also got some recurring TG themes in it such as ideas about transition and trust.” (Cowlin)

In the hands of Oxley the ambiguity of this sentiment is not lost. There is a lightness of touch and playfulness at work, particularly in the use of recycled US film from the Fifties and Sixties, which adds rather than strips away a layer of ambiguity:

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"The archive American film footage adds a glossy, Hollywoodesque quality to the video. Particularly the adverts and government videos, they just paint a vision of a perfect life, and I've always loved things that do that, however hard it is to actually believe them. Having never been there, I've always had this idyllic vision of America - I suppose a tongue-in-cheek view of their brash, advertising culture. 

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There is an on-going juxtaposition in the video between the hope and promise shown in the post-war American archive clips, and the darker visions of the band, that are silhouetted and therefore identity-less. The 'American Dream' is paralleled with the London Olympics, the build-up to which inspired the song”. (Oxley)

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It was, of course, British popular music’s role as a re-presenter of African-American musical form that was a defining characteristic of pop culture in the Twentieth Century. From Cliff Richard to Def Leppard, rock ‘n’ roll in Britain is often about parodying white Americans singing the blues. 

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That at its best this impulse should also be defined by its satiric impulse is standard: recognition that the abnormal tongue (the vernacular of consumer capitalism), which momentarily we seem to have borrowed, is in fact not our own. This is something Terminal Gods seem to understand:

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“I think having a position on America is more or less an irrelevancy to Terminal Gods. Just because they're an English speaking nation people expect them to have the same cultural values as we do. They don't and this failure to meet cultural expectations sometimes offends people. They've lots of lowest common denominator cultural exports and crazy right wing politics, but they also gave us Kurt Vonnegut and Iggy Pop. It's bigger, meaner, richer and poorer than anywhere else on the planet, of course it's a hive of scum and villainy.” (Maisey).

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Irony, it would seem, does not have to be spelt out in capital letters by Bono for its message to be understood. By the same token, good art is defined by its ability to communicate something so subtle that it could not be conveyed any other way. So it seems that Terminal Gods collaboration with Oxley encapsulates the ill-at-ease false-jubilance with which London 2012 embodied the conflicted capitalist impulses of commoditised nationalism and cultural imperialism in a way that would make David Hockney, if not Andy Warhol, proud.

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THE STAR QUALITY OF THE PIN-UP

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In the 1980s, when Andy Warhol wasn’t hanging out with Debbie Harry, he was famously a big fan of Duran Duran, and it is befitting, therefore, that in Cowlin, Terminal Gods have their own pin-up star. A man brave enough to follow in the footsteps of successive generations of flamboyant performers who have all channelled a singularly British “hetero-camp” sensibility. Andrew Eldritch, Joey Ramone and Iggy Pop may be the obvious reference points, but when Cowlin walks on that stage he invokes an impressive roll-call of British font-men: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Marc Bolan, Morrissey, and Jarvis Cocker.

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That the legacy of these Grande Dames is not represented in the current pop landscape, weighs heavy on Terminal Gods, but could ultimately work in their favour. Certainly Cowlin is doing something very different from the likes of Joseph Mount, the singer with the self-styled saviours of British electro-pop, Metronomy. As Oxley makes clear, Colwin is not just a singer, he is a front-man: representing the group and the point of identification for the audience. He understands that simple things like how you hold a microphone and the angle at which your sunglasses are worn are more important than pitch-perfection and instrumental virtuosity:

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“Cowlin is a proper front-man, and it's a rare breed these days. He commands your attention. He reminds me of Joey Ramone in the sense that he has this shy and awkward thing when you meet him in a bar (not that I've met Joey Ramone, but I've seen the documentary!), and as soon as he gets onstage he comes alive, and it's like he belongs there. No instruments, just his tall and skinny frame, some sunglasses and a microphone! 

Cowlin projects a real menace, a prowl. He's quite brooding, and he has the moves of an awkward pop star - my favourite kind. He also has a great silhouette, which I think is important in pop music involving back lights and smoke machines. They look good on camera - that's one of the main things that drew me to them actually. They're all very photogenic and great performers, so I just point the camera and they make it look good for me!” (Oxley)

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This synthetic performative quality is something that too often bands forget: neglecting to observe that, while switching from ukulele to banjo, half the audience have gone to the bar. Yet, this is a mistake that shouldn’t be made: popular music culture in Britain has always been more ambivalent about musicianship and authenticity than American rock ideology. You only have to see the way in which the mainstream has embraced the DJ-producer as star to realise that anxiety about musicianship is considerably less than it was in the days when Frank Farian had to hide his genius behind the stage name Boney M.

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THE DRUM MACHINE AS STAND-ALONE INSTRUMENT

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And yet, even though indie-pop has expanded to incorporate bands like the xx, who use drum machines and samples, the rock community is perhaps less receptive to this, as Robert Maisey argues:

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“Most contemporary bands with programmed percussion do so to facilitate much more expansive electronic backing tracks. It’s extremely rare (if unheard of) to find a band touring the Rock or Indie circuit using a drum machine as a stand-alone instrument”.

In part this can perhaps be attributed to the impasse that happened at the end of the 1980s. After baggy, dance music went one way and fragmented into house, techno, trance and big-beat, while rock music stood still. Commensurately, Maisey is well aware of the implications of Terminal Gods' use of the drum machine:

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“Way back in the late '70s, bands like Suicide and The Human League were eschewing live drums for a full time machine, and,this legacy continued right through to modern dance music. On the other hand, using a drum machine in rock or Indie was pretty much the exclusive province of what became known as Goth and sort of met a dead end there”. (Maisey)

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The death knell of the drum machine, and to some extent Goth, came in the form of Grunge and then Brit Pop. You only have to listen to Bob Rock’s Spartan production on The Cult’s eponymous sixth album from 1994 to know that something changed radically after Nevermind.

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That is not to say that 1990s producers like Butch Vig and Stephen Street didn’t have a sound; but rather that these bands rejected the explicit celebration of music technology, preferring instead either the sparse minimalism of Nirvana or the tinny back-beats of Blur. In terms of British bands from this era, only Steve Brown’s work with the Manic Street Preacher’s really continues with his 1980s sound. The concurrent success of Nine Inch Nails in America is the exception that proves the rule: Reznor’s collaboration with producer Flood, on 1994’s ‘The Downward Spiral’, took the drum machine into the home of five million Americans. That Reznor paved the way for the success of the Marilyn Manson road show in America is clear; however, just as the drum machine is not a defining feature of Manson’s sound, British audiences were also cautious about the gauche theatricality of the group, who seemed more Kiss than Ian Curtis.

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That something was lost has been demonstrated over the past ten years as successive waves of bands look back to the 1980s as a golden age of synthesizer-based dance-rock. Taking its cue from Giorgio Moroder’s early recordings with Donna Summer, the proliferation of synthesizer-lead disco–rock in the late 1970s remains impressive. There is a definite arch that can be traced from Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, through Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’, to Blondie’s ‘Atomic’, and onto Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ culminating in Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’. Even in the very mainstream, artists like Rod Stewart, Abba, Roxy Music and the Rolling Stones embraced this new sound. Thirty years on, that this culminated with the infamous Disco Sucks campaign of 1979 - which saw the ritualised burning of disco-records in US baseball stadiums - seems preposterous. However, it is easy to forget that beneath the ham-fisted semantics of public health lurked an ill-concealed narrative of homophobia. That bands who defined the New Pop era of MTV and Smash Hits made this sound their own is well-documented in various accounts of 80s pop and indeed it is what unites the back-catalogue of bands like The Psychedelic Furs , Tears for Fears, New Order, Eurythmics and Duran Duran. Less often considered is the legacy of this sound on American FM rock acts: '80s Queen, ZZ Top, Fleetwood Mac, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, and Tina Turner all owe a debt to the sound of the drum machine.

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TERMINAL GODS: REHABILITATING TECHNOLOGY, THE ROCK SOUND... AND THE MAINSTREAM?

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What is satisfying is not that Terminal Gods bring these twisted narratives to some sort of meaningful conclusion, but rather they are pregnant with the possibility of what the habilitation of the Goth sound might mean. In part this can be seen as a prerogative of the download generation:

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“We've probably all got our own stories. For me, I was dabbling in emo at 15, moved onto darker stuff from there like the now-no-more band I Am Ghost, then from there to stuff like Tiamat and Type O Negative, then to The 69 Eyes, then to The Cult, Siouxsie, and the rest. So... yeah, in my case, it was a chain of "this band sounds like/influenced this band'." (Halinsk)

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Likewise Maisey is phlegmatic about being born in the year when many of its detractors would argue the drum machine was over:

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“I never really felt out of time. I worked my way backwards: I started listening to stuff, I got into stuff that was around when I was younger (Nightwish, Type O Negative - even Cradle of Filth for a while!) and worked my way back to bands like Fields of the Nephilim and The Sisters Of Mercy.

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With bands that maintained a touring schedule (like The Sisters, or the Mission) there was no sense of having missed out. Late coming sure, but there was still a lot going on to participate in and enjoy. It was only when I got into more underground stuff and started listening to cassette tapes by utterly defunct (Rosetta Stone, Children On Stun) bands that I felt a real sting of having missed out.” (Rob Maisey)

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But how do they feel about courting the mainstream and carrying the mantle of Goth-rock crossover in the twenty-first century?

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“In its essence, all rock and pop music is dance music really, insomuch as one of its fundamental roots (along with folk and blues) is the dance hall jive music of the '40s and '50s. So it’s all variations on the same theme really…”

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