The first time I heard 'Sulk' by Associates
15 min read
As I write – on 14th May 2019 – it is 37 years to the day that the Associates released their defining album ‘Sulk’. Here I reflect, in some depth, on the first time I ever heard this stupendous creation…
1982 was a very difficult year for me, one of the hardest of my life, but it was also a year in which the most astonishingly potent and unprecedented music avalanched forth from all directions. There’s something about being around 13 that makes everything you encounter cut so deep. You are like fresh, wet concrete and the imprint of any hand remains for life.
My inner world was already being sculpted, via my Walkman, by unorthodox talents such as Japan, Ultravox, Visage, Soft Cell and, by way of contrast, Dexys. Somehow, I came late to the wondrous party that was The Associates, just in time to watch their Rome burn, while the flames that would consume them were at their highest.
I guess I first heard them on Radio 1 or saw them on Top of the Pops at the time of their big three singles. Musically I was – and still am – hard to seduce. I think I heard ‘Party Fears Two’ and thought ‘Oh blimey, that’s thrilling’, but for some reason didn’t get round to buying it. Then I heard ‘Club Country’ which impressed me… but less than the former. The follow-up, their swansong ’18 Carat Love Affair’, I found too schmaltzy (though now it’s among my most treasured).
It was around that time, the summer of 1982, that I found myself on holiday in Norfolk with my family. I recall being in a record shop and pulling out the album ‘Sulk’. I was struck by the blinding exoticism of the cover and the two figures sprawling around in some kind of Kew Gardens hothouse. The largesse of the cover was somewhat undermined by a plain sticker that read, ‘Includes the singles Party Fears Two and Club Country’, but it was that traditional, drab marketing tool that finally closed the sale. I took the gamble that more akin to those singles would be inside. I was conned, beautifully conned.
There was a clue to the surprises within in the name ‘Sulk’. I didn’t like it as a title, it didn’t say much and sulking is a childish trait that’s scorned and, again, it seemed the antithesis of the glittering exuberance I’d already witnessed. In fact, I distinctly recall feeling that they weren’t good at titles in general: to my young mind (used to the pomp poetry of names like ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’) titles like ‘Skipping’, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ and ‘No’ appeared unimaginative, whereas the more unusual candidates like ‘Nude Spoons’ and ‘Bap de la Bap’ felt like forced mystique. ‘What the hell is a bap de la bap?’ I remember thinking, ‘A white bun born out of a white bun?’ (Of course we all, er, know now, eh?).
One big issue was I could not get my head around the name ‘The Associates’, as they were verbally called by DJs or, worse, just ‘Associates’ as appeared on the album. It was like a name they’d got by tearing a business card in half: blank, flat, workaday – again the very opposite of the vibrancy of ‘Party Fears Two’.
Also, I felt a little sorry for these Associates: there were only two of them. To me back then, a band was a gang who all felt the same. These guys had no one to play with. Soft Cell got away with it because Marc did the singing and Dave did all the music, that was clear and it just looked like they were wilfully a duo. But these guys… they sounded like a huge group yet no one else wanted to be seen in photos with them. I didn’t get it. But that’s because none of these things are about the music…
Music changes everything. Doris Lessing had this to say about it:
“Is it possible… that we are poisoning ourselves with music? Our lot, my contemporaries, from our adolescence on, we listened to dance music, day and night, and it was all of it romantic and sentimental. It yearned, it wanted, it longed… and expected, too, for somewhere, sometime, a promise had been made. Some day I will find you… We were immersed in dreams… Shamans have used music for thousands of years to create special moods, young men are prepared for killing by stirring marches… but this is so delicate a thing that it is used carefully, by specialists, in special circumstances. But we deluge ourselves with music… soak ourselves in it, often feed it direct into the brain with machines designed for this purpose – and we never ask what effect it may be having.”
Does music make a promise that life itself can’t keep? Perhaps a good song is a neat vignette of catharsis that seems to perfectly evoke our lives; a diorama, a mini-world in which everything is perfectly placed to summarise our emotional wanderings; so compelling, we mistake the mirror for the territory, before blundering out into the sprawling landscape of reality, drunk on hope, only to find chaos and disappointment. Thus, we are sent retreating again to our bolt-holes and our records, to dream again of what might be, surrounded by swirling sound.
Interesting, too, that it’s become a hackneyed trope in TV to use the sound of a needle jerking from a record to denote a sudden and humiliating jolt back to reality.
A number of hymn tunes were deliberately written to be ponderous and dull because the Church was frightened that people would become enraptured by the music, rather than the message of God. Well, for many of us music itself became our overarching religion, with it naturally following that the musicians could be seen as gods and goddesses. And therein lies many a problem, as we shall see…
Back at the house in Norfolk, the rest of my family had vanished off somewhere, leaving me alone in the large lounge with a hi-fi. Two big bay windows looked out onto an impressive coastal panorama: a vast, unsettling network of marshland and creeks stretched away to the horizon ending in a long, sandy island and the sea. The sense of wild, desolate space was overwhelming.
It was in this setting that I first dropped the needle onto the whirling, crackling platter that was ‘Sulk’.
A single snare hit brought ‘Arrogance Gave Him Up’ fast-marching into the room. Immediately there was something odd about it: a dry, plastic nature to the sounds, something sharp and abrasive going on. I was offended in some way. Even to my 13 year old ears the production sounded awkward, as though the sounds weren’t sitting right.
Then I realised the drummer was having a fit all over it. It sounded like he was trying to hurry it up all the time and I hated the boxy crack of the snare. But I remember that, as it progressed, I became dazzled and amused by how he seemed to be going for the world record of how many snare hits could be crammed into a fill. He was like an incensed, wind-milling fighter, his mates unable to hold him back from constantly attacking the drums. Underneath this skittering cacophony, however, a rousing anthem was emerging, something like a thrilling, sixties movie theme; the beginning of an immense adventure.
‘But where’s the guy’s voice?’ I continually wondered.
It kept not arriving. I was taken aback. This was the first album I’d ever heard that started with an instrumental. The bloke’s voice was one of their strong suits, why risk leaving it out?
All too soon it sounded like the drummer’s mates were finally wrestling him from the kit as he struggled to land his last crazed slaps.
‘Now where’s the guy’s voice?’
Immediately a new mystery was occurring. Something large and undefinable was being rolled around an empty indoor swimming pool building, whilst a load of metal chips were being sprinkled into a bowl.
‘Where am I meant to be now? What are they doing? Where is the singer?’
I began to wonder about these Associates. Were they even interested in people liking them? Why put all these obstacles in the way of the shimmering pop and the soaring voice? Surely that’s coming now?
NO.
‘No’ – the song’s opening made it very clear the shimmering pop wasn’t coming. What then began could not have been in sharper contrast to the first track: perhaps the drummer had been safely straitjacketed and stowed in a padded cell, because a soft-sounding drum machine in a cavernous space began to count in the moment that would, frankly, alter my life for good…
As I looked out across the marshes, an incredible sonic landscape was being established that seemed to merge with the barren vista.
A thin, insistent piano refrain – Russian in nature - appeared to be suspended in the air. Underneath this, a deeper piano began to propel my spirit out onto the jagged marshland, rich in a kind of irresistible foreboding. Disembodied, mumbling voices were bubbling up from quagmires in the creeks. A mammoth lurching sound - somewhere between a brass section and a giant trunk being dragged across the heavens – punctuated the overture, piling on the apprehension. But then a lilting refrain replaced the Russian piano, I couldn’t make out whether it was strings or some slightly otherworldly variation of them, but it was bringing in a new aspect – a kind of sorrowful romance, a wistful reverie before… two minutes exactly into the song and over 5 minutes into the album… the single most gargantuan voice I’ve ever heard eclipsed the scene with monumental magnificence!
“Tore my hair out from the roots,
Planted them in someone’s garden,
Then I waited for the shoots,
Then I waited for the shoots.”
I was frightened. Not only was the voice enormous, but it was also dragging a cavernous oil-tanker of reverberation behind it. It is still, to this day, the most colossal production of a voice I’ve ever known of. But then what does this singer choose to say as his opening salvo on this album? No prosaic statements of love and loss for this character… instead the chillingly authentic ramblings of a hopeless schizophrenic from the deepest recesses of Bedlam: the tearing out of the hair, the planting, the waiting for new growth out of the earth. This was confounding and disturbing, yet the bewitching spell of the music and the conviction of his delivery put me inside the mind of the madman. Suddenly I wanted to know if the human hair plant was going to flourish.
The deranged imagery continued and, at points, the voice veered scarily into peculiar chromatics…
“Tearing facial masks in bed.”
This added to a sense of hysteria, as though the singer was on the edge of panic. The central mantra of the song appeared to be pointing to a situation between the singer and a woman.
“Tear a strip from your dress,
Wrap my arms in it.”
These words acted as small respite in the song with their delicate poetry. ‘At last,’ I perhaps thought, ‘something between a man and a woman, the comfortingly threadbare subject of heterosexual love’, albeit with bondage overtones. To digress for a moment, twenty-six years later, in the top room of a house off the Holloway Road, a girl actually did this to me, except it was the soft cotton belt of her dress she removed, before tying my hands to the iron bedstead. I never told her about the song.
“Shaved and cut myself again,
Should have let it slip down further.”
Whatever was going on with his hair and this girl, the singer was indicating suicidal thoughts, before stepping off into one of his most psychedelic and sinister couplets:
“Crushing sour stones taste sour,
Every minute hears a medal.”
No, not ‘Every minute here’s a medal’ which could seem appropriate: a reward for getting through each minute of this anxious ordeal; the minutes themselves were hearing medals. Could terror and bliss be ever this intertwined?
Then came a plateau where the whole song seemed suspended. The vast, aching croon intoned…
“No, no, no, no…”
The last note was held with gorgeous poignancy before he and the music crashed back down to earth with a final ‘No’ that resounded like the no-est no of all noes, elevating the simple title into stratospheric significance.
Listening to it today, that final ‘No’ really is immensely affecting, as though out of the horrified mouth of the architect of the Titanic, watching from afar as the final tip of his life’s work is swallowed by the Atlantic.
Finally the marshes in my young vision were full again of the Cossack voices with the insistent piano, but with the feeling of romping to the finish line now. Yet there was one last surprise – and it was a special one. Intoning the final mantra, ‘Tear a strip from your dress’, he suddenly leaped perhaps two octaves just for the word ‘Strip’ then straight back down again! I couldn’t believe it. This was a singer that did things no other dared do – or would even think of. This was a kind of vocal gymnastics I’d never been exposed to before, the divine yodelling of the gods.
With ‘No’, The Associates had successfully captured my young heart and mind. Letting the entire album play out revealed - even back then - a wanton, belligerent, self-sabotaging spirit that perplexed and intrigued me.
I found ‘Bap de la Bap’ and ‘Nude Spoons’ hard going, the sort of tracks a band with serious cabin fever might jam out of irritation in their rehearsal room, then discard as aberrations. But The Associates had put these at the forefront of their album. Consult a professional album programmer and they’ll tell you it is pretty much imperative to place your singles and strongest songs at the start, to seduce people in. Then you can take them round the houses and reveal some of your darker secrets, your princes in the tower if you will, before finishing on a powerful song, like a thankful embrace. Comedians apply the same principle in stand up – saving their more challenging material till after they’ve won the crowd over. It’s also commonly known as the ‘Shit Sandwich’ in management circles, where they critique their employees with a compliment, followed by the key criticism, topped off with a compliment to make them go away smiling.
With ‘Sulk’, none of this happens: the singer is either aloof, late, or aptly sulking for the first 5 minutes of the record; when he deigns to arrive, he is babbling unnerving, fractured nonsense in bleak surroundings; from there he takes us off on a terrifying chase, pursued by blurred monsters and images of fornicating cutlery…
Eventually, the clouds crack right at the end of the album and the glorious sun of the singles beams through. The upshot is… these Associates play bloody hard to get. In fact, if you reversed the entire song order you’d probably get the sequence an album programmer would choose. These buggers reversed it!
I remember that day finding the album to be an overloaded banquet that had me bilious, yet deeply intrigued to see how it would play out over subsequent listens. Something other than ‘No’ was haunting me though… a track with another simple title, ‘Skipping’. This one was growing on me like Martian ivy. With its flamenco guitar it gave off the smoky impression of burnished sunsets melting into the sea on some far-flung, exotic holiday, where the sangria and the fading light can send you off into a beatific reverie, tinged with melancholy.
“Ripping ropes from Belgian wharfs.”
Was there ever a more pleasing and transporting lyric? That line took me from the word go.
However, it’s the way that ‘Skipping’ ends that catapults me to the highest highs I can reach through music. It really is like a sonic orgasm. I just listened to it again whilst writing. Those spiralling guitars of infinite yearning, never quite seeming to find their peak, as Billy’s voice literally skips all over the unfolding drama, repeating the words ‘Skip’, ‘Skipping’ and ‘I left you there’, they made me marvel like I did thirty-five years ago and brought tears to my eyes.
I remember holding that cover and staring at it, mesmerised. The two figures were reclining in some sort of opulent green house, on separate benches draped in white sheets, garishly lit from underneath with startling hues of blues and greens. A mountain of exotic foliage was erupting behind them, likewise saturated in turquoise, teal and viridian. But the touch that elevated this album cover from the good to the exceptional was the minimal inclusion of red: in the scant brickwork peeping through behind the ferns and, most sublimely, in the shawl sported by the curiously-posed figure on the right.
I looked at them and wondered about their lives. When you have little information to go on your imagination runs wild. I assumed they were taking a brief break from the studio to have this shoot, and that this was part of the studio complex that I imagined to be large and salubrious, in keeping with the music. I guessed the mixing desk and all the instruments were just out of shot. I mean, this environment so perfectly suited the music, how could it not have been the place it was made?
The person I now guessed to be Alan Rankine was sat on the right. He seemed very measured and still sat in his shawl. His face was well-lit, but his eyes were doing something incredibly strange: his pupils seemed to be disappearing upwards as though he was about to faint or go into some sort of mediumistic trance. I couldn’t believe that someone would want to look like that on this most important picture… Why?
The instantly recognisable singer, Billy Mackenzie, was on the left and he couldn’t have been more in contrast to Alan: his pose was no pose, for he was clearly snapped mid-fidget; he looked flighty, beset by nervous energy, his raised eyebrows betraying a discomfort, a sense of being found out; his hand had been eternally caught in the middle of adjusting his cap, whilst one boot kicked the heel of the other in a show of restlessness. Alan looked like he’d been melded to the seat for hours, whilst Billy had been fluttering all over the set like a butterfly. It’s rare to see such motion in a still of a seated figure.
Sadly, the exotic butterfly that was Billy decided to fly from us all on 22nd January 1997, just short of his 40th birthday. Alan Rankine is happily still with us. He once told me his favourite quote comes from Henry David Thoreau: ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them’. Well, after ‘Sulk’, that can never be said of Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine.