By the
summer of 1978 punk rock had lost the power to shock. The revolution that
had shot an amphetamine rush into a moribund music scene had been subsumed
into the mainstream. Or so it seemed until The Clash invited one of the
lesser-known names from the New York punk scene to support them.
Part electronic rock band, part performance art project, Suicide comprised
visual artist Alan Vega on vocals and musician Martin Rev on electronic
keyboards and drum machine. Formed eight years earlier amid Manhattan’s
downtown art scene, alongside the New York Dolls, they were inspired equally
by Iggy Pop and Elvis Presley, Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground,
Kraftwerk and Stockhausen – and sounded like none of them. With their grimy
black leather street clothes, wraparound shades and a confrontational
attitude to performing, they found a natural home in the Manhattan clubs,
where punk was kicked into life by The Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell,
Television and Blondie.
Not many people enjoyed the experience of watching Suicide’s ground-breaking
experiments in tech-noir. In an era of rock-n-roll hedonism they made an
intense electronic noise in which primitive rockabilly rhythms and fragments
of melody fought to escape from a maelstrom of feedback and distortion
played at maximum volume. Vega’s aggressive stage persona blurred the
boundary between performer and audience in the manner prescribed by the
Surrealist visionary Antonin Artaud in his manifesto Theatre of Cruelty
(1935), using confrontation to break down barriers. He swung a huge
motorcycle chain menacingly around onstage. Sometimes he would cut his own
face with a switchblade, ‘just to freak people out’. Once he leapt offstage
and blocked the door, bike chain in hand, to stop dissatisfied audience
members leaving.
When Suicide came to Europe they proved too extreme even for audiences
accustomed to the de rigueur anti-social behaviour of punk. The booing began
moments after they took the stage in front of an audience impatient for the
hyped-up garage rock of The Clash. Beer bottles began to be thrown – full
beer bottles. Rev, impassive behind his bug shades, responded by cranking up
the volume and attacking his keyboard with renewed aggression, stabbing
jagged shards of discordant noise into the pulsing rhythms that rumbled
through your gut. Beside him Vega, blood seeping from a head wound, openly
baited the angry crowd and carried on singing – if singing was the word for
a voice that ranged from psychotic crooning to a satanic Elvis impression,
punctuated by strangulated yelps and howls. And that was not just one
isolated show; it happened every night. In England an enormous skinhead
clambered on to the stage and thumped Vega in the face, breaking his nose.
In Scotland the many missiles hurled at the singer included an axe. In
France there was a full-scale riot. Suicide’s crime? To have no guitars or
bass or drums.
‘It was like being in Hell,’ recalls Vega in David Nobakht’s newly published
biography, Suicide: No Compromise (2005). Reminiscing further before a
London concert this January, Vega adds: ‘In the Seventies I was afraid for
my life every night but that didn’t matter, it energised me. Growing up in
Brooklyn you learned never to give up. You could get your ass kicked but you
fought to the death. Stupid macho crap. But that’s why we were never forced
offstage.’ Suicide, as their name suggested, were not for the meek or
faint-hearted. They might not have had guitars but they had more punk
attitude than the countless copycats who followed in the footsteps of The
Sex Pistols and The Clash. In fact Suicide had coined the term ‘punk’ for
their music as far back as 1971, advertising their shows as ‘a punk music
mass.’ Their signature tune was Frankie Teardrop, a terrifying twelve-minute
psychodrama about a factory worker who loses his job and murders his wife
and kid before committing suicide. By the end of it (if you got that far)
you knew just how he felt.
‘We were waiting on line when punk arrived,’ says Vega, who has the stocky
build and strangled vowels of an ageing Brooklyn streetfighter. ‘Here was
finally a movement that took us with it. Before that there was not anything
that could place us. We thought of our music as being religious and it
probably is in a way. Whoever woulda thunk it that the word Punk would
become a movement that we inadvertently probably started? I dunno, I’m not
into taking credit as the first one to do it and shit like that, but it was
the first time anyone used the word punk since Lester Bangs used it in a
Creem magazine article on The Stooges in 1969.’
Thirty-five years later, Suicide have yet to achieve a hit record, although
Vega enjoyed a 1981 solo hit in France with Juke Box Babe. But they are
still recording and performing together, have just had all their five albums
re-released – each with extra CDs of live performances, from their 1975
demos to a Paris concert in 1989. And they are finally being recognised as
one of the most important influences on twenty first-century music.
Before Suicide there were no electronic duos on a gig circuit dominated by
progressive rock dinosaurs. The release of their debut album in 1977, with
its arresting melange of industrial noise and heart-melting melody, and its
1980 successor (adding the pop sheen of producer Ric Ocasek of The Cars),
directly inspired many of the first wave of synth-pop bands. Without Suicide
there would have been no Soft Cell or Human League, Depeche Mode or Pet Shop
Boys. They inspired Joy Division, Primal Scream and the Jesus and Mary
Chain, REM, Nick Cave and even Bruce Springsteen, who befriended them and
acknowledged their influence on his stark Nebraska album. They can be heard
more clearly in the post-rave generation of dance musicians like Underworld
and the Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin and The Prodigy.
Yet for many years Suicide received little credit for their work,
languishing in the ghetto of artists whose critical acclaim fails to
translate into record sales. ‘We only made enough money to live but if you
gave me a choice to make all the money some of those people made and sound
like Soft Cell, I still wouldn’t do it,’ insists Rev. ‘I wouldn’t want to be
part of it. It’s a betrayal. I’d rather make no money and do what I do. We
have a different path and a different destiny.’
Similarly, credit has eluded Vega, originally a painter who found a niche
with sculptures of cruciforms using light bulbs, neon and found objects,
which was equally ahead of its time. Jeffrey Deitch, the New York gallery
owner who championed Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, recalls his 1972
show at the OK Harris gallery as ‘the toughest and most radical art I had
ever seen’. He describes Vega’s installation made of ‘lights, TV sets, coils
of wire and other discarded electrical equipment … dumped in piles on the
floor. Some of the power cords were spliced together and plugged in.’ And
this, remember, was nearly 30 years before Tomoko Takahashi’s installation
of electrical detritus filled the Saatchi Gallery, earning her a Turner
Prize nomination. ‘Apparently my work started a school called Scatter Art,
so Jeffrey Deitch told me,’ says Vega, who was recently given his first show
in 20 years at the Deitch Gallery. ‘So it happened again – a coupla guys got
famous for it. I’d done it already, but they sold theirs for megabucks and
had it shown in museums and stuff like that. Just like that Soft Cell thing
all over again.’
For Vega, there was never a distinction between his music and his art. ‘Art
and music – it’s all the same thing to me,’ he insists, ‘I’m still the same
guy doing it’. Julian Schnabel, writing in 100,000 Watts of Fat City (1997),
a book of photographs of Vega’s sculptures, saw parallels in Vega’s favoured
themes: ‘Alan Vega has been meditating on the crucifix, death and ecstasy
with every sensory pore in his body,’ he wrote, ‘whether singing, making
music or building crosses, since I can remember and even before that’.
Vega’s art and music began life at the Project of Living Artists, a
publicly-funded art space in New York which he had helped to found in the
late 1960s. Open 24 hours a day, it was similar to Warhol’s Factory, with
artists and musicians, feminists and political agitators sharing space with
junkies and alcoholics. It was there, in 1970, that Vega met Rev, who had an
avant-garde jazz group called Reverend B, and they discovered a shared
interest in radical politics and electronic music as a means of artistic
expression.
Still together and still at the cutting edge after all these years,
Suicide’s last album, ‘American Supreme’, addressed the state of post-9/11
America and showed them to be moving on, incorporating elements of hip-hop
and funk into their stark minimalist palette. Their London show this January
found that they have a new audience, many in their teens and early 20s:
people who were not even born when Suicide began but have tuned into their
sound through the groups they influenced and the acknowledgements paid by
people like Bobby Gillespie and REM’s Michael Stipe, another fan. ‘I really
like Suicide,’ says Stipe. ‘They were so ahead of the curve and therefore
really unpopular, as well they should be.’
These days the shows usually end without bloodshed but, far from mellowing
with age, Suicide remain as experimental as ever and no two performances are
ever the same. ‘In the beginning Suicide stood out because there was nobody
like us. There still isn’t,’ says Vega. ‘I have known bands who try to sound
like us and some of them do a fairly decent job but they’re not like us.
They don’t have the intensity. Back in the day people used to say to us: “Oh
you guys are ahead of our time” but I don’t believe in that stuff. I thought
we were right on our time – everyone else was behind the time.’
Tim
Cooper is Music Editor for contemporary
Suicide: No Compromise by David Nobakht is available from SAF Publishing and
all five Suicide studio albums have been reissued on CD with extra live
discs by Blast First/Mute