‘‘Think about,” Fred Schneider tells Uncut, “one week I’m washing dishes to make ends meet as a result of I’d stop my job to do the band, after which the subsequent week we’re flying to Nassau to report…”
On the Bahamas’ luxurious Compass Level Studios over three weeks in early 1979, The B-52s laid down their self-titled debut album. These 5 skint musicians had been a daring signing for Island and Warners, even amid the joy of post-punk: a deeply unusual and subtly transgressive group, they shared as a lot DNA with the avant-garde, from Solar Ra to Yoko Ono to Captain Beefheart, as with surf music, lady group pop, disco and punk.
Shaped in Athens, Georgia, in 1976, The B-52s had been nourished by the town’s distinctive setting. This was a farm city of eccentrics, led by the likes of Jeremy Ayers (later of Limbo District) and report store proprietor William Orten Carlton, a spot that welcomed outsider artwork and queerness.
From the beginning, The B-52s had been uncommon. They had been a collective with no chief, a five-piece with three singers and no bassist (vocalist Kate Pierson dealt with keyboard bass together with organ) that sculpted songs by way of group improvisations, with a postmodern eye on the previous. This was clearest of their look – all atomic bouffant wigs, shiny materials and garish make-up, a stunning forerunner to the seedy Lynchian Technicolor of Wild At Coronary heart or Blue Velvet – but additionally of their music, which blended surf, punk and underground experimentation with the novelty weirdness and outer-space obsessions of the Fifties.
They had been kitsch, actually, however surreal and absurdist quite than camp or ironic; an American response to Roxy Music’s high-art trash aesthetic. But these had been the times when bands as weird as The B-52s might discover a dwelling on main labels, and Island and Warners’ wager paid off.
To say that their catalogue – now being reissued on this 9LP or 8CD field, minus 2008’s Funplex – begins sturdy can be an understatement: The B-52’s is a surprising debut, a airtight manifesto that appeared out of the ether. Its first facet specifically is near-perfection: from the ragged space-garage of “Planet Claire”, with its “Peter Gunn” riff, and the breakneck, proto-Strokes “52 Women”, to the swinging chaos of “Dance This Mess Round”.
Aspect One’s nearer, “Rock Lobster”, is the album’s crowning glory. Seven minutes of demented storage constructed round a detuned surf riff, with absurdist lyrics a couple of seaside get together, it evolves right into a savage outro showcasing guitarist Ricky Wilson’s genius. Involving detuned, lacking and unison strings, his novel method – half Ventures, half Magic Band’s Zoot Horn Rollo, half Sonic Youth earlier than Sonic Youth – allowed him to play slashing elements that also sound like little else, and hit tougher than most punk or no wave. With Schneider dealing with declamatory spoken phrase, The B-52’s, particularly “Rock Lobster”, reveals off Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s Ono-esque vocal experimentation, and famously impressed John Lennon to name Ono from Bermuda to inform her that her “time had come”. Double Fantasy was the consequence.
Producer Chris Blackwell sensibly saved the preparations minimal and the sound dry on The B-52’s, mimicking the band’s reveals, which provides the report a fantastically crisp really feel. Rhett Davies was equally strict on the follow-up, 1980’s Wild Planet. Regardless of songs about poodles referred to as Quiche and demonic vehicles, there’s loads of edge: “Social gathering Out Of Bounds” is interspersed with eerie discord, the raunchy “Soiled Again Street” doesn’t disguise very laborious behind its driving metaphor, and single “Personal Idaho” is consumed with paranoia, Schneider warning over one in all Wilson’s most interesting riffs: “Don’t let the chlorine in your eyes/Blind you to the terrible shock/That waits for you on the backside of the bottomless blue, blue, blue pool…”
The B-52’s and Wild Planet used up their pre-fame materials, and now the group wanted recent songs. To purchase a while, in July 1981 they launched Social gathering Combine!, a pioneering but inessential remix album that squashed three songs from each LPs into side-long medleys. Within the meantime, they had been recording with David Byrne, however numerous difficulties meant the outcomes had been trimmed to a mini-album, 1982’s Mesopotamia. Their makes an attempt to fill out their sound with horns, synths and the like don’t all the time succeed, however the Levantine disco title monitor stays a nice instance of their interlocking vocal elements, overflowing hooks taking the place of conventional choruses.
The group modified their course of for 1983’s Whammy!, with Ricky Wilson and drummer Keith Strickland dealing with all of the music on drum machines, synths and guitars. Jamaican engineer Steven Stanley, one of many sonic wranglers on Social gathering Combine!, produced the delightfully out-there outcomes. Whereas they embraced electronics, this wasn’t your ordinary mid-’80s sound: the frantic likes of “Whammy Kiss” and “Butterbean” are extra akin to Suicide overlaying Beefheart at Black Ark.
“Tune For A Future Technology” was a weird, good single, every of the group delivering a spoken verse about themselves, then coming collectively to trill “let’s meet and have a child now”. Whammy! initially included a canopy of Ono’s “Don’t Fear…”, sadly changed with the inferior “Moon 83” on subsequent pressings, together with this one.
Issues started to go fallacious for The B-52s about now. Ricky Wilson grew to become in poor health with AIDS, protecting it a secret from all however Strickland, whereas relationships within the band fractured. When Wilson handed away in 1985, Bouncing Off The Satellites was virtually completed and was launched the next 12 months with no lively group and little promotion. Maybe unsurprisingly, solely the joyous, rockabilly-powered “Wig”, reworked from a decade-old jam, captures their ordinary zest.
No-one might exchange Wilson, so the brand new songs the group wrote after they reunited later within the decade had been much less manic, much less experimental, however extra soulful and in tune with the instances. Consequently, 1989’s Cosmic Factor grew to become an enormous hit, one of many best-selling albums within the US that 12 months. It was a heat, welcoming report: the group seemed again fondly on their Athens days on “Deadbeat Membership”, and indulged their interstellar fixation on “Topaz” and the title monitor, even whereas “Channel Z” took pictures at political “disinformation”. Granted, the snare sounds had been gargantuan, however that was laborious to keep away from in 1989.
Equally inescapable was “Love Shack”: if it suffers considerably from overfamiliarity today, it’s however a playful piece of Southern groove, with Schneider, Wilson and Pierson’s vocals freeform and important.
1992’s Good Stuff has its moments – “Is That You Mo-Dean?” was one other house traditional – however suffered from the absence of Cindy Wilson, overlong tracks and more and more slick manufacturing from Don Was and Nile Rodgers. The B-52s would later carry out the title track for 1994’s The Flintstones – a peak in visibility, a dip in high quality – tour extensively and, on this decade, take pleasure in residencies in Las Vegas.
Whereas there’s one thing very B-52s about Nevada’s atomic testing websites, casinos and cheesy Strip, Vegas continues to be an sudden vacation spot for a gaggle so conceived within the underground; but it’s maybe no weirder than Bryan Ferry, a fellow explorer of the kitsch and the curious, staking out his patch on Easy Radio.
The B-52s have been calling themselves “the world’s best get together band” for years now. They’re not totally fallacious, after all, however the Athens troupe are a lot greater than that. For one, the best way they’ve lived their lives and offered themselves has lengthy been an instance to marginalised outsiders, whether or not queer or in any other case. And the music collected right here – particularly their effervescent debut – has impressed acolytes from Beat Taking place to Boy George, Sleater-Kinney to Stephen Malkmus, to not point out Lennon and Ono. As this field charts, they’re a kind of uncommon teams who can genuinely declare to have launched the counterculture gloriously into the mainstream.