Mark K-Punk is a renowned blogger.

Since what we are being invited to admire nowadays is contemporary so-called “art rock”, a semiotic effigy, a dead recapitulation: what better time to think about what art pop once was and still could be(come)?

Fascinatingly, the potentiating machines which art pop draws upon are not “musical” at all, and what is radical about art pop is that IT IS NOT MUSIC. Brian Eno’s description of himself as a non-musician was much more punk than the Spectacular transgressive displays with which we are apt to confuse it. Eno was simply making the same move that Duchamp had made sixty years before in relation to art, i.e. freeing up certain affectivity-generating machineries from their containment within so-called relative autonomies. No more musicians, no more artists, only abstract engineers.

Ultravox– Artificial Life, [Ha! Ha! Ha!]

In the list of “influences” Ultravox’s John Foxx provided for In the City fanzine in 1977, he celebrated the Velvets not for Reed’s transgressive Romanticism, but because “they taught us that music is just organized noise—thereby destroying any mental blocks about musical theory etc—anyone can do it.” Similarly, the importance of Warhol was that he was “a humanoid in charge of a factory that made him images to puzzle people—mostly mirrors—everything new should be irritating to some existing value—forcing those who hold those values to re-evaluate even if they finally reject it”.

Fittingly then, Ultravox were despised by more or less everyone—in the media at least. Precisely because Foxx, born Dennis Leigh, was a working class Northerner, he did not fit into the proletarian pantomime that Mclaren was directing with the complicity of the bourgeois media. Also, Foxx was a committed modernist, whose punking of modernism consisted in his conviction that it could be delivered through mass media.

If k(yber) punk begins anywhere, it is with Ultravox. And it is their second LP, Ha! Ha! Ha! on which Ultravox were able to fully realize Foxx’s icily Conceptual vision.

Ha! Ha! Ha! plays like what you might have imagined punk rock would sound like before you actually encountered the lame predictability of the music. Here was an LP that made had more to do with the icy hauteur of the European avant-garde than the sweaty impatience of rock and roll. Atonal classicism (which came via classically-trained viola and synthesizer player Billy Currie), Marguerite Duras, Alain Reisnas loom everywhere in Ha! Ha! Ha!’s distorting vorticist labyrinth.

And so to “Artificial Life”, Foxx’s coruscating cubist portrait of the after-hours pursuits of the English master class (“vibrate on sulphate till it gets late, and their velocity begins to sag”). Listen to the ice-precise disgust of Foxx¹s Proletarian Outsider (“I’ve learned to be a stranger / Stranger still”) as, appalled, he witnesses the bourgeoisie at hedonic play, like Bill wandering transfixed-repelled around the orgy at Someron in Eyes Wide Shut. Foxx speaks not from the slave-position of hot rage, but from the cold loathing proper to the Outside of Society.

I should have left here years ago
But my imagination won’t tell me how
This whirlpool’s got such seductive furniture
It’s so pleasant getting drowned
So we drink and sink and talk and stalk
With interchangeable enemies and friends
Trying on each other’s skins
While we’re dying to be born again

Compare Foxx’s Bacon-cut and Heartfield-slashed Grosz-out to the leaden lumpen-punk pub-dub social realism of a bourgeois like Joe Strummer and you can have no doubt that it is Utraovox’s proletarian modernism that has infinitely greater punk potential.

[visit Ultravox’s website here, buy Ha! Ha! Ha! here]

Grace Jones– Private Life, [Warm Leatherette]

Cut to Compass Point, Nassau, where Grace Jones cuts a version of the Pretenders’ “Private Life”, and reveals the virtual attractor of the k-punk line was always the black female neurobot.

The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde: “In the late Seventies, everyone in London, as I remember listened to reggae music and not much else. Like all London punks, I wanted to do reggae, and I wrote “Private Life”. When I heard Grace’s version (I think it was in a club in Germany) I thought: “Now that’s how it’s supposed to sound”.

But as with Foxx, the image(s) are no less integral than the sound. Grace Jones is not a creative subject, still less an artist, but a Conceptual-Affectional-Perceptual machine devoid of interiority. It-she is the imperious Masoch queen, cold and cruel, impassively disdaining the ardent passion of her bachelors—“sentimental gestures only bore me to death” “Attachment / Obligation / Regret shit, that’s so wet / And your sex life complications are not my fascination”—the infinitely decomposable and recombinatory blue-black panther anorganism perfectly adapted to the McLuhan-Burroughs present in which there is “no privacy and no private parts”.

[visit Grace Jones’ website here, buy Warm Leatherette here]

Visage– Pleasure Boys, [Pleasure Boys 7”]

Cut again, to 1982. Visage’s “Pleasure Boys Dance Mix”.

Visage began as an aristocratic leisure offshoot of Ure-period Ultravox (Midge himself , plus Billy Currie) and art punks Magazine (Barry Adamson, John McGeoch, Dave Formula), envisaged as little more than a divertissement, a disco backing to the catwalk prancing of the studiedly decadent Steve Strange. Their raison d’etre was strictly functional, not at all Romantic-subjectivist: the group was there to fill a gap in the market. Socialite and DJ Rusty Egan needed more disco electronika to play at his and Strange’s clubs.

By the time of “Pleasure Boys”, Ure had long since departed in a fit of rockist outrage at Strange’s allegedly excessive attention to the “fripperies” of image. But Visage were essentially a fashion statement. And as Strange, an admirer of Helmut Newton (who shot the sleeve shots for Visage’s second LP The Anvil) knew, the best fashion shoots are those with a narrative and a mis-en-scene. Visage gave Strange, a working class Welsh soulboy and Bowie obsessive, the chance to live out his sci-fi fantasies in the playground of late seventies post-punk clubland. The pleasure boy was the last in a line of decadent-aesthete simperonae which Strange had cultivated: used and abused doll (“Mind of a Toy”), Lestat-like vampire incapable of passion (“The Damned Don’t Cry”), solitary European traveler (“Fade to Grey”).

“Pleasure Boys” begins with looped motorcyle revs reminiscent of Roxy’s “Virginia Plain”, and by this time, the rump Visage of Strange, Egan, Currie, Formula and brass player Gary Barnacle had perfected their John Barry-meets-Moroder wide-screen anglo-disco.

But the astonishing thing about the track, enormous in the hip-hop clubs of New York in the early eighties, is the way that, around the four-minute mark, it (d)evolves into a prototype of acid house. Strange’s vocal are gone, and it’s as if, in erasing the hystericized male body, Visage have opened up a space in which the then only potential population of ecstatic boys beyond the pleasure principle can dance.

[visit Visage’s website here, buy Visage material here]