CHAPTER 79

 

 

#22: ELECTRONIC

“Forbidden City”

from the album Raise The Pressure

Released: July 1996

 

Some professional music people bear a very narrow conception of what constitutes “perfect pop.” Normally they acknowledge that chimera within the framework oh fuck off let’s begin again. They regard Perfect Pop as typically being mid-tempo, containing lots of melismatic guitars and resembling the work of The Byrds in the mid-1960s. In the actual mid-1960s this would have been the equivalent of your parents eulogising Al Jolson as “proper entertainment.”

 

How much bitter resentment underlines that mindset, coupled with the knowledge that younger generations of musicians have gone in a completely different, if related, direction and that people younger than them per se consider their notion of Perfect Pop outdated, with a coating of poignancy for the pathetic? Perfect Pop as these people and most radio stations understand it is less and less relevant as the decades squander into succession.

 

Nor is Perfect Pop by and large that popular. “There She Goes” by The La’s gets played everywhere to this day, but wasn’t a Top 40 hit at all on its first release, and even on remixed reissue did not get beyond number thirteen. Similarly, “Forbidden City,” as perfect a “Perfect Pop” song as could ever be perfected, stopped at number fourteen in its first week. Looking at what kept both songs down, we find many subsequently forgotten offerings by fashionable names of the period, usually with bigger-budgeted promotional forces behind them, some transient workaday dance tracks, a few genuine classic pop singles, and quite a lot of topical-at-the-time songs about football. 

 

We recognise that the charts are by and large a very poor barometer of genuine popularity; they mostly consist of passing fancies and whims which materialise for a few weeks before vanishing for good, like a cat being attracted to a ball of string. But in the summer of 1996 Electronic were not trendy, and the general suspicion was that here was a bunch of middle-aged men who weren’t in tune with the way things were travelling (songs by Kula Shaker and Ash far outperformed “Forbidden City” that week).

 

They were out of time, Electronic. Which was and is a shame because “Forbidden City” is something approaching the paradigm of perfection. The song slams into immediate and violent view (“THERE’S NOT A HOPE!”). Johnny Marr’s guitars propagate hook after hook (and his raised-eyebrow bass in the choruses is a sort of p-word which I’m not going to mention in this book; take a Barthes) as though giving a pocket history of rock guitar from Hank Marvin to Robin Guthrie (the harmonic thickening on the pre-penultimate chorus), the decisive drums which close down the song’s hell like a demolition derby auctioneer’s hammer, the escalopes of actual-Kraftwerk (Karl Bartos) synthesisers.

 

I didn’t realise until looking it up on Wikipedia that the song is actually about an abusive relationship that a young man has with his father, and his inability to walk away from same. Hence there is an air of hobbled hopelessness about the song and its performance, as if pop itself is doomed if it cannot fix this profoundly imperfect situation. The song blinked for a public second and then where’d it go, what or who was that? But it was the “No” to McAlmont and Butler’s “Yes.” It was far too slow and knotty to dance to hence slept over a suspended rope of spent potential. It isn’t what the song deserves, or indeed what I deserved.