Lost Album Classics Vol. II
Album Title: Colossal Youth
Artist: Young Marble Giants
Release Date: 1980
Young Marble Giants were a short-lived band from Cardiff Wales with a post-punk vision that stood in stark contrast to the prevailing sound of the early '80s "new wave" movement in the UK.
I purchased their first and only album,
Colossal Youth based on the brand name credibility of their label, Rough Trade Records.
Photo: Rough Trade Record Shop
Rough Trade began as a retail record shop founded by Geoff Travis in West London in 1976. In 1978 Travis began issuing 45 rpm singles on the Rough Trade label including reggae artist Augustus Pablo, and the debut singles by the Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers and the Sheffield based electronic music group Cabaret Voltaire. In 1979, Rough Trade created a splash with the release of
Live At the Witch Trials, the debut album of the Fall, a Manchester band led by the eccentric vocalist Mark E. Smith. Early in 1980, Rough Trade released
Crazy Rhythms the stunning debut album of the New Jersey based garage band the Feelies.
I still remember purchasing
Colossal Youth at my local punk record store, Newbury Comics in Boston and my first impressions when I came across the album in the "New Artists" bin at the store.
I loved the black & white cinéma vérité influenced cover art of
Colossal Youth, but I purchased the album (without hearing it) on the strength of Rough Trade's reputation for releasing music by highly innovative artists. Nearly every album release by Rough Trade in 1980 was bold and innovative. Rough Trade was the earliest indie label of the post punk era. For the sake of accuracy I should add that the venerable post punk label Factory Records was also formed in the same year (1978), up north in Manchester England. However, Rough Trade issued it's first single just a couple of weeks before Factory Records.
The Rough Trade label was the epitome of "post-punk", a term first used by music critic Greil Marcus to describe the incendiary Leeds based band, Gang of Four.
Photo: Young Marble Giants
The music on
Colossal Youth came as a complete surprise to me upon first hearing it. Young Marble Giants didn't even play rock music. Instead of a drummer, the Young Marble Giants used electronic drumbeats played on low tech homemade synthesizer attached to a brief case containing a box of circuitry and several knobs and dials. The drum machine gadget sounded very similar to Brian Eno's earliest low tech synth experiments with Roxy Music.
There really wasn't a genre or existing musical category in the early Eighties to file the music of Young Marble Giants under. The Young Marble Giants had a musical vision that was completely outside of rock music framework. Even the most experimental post punk groups like Gang of Four, the Mekons, Joy Division and the Fall maintained rock music as the basic framework for their avant garde musical adventures.
The Young Marble Giants' music was dark and minimalist, not unlike some of the quieter and more introspective music of the Velvet Underground. The only two instrumentalists in YMG were two brothers: Stuart Moxham played choppy rhythm guitar phrases on a Richenbacker guitar and wrote most of the music. Phillip Moxham played bass in a manner that was influenced by the dub reggae sounds of Robbie Shakespeare and the juggernaut bass lines of PIL's Jah Wobble.
The focal point of YMG was female vocalist Alison Statton. Allison had a winsome, waif-like voice. Allison intoned the lyrics in a cool and detached manner that floated over the musical mix. Her understated vocal phrasing became widely imitated by many female vocalists, most notably Beth Gibbons of Portishead. The songs expressed an antipathy toward the consumer society and capitalism in general.
The opening cut on
Colossal Youth,
Searching For Mr. Right shows how radically different Colossal Youth was from the crop of bands associated with the emerging post-punk scene in Great Britain in the early '80s.
Searching For Mr. Right
Searching for Mr Right
Waiting up half the night
Feeling like I'll be dead
Before I'm old
Teaching myself to be
The Young Untold
How can I hope to be
Someone for you to see?
Blind as the Fate decrees
I will go on
Teaching myself to be
The Young Untold
Am I in vain tonight?
Lose you against the light
Who can you be
Mr Right?
Young Marble Giants had a deeply cynical post modern view of traditional romantic relationships. The lyrics of
Searching For Mr. Right completely reject the power imbalance in male/female relationship. Alison expresses her own frustration with having to play the role of the "young untold" girl who has to play dumb in order to attract the attention of a male.
Another song
Include Me Out is an angry outcry against consumerism directed at a former romantic partner.
Include Me Out
Re-arranging the atoms in my hairdo
Gets me thinking 'bout
good times I had with you
Back in the Sixties when love was free
Never need to worry bout my G.C.E. *
Dying of boredom in your plastic home
Pretty the pictures, work to the bone
Don't be depressed,
you can just pick up the phone
But it won't answer 'cos
there's no-one home
Count your possessions out one by one
Include your lovers, include the one
You threw away in nineteen sixty three
Include me out, don't label me
* (footnote)= G.C.E. is the General Certificate of Education issued in the UK to advanced level students as a pre-requisite to attend colleges of higher education.
Music For Evenings is another existential polemic against the notion of romantic love in which Ms. Statton tells her romantic pursuer how boring he is and to stop coming around her with his wallet. Strong words indeed.
Music For Evenings
I don't need you to love me
I don't need you to care
Take your body from by me
Be yourself over there
Though you think you adore me
Secretly you just bore me
When I'm thinking of something
You always come up nothing
Now I'm not a neurotic
Or my business psychotic
And my only excuse is:
Everything comes from chaos
Keep your music for evenings
And your coffee for callers
Say goodbye to your freedom
Don't come here with your wallet
I saw Young Marble Giants in concert on their first and only American tour at Hurrah's in New York. They played faithful renditions of the songs on
Colossal Youth and were well received at the notoriously rowdy punk club. About 50% of the audience didn't quite know what to make of the strange ensemble of three musicians who played a set of quietly hypnotic music that was unlike any music they'd ever heard before.
I was sad to read in NME that Young Marble Giants had called it quits shortly after their American tour ended. But I'll always have the sublime
Colossal Youth to remember how they enchanted me with their authentic Bohemian attitudes in the summer of 1980.