Apparently I already missed a book about Ramleh, but thankfully I've been able to pick up a copy of this before they all vanish. Ramleh, as you may or may not recall, were the original power electronics act that weren't named after a bongo magazine, who expanded and evolved into something else entirely and whose influence seems to have been more far reaching than any of us could have predicted. Broken Flag was the label run by Ramleh's Gary Mundy - mostly tapes, but also some vinyl, some printed material, and which was firmly enmeshed in a pre-internet network of like-minded individuals and artists spread all across the planet. Given that the weirdy music tape scene of the early eighties was arguably too broad and expansive - both in terms of aesthetic as well as where it was happening - to ever be done justice by a single definitive tome, the best we can probably hope for is this sort of sharp focus on a particular group of individuals which we can take as in some way generally representative of the bigger, more nebulous picture.
My shelves never sagged beneath the weight of Broken Flag releases, but I had a couple of things and would have had more had my pocket money stretched further. I know a few of the people who turn up in this book, and have probably stood in the same room as about half of the rest. I've even recorded in the same studio as Skullflower, with the same engineer, and recall a good few of the major live events described here, even though my attendance was prevented by my living in the wrong part of the country and having school in the morning. It's fair to say that I'm invested, and doubtless biased to some extent, but I really feel that this account does a tremendous job of capturing something which was important on some scale beyond just those involved, because as Gary Mundy says:
The period of music and culture we grew up with and inspired us was like nothing else and will never happen again. This in itself justifies our recording it as much as possible.
What the fuck are we talking about here, you may well ask. It was music, electronically originated or otherwise flying against both convention and tradition, and mostly born at a tangent from punk with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and SPK as midwives. It's what Ministry fans who weren't there now term industrial music, not having realised that Monte Cazazza was joking when he came up with that one - although little of the music squared well with so limited a term. Most people discovered it either by accident, or by knowing someone who had themselves discovered it by accident, because it was generally ignored - even shunned in a few cases - by the music press of the time, arguably excepting Sounds*1. You bought records if shops had them, or you sent for tapes through the post, often produced by one bloke running off cassette copies of his own strange noises on a home stereo with artwork photocopied at the local college; and it was fucking exciting because often you had no idea what you would get beyond it being something you'd never heard before, and it was our thing; and it seemed like part of more than just rock and roll and the music business, as heir to modernism in the art and philosophy of the twentieth century - music which sent you off to the library to look for Burroughs or Genet or Francis Bacon or Stockhausen or whoever else, more than it made you wonder what their first album sounded like or whether they were into the Stones.
This is what is communicated in Even When It Makes No Sense, which additionally brings in a great many of the original artists to describe what they were trying to do, making for a thorough discussion of extreme or unusual art and its aesthetic - which I applaud as a vital undertaking given some of the bullshit that has been thrown around in recent years regarding labels such as Broken Flag, Come Organisation, and others, invariably with little effort made to understand why anyone would present art as an attack, or why we really needed to glue pictures of Benito Mussolini*2 onto the covers of our tapes of distorted short wave radio.
My personal outlook at the time was a kind of weird amalgam of anarchism, libertarianism, and a warped kind of socialism. I sympathised with some of what was being done at the time, but it was all so negative and humourless, and a lot of people involved in those left-wing organisations were such wankers. It became difficult to want to associate with them. They seemed to be advocating a really grim future where everyone was equal, but everyone was fucking miserable also. Part of what I did was definitely intended to piss those people off. Some of what I did went against my personal beliefs, but it was worth it just to try and shake them up. Unless you were there, it's difficult to explain. The comedian Alexei Sayle once said that when you told a joke, there would be a pause while people analysed what you had said before deciding whether it was appropriate to laugh, and I think there was a lot of truth in that. That said, yes the Falklands was a pathetic war, yes, Thatcher was a cunt, but no way were the youth at large going to support Red Wedge with its Soviet grimness. I felt the only way forward was what I saw as a real kind of punk ideal of embracing everything and making personal decisions about what you wanted and being true to yourself and not joining tribes. Very few of us took that message from punk, but I did and, to a large extent, still do. I've never understood party politics. My views are a mixture of bits of most parties' ideas, with a few of my own thrown in for good measure. The idea that a large group of people can always agree on every issue is insane. It goes against human nature.
Finally, the book reprints the two issues of the original Even When It Makes No Sense produced as A5 zines. I had the first one but flogged it on eBay because it didn't have any pictures and I didn't understand it, but being now older and marginally less stupid, I'm very glad to have a second chance with the thing which, if slightly uneven, provokes thought beyond simply serving as a snapshot of its time and place - and particularly with the anonymously authored*3 six page assemblage, treatise, or whatever you'd call it on G.I. Gurdjieff and Syd Barrett, which has itself sent me off to eBay for a copy of Colin Wilson's The War Against Sleep - his biography of Gurdjieff. Four decades down the line and this gritty well-spring is still throwing off sparks, taking us to new places.
*1: Before anyone starts, no, it was never championed by the fucking NME as I've heard said a few times. Fuck off.
*2: To be fair, it was usually Adolf Hitler. I personally favoured Mussolini because I wanted to be different.
*3: Although I'd put money on it having been written by Philip Best.
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