Post-Punk Monk

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It was a dozen years ago today when I first posted about the Visage Mark III lineup which had bade itself public in 2013 following what seemed to be many months of behind the scenes pronouncements by various and sundry. That the Visage II seemed to evaporate before achieving liftoff, initially led me to think that if we heard anything from the beleaguered band, it might count for a small miracle. As I’d been trained to do over the decades of Visage inactivity [in spite of my enthusiasms] I ignored it until it could not be ignored any longer.

Right before the announcement of Visage Mk III there was also the Detroit Starzz project that appeared to be ready for takeoff before it seemed to slip back into the shadows in the time that Visage once again became a going concern. At the time I never managed to hear any of the songs which had begun to trickle out to the public. Though years later I finally managed to hear a few. The material with Steve was pretty good and I would be happy to hear more, but to date, it hasn’t happened.

As the reality moved closer to the surface, it transpired that in spite of fan interest, Midge Ure was keeping far removed from the band that he had initially built. His interest lay in the then-current reactivation of the Ultravox mothership by that point. Naturally Billy Currie also demurred. As did Barry Adamson, who became an underground star in the 90s with his solo career.

A bigger rift was down to Rusty Egan initially being involved then pulling out of the project after coming to loggerheads with the behind the scenes business practices of the new regime. Visage had been down to Rusty dreaming big and getting his friend Ure to believe in it. From 1979 to 1986, the constant in Visage had been Steve Strange and Rusty. The excellent B-side “I’m Still Searching”‘ from the “Night Train” single was said to be down to Egan working with Strange with no other members involved. I was initially dubious of what the band could do without a prime mover like him.

But there would be some continuity. Steve Barnacle was still the bass player. And before Rusty departed, he did make an enormous impact on the new music by inviting the great Robin Simon to play guitar in what must be the most canny move ever. Hearing this gave me some hope. Then I heard that Mick MacNeil of Simple Minds was involved, as was original keyboardist Dave Formula [at least in the writing]. I cautiously adopted a wait-and-see posture.

I noted that the label activated to sell these new Visage wares was calling it self Blitz Club. Appropriately enough. The first issue in February of 2013, under the Visage name was a three track DL and CD-R of…an old B-side. “Frequency 7,” which was all over the place usually in its somewhat tedious dance mix. Which was here along with the much more striking 7″ version that was only on the Radar “Tar” 7′ single. I was happy to have the song in digital form, but the brickwall mastering was not instilling me with the fullest of confidence. Nor was the post-modern Randome remix that was… inconsequential. For a Visage said to have an album in the oven, this tired rehash didn’t telegraph a strong hand. Why did they not lead with new material?

It was three months later when a new Visage website was revealed to the world and it gave me no little hope at what the new effort might accomplish. Copy on the website discussed the modus operandi of the new Visage, and it prominently noted that there would be analog synthesizers used throughout, and it specifically cited no brickwall mastering, though the “Frequency 7” single had obviously slipped out without it being caught. This was all encouraging, but it’s deeds, not words, that matter. And then April brought not only showers but the first new Visage single since “Beat Boy” in “Shameless Fashion.” I thought it was certainly a Visage song in name at least. I was curious and there was a Visage Soundcloud account so I bit the bullet and tried before I bought. Which, if anyone knows me, is so not how I roll. Typically, I wait until I own a physical copy in my hands to hear and judge anything. But Steve had been through the wringer. It could have been a disaster.

Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all. Not exactly top flight Visage but having Robin Simon playing guitar on this certainly kicked it up several notches. Steve was admirably garish on the Peter Ashworth cover photo. After hearing this I was becoming cautiously excited against my better judgement. May brought the news that the album was going into pre-sale in a signed deluxe package with bonus disc for…£20.00! I was ready to bite. I just needed a little push.

Then the second track dropped in a Soundcloud clip that I awoke to one morning and this was no little push. This was a huge shove! “Never Enough” was incredibly powerful. It sounded easily the equal of my favorite Visage track, “Visage.” It was a storming dance track with one of my top guitarists slaloming effortlessly through the Mororderspace like Jean-Claude Killy. After listening, wide-eyed to this just once, my next step was getting to the Visage website and pre-ordering the deluxe “Hearts + Knives” package as well as the “Shameless Fashion” CD-5 single!

When they arrived I was stunned to hear that they had succeeded. Wildly. It’s the goal of every old band to regroup decades later, record a new album that pays deference to the foundational ethos of the band that made their name in the first place, while bringing the band into the present somehow. It’s virtually guaranteed not to happen, of course. But in this instance, it magically did. Everyone involved gave their best to the effort and it managed to go over the top into being the kind of success that was utterly rare in this fallen world.

Making music that hit all of the 1979-1980 marks was no mean feat! My favorite bands fail to do this continually, but this Visage lineup somehow managed it. But the coup de grace was in the emotional grounding that the singer brought to the table. The lyrics made reference to the difficulties that Steve had lived through and gave it all an emotional grounding that had never been a prominent feature of Visage. Visage was always hot electronic dance rock. End of discussion. But now on a song like “Hidden Sign” when Steve spoke in the middle eight of walking through Paris in the rain with tears streaming down his face, I really felt the hurt he was referencing. The old hauteur was gone with the wind as Steve got real and vulnerable!

And I was astonished as single after single was peeled from this bounteous album! Every track I wished would be a single ultimately was! And these were physical, CD-5 singles, with the exception of “Lost In Static” which was a 12″ single. Ironically, the only vinyl single from Visage during the new wave of hipster “vinyls.” By the end of the campaign there had been six [6!!!] singles released physically from this album in a time when active bands I also loved, like Simple Minds, hadn’t released a physical single in almost a decade.

Then Visage did something that was listed as a goal as far back as 1983 but really, no one ever expected them to achieve; they went on tour! What I wouldn’t have given to have seen this crack team live! At one point there were rumors of a US tour hitting Chicago [and we would have been there] but in the end the thorny US work visa issue may have scuttled the plans. Meanwhile, Visage were on a tear. And I was eager to soak up the bounty of music they were proffering.

It was late in 2014 that brought another unexpected development with an orchestral album featuring newly recorded arrangements of Visage classics abetted by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. As they had very memorably made the John Bryan Widescreen Extended Version of the already brilliant “Never Enough” easily secure the “best remix of the 2010’s” gold cup, I was hot to hear the results of them embellishing a wide spectrum of Visage material. In that we were saving for a big vacation that year, I missed the pre-order so the bonus CD-R of mixes is still missing from my Record Cell.

Next: …Endgame

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Steve Strange was largely marginalized during the 90s. While the Bassheads remix of
Fade To Grey” entered the UK Top 40, he was in a perilous state as he had become addicted to heroin while modeling for Jean-Paul Gautier in the 80s. Clean periods in the 90s were fragile. He was close with the music couple of Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence and at the same time that Hutchence died in 1997, Strange’s flat burned down and that send him over the edge. He suffered a breakdown and relapsed back into heroin usage.

This was while he was out of the public eye. The only manifestation of Visage was a European Polydor compilation that picked tracks from all three albums. It was the first time that any tracks from the “Beat Boy” album made it to the silver disc. As well as the German language track “Der Amboss,” thought the version on this CD was obviously sourced from the “Fade To Grey Dance Mix” masters as the intro had the hints of the segue from “tar” still audible.

Then as the Y2K panic was a full throttle, Steve got very much in the public eye once more with his arrest for shoplifting, famously, a Teletubby doll for his nephew. His prior shoplifting offenses hadn’t become public yet, but this one did. The press had a field day with the singer’s fall from grace. His lawyer cited the potential for self-harm as a factor in his sentencing and ultimately his three month sentence was suspended.

At that point Strange went to live with his mother and sister in Wales, which was the best thing for him. With the heat of public glare upon him, he did the thing any exhibitionist would do: he put out an autobiography: “Steve Strange Blitzed!” Though I was a big Visage fan I’ve not bothered with the book as I suspect it’s all about the social whirlwind that centered on Steve with little ink on the actual records themselves.

Around the same time in the 2002-2003 period he became active int he Retro 80s tour scene representing Visage live for the first time ever. But that wasn’t enough for his ambitions. He tried to get a Visage II with young players from the Electroclash scene [Seize, Goteki] forming the nucleus of a new Visage band. In 2007 the single fruit of this effort was released as a charity download; “Diary Of A Madman.”

Strange bounced like a pinball from bumper to bumper in search of something that stuck. He sang lead on a track for the duo Punx Soundcheck called “In The Dark” on the “When Machines Ruled The World” album of 2006. Concurrent with this musical activity were the bread an butter of Strange’s career at the time. Participation in the unseemly world of British “reality” programming on television. Strange was on shows like “Celebrity Scissorhands” and “Pop Goes The Band” where he traded on his dark celebrity status to try to get a foothold he really needed.

A better fit was Steve’s cameo as himself on an episode of the “time travel police procedural” [“?] “Ashes To Ashes” where the protagonists went to the Blitz Club and Visage were performing live [as they never did]. Steve had angular makeup right out of the “Fade To Grey” video while Sandrine Gouriou from the Visage MK II played keys.

Even the bad publicity helped stoke interest in the Visage catalog, and the first dozen years of the new millennium saw a trilogy of Visage compilations join the first two already noted. Shortly after his arrest, there was a European compilation called “The Damned Don’t Cry.” It was notable mostly for a first pressing that contained the rare B-side ‘Second Steps” in place of the common instrumental “The Steps.” In 2010 Universal/Polydor released a new disc called “The Face: The Very Best of Visage” which was graced with a pair of new post-modern remixes of “Fade Yo Grey” to bait the faithful. With the third new compilation appearing in 2013.

Next: …The Third Act

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Of course, in 1986, no one knew publicly that Steve Strange had a heroin addiction. This accounts for numerous ill-conceived musical efforts in the broad spectrum of Rock and Pop music. Which is sad, of course. The sadder part was there’s no shortage of terrible albums where heroin can’t be blamed at all! Where it was down to chart chasing, bad judgement, second guessing, and artists who had simply lost touch with their creative powers.

In the decade following the “Strange Cruise” launch pad explosion, we simply didn’t hear much of Steve Strange. Meanwhile, the music industry wasn’t standing still. In 1982 the compact disc made its long-awaited [by me, anyway] debut. The first “Visage” album was out there even in Orlando, Florida, where I lived in to mid 80s. I bought the first copy I saw after the summer of 1985 when I had gotten my first CD player. Probably within the first year I was CD compliant. The highly desirable CD of “The Anvil” was reputed as well from this time but I never managed to find a copy. Ever.

Owing to that difficulty, I was excited when I saw in a catalog of CD imports that I bought many things from in the late 80s, that the “Fade To Grey: The Singles Collection” made it to the silver disc and I was on that one like white on rice. It was for a few years for me, the only way to experience the exquisite “The Damned Don’t Cry,” albeit in its 7″ edit only.

I had a policy of always looking in the “V” bins for Visage singles and any 12″singles I saw made their way into the Record Cell. I had kept every Visage 12″ I had bought new, but I managed to round up copies of “Mind Of A Toy” and the all-powerful “Visage” single. The latter’s 12″ remix was a stunner, hearing it possibly a decade after its release. Thanks to the catalogs I was supplementing my local buying with.

The odd thing was though, that to this day, I’ve never ever seen any copy, either 7″ or 12″, of “Fade To Grey” in a record store. The US Dance Mix EP with the mighty US John Luongo extended remix [my first extended remix – and a great one!] was everywhere at the time. Maybe the fact that even the 12″ A/B side were the straight LP mixes, convinced importers to pass that disc up? The single in both formats is still in my want list but to this day it’s not in my collection.

Speaking of singles, there was a flurry of Visage CD singles in the early 90s that I managed to find on the ground or in catalogs. There was an Old Gold CD-5 EP with all three 12″ extended remixes on the silver disc that I found in Canada. Then a German EP with the unique German-only 6:17 “Fade To Grey” extended re-edit, as well as the full length “Damned Don’t Cry” and the Dance Dub of “Beat Boy.” I got this one in both the jewel box and cardboard sleeve version! And finally there was a Post-Modern remix single of “Fade To Grey” that I bought anyway. I can’t remember how trancy this may have been, and I got the 12″ as well as the promo-only 2×12″ version for the collector’s sickness.

Then with the 1993 Bassheads remix reactivated, there was a new issue of “Fade To Grey: The Singles Collection” the following year, now re-titled “Fade To Grey: The Best Of Visage” which appended this 7″ remix as well as the digitally m.i.a. “Love Glove” 7″ mix on it, so naturally I had to buy one. Especially since it was a US CD and inexpensive.

Then, in 1997, the unthinkable happened and the long-sought after “The Anvil” album got a second released on CD from the obscure US reissue label, One Way Records. I bought one of these immediately and was graced with the lushly dark second Visage album finally on the silver disc to enjoy normally. It had been an agonizing dozen year wait from my perspective. And it wasn’t until the internet era that I ever saw evidence of the first German pressing from 1993, though always out of my budget at three figures in the aftermarket.

A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

So in the 90s, the vast majority of the action on the Visage front was all about making inroads to the silver disc. Steve Strange himself had been silent ever since the 1986 “Strange Cruise” album. With but a single, obscure exception. It was in 1991 when viewing a record catalogue in the pre-internet era, that I saw a [gasp] Steve Strange solo single! I ordered it immediately, half expecting another singer using the same name on the actual disc. But no! The “Bolan-ESQ” single was absolutely our Steve singing a medley of T-Rex hits on the A-side with an all-new B-side called ‘The Best Is Yet To Come” which offered a moody, angular take on Synthpop that I was definitely down with. The project seemed to be down to just Steve and the producer and engineering team, Steven Robert Glen and Tim Jones. They all shared credit on the B-side.

The A-side was good fun. It was T-Rex? How could it not be? The B-side hit closer to the Visage marks with a track that avoided the pitfalls that had happened on some of “Beat Boy” and almost all of “Strange Cruise.” You could color me intrigued, but aside from the fact that I owned the 7″ [with a promo sticker on it] and almost no-one else did, I waited the rest of the decade for more Steve recordings to manifest to no avail. The promise held in this obscure single would go dormant for the rest of the decade. It would be not until the cusp of the new millennium that I’d once again hear about Steve Strange. And the news wasn’t auspicious.

Next: …The Damned Don’t Cry For Help