Visage

There were quite a few serendipitous moments in my life as a music collector. One of the best and most portentous happened when, as a junior in high school, I was taking a shortcut through the girl’s dorm, and an acquaintance from the dance department – we were friendly, but not really friends – suddenly thrust three records in my hand and told me to go listen to them. I have no idea why she did it. We’d never talked about music at all and never really spent any time together, but there she was, handing over the small stack of vinyl that would forever alter my life. I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t even remember her name. Hillary, maybe.

All the records she gave me were top notch. There were two singles and one album, and I had never heard of any of them. The album was by a spooky looking woman called Lene Lovich, destined to become one of my favorite albums of that decade. One of the singles was by a band called the Teardrop Explodes and was called When I Dream. There is a long history of stupid names in popular music, but it seemed like British bands in the eighties were really trying to outdo each other with absurdity. The Teardrop Explodes? Haircut One Hundred? Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark? What was in the water over there?

At any rate, When I Dream is a great song, far and away the best thing they ever did as a group. It is impossibly buoyant and happy, while still being coolly detached, and I have yet to play it for anybody that doesn’t immediately respond to it. Lene Lovich and The Teardrop Explodes single were great examples of early new wave. They used the traditional instrumentation of a rock band, but the melodies were all angular and alienating and the arrangements were unusual and creative and unlike anything you could hear on the radio. Especially in northern Michigan. But it was the third record, the other single, that was an absolute revelation. It was by some group named Visage (reasonable enough name) and the song was called Fade to Grey (finally, I can use my quirky fetish for the British spelling of grey in the correct context).

Visage was not a band, at least not in the traditional sense, because they used primarily synthesizers over an artificial four-on-the-floor dance beat. This was shortly after my breakthrough discovery of Ultravox’s Vienna album that finally entwined the thrill of the beat with the excitement of synthetic sound, and the Visage single seemed cut from the same cloth. And no wonder. As it turned out, half the members of Visage came from Ultravox.

The song starts with lightly played shifting chords before giving way to the sequenced pulse that runs throughout the piece. A couple of measures to set the tempo, and then there’s a spine chilling electronic glissando, heavy on the echo, that arcs up to heaven as the beat kicks in. A warbly synthetic string section fills the sound out, and a lushly layered wordless vocal mimics that call to the sky and the song is off and running. The whole sound is so elegant and lush, while still being oddly cold, that it just pulled me in immediately. The lyrics are typically disjointed new wavey lyrics that don’t really mean anything but are heavy on atmosphere, and a sensual French female voice beckons se faner en gris. I was entranced.

Visage, as it turned out, was created at a dance club – Billy’s – in London. While the social and political climate was brutal and bleak, and the righteous anger of the punks ruled the streets outside, Billy’s offered a haven from the ugliness. Playing mostly Kraftwerk and David Bowie and Roxy Music, Billy’s was an elegant and sophisticated (or pretentious and fey, depending on your perspective) oasis, where ultra-chic Europeans in their finest threads came to see and be seen and forget the troubles of the world in their glamorous cocoon. Billy’s is where the New Romantic movement started, and it was exactly as the name implied, a willful ignorance of the brutal realities of urban life by putting on deeply tinted rose-colored glasses and fancy suits and drinking and dancing and mingling in that peculiarly European combination of elegance and decay, which I guess might as well be the etymological source of the word decadence. The center and symbol of this luxuriously decadent club was Steve Strange, an ex-punk, who had reinvented himself using the most outrageous clothes and make-up imaginable. This is where new wave got a lot of its look, and Strange used to play dress up in elegant suits, or romantic pirate garb, with breathtakingly surreal make-up, sometimes more like landscapes painted on his face then anything anybody used to highlight their lips and eyes. It was in stark contrast to the embrace of ugliness the punks symbolized, but it would turn out to have just as much – if not more – influence on the look and sound of the ‘80s. Steve Strange and his mate, Rusty Egan, a DJ and former band member as well, wanted to record some new music to fit into the club’s playlist. Rusty’s former bandmate (from the Rich Kids) Midge Ure offered them some studio time and helped them to record their first song, a tarted up cover of Zagar and Evans’ In the Year 2525. The song was a big success at the club, and Ure stayed on to work on some more music with them. Ultravox’s Billy Currie joined them (Midge Ure, if you’ve been paying attention, was in the process of taking over singing and songwriting duties for Ultravox from John Foxx) along with three members of the band Magazine (including bassist Barry Adamson, who would later go on to a remarkable solo career writing imaginary film noir soundtracks) and Visage was officially born. They released another single, the strange anti-smoking Tar, which also was well received in the club, and then sat down to record an entire album. Released in 1980, the same year as Ultravox’s Vienna, that eponymous album contained Fade to Grey, which burst out of Billy’s and washed over the world, heralding the coming of synthpop.

But, being stuck in Michigan, I didn’t know anything about that. I didn’t know there was an album’s worth of material. I didn’t know who was in the band or what their affiliation to my beloved Ultravox was (for such a big music fan, I have a curious aversion to reading any music magazines), all I knew was Fade to Grey, and I held it close to my heart.

That was in the spring of 1981, well after the album had been released. It was one of the most fruitful times of my early music collecting, where I really came into my own and started discovering lots of music that really spoke to me. Kraftwerk, Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark, Talking Heads, Byrne and Eno’s remarkable My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Lene Lovich, David Bowie, Visage, Japan – every time I turned around, I stumbled across another phenomenal vein of sonic gold. It was also the first year I lived away from home (although it was a five-minute walk away), and the year I met Eric and became his roommate. It was probably the most condensely packed time of growth in my life, and set me well on my way to becoming who I am today.