Description
Book SynopsisGavin Butt tells the story of the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds, showing how bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget drew on their university art school education to push the boundaries of pop music.
Trade Review"A fascinating, informed and highly readable account. . . ." -- Rupert Loydell * International Times *
"This is an important book. . . . It reminds us of—and perhaps implicitly yearns for—a time when a university art school education was free, open, inclusive, and multidisciplinary, where theory was able to re-energise practice and offered new paths out of the cul-de-sacs of art practice, where a local scene that was largely self-supporting and independent could be local without ever being parochial, where contemporary debates arising out of feminism, race, and left-wing politics could be acted out in an exciting form of ‘praxis’ and where competition between educational institutions could be collapsed, where a small city like Leeds could host a self-supporting creative eco-system where students were able to freely cross-pollinate." -- Aidan Winterburn * Tribune Magazine *
“No Machos or Pop Stars is an account of the plethora of post-punk bands that emerged out of the ‘Leeds experiment.’ . . . The range and richness of Butt’s research is evident throughout.” -- Peter Suchin * Art Monthly *
"As a history of educational ideas and systems this book is excellent. As a work of cultural history it is superb. . . this is also a book about music and musicians and it is full to the brim with insightful anecdotes and recollections from those who were active participants within this pre-figurative artistic community. It is a deft piece of writing and structural organisation, and there is no shortage of visual materials either. . . .
No Machos or Pop Stars is extremely thorough and thoroughly readable." -- Richard Thomas * The Wire *
"More powerful than [Butt's] scholarship, and his own voluminous interviewing of those in the scene, is his clear passion. He writes as someone moved by the music, weird, wonderful, and varied, that Leeds spawned, groups like Delta 5, Gang of Four, Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, and the Mekons." -- George Yatchisin * California Review of Books *
"Written with both scholarly precision and an evident fan's enthusiasm, the book is a serious history of popular modernism in West Yorkshire, as well as a social sketch of artists and young people reacting to a collapsing society with a rarely matched intellectual, aesthetic and social application. . . . A welcome feature of
No Machos—which is sadly unusual in many books related to punk and post-punk—is a contextualisation of the environment that created these scenes." -- Marcus Barnett * Corridor 8 *
Table of ContentsPreface: Class Acts ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: The Art School Dance Goes On 1
Part I. Avant-Garde and Punk
1. Beginning at a Dead End 23
2. Anarchy at the Poly 56
Part II. Forming a Band
3. Punk Bohemians 75
4. Debating Society 105
5. Why Theory? 126
6. “No Machos or Pop-Stars Please” 146
7. Electric Shock 171
8. Rehearsals for the Mutant Disco 198
Epilogue: The Limits of Experiment—1981 and After 225
Notes 245
Discography 267
Bibliography 271
Index 283
