Tones on Tail – Everything – Review

Tones on Tail

Everything (Beggars Banquet)
by Nik Rainey

Maybe, in their way, Bauhaus were the STP or Bush of their day – a band that transcended near-universal critical derision, stylistic charlatanism and ridiculously pretentious lyrical meaninglessness to become the standard-bearer for successive generations of adolescents for whom phony morbidity, rampant poseurdom, and ill-fitting cultural hand-me-downs are practically mandatory. In other words, they were one of the first great “post-modern” rock bands, all brittle, half-understood style coated by only the barest veneer of faux-substance, a marvelous bridge between the clownish, slushy pop misery and gooey center of gravity of the Cure and the convincingly hellish anarcho-spasms of the Birthday Party, an 11th-grade Anglophilic pseudo-intellectual’s band if ever there was one. (I think you can guess by now I’m speaking from experience.)

Hence, just as I rub my hands together gleefully every time I see Plan 9 From Outer Space or Robot Monster listed in TV Guide, so too does the arrival of the latest Bauhaus-related repackage send me into twitters of delight that leave me sucking in my cheeks in search of the now-elusive sallow, malnourished look I mastered at 17. Bauhaus: Beneath the Mask, a book packed with vicious press clippings topped with a tentative rehearsal run-through of some of their early classics (I still can’t bring myself to encase that word in quotes) on a bonus CD, is a brilliant slab of masochistic nostalgia on a par with revisiting the shoebox containing all your bad study-hall poetry and break-up letters, but it also signals the fact that this particular archive has finally been squeezed dry. But never fret, pasty ones, their 1983 demise was mere prologue to the dozens of “explorations of the true artistic self” (or some such soul-searching interview spew) that the former Haus-mates launched into, both solo and in various group permutations, and for most of them, the cannibalization process has barely begun. (No Bubblemen box set, though, I beg you.)

Tones on Tail, the side project begun in 1982 by guitarist Daniel Ash and Bauhaus roadie (does that mean he wore a headband and a cloak?) Glenn Campling (and later joined by drummer Kevin Haskins after Bauhaus’ breakup), has actually had its output reconfigured into a fair number of releases itself, not bad for a band whose existence amounted to two years, one album, and a handful of singles and EPs. As the title implies, Everything supersedes them all – these two discs contain every officially-waxed note of their brief career. ToT’s intent was to serve as the light-hearted counterbalance to Bauhaus’ bleak minimalism, a point Ash et al. exploited none-too-subtly (Bauhaus wore black, right? Then we’ll wear white!), but in practice, it paid off more often than not, conjoining sensual studio atmospherics with a brave willingness to attempt any musical style, no matter how ill-suited, into a lightly-pretentious fondue that, at its best, trumped anything Bauhaus ever did for sheer listenability. (“Sheer,” in fact, describes them rather well – some of their best moments, like the vaporous synthesizers that mist through “Lions” and the way Ash’s effects-laden vocals and guitar keep crossing each other between channels in “O.K. This Is The Pops,” are impressively translucent.) You may be surprised at how influential they were: “Go!” remains a prime piece of danceable sloganeering (and a nice bit of sonic shorthand for ’80s-obsessed movie soundtrack compilers), and the bitter “Movement of Fear” (allegedly a claws-out swipe at ex-colleague Peter Murphy) has been repeatedly cannibalized: By Fun Lovin’ Criminals, who used a tremelo’d guitar fragment in “Scooby Snacks”; by Murphy himself, who used most of the lyrics for his riposte (“The Answer Is Clear”) on his first solo album (a trick that could’ve saved Lennon and McCartney a lot of vengeance-songwriting man hours back in the early ’70s : “How Do I Sleep? How Do You Bloody Sleep, Four-Eyes?”); and by, um, themselves (so they didn’t have to bother learning the actual melody of “Heartbreak Hotel”). Beyond that, there’s a number of entertaining curiosities: “Twist” interpolates the first few notes of the guitar solo in “Rock Around the Clock” into a fun piece of psych-fi, “Christian Says” attempts to attack organized religion as if it were a female acquaintance’s abusive boyfriend (not a half-bad metaphor, come to think of it), and the bizarre “Slender Fungus” suggests the work of Batcave regulars who just heard their first Robyn Hitchcock album. As with any Bauhaus-related project, the inclusion of a lyric sheet is a dire mistake (“And a two-speed crossword/Called ‘Love in the suds'”… um, yeah, exactly), but disregard that and take it in the spirit in which it was conceived (the liner notes claim they were “fueled on a steady diet of hash and McDonald’s Big Macs” – druggy fast food? Sounds good to me) and you’ll be most satisfied.

David J, on the other hand, was the Bauhausman with the singer/songwriter’s soul (he wrote the least wanky lyrics of all of them, which still don’t exactly make him Lenny Cohen, y’know what I’m sayin’?) and the closest thing to bohemian cred (he ripped off a chunk of text from Billy Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night before it was even published for “Exquisite Corpse” and larded his first solo album, Etiquette of Violence, with references to such hip entities as Joe Orton and Neal Cassady), which led him to blaze a more human course than his associates and pick up interesting collaborators like the Jazz Butcher and Watchmen creator Alan Moore for his pre-Love and Rockets solo career. On Glass – The Singles collates most of the hard-to-find material he recorded from ’83 to ’85, most of it in an appealing light-pop vein that suits his thin voice and none-too-overreaching lyrics quite well. The best stuff takes noirish notions that Bauhaus would have turned into neutered black caterwauling (“I Can’t Shake This Shadow of Fear,” “Saint Jackie”) and gives it fresh shading; the “arty” ballads and faux-jazz stylings (“Night of the Silver Veil,” “This Vicious Cabaret”) are saved from preciousness by his nimble approach; and he only skirts insufferability when he tries to cover John Cale (he tries desperately to imbue “Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend” with menace by drawing out the “f” in “fear” – I swear you can practically feel the spittle striking you in the face) or bellyaches about what an ever-lovin’ bitch it is to be in a rock band (“The Promised Land” [included here in two different versions], which nonetheless has one of his better melodies). Still, a nice footnote to a minor-but-fetching career – in fact, both albums are endlessly pleasurable all the way through. But of course, I’m still wearing most of the same clothes I had on when I first heard this stuff, so maybe you shouldn’t put too much stock in what I have to say.