With grateful thanks to Brian (mateybloke) Devine, I thought I'd share with you all here some of my 'musings' on the lyrics John wrote for Ultravox...
I may get further and continue for an indefinite period, but I'm not habitually a 'completer / finisher'. You can read more on my blog, to which I will link future posts.
http://translatedbirdsong.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/satday-night-in-the-city-of-the-deadSo here goes with the first one. I'd love to provoke response / discussion etc because, like you all, I am always seeking a greater understanding of the man's work. And after all, this is all just my interpretation.
Yours may be different. I could be wrong. Imagine THAT
Do post your own thoughts here, and who knows where we will end up
Satday Night In the City Of The DeadFoxx reflects – at least in the title – on his perception that London in 1973 was ‘virtually dead’. He arrived in the capital towards the end of 1973, clutching copies of Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ and Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ at a time when very little was happening underground and the mainstream pub music serving was ‘as dull as ditchwater’.
He wrote this song deliberately in the style of an imagined Americana – the scene described by Bowie in his lead single ‘Jean Genie’ and Dylan on ‘Tombstone Blues’ and the ‘Highway 61′ title track. A downtown New York populated by dealers, users and gangsters – night time doorways and darkened alleys home to the living dead. The structure of the lyric and style of writing is homage to Bowie and Dylan in this respect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGQo6zpVzt8
By 1976 when the song was finished, Bowie had become known as the ‘thin white duke’ (for the Station To Station album) and could perhaps be the icon to which the ‘Bony’ description refers in Foxx’s second line. Tying in perfectly with Dylan’s own reference to Bowie (Mr Jones) in the Ballad Of A Thin Man. There’s another clever cut-out in this song too that ties it in with Ultravox! first single ‘Dangerous Rhythm’ – Dylan observing in his song that ‘something is happening here, but [Mr Jones] don’t know what it is…”
Also zipping around New York at this time was Johnny Thunders “Jet Boy” – another reference by Foxx in the opening couplet of ‘Satday night’. But he cleverly sets the Dolls of his story very much in England, referencing the cruisers drifting around downtown, via a deserted Tottenham Court Road, in a Ford Zodiac. Picking up ‘litter’ in the shape of the discarded and hopeless?
It’s a seedy image, hustlers cruising around the city streets picking up ‘all-night boys’ for sordid encounters (‘rough trade’) , dealing drugs in S&M clubs and gay dungeons.
Foxx makes an oblique parallel here with another emergent ‘trade’ on the streets of London in 1976 – the distribution of home-produced, low cost independent records from the back of vans and private cars. Throbbing Gristle, Thomas Leer etc, consummated in the operation of Rough Trade Records from Geoff Travis shop in West London, and latterly Stiff records featuring The Damned and Ian Dury.
Satday (a colloquialism; deliberate carelessness to speed the pace) Night in the City of the Dead goes on to personify some of the characters observed on the streets and in some of these clubs. Bowie is referenced again ‘dancing like an insect’, among the punks on the Kings Road in their ‘ripped suits, zip boots’ and ‘spiked hair’. The punk fashion was to destroy, alter and change – second hand clothes were made for this purpose. Cheap to buy and easy to customise with pins, paint and razor blades. Notice the alliteration in the phrase ‘Oxfam outlaw’, cleverly rhyming with the ‘buzzing like a chainsaw’ effect of recreational drugs. Foxx includes contemporary socio-economic phrases too, like ‘dole queue’ and ‘high-rise’ – painting a picture of the forlorn hopelessness, despondency and all round physical and economic ‘greyness’ that he encountered in 1973 London.
In its own way, punk was an assemblage of all these influences, events and sub-cultures – held loosely together with safety pins (Jon Savage ‘London’s Outrage’ interview 2002) and spawned from the unseen creatures that inhabit the City of The Dead. Ultravox! themselves evolved from the same soup, while steadfastly standing apart and observing, rather than becoming enveloped in the scene around them.
The cultural, literary and musical references in this song alone are enough to isolate the Art School boys from the dole queue statues, never mind the articulate song structure and musical competence that accompany the lyrics.
