“I’m listening to Steve Bush, and sometime during the past 18 months he’s been listening to the Mark in The Pop Group. Let’s lecture.
‘'Why aren’t you doing anything, Steve,' he was saying… Well, I said, I am doing something, I’ve got the group, I’m trying… 'Yeah, but what you’re doing isn’t the right thing!' Well, what do you mean? 'Everyone should be allowed to do what they want!' Yes, Mark, yes. You have to embrace some kind of French resistance attitude to everything. I had to take two days off work after this confrontation.’
Bush calls the Pop Group ‘beatnik fascists.’ They are a symbol of dodgy elitism, a confused dialectic, they told us what not to do with our guilt and our shame… The Pop Group averted our gaze away from Bristol. How many more were there like that! Bristol is caught up in itself, making awkward attempts via unappealing labels like Heartbeat and Fried Egg, to communicate something outside the city borders. More than any of the obvious cities that have been burned with ‘scene’ tags, there is a Bristol community, almost completely locked in its own dimension.
‘A gold fish bowl,’ says Bush, ‘where everyone swims around and round each other inside the glass.’ The Pop Group, maybe, contaminated Bristol—from outsiders’ and insiders’ points of view. Bush talks unchecked for 15 minutes about the snobbishness and cliqueishness and isolation of Bristol. He’s battling against Bristol, and being stuck inside Bristol, instead of battling against the bigger things outside.
‘You can only hit out at the things that you see. And for us that’s been the Bristol bullshit, and there has been a lot of it. This has been the bands’ fault, the fault of people ignoring what’s been going on, certain attitudes. There have been a number of times in Bristol when there have been a lot of good bands, and if they’d been encouraged they could have come on. It’s dormant now, just beginning to build up again. Something will have to happen, or it will just drop again. We are concentrating on the outside now. The EP is to get us outside after two years, and to say—look at us! We’re going to go on making records until people really start buying them, and talking about us. 'Eloquent Sounds' is our first shot but it’s no way our main shot. A little teaser, really.’
At the moment Essential Bop’s rich would-be cabaret pop lacks definition and power, can succumb too readily to convolution and equivocal mannerisms.
Essential Bop are apt to gush a little, but they’re a long way from being plain. Bush’s vocal heroes are Aznavour, Sinatra and most of all Scott Walker (next year’s big thing). He sings—a joyous, copious collision of syllables and images—with mad elegance, switching from suaveness to seriousness to all tensed up. The Bop sound is an abbreviated psychedelia… early Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, snatches of gentler Velvets, dashes of ‘Pebbles’ pulp, twisted around the new days stylings of Magazine and The Associates. Going over the top. Going round the bend. A dangerously sonorous sound.
Bush shows me a letter from a local BBC TV producer—Bush had tried to get Bop on a local tea-time magazine programme. The producer called Essential Bop ‘way out… too rock'n'roll with five A-levels…’ which is indicative of a wet, old-fashioned, even slumming attitude that maintains pop can never [be] intelligent, adventurous, emotional… the old rock laws. Fear of sophistication and change and new/style.
Essential Bop find themselves, peculiarly, in the middle of a road.
‘We get it from both sides. We get the highbrow accusation from one side, 'oh they’re just trying to impress us', and then we get the 'you’re too rock'n'roll from The Pop Group school. We’re just a beat group!’
A beat group with an absurdist slant.
‘There’s horror in our music, and there’s humour.’
The Bop need to smarten themselves up in all ways. Keep a few secrets. Get a sharp manager who can tell them what not to do. Smile as if they know something no-one else does, or as if they’re crazed, or don’t smile at all. Amplify the good things in their make-up, smother the ugly things. With discipline they could get very good, and they would be talked about. It’s better to calm down than to try too hard: in some ways.”
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