Young, Gifted and Skint: The Early Years of New Model Army (1980-1984)
During their formative years, New Model Army operated like a bastard ship unwittingly lost at sea. Picking up the occasional signal from the central cultural beacon of London, they selectively adopted the newfound ideas of punk that best served their developing vision. They were blissfully removed from the rigid boundaries of any one music scene, allowing them to write with an unsullied approach. The result was a musical and political alloy that was equally as callous as it was tender. It was anthemic, and it was empowering.
Such a wide scope of tone inevitably opened the door for misinterpretation. New Model Army never quite fit in with any of the conclaves of the underground music scene of the era. Too ugly for the New Romantics but too pretty for the Punks. Too upbeat for the Goth scene but too abrasive for the Mainstream. There were bits and pieces of all of these styles in New Model Army’s music, but only by happenstance. They were a difficult group to classify, subsequently making many genre elites turn their nose up at welcoming the band. But New Model Army were content in this rejection like a runt amidst peacocks.
There were some peripheral connections with the blossoming punk scene at the time. The majority of the band's early output was released by Abstract Records (also home to 1919, Hagar the Womb, UK Subs, and The Outcasts, as well as the classic "Punk And Disorderly" series). They cut two singles on Abstract in addition to their first proper album: "Vengeance."
This was where New Model Army would crystalize their sound and make their mark outside of Bradford. Curiously produced by Angelic Upstarts guitarist, Mond Cowie, "Vengeance" quickly met with positive reception upon its release. The songs were punchy and memorable, based predominantly around Stuart Morrow’s savant lead-bass guitar. Lyrically the album spoke to an expansive breadth of topics, ranging from right-wing militant religion and the hypocrisies of liberal doctrine to the futile war in the Falklands and, most notably, the reverie of hunting down Nazi war criminals in the name of justice. While they perhaps never intended to pen one of the greatest antifascist anthems of all time, "Vengeance” remains as triumphant today as it was in 1984.
The following year, New Model Army would make the leap from the underground into the mainstream music industry with their 1985 album "No Rest For The Wicked", released by EMI. They would receive much criticism for this decision, most markedly recalled through Conflict’s infamous campaign against the band in 1986.
Still, it’s curious that a band who had been so ambiguous up until that point ended up in the crosshairs, becoming a target for the unforgiving ire of the punk scene. Perhaps it’s because many of the principles that the band appeared to uphold had resonated with more people than anybody realized. Musically and politically, NMA’s output up until 1985 feels like a distant cousin of bands like The Mob, Omega Tribe and Zounds. Melodic, bass-driven, emotional music conveying a very personal take on the decline of British society.
The personal is political. Whether conscious or not, this was absolutely New Model Army’s modus operandi. They sang about relevant, relatable topics, from both a pointed political angle as well through a deeply intimate narrative, illustrating life as it was in England during the early 1980s. The wretched reality of Margaret Thatcher’s regime was evident in every facet of daily life, bringing the political to the personal level for everyone in the country regardless of their social faction.
2020 marks the 40th anniversary of New Model Army. While the majority of their career has been well documented, those early years of the band still remain overlooked. The significance of any band’s genesis cannot be denied. Negative Insight was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with founding member and band leader Justin Sullivan, to reflect on the band’s provenance.
Congratulations on the 40th anniversary. I’m sure you never expected to be celebrating it, particularly amidst an era quite like this.
I certainly didn't ever expect it. I expected us to do two gigs at a pub in Bradford and that was it. I think it was part of the nature of the times that we started. The careerist idea of music was one of the things that was absolutely dismissed by the whole punk ethic. Success in general was dismissed by the punk ethic and certainly the idea that you were entering a kind of “career” never entered our heads.
The first three years of the band don’t seem all that well documented, which I always found curious.
That’s because nothing much happened. (Laughs) We struggled playing a few gigs around Bradford here and there. No one outside of Bradford ever heard of us.
I try to remember those days, but my memory’s a little hazy, and I'm not bothered about looking back. It was a kind of “doublethink” in the sense that we were desperate to be successful, you know like everyone does when they start. You have fantasies of being a successful band. But at the same time, you're kind of dismissive of it all anyways. You just sort of struggle on from one show to another and it doesn’t matter. Because what is exciting is being in a room with other musicians and creating something that you think is great. And actually, 40 years later that is the kind of bottom line that is exactly the same.
NMA live at Marquee Club June 20th 1984 - Photos and venue programme courtesy of Paul Wright (Setlist can be viewed here)
So for the first few years, that was pretty much how it was. You wrote, you performed live and simply enjoyed being a band. I know there was the 1981 demo that was later included on the "Vengeance: The Whole Story" reissue. I was curious to know more about those recordings.
There was a few demos that we cobbled together. When we re-released "Vengeance" about 10 years ago, we went back and found these old four-track cassettes. They were recorded sometimes by me, and sometimes recorded by someone a bit more professional. A couple people we knew at the time had these four-track recorders. They weren’t state of the art, but we were so far off from the idea of making a record that this was the nearest we got.
Were the demos for your own personal reference or were they ever released at the time?
No, they were never really released ever until we put them out on "Vengeance." When the internet started to form, people had cassettes that had swapped hands back in ‘81 so they started to appear on the internet a bit.
So initially they were really just for you, your friends and tape trading?
Yeah, it was that kind of thing. You know I can’t remember much! I remember getting excited about making a four-track recording in somebody’s garage, getting a record of the song down. And in a way it was all sort of exciting. They were dark, conflictual times in those early ‘80s years and we were in the middle of it. It was all kind of… dark and conflictual… and creative! Me and Joolz lived in this house in Bradford together and we cobbled together a number of different artists, all of whom would congregate there. Seething Wells, David Stockwell, Wild Willi Beckett, Ian Astbury passed through for a year or so, Aki Nawaz who was the first drummer of Southern Death Cult. All these various people passed through our house, of which Joolz was the matriarch, busy creating stuff and helping other people to create stuff.
Was the whole band living there as well at the time?
No, not at all. I met Stuart Morrow, whom I formed the band with, before I knew Joolz. I met Joolz in the beginning of 1979, and I think New Model Army owes a lot to her vision for how a band could be.
It’s remarkable because it’s almost an entire album’s worth of material on these relatively unheard demos at the time. I know some of the tracks later appeared on the Radio Sessions '83-'84 LP in 1988, but really never saw a formal release in their entirety until 2012.
Basically by the time we got to "Vengeance," we had already got through an entire album’s worth of material that we had discarded. Either we were bored of it or we got better stuff by the time "Vengeance" came along.
Well, I think the songs are fantastic. They hint at what "Vengeance" would sound like, but they stand as very unique on their own. So while the period may not have been terribly active in the spotlight, it sounds like it was incredibly creative and fun.
I think it was based on this thing that Stuart had this astonishing talent and didn’t know what he wanted to do as a bass player. And I couldn’t really play guitar beyond a few chords, but I could write a bit. My writing was sort of influenced by punk, but my first love was always Motown and ‘60s American Soul. So yes we were influenced by punk in the way that we went about everything, but musically we had all these different influences.
Politically you were quite aligned with much of the peace punk scene that was thriving in the UK around that time. Touching on pertinent topics of the era such as the Falklands War, ‘84 Miners Strike, etc.
We were obviously Left and anti-Thatcher, but we were tackling topics at oblique angles. The Crass thing - there was an agenda, and everything must fit into the agenda. Music was kind of secondary to the agenda. We were never that, we were the absolute opposite: there is no agenda, we feel free to write about what we want from any point of view that we want, and it’s really primarily about the music. So we were never really in that movement, and in return we were not trusted to be “on message”. So we were a little bit outcast.
At the time it was kind of like all these movements, there were all these subdivisions throwing daggers at each other a little bit.
Was there ever crossover with any of those groups?
Many years later we did a couple gigs in Germany with Chumbawamba. I remember Alice came up to me before the gig and she said, “I got a guilty secret. I used to distribute leaflets outside your gigs telling everyone what a sellout you were and they shouldn’t go support you.” (Laughs)
The first single ("Bittersweet") was released by the short-lived label Quiet Records. How did you end up partnering with them?
We had a stroke of luck early on where we were invited to play a couple gigs in London to perform for some record companies. The agent who booked the gigs was a guy named Nigel Morton. All the labels came to watch us and all they all hated us, but Nigel liked us. He basically said, “I want to be your manager.” And he became our manager. He got us a lot of gigs but he also arranged the deal with Quiet Records. I don’t know much about it though.
From there you went on to work with Abstract Records. How did that relationship come about?
Abstract was run by a guy named Edward Christie, who was basically a good guy, although I think we didn’t always treat him particularly well. We were terribly arrogant and angry. Looking back, he did his best with us. I remember when we were making "Vengeance" we had a budget of five days in the studio to make the album. When we ran out of the five days we came back to Edward and asked, “Can we have two more days? Please? It’s going to be worth it!” And he said, “Yes.” And of course it was (worth it).
Your second single ("Great Expectations") was also the first to prominently feature the artwork of Joolz who would subsequently go on to do all the NMA cover art from there onward.
Well even the very first logo, which is on the first EP; the stencil writing was my idea and the red circle was hers.
Joolz is actually in the background of everything to do with the band in the early years. She was sort of our first manager too, then Nigel took over. Joolz was always part of the vision though, pushing and supporting.
Going back to "Vengeance,'' I was actually unaware of this prior to preparing for this interview, but I noticed that Mond Cowie from Angelic Upstarts is credited for producing the record and the subsequent single on Abstract ("The Price"). Was this someone you had selected to produce the album?
No, he was selected for us, but bless him, we got on fine. I remember he brought down a Guild electric guitar which I used a lot on "Vengeance" and I really liked it. I can’t remember much about it all, just feeling a certain amount of mixture of excitement, pressure, fear and people around the band saying, "Oh, this is great!"
You have to remember that in 1984, the New Romantic movement was just beginning and the anger of punk had become passé in a sense. So the album was never going to be a mainstream hit.
The next album, "No Rest for the Wicked," is obviously where you made the big leap to EMI and the sound got locked in, but "Vengeance" as a stand-alone album is incredibly strong.
Yeah, I think "Vengeance" is a great album. It’s what it is. It’s simple. With "No Rest," I always felt that it was not a great album. We were suddenly in a big studio with a lot of money and the possibility of triple tracking everything, all this new technology that we didn’t really understand. It ended up being a bit "overcooked," shall we say? I think even some of the writing is overcooked too. "Vengeance" has this sort of pure fire in the songwriting, but "No Rest" becomes a bit self-righteous. The production of it is HUGE, because we were able to do that for the first time. But were we really ready to do it?
Well, if you look at most bands’ catalogs, the earlier albums were often produced working under some sort of confines, be it time, budget, musicianship, etc. You don’t have the luxury of overthinking things and as a result the album manages to capture the music in the raw. If a song can’t stand on its own without some decadent production, I might question the quality of the song overall. That being said, I don’t necessarily hear "No Rest" the same as you do. I may be biased as it was the first NMA album I owned so it’s quite dear to me, but I can understand that as the artist you may look back on it differently.
I shouldn’t say anything about our albums because what I think may be a bit irrelevant. It is what it is, and "Vengeance" is a record of the moment.
That being said, how do you feel 36 years on reflecting on the themes of the album, where things were at that time and where we are now.
I get asked this question all the time, actually. Is now a kind of parallel to the early ‘80s? To which my answer is no, I don't think it is. Rather I think everything that is happening now is a result of everything that happened in the early ‘80s.
I suppose looking back you can see some parallels. The Left was very Left and the Right was very Right. On the other hand, the extreme Right that was once existing in the early ‘80s underground, now these fuckers are in power.
There are definitely parallels but clearly we’re in a much different situation now. It’s true that during that time you had groups like the National Front actively recruiting youth from within the underground music scenes, but for the most part their agenda and ideas existed on the fringe.
Right. There were a few maverick Tory MPs with deeply fascist/racist sympathies, but it wasn’t the mainstream of the party. But now in the UK and in America, there has basically been a coup d'etat within both the Tory and Republican parties by these people.
"Vengeance" has been an album I find myself revisiting quite a bit these days. With the state of the world, the rise of right wing extremism, etc. It still feels very empowering and anthemic. It holds up.
It’s true about love songs as well. I believe that if you write something which is "True" at a time, it remains true. Because although times change, basic truths about how people are or how society works remain true, you know what I mean?
In celebration of their 40th anniversary, New Model Army will be performing an extensive live set via live stream on Saturday, October 24th 2020.
More information and tickets for the event can be acquired over at their official website.
Huge thanks to D. Joseph, Johan Asp and Nicklas Carlsson for their help with this feature.
All NMA vinyl from the collection of NI Staff except cover shots of “Vengeance” from the collection of Nicklas Carlsson.
NMA Fanclub zine from the collection of Johan Asp (Drums, Driller Killer).
All photos used with permission:
Marquee Club , June 1984 - Photos courtesy of Paul Wright (Visit Paul's Flickr site for more photos of the era)
Reading Paradise Club, April 1984 and London Marquee, November 1984 - Photos courtesy of Steve at retromanblog.com
Very special thanks to Laura Morphine for encouraging the pursuit of this feature.
