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| A Persona. |
The Hit
The biggest surprise I found in researching M’s 1979 hit, “Pop Muzik,” was that the man behind, Robin Scott, first tried to record it as either R&B or funk. That detail comes from Stereogum's entry in on M in its (and very good) series on No. 1 hits. As noted in the same piece, Scott cleared out the analog instruments and started working with keyboards to create “an otherworldly synthetic take on the song that was inspired…by Donna Summer.” It also contains an old quote on the inspiration for the single:
“Scott later said that he envisioned himself speaking as a disco DJ, floating above the crowd and making ridiculous voice-of-God statements. Talking to Melody Maker at the time, he explained, ‘I get the feeling that people want to know that someone is in control. I see everybody in the disco like being in an enormous army which is waiting to be told what to do. They’ve all rallied under this call, and now they’re sweating out their hang-ups there.’”
For anyone wanting to dive…pretty damn deep into Scott’s life, influences and process, a site called Discog Info mined all sorts of old quotes that get into all that, but the Stereogum piece does the best work both placing “Pop Muzik” in time and breaking it down. It calls it the first true new wave song to hit No. 1- a fair call based on the competition, Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (more on Blondie here) and The Knack’s “My Sharona” (more on The Knack here) - and it makes a strong case for the future-forward originality of the song’s style and structure:
“A mechanistic drum pounds out a steady, basic thump. Keyboards make noises — blips, pings, squirts, hums — that sound strange and spartan and alien while still somehow resolving into catchy melodies. A British man deadpans absurdist non-sequiturs, sounding bored but also excited by his own boredom.”
That sums it up better than I ever will. And now…
The Rest of the Story
Robin Scott never lacked for interesting associations. Born in Croydon, Surrey, UK, in 1947, he attended Croydon Art College where he started a long friendship with the future Svengali of English punk, Malcolm McLaren, and another collaborator, Vivienne Westwood. Though he did do some work with McLaren - e.g., he told Music Hit Box in a circa-2017interview that he helped them develop ideas for the “Let It Rock” boutique, though Wikipedia’s entry says he passed on the chance to work with them at the Chelsea fashion shop SEX - Scott committed to music early, and in one form after another.
He started in folk in the late 1960s, sharing shows with the likes of John Martyn, Ralph McTell and David Bowie, but left that behind to work with prog-rock artists (e.g., Camel) and on a 1970 multi-media project titled The Voice. Writing the musical Teardrops & Heartache - a story "parallel to" The Rocky Horror Picture Show, apparently - came in 1973, and he turned to producing by the mid-‘70s, starting with a (somewhat) pioneering, pre-punk, London pub-rock funk band called Roogalator. Frustrated by what he (correctly) saw as a narrow-minded music industry, Scott stood up an independent label called Do It Records and released Roogalator’s debut album, Play It by Ear, which served a song improbably titled “Cincinnati Fatback” as a lead single. He stuck with producing for a while - with Adam & the Ants 1976/77 debut album, Dirk Wears White Socks, as a notable credit - but he soon passed Do It to his partners in the business and relocated to Amsterdam, then Paris.
Scott dabbled across genres throughout this time - punk was all over his life and he talks of a “love affair” with dub and reggae - but the pivotal moment in his career as a musician came when his ongoing friendship with McLaren put him in "the vortex of wonderful madness associated with The Sex Pistols," which vortex pointed him to an opportunity to record and filmed the debut performance by The Slits at a Paris nightclub. Discogs identifies the venue as a strip club/disco, and it notes another influence, both musical and cultural, that inspired him at the time:
“What I like about disco is the fact that it crosses all barriers. It's completely classless, without race or colour…I would go as far as to say that it's almost the last movement in pop music. It's a new escapist format. It's a full-swing back to the days when people wanted to dance to the Glen Miller Sound. Get out and enjoy yourself just for the hell of it. And in disco, melody and lyrics have become subordinate to the rhythm. For me, disco is the heartbeat of totalitarianism. It reflects the maturity of the pop music business going into the consumer society.”
A combination of those influences and a decade’s worth of life as, in Stereogum’s words, “a journeyman” inspired Scott to take another run at making a splash. He wrote the first M single, “Moderne Man(/Satifsy Your Lust)," while living in Amsterdam with his wife, Brigitte Vinchon (aka, Brigit Novik, a former circus performer, apparently?). He based the modern man something on a cultural caricature, “an 80's yuppie, living in a eurovision landscape away from those white cliffs of Dover,” and released it as M’s first single. The song’s title also delivered his name for the project:
The biggest surprise I found in researching M’s 1979 hit, “Pop Muzik,” was that the man behind, Robin Scott, first tried to record it as either R&B or funk. That detail comes from Stereogum's entry in on M in its (and very good) series on No. 1 hits. As noted in the same piece, Scott cleared out the analog instruments and started working with keyboards to create “an otherworldly synthetic take on the song that was inspired…by Donna Summer.” It also contains an old quote on the inspiration for the single:
“Scott later said that he envisioned himself speaking as a disco DJ, floating above the crowd and making ridiculous voice-of-God statements. Talking to Melody Maker at the time, he explained, ‘I get the feeling that people want to know that someone is in control. I see everybody in the disco like being in an enormous army which is waiting to be told what to do. They’ve all rallied under this call, and now they’re sweating out their hang-ups there.’”
For anyone wanting to dive…pretty damn deep into Scott’s life, influences and process, a site called Discog Info mined all sorts of old quotes that get into all that, but the Stereogum piece does the best work both placing “Pop Muzik” in time and breaking it down. It calls it the first true new wave song to hit No. 1- a fair call based on the competition, Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (more on Blondie here) and The Knack’s “My Sharona” (more on The Knack here) - and it makes a strong case for the future-forward originality of the song’s style and structure:
“A mechanistic drum pounds out a steady, basic thump. Keyboards make noises — blips, pings, squirts, hums — that sound strange and spartan and alien while still somehow resolving into catchy melodies. A British man deadpans absurdist non-sequiturs, sounding bored but also excited by his own boredom.”
That sums it up better than I ever will. And now…
The Rest of the Story
Robin Scott never lacked for interesting associations. Born in Croydon, Surrey, UK, in 1947, he attended Croydon Art College where he started a long friendship with the future Svengali of English punk, Malcolm McLaren, and another collaborator, Vivienne Westwood. Though he did do some work with McLaren - e.g., he told Music Hit Box in a circa-2017interview that he helped them develop ideas for the “Let It Rock” boutique, though Wikipedia’s entry says he passed on the chance to work with them at the Chelsea fashion shop SEX - Scott committed to music early, and in one form after another.
He started in folk in the late 1960s, sharing shows with the likes of John Martyn, Ralph McTell and David Bowie, but left that behind to work with prog-rock artists (e.g., Camel) and on a 1970 multi-media project titled The Voice. Writing the musical Teardrops & Heartache - a story "parallel to" The Rocky Horror Picture Show, apparently - came in 1973, and he turned to producing by the mid-‘70s, starting with a (somewhat) pioneering, pre-punk, London pub-rock funk band called Roogalator. Frustrated by what he (correctly) saw as a narrow-minded music industry, Scott stood up an independent label called Do It Records and released Roogalator’s debut album, Play It by Ear, which served a song improbably titled “Cincinnati Fatback” as a lead single. He stuck with producing for a while - with Adam & the Ants 1976/77 debut album, Dirk Wears White Socks, as a notable credit - but he soon passed Do It to his partners in the business and relocated to Amsterdam, then Paris.
Scott dabbled across genres throughout this time - punk was all over his life and he talks of a “love affair” with dub and reggae - but the pivotal moment in his career as a musician came when his ongoing friendship with McLaren put him in "the vortex of wonderful madness associated with The Sex Pistols," which vortex pointed him to an opportunity to record and filmed the debut performance by The Slits at a Paris nightclub. Discogs identifies the venue as a strip club/disco, and it notes another influence, both musical and cultural, that inspired him at the time:
“What I like about disco is the fact that it crosses all barriers. It's completely classless, without race or colour…I would go as far as to say that it's almost the last movement in pop music. It's a new escapist format. It's a full-swing back to the days when people wanted to dance to the Glen Miller Sound. Get out and enjoy yourself just for the hell of it. And in disco, melody and lyrics have become subordinate to the rhythm. For me, disco is the heartbeat of totalitarianism. It reflects the maturity of the pop music business going into the consumer society.”
A combination of those influences and a decade’s worth of life as, in Stereogum’s words, “a journeyman” inspired Scott to take another run at making a splash. He wrote the first M single, “Moderne Man(/Satifsy Your Lust)," while living in Amsterdam with his wife, Brigitte Vinchon (aka, Brigit Novik, a former circus performer, apparently?). He based the modern man something on a cultural caricature, “an 80's yuppie, living in a eurovision landscape away from those white cliffs of Dover,” and released it as M’s first single. The song’s title also delivered his name for the project:
“The name 'M' was arbitrary. I was working on the sleeve for MM in the studio of Jean Baptist Mondino whereapon I noticed the florescent 'M' over the Metro station outside his window. I took it as a sign... a corporate logo for MM, money markets, Mickey Mouse whatever you choose to see.”
Scott made M out of a handful of studio musicians - several of whom went on to form Level 42 (of “Something About You” fame) - but also his brother Julian (bass) and Novik (backing vocals), and, a little later on, a young music programmer named Thomas Dolby (of “She Blinded Me with Science” fame). I didn’t come across any stories as to how “Pop Muzik” blew up, climbing to No. 2 on the UK charts in May of 1979, then to No. 1 on the U.S. charts six months later. To offer one theory, Stereogum puts its popularity down to audiences not quite letting disco go - “straight-up disco was struggling in America, but slightly refracted post-disco sounds were booming” - and I’ll take that.
Scott would put out two more albums as M - 1980s (thematically tight) The Official Secrets Act and 1982’s (quite good) Famous Last Words - and with most of the same musicians pitching in. He/they scored three more minor UK hits with it: “Moonlight and Muzak” (No. 33, 1979); “That’s the Way the Money Goes” (No. 45, 1980); and “Official Secrets” (No. 64, 1980). “Moonlight and Muzak” actually comes from the same album as “Pop Muzik,” New York-London-Paris-Munich, but it still planted the seeds of first friction between Scott’s ambitions and his label’s (MCA Records) demands. He broke his own template for its sound, for one, but the song also drew from a headier source, one that couldn’t got glossed over a la the quietly complicated “Pop Muzik,” i.e., Scott’s visit to the Muzak Corporation in America:
“There were all these white-collar workers conscientiously putting together music with the precision of chemists. Way before Eno was doing it, these guys were doing it for real. They were preoccupied with the pace of workers in factories, and how to maximize efficiency. That was the motivation behind 'Moonlight and Muzak', which was a UK top 40 hit.”
As anyone can tell based on the dates above, M survived the tiff over his follow-up single for some time, but they did stiff Famous Last Words by “declining” to release it in the UK. After Scott and his label officially parted ways, he picked around at producing for a couple years until he found a project that really excited him in 1984. It involved calling artists from all over Africa to recording sessions in Kenya - one of them a South African vocal trio called Shishika - hence the name of the final product from the sessions, an album titled Jive Shikisha! After some part of the industry, as Wikipedia puts it, “suppressed” Scott’s world music, he checked out of the music industry for a couple decades. It was U2 who drew him back when they used a Steve Osborne remix of “Pop Muzik” on their PopMart tour. After that little flutter died down - though not before he performed his hit single live for the first time in Australia in 2007 - Scott moved on to mentoring budding musicians and doing some visual art.
He's still kicking and has returned to the studio a couple times since, including a self-released album called Emotional DNA in 2017 (the single: “My Rescue Remedy”) to celebrate his surviving cancer, plus a 2021 album titled Wing & A Prayer. I haven’t listened to either. For the record.
About the Sampler
A powerful, life-long resistance to any music that over-involves synthesizers - it’s entirely possible I’d heard only parts of “Pop Muzik,” and without ever getting past “ugh, synthesizers” - set me up to hate M. I did not. It took getting into his head-space for that to happen…and letting go several silly/stupid personal hang-ups, but I post both history and sampler as an admirer, if not a fan. I might like the encompassing social critique written into the music more than I like the music itself, but still…very impressed.
Because Scott created a sound/(broad?) concept for each of his albums, I decided to organize the M sampler chronologically. I rep his producing days with a couple by Roogalator - “Cincinnati Fatback” and “All Board” - but also added “Cry Myself to Sleep,” a dub/reggae-influenced single he recorded for Do It under the pseudonym Comic Romance. It’s on to the M material from there. I’ve already linked to the three big singles on New York-London-Paris-Munich, but I added “Woman Make Man” to demonstrate Scott’s willingness to commit to a tone/concept (you can take the kid out of art school...).
Because I feel like I missed two-thirds of what’s going on with The Official Secrets Act, and that’s a minimum, I’m going to spend more time with it. And that means I only pulled “Your Country Needs You,” “Join the Party,” “Transmission” and “Maniac” to the sampler half-consciously at best. For what it’s worth, I like the way he balanced the electro-pop stuff with analog sound/instruments, so I got a little grabby when making the sampler. The selection includes, “Doubletalk,” “The Bridge,” “Yellow Magic,” “Neutron” (still real, real synthy), “To Be Is to Buy,” “Dance on the Ruins,” and, a first-impression favorite (as in, it’s already on the March playlist), “Honolulu Joe.” And, yes, I’ll also be spending more time on Famous Last Words
All in all, call it a good week of listening, improved by a good story. The next chapters heads in a totally different direction. It’s a bit of leap, honestly, bigger than just crossing the Pond. Till then…
Scott would put out two more albums as M - 1980s (thematically tight) The Official Secrets Act and 1982’s (quite good) Famous Last Words - and with most of the same musicians pitching in. He/they scored three more minor UK hits with it: “Moonlight and Muzak” (No. 33, 1979); “That’s the Way the Money Goes” (No. 45, 1980); and “Official Secrets” (No. 64, 1980). “Moonlight and Muzak” actually comes from the same album as “Pop Muzik,” New York-London-Paris-Munich, but it still planted the seeds of first friction between Scott’s ambitions and his label’s (MCA Records) demands. He broke his own template for its sound, for one, but the song also drew from a headier source, one that couldn’t got glossed over a la the quietly complicated “Pop Muzik,” i.e., Scott’s visit to the Muzak Corporation in America:
“There were all these white-collar workers conscientiously putting together music with the precision of chemists. Way before Eno was doing it, these guys were doing it for real. They were preoccupied with the pace of workers in factories, and how to maximize efficiency. That was the motivation behind 'Moonlight and Muzak', which was a UK top 40 hit.”
As anyone can tell based on the dates above, M survived the tiff over his follow-up single for some time, but they did stiff Famous Last Words by “declining” to release it in the UK. After Scott and his label officially parted ways, he picked around at producing for a couple years until he found a project that really excited him in 1984. It involved calling artists from all over Africa to recording sessions in Kenya - one of them a South African vocal trio called Shishika - hence the name of the final product from the sessions, an album titled Jive Shikisha! After some part of the industry, as Wikipedia puts it, “suppressed” Scott’s world music, he checked out of the music industry for a couple decades. It was U2 who drew him back when they used a Steve Osborne remix of “Pop Muzik” on their PopMart tour. After that little flutter died down - though not before he performed his hit single live for the first time in Australia in 2007 - Scott moved on to mentoring budding musicians and doing some visual art.
He's still kicking and has returned to the studio a couple times since, including a self-released album called Emotional DNA in 2017 (the single: “My Rescue Remedy”) to celebrate his surviving cancer, plus a 2021 album titled Wing & A Prayer. I haven’t listened to either. For the record.
About the Sampler
A powerful, life-long resistance to any music that over-involves synthesizers - it’s entirely possible I’d heard only parts of “Pop Muzik,” and without ever getting past “ugh, synthesizers” - set me up to hate M. I did not. It took getting into his head-space for that to happen…and letting go several silly/stupid personal hang-ups, but I post both history and sampler as an admirer, if not a fan. I might like the encompassing social critique written into the music more than I like the music itself, but still…very impressed.
Because Scott created a sound/(broad?) concept for each of his albums, I decided to organize the M sampler chronologically. I rep his producing days with a couple by Roogalator - “Cincinnati Fatback” and “All Board” - but also added “Cry Myself to Sleep,” a dub/reggae-influenced single he recorded for Do It under the pseudonym Comic Romance. It’s on to the M material from there. I’ve already linked to the three big singles on New York-London-Paris-Munich, but I added “Woman Make Man” to demonstrate Scott’s willingness to commit to a tone/concept (you can take the kid out of art school...).
Because I feel like I missed two-thirds of what’s going on with The Official Secrets Act, and that’s a minimum, I’m going to spend more time with it. And that means I only pulled “Your Country Needs You,” “Join the Party,” “Transmission” and “Maniac” to the sampler half-consciously at best. For what it’s worth, I like the way he balanced the electro-pop stuff with analog sound/instruments, so I got a little grabby when making the sampler. The selection includes, “Doubletalk,” “The Bridge,” “Yellow Magic,” “Neutron” (still real, real synthy), “To Be Is to Buy,” “Dance on the Ruins,” and, a first-impression favorite (as in, it’s already on the March playlist), “Honolulu Joe.” And, yes, I’ll also be spending more time on Famous Last Words
All in all, call it a good week of listening, improved by a good story. The next chapters heads in a totally different direction. It’s a bit of leap, honestly, bigger than just crossing the Pond. Till then…
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