No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk

by Gavin Butt

Overview

After punk's arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how England's state-funded education policy brought together art students from different social classes to create a fertile ground for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional music scene of lasting international significance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478018636
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	1,049,990
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Gavin Butt is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Post-Punk Then and Now.

Table of Contents

Preface: Class Acts  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction: The Art School Dance Goes On  1
Part I. Avant-Garde and Punk
1. Beginning at a Dead End  23
2. Anarchy at the Poly  56
Part II. Forming a Band
3. Punk Bohemians  75
4. Debating Society  105
5. Why Theory?  126
6. “No Machos or Pop-Stars Please”  146
7. Electric Shock  171
8. Rehearsals for the Mutant Disco  198
Epilogue: The Limits of Experiment—1981 and After  225
Notes  245
Discography  267
Bibliography  271
Index  283

What People are Saying About This

Green Gartside

“Beautifully written and meticulously researched, No Machos or Pop Stars will intrigue anyone with interests in politics, education, art, and popular music. Using a focus on Leeds in the 1970s and 1980s, Gavin Butt brings together theoretical acumen with vivid personal testimony to tell an engrossing tale of power, pedagogy, and dissent. This is a fascinating story of how fine art painters and performers became post-punk and pop pioneers.”

What Is Post-Punk? Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977–82 - Mimi Haddon

“With his energetic and fluid writing, vivid and entertaining interviews, and focus on fine art’s relationship to the origins of post-punk, Gavin Butt brings a new and valuable perspective to music’s history. Exciting and original, No Machos or Pop Stars invites us to hear post-punk in a new way.”

Editorial Reviews

"Written with both scholarly precision and an evident fan's enthusiasm, the book is a serious history of popular modernism in West Yorkshire, as well as a social sketch of artists and young people reacting to a collapsing society with a rarely matched intellectual, aesthetic and social application. . . . A welcome feature of No Machos--which is sadly unusual in many books related to punk and post-punk--is a contextualisation of the environment that created these scenes."--Marcus Barnett "Corridor 8" (10/26/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"More powerful than [Butt's] scholarship, and his own voluminous interviewing of those in the scene, is his clear passion. He writes as someone moved by the music, weird, wonderful, and varied, that Leeds spawned, groups like Delta 5, Gang of Four, Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, and the Mekons."--George Yatchisin "California Review of Books" (3/16/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"No Machos or Pop Stars is an account of the plethora of post-punk bands that emerged out of the 'Leeds experiment.' . . . The range and richness of Butt's research is evident throughout."--Peter Suchin "Art Monthly" (12/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"As a history of educational ideas and systems this book is excellent. As a work of cultural history it is superb. . . this is also a book about music and musicians and it is full to the brim with insightful anecdotes and recollections from those who were active participants within this pre-figurative artistic community. It is a deft piece of writing and structural organisation, and there is no shortage of visual materials either. . . . No Machos or Pop Stars is extremely thorough and thoroughly readable."--Richard Thomas "The Wire" (2/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"This is an important book. . . . It reminds us of--and perhaps implicitly yearns for--a time when a university art school education was free, open, inclusive, and multidisciplinary, where theory was able to re-energise practice and offered new paths out of the cul-de-sacs of art practice, where a local scene that was largely self-supporting and independent could be local without ever being parochial, where contemporary debates arising out of feminism, race, and left-wing politics could be acted out in an exciting form of 'praxis' and where competition between educational institutions could be collapsed, where a small city like Leeds could host a self-supporting creative eco-system where students were able to freely cross-pollinate."--Aidan Winterburn "Tribune Magazine" (12/12/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"A fascinating, informed and highly readable account. . . ."--Rupert Loydell "International Times" (10/24/2022 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

"More powerful than [Butt's] scholarship, and his own voluminous interviewing of those in the scene, is his clear passion. He writes as someone moved by the music, weird, wonderful, and varied, that Leeds spawned, groups like Delta 5, Gang of Four, Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, and the Mekons."

California Review of Books - George Yatchisin

"A fascinating, informed and highly readable account. . . ."

International Times - Rupert Loydell

"This is an important book. . . . It reminds us of—and perhaps implicitly yearns for—a time when a university art school education was free, open, inclusive, and multidisciplinary, where theory was able to re-energise practice and offered new paths out of the cul-de-sacs of art practice, where a local scene that was largely self-supporting and independent could be local without ever being parochial, where contemporary debates arising out of feminism, race, and left-wing politics could be acted out in an exciting form of ‘praxis’ and where competition between educational institutions could be collapsed, where a small city like Leeds could host a self-supporting creative eco-system where students were able to freely cross-pollinate."

Tribune Magazine - Aidan Winterburn

"Written with both scholarly precision and an evident fan's enthusiasm, the book is a serious history of popular modernism in West Yorkshire, as well as a social sketch of artists and young people reacting to a collapsing society with a rarely matched intellectual, aesthetic and social application. . . . A welcome feature of No Machos—which is sadly unusual in many books related to punk and post-punk—is a contextualisation of the environment that created these scenes."

Corridor 8 - Marcus Barnett

"As a history of educational ideas and systems this book is excellent. As a work of cultural history it is superb. . . this is also a book about music and musicians and it is full to the brim with insightful anecdotes and recollections from those who were active participants within this pre-figurative artistic community. It is a deft piece of writing and structural organisation, and there is no shortage of visual materials either. . . . No Machos or Pop Stars is extremely thorough and thoroughly readable."

The Wire - Richard Thomas

“No Machos or Pop Stars is an account of the plethora of post-punk bands that emerged out of the ‘Leeds experiment.’ . . . The range and richness of Butt’s research is evident throughout.

Art Monthly - Peter Suchin