Thatcher survivors

Sade and Rudimentary Peni

by Douglas Wolk

"I was a punk in 1977," declares bassist Paul Denman, once of the British punk band the Posers, "and I'll probably be one until I die." And with what mohawks-forever gang does Denman currently rock? Why, Sade, of course.

Denman's "punk" routine is not quite as stupid as it sounds. Like many people, I used to think of Sade as little more than whooshy cocktail-lounge music. I had my conversion experience about 10 years ago, when my friend Jeff put on "Turn My Back on You," from Stronger Than Pride (Epic), and said "Here, I want to show you something -- listen to this." Yeah yeah yeah, Jeff, I know it, it just makes me think I should be ordering tapas. "Okay, now, listen to this." He cranked the volume knob way up -- and all of a sudden I could hear the band, tense, subtle, playing around with the beat and the chords, filling in nearly inaudible details all over the mix, hitting a groove so coolly it all but disappeared if you didn't pay attention. They did for smooth '80s soul what Chic did for disco, making it all about ego-less collective musicianship. Who were these brilliant session pros?

As it turns out, they were Sade Adu's regular band -- the same group she's been playing with for the last 17 years. Denman, guitarist Stuart Matthewman, and keyboardist Andrew Hale enjoy the casual reliance on one another that only years of playing together can create. They've reunited for Sade's new Lovers Rock (Epic), her first album in eight years, and they sound more or less the same -- the production touches that date, say, Diamond Life (Epic) are absent, but then, parts of Lovers Rock will probably sound dated 15 years hence.

The musicianship is more telegraphic than ever; Matthewman, in particular, sticks mostly to acoustic guitar and plays as little as he can get away with, generally samba-inspired comping. There's a lot more reggae on Lovers Rock than they've tried before, though it's been de-reggaefied, the beat implied more than stated, one-drop riddims suggested by a gentle dub fill, "chunking" guitar parts by the lightest of brushes across the strings. Still, the single "By Your Side" amounts to the mathematical average of "Lean on Me" and "No Woman No Cry," and the album's title is also the name of the reggae subgenre that includes the likes of Gregory Isaacs and Sugar Minott. It's easy to imagine "Lovers Rock" itself being remade as a Jamaican torch song, though Adu's lyrics play its meaning literally: "The rock that I cling to . . . the one I swim to in a storm."

Those lyrics have grown a bit of a social conscience since we last heard from Adu -- there's one song about racism, another about slavery -- but it always sounds as if she were singing about the matters of the heart that are her chief subject. It's a kind of escapism, maybe a necessary kind. In the depressed, Thatcherite England in which her band formed, singing about sweet taboos and love stronger than pride was leagues away from the punk struggle, but it was also a way of making space for private life, creating a place where the state had no business at all.

SADE AREN'T THE ONLY returning English group from the Thatcher years: the hardcore band Rudimentary Peni's brutal, brutal little EP The Underclass (Outer Himalayan) features the same trio they started with in 1981. According to the press release, "The line-up of the band has remained stable due to the lack of death amongst the members." That's not a joke, or rather it's the blackest kind of joke: bassist/lyricist Grant Bland spent a few years fighting cancer, and 1995's Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric was apparently recorded while singer/guitarist Nick Blinko (whose obsessively detailed artwork can be seen on their album packaging) was in a mental institution.

Back in the early days, Bland could go on a bit: 1982's 66-second, 132-word speed-punk jolt "Cosmetic Plague" ends with "A deconditioned consciousness of mutual respect is the only way to cure this cosmetic disease." The Underclass crams 12 songs into 15 minutes, but Bland has boiled his thoughts down to the rawest, coldest aphorisms this side of Rimbaud: "Captive of Atrophy," in its entirety, goes "A collection/Of empty cells/You are/The crumbling walls/Of a prison." One song has 12 words; another has nine; the title track has four, and they're repeated thousands of times in Blinko's tiny handwriting on the EP cover: "Repression,/Rejection,/Oppression,/Exclusion."

If Sade is starting to come around to the idea of a world outside the boudoir, Rudimentary Peni are more convinced than ever that private life is as much of a sham as public life. The sole glimmer of hope on The Underclass is its existence, and the fact that the band have been able to stay together this long, shoulders to the wheel, grinding and howling in existential horror, punks until they die.