Urgh! A Music War is a return to The T.A.M.I. Show. The acronym stood for Teen Age Music International. No kid would have thought of that. Cut from concerts all over the UK, the US and in France, the film features thirty-five performances by thirty-two bands, all more or less identified by what we were calling post-punk or – more commonly – new wave music at the start of the '80s. Many of the bands included were signed to the roster of I.R.S. Records or Frontier Booking International (F.B.I.) a record label and an artist management company run respectively by Miles and Ian Copeland, brother of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the Police, who have three songs in Urgh! and open and close the movie.The brothers were major players in marketing punk and new wave music to the mainstream: Baby Boomers who packaged rebellious youth culture, like T.A.M.I. Show director Steve Binder and his crew from the Steve Allen Show, backed by American International, a subsidiary of MGM – an older generation selling the kids what they wanted to see, without too much attention paid to curation.
The acts in Urgh! are a wildly mixed bag, apparently chosen either by their contractual ties to the Copelands or by the simple expedience of being on tour and available for the filmed concerts. There's the Police, of course, performing in an amphitheatre built in a Roman ruin in Fréjus, on the Côte d'Azur, on their way to becoming one of the biggest musical acts of the '80s, along with a few bands that would enjoy brief but notable chart success, like the Go-Gos, Gary Numan, Devo, XTC, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Joan Jett, Wall of Voodoo and UB40. There are holdovers from the recent heyday of punk rock – the Dead Kennedys, Chelsea, 999, X – and post-punk bands whose reputation would grow long after they broke up (often re-forming decades later), like Magazine, Gang of Four, Pere Ubu and Echo & the Bunnymen. And then there are novelty acts best forgotten (The Surf Punks), oddballs that didn't age well (Skafish), lovable eccentrics (John Otway, John Cooper Clarke), and Invisible Sex, a band that apparently never really existed, whose only trace is their performance in Urgh!. And there's Klaus Nomi, a fascinatingly strange persona – imagine Struwwelpeter meets Dr. Caligari, singing opera – who needed the new wave moment to get his shot at the spotlight, but whose backup band seems to be a bunch of hippie sessions musicians in white coveralls. (And of course a moments silence for Splodgenessabounds from Kent, who appear in the credits and were filmed, but ended up on the cutting room floor).
The fuel for Urgh! was cheap and effective: weed and speed, punk drugs that provided bang for the buck before heroin made its periodic and inevitable appearances, culling the herd in every town's musical scene when it did. The performances in the film are mostly twitchy and nervous, even spasmodic, either to echo the music – Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo and a song with far too many tempo changes – or underscore the rage and/or alienation that our generation made it a point of pride to express. Most wired of all is John Otway, vaulting and tumbling across the stage, making me cringe in anticipation of the bruises and joint pain every time he does. With all this angst to express, it might be surprising that reggae became such a major influence on so many punk and new wave bands in the film, like the Police, the Members and UB40 (not to mention the Clash, the Ruts, PiL, the Slits, Bad Brains and many, many others). Urgh!'s frantic and ultimately exhausting pace comes to a sudden halt when Steel Pulse, an actual reggae band, perform "Ku Klux Klan" – with the band's percussionist charging onstage in a robe and pointed hood to menace the lead singer. Even if it wasn't unfashionable at the time, the musicianship and access to grooves weren't really within the musical skillset of most musicians in the punk scene; reggae was the closest we could get, although Steel Pulse's appearance is a reminder of how pale – pun intended – punk's reggae pastiches usually sounded.
When I finally saw Urgh!, many years after it first played in theatres – "real" punks didn't like being blatantly marketed to – it was to watch The Cramps, one of my favourite bands of the time, perform a typically unhinged cover of "Tear it Up." (The Cramps were basically what parents in the '50s thought their kids were seeing when they watched Gene Vincent; amazingly, they still have the same greasy charisma today, years after the death of their frontman, Lux Interior.) And I still love watching Gary Numan drive around the stage in his little cart; it's both endearing and hilarious. My late viewing of the film finally forced me to appreciate bands I'd missed, like the Au Pairs and the Alley Cats. There seemed to be so much happening with punk and its aftermath, and only so much a poor punk kid from the suburbs could hear or afford first time around. The fact that I can still critically parse my reaction to the bands and performances in Urgh! A Music War (yes, it's a terrible title) gives you some idea of how engaged I was with the music, then and now. I never felt the same again – it was more a sense of being a spectator to a musical moment that came and went before I knew what it was.
