Visage

from L to R Billy Currie Dave Formula Steve Strange Rusty Egan Midge Ure

Visage - Visage - 1980
Steve Strange-Vocals Rusty Egan-Drums Billy Currie-Violin Dave Formula-Keyboards Barry Adamson-Bass John McGeoch : Guitar Midge Ure : Guitar/Synthesizer	Visage Blocks On Blocks The Dancer Tar - Adamson/Currie Fade To Grey Malpaso Man Mind Of A Toy Moon Over Moscow Visa-age The Steps Fade To Grey (Dance Mix)
Visage - The Anvil - 1980
Steve Strange-Vocals Rusty Egan-Drums Billy Currie-Violin Dave Formula-Keyboards Barry Adamson-Bass Gary Barnacle-Saxophone Midge Ure : Guitar/Synthesizer	The Damed Don't Cry Anvil (Night Club School) Move Up Night Train The Horseman Look What They've Done Again We Love Wild Life Whispers We Move (Dance Mix) Frequency 7 (Dance Mix)
Visage - Best Of - 1994
Steve Strange-Vocals Rusty Egan-Drums Billy Currie-Violin Dave Formula-Keyboards Barry Adamson-Bass John McGeoch : Guitar Gary Barnacle-Saxophone Midge Ure : Guitar/Synthesizer	Fade To Grey Mind Of A Toy - Adamson/Currie Visage - Adamson/Currie We Move (Remix) - Adamson/Currie Tar - Adamson/Currie In The Year 2525 The Anvil Night Train Pleasure Boys Damned Don't Cry Love Glove Fade To Grey (Remix)

The Anvil (Polydor)

NME 27Mar82 by Paul Tickell

Ideally the dandy's role is a combative one - which is why he was once compared with the soldier and the priest. The dandy's gesture - his stylistic preoccupations - should alienate his audience and distance him from the values of domesticity and straight society. Let's forget Steve Strange once and for all - then - as a dandy: he's too conventional for the role - too keen on the economic status quo and eager to become part of the chic establishment of international jet-setters.

Strange is the man who would be king in this milieu - and if at one point his lust for the hip life at the top had the potential for certain selfish ironies (the lad from South Wales whose career started as a punk cast-off in The Moors Murderers but who now gets invited to the right cosmopolitan parties with all the other rich high protein social termites) - it's too late for that now - because Strange has succeeded too well - not with a vengeance but with Visage - a studio conglomerate whose first album in late '80 became the sound for the right (often mythical) club and discos in '81. It was a fragile - even tepid. sound (fading to grey) - but it wasn't easily dismissed because there was a vigorousness to it - largely thanks to the tight but exploratory rhythms and -syn-drum antics of Rusty Egan - another quite hateful person.

The new album - and It galls me to say it - more than it does you to hear it - is better than the first. It's more professional - more danceable - much more of an exhortation to take to the floor than (a current random example) the funkier stretches of Haircut's 'Pelican West'. As for comparing Strange to his peers - those New Romantics who made promises about "white European dance music" - well he's streets ahead of them and especially the ludicrous proposition which is Spandau's latest work.

A lot of the credit - of course - must go to Visage - the team. Here - you'll have to surmount yet more prejudices and forget the pomposities of Billy Currie and Midge Ure on Ultravox's 'Rage In Eden' - because with Visage their keyboard and guitar dramatisations work in a nicely cinematic - vulgar way. Thanks should also go again to that Egan man - and Barry Adamson on bass - joined by another ex-member of - Magazine - Dave Formula on keyboards.

On 'Night Train' - with the help of Gary Barnacle on sax - the team actually get funky - working you up and working around each other. If the band are normally more glacial than this - cuts like 'The Horseman' and 'Anvil (Night Club School)' still have drive and strength. But the vigour is always qualified: 'Move Up' (no 'Move On Up') may be mobile music - but there's no aspiration - more a kind of- dancing on the spot.

'The Anvil' may be an album which invokes the disco - but even more it wants to play in a hail - of mirrors. At the same time as Visage invite dance and motion - they also obsessively concern themselves with their own reflection - with emotions whose superficiality borders on neurosis. Here the Strange voice is very much part of the musical parcel - for what else is it but a mellifluous whine - capable of only a couple of emotions and even more of the luxury of feeling next to nothing? The achievement of 'Look What They've Done' - 'Again We Love' and - to a lesser extent - 'The Damned Don't Cry' (the current single and perhaps the weakest track on the album) - it to turn this heartlessness into a form of sentimentality. 'Whispers' would be in this mould if it didn't veer towards muzak and bad OMD.

'Wild Life' is the number which tries to reconcile Visage's danceable tendencies with the neurosis and toy melancholy of their leader. It can never be - the synths snarl with indifference and Strange's nightlife manifesto is that of a paper tiger cut into dinky little doilies. Maybe nobody will care too much about the failed attempt at cruelty - at Emotion - because the packaging is just so - and that means the assembling of another sort of team: Hair by Ollie - Clothes by Anthony Price - Presentation by Peter Saville - and Photography by Helmut Newton.

I'd thought 'Contort Yourself' the right kind of music for Newton's sado-eroticism - but 'The Anvil' is a greater approximation. You wanted -the moderne dance - well (forget your DAFs and Japans and Simple Minds on Virgin's 'Methods Of Dance' compilation) here it is: the night-time moves of marionettes - dummies - puppets - clowns - and imaginary celluloid beings. -it's all a little deathly - the sound of commodities fucking - but a noise which can be a good deal more exhilarating ("the sex appeal of the inorganic" - Waiter Benjamin) than healthy fun-loving creatures going at it.

All in all - Visage are a rather seductive disease - the skull beneath the made-up skin. On this album they've produced the most consummate backing tracks. Backing for what exactly? It's up to you to find out: all I'll say is that if Roxy were still fired by their original aesthetics - this is the kind of area they'd be covering - with a lot more flesh and humanity - naturally.