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

"No Machos or Pop Stars presents an extensive social history of the entanglement between punk rock and art college radicalism in the Northern English city of Leeds in the 1970s and 1980s. This relationship, at times critical and other times contesting, paved the way for the punk rock genre to become self-aware about the larger societal structures in which it was caught. Gavin Butt considers the ways that art school made it possible to hear the critique of ideology in music and, perhaps somewhat against the odds, paved the way for it becoming a popular sound in British and international youth culture. The book follows bands like Gang of Four, Scritti Politti, and Soft Cell to tell a different genealogy of art and music based on an exploration of the limits and possibilities of art education, especially in response to the challenges of making art after the avant-garde. Based on extensive original interviews with band members, the book pinpoints a crisis of state-funded English art education and disillusionment with the avant-garde as twin conditions for post-punk's emergence in the city"--
Gavin Butt tells the story of the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds, showing how bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget drew on their university art school education to push the boundaries of pop music.
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.