13. General Public, All the Rage (1984)

In some ways, it was in an inopportune time to close up shop on the band known in their homeland as the Beat and with the added explanation that they were English for records pressed in the U.S. Although their third album, Special Beat Service, had underperformed in the U.K., it brought a modest but discernible breakthrough across the Atlantic. As it happened, the burgeoning popularity with American audiences hastened the band’s demise. The Beat wound up spending an extended period on the road as their crowd size grew in the U.S., leading to a certain amount of disenchantment with several band members who grew weary performing the same songs every night. That aversion to the grind of rock stardom certainly wasn’t shared by everyone. Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger found nights on various stages to be just dandy.

“Me and Roger like touring very much anyway,” Wakeling said. “In some ways, we preferred the moment of singing on stage to the endless singing something over and over again in the studio. We had some songs that had been brewing, but we’d never managed to get together. The whole thing seemed magical and charmed the way it was set up.”

The magical and charmed situation was Wakeling and Roger suddenly have free time on their hands to collaborate when the Beat formally called it quits, issuing the dashed-off compilation What Is Beat? as a closing argument. After deciding to work together, the duo did a sort of open call for interested musicians to join them. The result was a stacked lineup of new bandmates who largely hailed from Birmingham, just like Wakeling and Roger. They welcomed in keyboardist Mickey Billingham and drummer Andy “Stoker” Growcott, who both played with Dexys Midnight Runners, and bassist Horace Panter, formerly of the Specials. In maybe the biggest coup, the initial lineup included guitarist Mick Jones, who’d just been ousted from the Clash. Jones wound up making his exit midway through the recording process of this new band’s debut album, but he was there for the formation of the group, which was dubbed General Public.

Any hopes that Wakeling and Roger had of their long-awaited, focused collaboration yielding expedient results were thwarted. The process of shaping their new songs proved arduous as they tried to navigate between extending the styles and sounds that make the Beat successful and forging their own brand of pop music. General Public worked on their debut album, All the Rage, across at least five different studios and for the better part of year. In the nineteen-eighties, when acts were expected to blast out new material with assembly line efficiency, the extended adventures in creation left the band members feeling a little dazed.

“We weren’t even sure if we sounded any good after all ten tracks were finally recorded,” Roger noted at the time. “If you can imagine hearing the same songs for something like a year non-stop, hardly even having weekends off, and recording them and then mixing them, by the time they’ve grown into adults, you’ve forgotten everything about them.”

At the very least, all that added toil is present on the album. When the more robust production sheet that would define nineteen-eighties pop was still buffing into being, All the Rage is an example of how much a pop record could gleam. The clearest, most famous representation of its sterling construction in the buoyant, emotionally vibrant “Tenderness,” which was a massive hit on the college charts and also cracked the Billboard Top 40. It’s matched in studio expertise by other sterling pop confections on the album, including the strident dance number “Hot You’re Cool” and the burbling. horn-stung “Where’s the Line?” On “Burning Bright,” General Public effectively align themselves with the hard-candy allure of Thompson Twins or A Flock of Seagulls. Thats the kind of hard-candy encasement they coated themselves in.

The clear embrace of more mainstream pop doesn’t mean General Public kept the material simple. For every time Wakeling and Roger returned to the comfortable pocket of slinky, tough ska, such as on the track “Anxious,” the offer up multiple instances of daring strikes away from the familiar. “As a Matter of Fact” hip hop swirled with mbaqanga and other styles with distinct African roots, and “Are You Leading Me On?” is filled with so many tempor and sonic explorations that the cut is practically a shapeshifter. Maybe the only time General Public seems be dogging it a little is on the album closer than shares the band’s name; “General Public” gets mired in dopey, dictionary-skimming lyrics (“Could this be your fascination/ Look out for hallucinations/ Stick right to the regulations/ Must keep down the population”) that accentuate the touch of redundancy to the music.

Even as General Public delivered a vivid new sound, the band’s pre-history remained a regular topic of conversation. The music press spent as much time dissecting the end of the Beat as they did opining on All the Rage. Moving forward is complicated when everything is framed by the past.

“Me and Roger never say anything about the Beat unless we’re asked,” Wakeling told Billboard around the time of the album’s release. “But then, a group doesn’t always have much say in marketing forces. Still, I don’t mind if it will sell back catalog Beat records, because that will benefit everyone else who was in the group.”

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.