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Magazine - Howard Devoto Comes up For Air

Howard Devoto is trying to play the game. The vocalist and lyricist behind legendary Mancunian post-punk band Magazine clearly isn’t comfortable with doing interviews, but given that that after twenty-eight years the band have finally decided to reform for a handful of dates this week, he understands the expectations that go with it. Magazine may have split up in 1981 following a career book-ended by two classic singles, Shot By Both Sides and A Song From Under The Floorboards, but they’re now regarded as one of the most influential bands ever.

Both Radiohead and Jarvis Cocker have covered Shot By Both Sides, while Devoto’s contemporary Morrissey, who wrote Last of the International Playboys about him, has played A Song From Under The Floorboards in concert. As three-verse distillations of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground go, Magazine were nothing if not ambitious. Given the band’s prevailing elusiveness, however, one can’t help but wonder why they’ve chosen now for such a significant resurrection.

“Well, some things need to happen at some point, don’t they? says Devoto of the reunion, “and we did actually get together for a few rehearsals in 2005. That sounded fine, but back then I had a proper job. I’m much more of a free man now.”

Given Devoto’s existential leanings, one can see a certain irony in this last statement, although now he’s no longer working as a full time photo archivist, his free time has allowed him to re-open the door on his past. It was Magazine keyboardist Dave Formula, however, who set things in motion.

“These dates have all been clustered around Dave’s solo album,” says Devoto, “which he’s been working on for the last couple of years. We all recorded different tracks separately, and I’d co-written something with Dave as well, so that was going on. Then we were contacted by a promoter who asked if there was any chance we might do something together, and within a couple of weeks that was that.”

One part of the equation missing from the line-up is Greenock-born guitarist John McGeogh, who died in 2004. McGeogh does appear, however, on Formula’s album, after an old studio tape was discovered with McGeogh heard between takes. This formed the basis of a brand new track by Formula, as well as a BBC Radio Two documentary tribute to the guitarist. The vacancy for the guitar slot has been filled by Noko, formerly Devoto’s foil in his post-Magazine project, Luxuria, and later of Apollo 440, much, it would seem, to Devoto’s pleasure.

“In a sense,” Devoto insists, “Noko wasn’t my choice, because I wasn’t there at the auditions. I left it to Dave, Barry (Adamson, on bass) and John (drummer Doyle), but he’s worked with all of us, either producing, co-writing or playing, so it kind of makes sense. He’s part of the framework.”

Formerly Howard Trafford, Devoto formed Magazine after leaving Buzzcocks, the band he formed with Pete Shelley (nee McNeish) after the pair saw The Sex Pistols. They put the band on at a now legendary Manchester show attended by future members of The Fall, Joy Division and other luminaries, and released the Spiral Scratch EP, defining punk’s independent aesthetic. Devoto jumped ship shortly after, craving something more complex. Magazine was the result.

“When music entered my life,” Devoto recalls, “it entered like an emotional hurricane, and when I was a teenager I wouldn’t have thought it possible that I would end up making music. But something clicked, and if it hadn’t been through punk, and if it hadn’t happened in a very quick way, I’m not sure I would have ended up in music. I didn’t work on it, but it just seemed to take hold.”

After four albums of nouveau punk-prog-glam wrapped around the vocalist’s studied ennui and lyrical allusions to Proust and Dostoyevsky, Devoto called time on a band who’d possibly become too clever for their own good. After a solo album and two releases fronting Luxuria, in 1990 he left the music business completely.

“A lot of that was to do with the lack of response to the second Luxuria album,” Devoto reflects, “which I would have right up there with the Magazine albums. I just thought, well, there’s a lot more of you than me, so that was that.”

Devoto came up for air in 2002 as one half of Buzzkunst, which reunited Devoto with Shelley. As for the rest of the band, McGeogh had left following 1980’s The Correct Use of Soap album to join Siouxsie and the Banshees, and later John Lydon’s Public Image Limited, while Adamson became one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds before embarking on a solo career. Formula joined Steve Strange’s Visage project with McGeogh and Adamson, while Doyle joined Richard Jobson’s Armoury Show with McGeogh. With such a patchwork of post-Magazine activity, then, just how well does the band’s own material stand up?

“Well,” says Devoto, “I’ve been listening to the records again, and on the whole have been very pleasantly and excitedly surprised, especially with The Correct Use of Soap. Somebody reminded me lately that I’d always said that album was designed to have a timeless quality. Now, thirty years on, I feel fairly vindicated. We were quite young when we made it, but those songs don’t feel like kids stuff, and as I start to step back into them, they still seem to stand up.”

Given the band’s welter of individual activities, any new material, or indeed any life for Magazine beyond the six scheduled shows seems unlikely. Devoto does, however, seem open to suggestion.

“One step at a time,” is how he puts it. “But we’ll see. Stuff like that can creep up on you and surprise you at the strangest times.”

As for attempting to pin down his thoughts on Magazine’s legacy beyond the songs, Devoto is awkward to the point of embarrassment.

“Do I really have to think about that?” he asks. “I can’t say it’s something I’ve even ever considered. That would be immodest, and I’m not capable of that.”

Magazine, O2 Academy, Glasgow, Monday February 16
www.

The Herald, February 12th 2009

ends

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