Electronic Sound Magazine Issue 85 Back Issue

If British punk was an art school concept shoehorned into a back-to-basics rock ’n’ roll scene, the American take was more literal. And Suicide were the original street punks, with nothing to lose and no fucks given.

While bands like the Ramones and Television take much of the credit, Suicide were the real deal. For a long time, Alan Vega and Martin Rev were universally reviled, even by their punk contemporaries, attracting volleys of missiles from the crowd at every gig they played. When they toured the UK with The Clash, Vega narrowly avoided being hit by a flying axe in Glasgow. “It looked like a tomahawk,” he later said. The extreme reaction they provoked was because they made music with old keyboards and drum machines rather than with guitars, but in doing so they invented a whole new and arguably more interesting genre – synthpunk.

John Lydon, née Rotten, described Suicide’s ‘Cheree’ as “complete rubbish” when guest reviewing the singles for NME during the summer of 1978, trashing it as “a combination of ‘Je T’Aime’, taped hiss and something awful”. It was the same week that he dismissed The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’ with just two words. “Trendy hippies,” he snorted. The stripped-down electronic world of Suicide and The Human League was seemingly too much for the likes of Lydon, only finding its audience after the fact, once the rigid orthodoxy of trad punk had caved in on itself.