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REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS

The Athens, Georgia oddballs’ joyously improbable success story retold in a boxset.

By Tom Pinnock

“Boys in bikinis/Girls on surfboards/Everybody’s rockin’/Everybody’s fruggin’”

The Warner And Reprise Years RHINO

‘‘IMAGINE,” Fred Schneider tells Uncut, “one week I’m washing dishes to make ends meet because I’d quit my job to do the band, and then the next week we’re flying to Nassau to record…”

At the Bahamas’ luxurious Compass Point Studios over three weeks in early 1979, The B-52s laid down their self-titled debut album. These five skint musicians were a bold signing for Island and Warners, even amid the excitement of post-punk: a deeply strange and subtly transgressive group, they shared as much DNA with the avantgarde, from Sun Ra to Yoko Ono to Captain Beefheart, as with surf music, girl group pop, disco and punk.

Formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1976, The B-52s had been nourished by the city’s unique environment. This was a farm town of eccentrics, led by the likes of Jeremy Ayers (later of Limbo District) and record shop owner William Orten Carlton, a place that welcomed outsider art and queerness.

From the start, The B-52s were unusual. They were a collective with no leader, a five-piece with three singers and no bassist (vocalist Kate Pierson handled keyboard bass along with organ) that sculpted songs via group improvisations, with a postmodern eye on the past. This was clearest in their look – all atomic bouffant wigs, shiny fabrics and garish makeup, a dazzling forerunner to the seedy Lynchian Technicolor of Wild At Heart or Blue Velvet – but also in their music, which blended surf, punk and underground experimentation with the novelty weirdness and outer-space obsessions of the 1950s. They were kitsch, certainly, but surreal and absurdist rather than camp or ironic; an American response to Roxy Music’s high-art trash aesthetic. Yet these were the days when bands as bizarre as The B-52s could find a home on major labels, and Island and Warners’ bet paid off. To say that their catalogue – now being reissued in this 9LP or 8CD box, minus 2008’s Funplex – starts strong would be an understatement: The B-52’s is a stunning debut, a hermetic manifesto that appeared out of the ether. Its first side in particular is near-perfection: from the ragged space-garage of “Planet Claire”, with its “Peter Gunn” riff, and the breakneck, proto-Strokes “52 Girls”, to the swinging chaos of “Dance This Mess Around”. Side One’s closer, “Rock Lobster”, is the album’s crowning glory. Seven minutes of demented garage built around a detuned surf riff, with absurdist lyrics about a beach party, it evolves into a savage outro showcasing guitarist Ricky Wilson’s genius. Involving detuned, missing and unison strings, his novel technique – part Ventures, part Magic Band’s Zoot Horn Rollo, part Sonic Youth before Sonic Youth – allowed him to play slashing parts that still sound like little else, and hit harder than most punk or no wave. With Schneider handling declamatory spoken word, The B-52’s, especially “Rock Lobster”, shows off Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s Onoesque vocal experimentation, and famously inspired John Lennon to call Ono from Bermuda to tell her that her “time had come”. Double Fantasy was the result.