Sigue Sigue Sputnik: "21st Century Boy"

21 May 1986

"[Martin Degville] shoots Leo Sayer all the way to Mars and back."

— Martin Degville

"[Giorgio Moroder is] Limahl's producer, you know."

— Neal X

I live in the Far East. (Actually, growing up in western Canada, I always considered Asia to be in the west with Europe to the east) I'm from the last generation to seek out ESL teaching jobs in this part of the world for ulterior motives. Some came to meet women they could never hope to have back home, others came in hopes of making money. Some showed up in order to keep an artistic dream alive, others were looking for a base from which to travel. Still others came to this part of the world to spread the word of the Lord. But our actual teaching jobs? Purely an afterthought.

What's curious about migration to Japan, Korea, China and so forth (as well as the rise of the so-called Tiger Economies) is that it failed to help secure Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong and/or Taipei as a new mecca of civilization. Paris, London, New York, LA: cosmopolitan centres of capital and culture whose influence gradually shifted west. Why, then, did this progression halt at the Pacific Ocean? Did America and Europe flex their muscles to retain their dominance? English teachers flocked to the "East" for all the various "opportunities", the markets raged from Sapporo to Singapore and Japanese cars and TV sets were getting snapped up around the world but no one thought that these emerging nations might actually emerge into something powerful. Because of Sony, fuel efficient cars, Galaxy Express 999, capsule hotels, Blade Runner, conveyor belt sushi, Nintendo and big neon signs with Kana script, it's inevitable that we picture Japan to be futuristic. Thus, it begs the question why it never became the future.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik managed to tap into Far Eastern romanticism better than most. The Beatles and The Beach Boys showed up for concerts in Japan more than twenty years earlier in JAL jackets and kimonos respectively but no one had ever visited the country in full cosplay regalia and, thus, fitted in like their predecessors hadn't been able to — or so they thought. The fans that they expected to meet, be mobbed by and who would shower them with gifts in Osaka and Nagoya were supposed to look just like them. Tony James, Neal X, Martin Degville and the other two may have looked like freaks back home but they were expected to blend right in in the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese are famously committed to their pop star heroes. Here in Korea, they will seek out the middle schools of their favourite KPop idols. In England, they wander around the town of Swindon just to catch a member of XTC round the local off licence. They're accustomed to traipsing around the world in search of a group or singer while often looking the part. What they may not have expected was to see someone come to them looking just like they did. Cosplay is a thing (with, I must say, a name that fails to do it service: given the lengths some go to mimic their chosen pop culture icon, I don't think that suffixing the verb 'play' adequately describes these people) that Sigue Sigue Sputnik seemed keen to anticipate and exploit.

Japanese fans may or may not have been convinced by their doppelgangers (and, to be sure, their success in Japan carried on for a lot longer than back home) but what of everyone else? Punk mohawks were still seen — even captured on postcards by the mid-eighties — and ver Sput's fashion sense wasn't so far off from the garish times but the public back in the "west" wasn't as interested in looking like them. I doubt few even cared to look at them. Leader Tony James had previously been a member of punk also-rans Generation X alongside Billy Idol. Being notable for being just another punk group, they wre associated with groups like the Bromley Contingent, hangers-on who lived and breathed the punk lifestyle while following around their idols from gig to gig and from grotty bedsit to grotty bedsit. Coming out of that subculture, it's likely that Sigue Sigue Sputnik craved creating one of their own — they even had their own pair of femme-Sputs along to play keyboards and get dressed up. But an organic pack of spotty youths dressed in hot pink suits and with hair teased to the ceiling? Look to Japan, boys.

As for "21st Century Boy" (misprinted as "20th Century Boy" on the singles review page something I like to think Degville and X either didn't notice or didn't give a toss about, if not both), it's a turd. Sounding very much like "Love Missile F1-11" only not as good, it could only have come from people who proudly claimed that they were "not interested in music".  It wouldn't be long before very few listeners remained interested in their music. The future would be elsewhere.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Janet Jackson: "Nasty"

The US makes its first claim to the future with New Jack Swing. East Asia was still all about Michael Jackson (and heavy metal groups) but his younger sister Janet was the one who looked forward. Brave to give stardom a shot independent of her famous siblings, it's strange that few saw that she might be the one with the real pop career on her hands. Michael's pop instincts were already beginning to be dulled by this point but Janet's rival her famous brother's 1979 triumph of Off the Wall. "Nasty" is as potent now as it was over thirty years ago and a far more significant indication of where the future lay than anything Sigue Sigue bloody Sputnik could ever fart out.