No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk

by Gavin Butt

After punk’s arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how England’s state-funded education policy brought together art students from different social classes to create a fertile ground for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional music scene of lasting international significance.

Genres: Music, Punk

312 pages, Hardcover

Published October 18, 2022

About the author

Trained as a fine artist and art historian, Gavin is a writer, curator and filmmaker.

Across his diverse output, he is interested in how the social worlds and aesthetic preoccupations of visual artists can be connected, sometimes in surprising ways, to those within popular music, queer culture and performance.

Gavin has written widely on queer art and culture, showing how LGBTQ+ artists have challenged us to think again about how aesthetic judgements are routinely linked to social ones. He has published essays on artists and performers Oreet Ashery, Joe Brainard, Mel Brimfield, Shirley Clarke, Samuel R. Delany, David Hoyle, Kiki and Herb, Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol and others.

He often works collaboratively with other authors and artists on creative projects too, including as co-director of feature film This Is Not a Dream. With writer and curator Heike Roms, he is currently exploring the civic importance of experimental art and education through a new exhibition project Live Class: Performance and the Art School.

Gavin has held academic posts as Professor of Visual Cultures and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle.

Reviews

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love the political, confrontational, feminist, and queer influenced post-punk of bands like Gang of Four, The Mekons, Delta 5, Scritti Politti, Soft Cell, and Fad Gadget, you may be surprised that members of all those bands attended Leeds University or Polytechnic between 1977 and 1981. While there, they were heavily influenced by radical theorists, and sound lab and performance art instructors who instilled in their students a need for a new way of making art (as a group) and questioning capitalism’s takeover of the existing arts culture. A fascinating read!

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I suppose you could say the Mekons were a way of bringing Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object and The Whole Earth Catalog together… I think an awful lot of the flailing around we did [as art students] was a search for form: What form is our disillusionment going to take? Quite how we ended up in bands I’m not entirely sure… We were just flailing around trying to find some form that would represent, or bear witness to disillusion. Certainly this is what the Mekons were doing… We never had the confidence that what we had to say would make any difference… But we knew we had to say it."
– Mark White

[Pamela Chacón · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book! I think it is an extremely important book in the history of popular music. It shows why the post-punk scene from Leeds became so important.

If you love post-punk, art and politics with critical content; you'll definitely going to love this one. It's really nice to see an anti rockstar attitude and feminist vision in a book of popular music.

Amazing research by Gavin Butt.