Script of the Bridge by the Chameleons: ’80s Made Music that Speaks to Today
Anyone listening to Script of the Bridge cannot help but notice that it is far superior to anything U2 or Big Country or The Alarm were putting out at the time, and as far as U2 goes, they’ve been going downhill since their live album recorded at Red Rocks.
The Chameleons came out of that hotbed or British alternative music, the Manchester area; to name just a few of the other bands to spring from there would be name a veritable who’s who of 80’s music greats such as New Order, The Smiths, A Certain Ratio, and The Durutti Column. (And you thought Athens, Georgia was the locus classicus for great alternative music in the late 70s/early 80s.)
Script of the Bridge is The Chameleons debut album and it’s tough to find a more impressive one from a band that remains virtually unknown. I bought it on vinyl the year it came out and it has one of the best liner notes in the entire history of that long-lost musical tradition. At the bottom of the back of the album are these words: To obtain the best effect from this LP please turn it up.
Too true.
The album is a plethora of guitar anthems, opening on side one with Up the Down Escalator (There Must Be Something Wrong, Boys). Although written over twenty years ago, the song could be about today:
Obnoxious action, obnoxious results
From teachers who refuse to be taught
Distorted pictures and dizzy dizzy people
Rush by me at the speed of thought.
They sit at their tables and throw us the scraps
For Christ’s sake can’t they leave us something
Now they can erase you with the flick of a switch
Now much longer must be wait
Now!
Yes, there must be something wrong, boys and our leaders still persist in going up the down escalator and vice versa. The music is charging and powerful and, yes, it should be played loud, damn your eardrums to everlasting hell!
The album is peppered with similarly engaging songs, but Script of the Bridge achieves masterpiece quality primarily on the basis of its three strongest songs. The Chameleons certainly can’t be accused of obvious political posturing like some of their contemporaries, they seem more interested in exposing the political in the personal. What most people ever fail to understand-and what Gang of Four made a series of masterpieces about-is that the personal is political. Everything is political.
In a country which seems determined to stamp out evolution from its schools forever because it’s “just a theory” and replace it with creationism which they fail to comprehend is “just a religion” the song title Monkeyland seems more apt than ever. Just about every time I see Pres. Bush’s lying, smirking, fruity pursed lips I am reminded of the song’s opening words:
I shake my head and shiver
They smile and they stab my back
As they shake my hand
Send out an SOS please
Come quickly
I’m marooned in monkeyland.
Do you sometimes feel marooned in monkeyland. Just as Thomas Paine and Sam Adams and Ben Franklin must have felt so during the years leading up the American Revolution, I fear we are surrounded by monkeys who somehow got in charge of things. In fact, I think I once saw Dick Cheney pick a nit off Bush and eat it. As powerful as those opening words are, the concluding words are nothing less than chilling, yet just as perceptive about today’s political climate.
Is there anyone there?
Life’s an optical illusion like other optical illusions
Ah, beware.
The song Thursday’s Child starts off sounding almost like a Durutti Column song with its ethereal single guitar strum before building to a crescendo and then settling down again to fade out. Lyrics here also give the impression that The Chameleons were time travelers who visited the early 21st century and then went back in time to write about it.
Where are we first and last
Bound together in our past
Much too cruel and much too fast
And much too quick to anger
Indeed, The Chameleons speak to the past and to the future and forever about the state of society when they go on:
Traps laid bare in my face
Set to keep me in my place
Say goodbye to the world
And life it seems is colder.
A deep sense of discontented alienation pervades this song, as it does many others, and that lyrical disaffection is mirrored by the music. The great difference between The Chameleons and U2-along with many of the other big guitar bands of the period-is that The Chameleons are capable of matching sound to words. Whereas U2 even at their anthemic best, exemplified by the album War, always seem to sound the same no matter what they are preaching about, The Chameleons subtly tailor the sound to the message.
Which reaches perfection in the album’s closer, the extraordinary song Second Skin. An epic at nearly seven minutes, Second Skin represents The Chameleons at their level best. What Pink Floyd took a full double album to do, The Chameleons manage to do in one song. Second Skin is a haunting and complex narrative of a vision or hallucination or possibly a true visit from strange messenger. (I can only assume that the director of Donnie Darko couldn’t get the rights to Second Skin, it would fit in perfectly.)
The song toys with the symbiotic yet oppositional relationship between the celebrity and the person behind the celebrity as well as the celebrity and the fan, but it could very well also be about coming to class consciousness, or shedding societal expectations to reveal the real person beneath.
Whatever the song may in reality be about, it’s poetry of the highest order and will stick with you well after you hear it. If you are a fan of Donnie Darko, Fight Club, or The Crying Game you will appreciate Second Skin on some level that may never even reach your consciousness.
The Chameleons, or Chameleons UK, or whatever name you know them by were shamefully overlooked by audiences that grasped the much more PR-savvy U2 to their bosom. The Script of the Bridge certainly must rank among the top twenty albums of the 1980s. Be aware that this review was of the original 1983 US release and that the UK issue contains songs that weren’t included on it.
