Doll by Doll: Post Punk's Bleeding Hearts

"...a story is a narrative of events arranged in a time sequence." -- E.M. Forster

"'I think we should try to be more open.' More clear as well: more frank and more clear; two things that don't always go together." -- Maurice Blanchot

It's already deep in the ether, as gone as these things can be. No matter what remains hidden somewhere on tape, or the recorded artifacts on scarce 12" record albums, the music itself has long since passed on into pop's obscure historical memory.

Doll by Doll was a much reviled Scottish rock & roll band who staggered onto the U.K. scene during the post-punk era. They made deliberately complex music that combined '50s rock & roll, anthemic girl group choruses, hardscrabble Northern soul, over-amped guitars, tumultuous shifting rhythms, danced-out bridges, spoken and sung poetry, Springsteen -esque dynamics, punk fury, theatrical narratives, and a sense of fallen, damaged beauty, drama, and pathos that could only be realized by excess and be greeted by confusion, hostility, and nearly wholesale indifference.

Fronted by songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist Jackie Leven with pals Jo Shaw on guitar, David McIntosh on drums, and Robin Spreafico on bass -- the latter later replaced by Tony Waite, who also produced the band's first through third albums -- Doll by Doll showed up to London's downer party unannounced -- and paid dearly for it in the Brit music tabloids.

Doll by Doll recorded four albums, two for Automatic -- Remember and Gypsy Blood (both 1979) -- and two for Magnet -- Doll by Doll (also released in the U.S. on MCA in 1980) and Grand Passion (1982), by which time Leven was the only remaining member.

Leven, who carried his lyrical excesses into a marginal solo career, wrote songs that employed the poetry of Antonin Artaud ("Human Face" on Gypsy Blood), Anna Akhmatova, T.S. Eliot, and his own sense of near Shakespearean tragedy to a music mix that seemed like it had heard and incorporated everything, like a snowball rolling downhill only to splatter with all of its acquired detritus: Television, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Roy Orbison, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, the Shirelles, Ronettes, Scott Walker, Charles Aznavour, and Jacques Brel to name but a few.

The debut offering, Remember, was a hint at what was coming from this quartet. With a silhouette of Artaud as Jean Paul Marat from the play Marat-Sade, it became the band's symbol -- they picked up something from Malcolm McLaren's loopy Situationist branding ideas, after all. Far more conventional than its successive recordings, it stuck close to the time period's formulas, but Leven's voice could alternately move from the bottom of a mellifluous baritone to a crystalline falsetto without a seam. It stood outside time, outside space, and certainly outside the purposely unmusical zeitgeist of the era. (Who would have thought something so "inside" could be art brut?) Here he sings surrealistic, autobiographical street tales of haunted, doomed love, crumbling empires, and a ruined hope that could only live in the heart of a damned man. His voice soared above the din of his and Shaw's dueling, detuned scraping guitars, floppy low-end basslines, and skittering drums. Thudding kick drums and sparkling snares were juxtaposed against cymbals that sounded more like gongs vying for the top spot with Leven and Spreafico. All but the vocals and silences were recorded in the red. The Brit journalist mob -- with notable exceptions like Barney Hoskyns and Nick Kent -- were intrigued but deeply skeptical as well.

Doll by Doll's live reviews in Sounds were equally troubled, wondering just what the hell was going on with this band who dared play in a London that was so vital between 1974 and 1983, chock-full of Oi! bands, doomy goth acts, a new wave of distinctly British pop, the ska revival, deep, dub-style heavy reggae, the more warlike sounds of Killing Joke and their mirrored antithesis, Public Image Ltd., the fractured funk of the Pop Group, Gang of Four, and A Certain Ratio, and the art rock of Wire. In performance, this gang of Scots played a full-on arena-in-their-basement style of rock & roll; their songs had everything to do with the acceptance of redemption in all its guises -- even for the emotionally damaged, even if it were only attained in death -- and nothing to do with the dour, sullen politics or creeping interior paranoia and bleak futurism that drenched the songs of the period. Doll by Doll didn't give a damn about Thatcherism, nuclear destruction, or Northern Ireland. What Doll by Doll offered was a sense of tarnished, fragile beauty that was anchored in masculine anger and confusion. This band had a set of peers working unknowingly at the same time, whose first album was also dissed: Ireland's Virgin Prunes and their New Form of Beauty releases and debut album, If I Die, I Die, issued early in 1982.

It was Gypsy Blood that turned the corner and set the band over the edge of the abyss with critics. Their mild distrust and curiosity became ire and rage. The album, however, is Doll by Doll's enduring masterpiece. It opens with "Teenage Lightning," all thundering drums and edgy guitars followed by Leven's triple-tracked vocals along with the entire band singing backup in seven-part harmony behind him: "If you go walking in the street today/Make sure you listen to what the young boys say/They know the color of speed is red/You don't become a hero until you're dead/They don't want to hear no hard luck story/About the rise and fall of love/There is no Starman watching from above." The harmonies were so rich, they extended out as branches from pop's golden era -- the Beach Boys in the mid-'60s (and Leven could do 12 vocal tracks in one sitting like Brian Wilson did) -- and broke off somewhere past everything that was happening in 1981. The disc pointed forward in a way that didn't deny history but incorporated it in a gorgeous overreach. This was pure, unabashed romanticism that combined Phil Spector-ish doo-wahs with punk's overwrought fury, French Symbolism, and soul and new wave dance beats.

But the worst offense of all to the critics was that the album was completely unapologetically melodic without irony. Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, and Squeeze could be accepted because they employed craft along with wit and sarcasm, but Doll by Doll was serious. It was a mess, but a tightly organized disorder that sprawled across rock's past and pointed to the future. Worse, the title track, which immediately followed, began with a Rhodes piano playing a jazz riff (which sounded like Georgie Fame but was Shaw) that was countered by McIntosh's careening snare and Leven singing a doo wop intro with lyrics that went straight to the street corners of the Glaswegian night portrayed so nightmarishly in the novel Trainspotting: "I'll tell you this, John boy, I'm not so green/I was married before I was 16/Rings on the fingers of speech/I feel out of reach/Born a prisoner on Skull Beach/Gypsy blood...'Love burns in the heart of the master/He, seeing only God in everything/With the white flame of worship purges/It of all fancied imperfection'/I got the answer to everything: the last romance is/A sky that is lost in my heart." The inner quote is from Hafiz, a Sufi mystic poet -- long before new age folks were raving about Rumi.

Yet it wasn't just these two songs; the album's sides were jacked into a tense battle with one another. First, there are the sacred and the profane, inseparably identified with love on the album's finest tracks: "Stripshow," "Human Face" (the title and first verse a translated quote from Artaud: "The human face is an empty power/It is a field of death/The last thing that's left to me now is the love of the love of my own breath" -- before Leven starts sweetly singing of switchblades, Jesus weeping, and romantic love), and "Hey Sweetheart." Side two commences its engagement with forces beyond sight and perhaps sense as well, the Licht und Blindheit of Joy Division's "Atmosphere," in a suite of songs. Shaw's "Binary Fiction," an angular, dissonant walk along the edges of outer darkness, followed by Leven's "Hell Games," which delves into the spiritual without reserve, as if to call the cosmos of Shaw's tune out for a showdown, and does in the squalling harmonics of "Forbidden Worlds." The seeming respite in "Highland Rain" is a deception. It echoes a folk ballad revved just enough to make it rock, but it is a rock rune instead. Lyrically, it's full of pastoral settings, contrasted with violence: "bashed hearts and...smashed knuckles." The final trio of tunes leaves the listener dazed, wondering how the band got from side one's urban reality and spiritual love to side two's steely-eyed cosmic questions that pummel the body and mind into submission and acceptance of its frailty. The album's final track is a mildly dissonant, classically themed short piece. It's Leven singing a translation of the great Russian poet Anna Anna Akhmatova's "When a Man Dies." Trouser Press' Ira Robbins and Touch & Go fanzine's Tesco Vee (also of the notorious Meatmen) were the only Americans to get Gypsy Blood, though Claude Bessy (aka Kickboy Face) -- a German critic and musician living in Los Angeles -- did, too, in the belated Slash.

Doll by Doll's strident, fierce-hearted pursuit of the romantic, the elegance of the sung language, and the unwavering embrace of rock's myriad, loopy history brought the fury of all that was held anti-sacred down on the band's head. They never recovered. It took another two years and a legal battle to get out of their contract with Automatic. When they re-emerged on Magnet in 1980, the band was different yet somehow the same. In the ensuing two years, Doll by Doll responded to the critical (and sometimes physical) attacks with more touring just to stay afloat. When their self-titled album did appear, it was from a band who looked only at romantic love from all sides and tossed the rest. The sonic attack was toned down, more acoustic instruments appeared, from mandolins to congas to an Oberheim -- and loads of backing singers. It was lush, chock-full of soul references and picturesque street scenes. Doll by Doll walked completely away from the edges of the post-punk abyss to embrace Leven's difficult, ever-tarnished romanticism, which was equal parts disappointment and brokenness, and redemptive optimism. The opening track, "Figure It Out," could have been recorded by Springsteen's E Street Band with Leven fronting them. The album's second single, "Caritas," was an out-and-out funk tune, complete with Nile Rodgers-style handclaps (which were de rigueur at the time). Leven's lyrics were pure pop poetry this time, and the onslaught of backing tracks and singers sounding like a gospel choir underscored them. The album's key moment is "Main Traveled Roads"; it pays undisguised tribute to the band's Celtic/Scottish folk roots, and shoves them up against the warrior soul poetics of Japanese author and madman Yukio Mishima in a direct lyrical quote.

The album was issued by MCA and deleted shortly thereafter; it received no promotion even in a place where it might have been embraced. It was ignored in both the United Kingdom and America. Completely. It was another two years before the name Doll by Doll emerged again. This time, only Leven remained with vocalist and keyboardist Helen Turner (later of the Style Council and Paul Weller's solo albums) and a star-studded cast that included Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, saxophonist Mel Collins, Tim Cross, Maggie Reilly, Graham Broad (of the Edgar Broughton Band no less), and Tom Newman. There are moments here, and Leven's lyrics remain top-notch. The compositions themselves have style and grace, but the performance is decidedly lackluster. Turner's singing paled in comparison, and since she dueted on virtually every track, the strain on the listener becomes tiresome because there is no musical fury to answer to and the voices simply don't match up. The band of hired guns offered no tension, no fire. And nowhere is this borne out with more disappointment than on the album's single, a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb." The sheer thinness of the production, the haphazard phrasing of the singers, and the competent but rather boring instrumentation sink the Doll by Doll name into the obscurity from which it rose.

Leven has had an aesthetically brilliant but marginally successful solo career and has made recordings with everyone from Eddi Reader, Mike Scott, and David Thomas to author Ian Rankin. Doll by Doll has reunited on-stage in Germany and Scotland, though they haven't recorded together.

The point of this saga is a question of timing. Had Doll by Doll appeared at the end of the 1990s, they would have been embraced and heralded as pop geniuses. The proof is in the recorded work of so many other artists who have through the layers of time and other influences embraced many of the same romantic attitudes lyrically, and even in production style -- though never with the same rockist intensity, dark street vision, and over-the-top excess. Among them are the Waterboys, Chris Connelly, the High Llamas, Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Aberfeldy, Autour de Lucie, the Go-Betweens -- who were contemporaries -- the Pastels, and even Saint Etienne and Greg Dulli's Twilight Singers.

Just as Doll by Doll's living story is fraught with frustration and disappointment, so is their legacy: the recordings themselves remain on ever more quickly disappearing vinyl copies hoarded by collectors or lolling in used-store dustbins. The shiny, pristine CDs of the current age have not been graced by their countenance, nor have the aging critics of old England had another opportunity to eat their hats for their folly -- but one wonders if they actually would. Leven has made several attempts to get the band's catalog reissued on CD, but they have been met with disappointment -- though he remains optimistic. Doll by Doll does have one CD release, however: a live date from 1977 that features the band playing all of Remember has been issued by Cooking Vinyl in the U.K. Other than this godsend, Doll by Doll remains a true music geek's band, but even stateside, although their work is often discussed in glowing and sometimes heated terms, the realm of ignorance and indifference rides high. The rest, at least currently, is silence.

(By Thom Jurek, All Music Guide)