GB: That's something else that's missing now, on the whole. The ability to act as a catalyst.
SR: I think it's faded away, and less people try and do that. Fewer bands would respond to that either! Before the guys I used to admire--Morley, Hoskyns and this guy on Sounds too, Dave McCullough-- before them, the great avatar of that role of critic as prophet and catalyst was a guy whose writing changed rock'n'roll, Lester Bangs. He really prepared the intellectual groundwork for punk. It's telling that he's the only rock critic that's ever had a biography written about him. And he deserves it. He's as much to do with punk rock happening as the Ramones. But I think the mode now for music journalist that people look up to now is less the messianic mode, and more the analyst, someone like Greil Marcus. You can see bands that were formed in Lester Bangs image, or the image of his prose, but I don't think you'd necessarily have seen that with Greil Marcus. His genius lies in a different function, in a way. He does the mythography of things after they've happened. I don't think that bands particularly formed to follow the Marcusian program, as it were. Whereas, that has definitely been the case with Lester Bangs, with Paul Morley. Even with people like Garry Bushell at Sounds who basically codified the whole Oi! movement and came up with quite an impressively worked-out aesthetic. He connected all the Oi! bands to Madness and 2-Tone, and connected that back to Slade, and came up with a sort of canon of English working class music. I didn't particularly agree with Bushell's vision, but it was quite an impressive achievement, critically speaking.

GB: Obviously the mid-80s were a bit of a desert. But you've said on Blissblog that when you started writing for Melody Maker in the later 80s it was an exciting time.
SR: Yeah, there was this trough period, 1985 and 1986. I remember them as bad years, I was really struggling to find anything exciting to write about. Me and my friends did this fanzine Monitor and a lot of the pieces in it were kind of "what's wrong with the state of music" gripes. Then in '86 I started writing for Melody Maker and it was quite hard at first finding things that were worth of hyping, stuff you could really shout loud about. There were a lot of quite interesting things, but it seemed like a bleak time really. And then things seemed to pick up a bit, and hip hop got really interesting, and indie music stopped being so small and pathetic-sounding and started drawing on interesting ideas from the 60s and expanding on them. It all seemed to take off again. There was acid house, and some interesting things were happening in industrial music too. There were so many things going on in the late 80s that it did become this time where me and my comrades on Melody Maker could do a thing that was kind of like what the music press had been like when I was growing up: weave all these things together, make a case for them as being a wonderful time. A friend of mine, David Stubbs, who'd been involved in Monitor and then joined me on Melody Maker, wrote this piece '1988, The Best Year for Rock Ever' and while I don't think it was now, at the time we truly believed it. I mean there really were a lot of great records that came out that year. If you go beyond rock and look at what else was happening--acid house, and rap was arguably peaking in a certain sense. Things had gotten really good. The mid-80s had been rough though. I think one of the things I said in the book's afterchapter was that it was not so much that chart pop was crap, but that alternative music in the mid-Eighties wasn't really coming up with the goods. That's what you felt: that indie labels were not heroic anymore because they weren't pushing the boundaries like they had been during postpunk.

GB: Why do you think there's been a renewed interest in some of the ideas from the postpunk period?
SR: Partly I think it's--not exactly a mathematical thing, that's not quite the right word, but something like that. It's like, where else is there to go for new band looking for influences? After postpunk, the retro-rock era takes over--well, there would still be some groups in the late Eighties and into the Nineties who managed to push things forward, but what develops is a kind of retro-rock economy of influences. So in the 1980s, it's the 60s that get worked through; and by the 90s people are working through certain elements of the 70s. So by 2000, post punk was maybe one of the few areas left to go into. I can't see how mid-80s revivalism is going to be possible, because those people in the mid-to-late Eighties were reviving earlier stuff! You can't have bands now forming their sound according to Dinosaur Jnr, because as good as they were, they were really a composite of things like Neil Young and a bit of Hendrix and so forth. So in some senses I think postpunk was one of the last places left to go for retro. Another factor is that there are certain sonic characteristics of postpunk that felt refreshing after what rock had been like in the 90s. The fact that postpunk is often rock music that's very danceable, that has space in the music, has edginess and angularity. Also, there's certain kinds of vocal styling that would have been refreshing after the vocal styling that was invented by grunge and just got totally worn out. That kind of Kurt Cobain voice, where it's kind of bluesy, but kind of defeated. I think of it as like an old mans voice from a young man's body. So there a whole lot of other vocal stylings that come out of the New Wave era that people are using.

I don't know if people are inspired by the politics and cultural context. I get the impression that people don't know that much about it, and there's a certain aspect that is unrecoverable. Someone that grew up after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and communism can't imagine what it was like when I was growing up. At the time it really did seem like the world could get blown up. One of my school projects as a teenager was on the nuclear arms race. The whole thing was about megatons and different radiuses of radiation from the centre of London. And my commuter town thirty miles outside of London, it wouldn't be in the fireball zone, but it would be in the zone where large buildings would be knocked down and radioactive fall-out would be really bad. There was a book that came out that year that was a plausible scenario for the Third World War breaking out, written by this military expert, all about the Soviet army over-running West Germany. Nowadays people have different fears, like terrorism. But we had that too, with the IRA! But yeah, there are certain things that are unrecoverable, like with those younger people who gave me slightly incredulous looks when I said that certain gestures were deemed subversive in the postpunk era. Perhaps the sheer dread of the postpunk era is the hardest thing to communicate to people who are young now.