Quirk Your Enthusiasm (7)

By: Greg Rowland
August 7, 2016

One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite New Wave songs from c. 1977–1982. Josh Glenn’s series introduction is here, and you can listen to the QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM playlist here. Enjoy!

“JILTED JOHN” | JILTED JOHN | 1978

By 1978, England was truly rubbish. Although the literal penumbras of junk wouldn’t despoil the streets of London’s once glamorous West End for another year, our glorious Winter of Discontent, wherein laudable industrial disputes brought flotillas of black trash bags to the city, and the dead remained unburied, their legions governed by Dick Emery, a beloved chirpy folk impersonator, a cadaver of six week’s vintage and very much falling out of character.

A nation unsure whether to panic, laugh, get angry or just lie down in a quiet corner and wait for the invention of the internet, Jilted John served us perfectly, backed by a deadening root to fifth riff that endures through the whole song, with a minimalist harmonic passive aggression that falls between parody and the art-waves of Magazine or The Pop Group.

Like all parody, the emotional germ of the dissected can often be felt more profoundly than those in thudding ur-texts, and particularly here, where there is no ur-text apart from the misery of rejection, elucidated in playground taunts, a thousand years away from the pristine emotional intelligence of today’s Millennials. And perhaps a thousand years too from the magical urban quotidian of McCartney and Davies and Wood that lit up the late 1960s, where cultural optimism briefly triumphed over material reality. But there is truth in John’s lament, glimpsed not through psychedelic horn-rims, but through tear-stained chip shop paper, as a lost soul, cloaked in anorak, rails piteously against a world that birthed Gordon: a manly matey, a usurper of Julie, a bus-stop cackler and, forever, a moron.

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QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Mark Kingwell on Soft Cell’s TAINTED LOVE | Joanne McNeil on Gary Numan’s METAL | Devin McKinney on Suicide’s FRANKIE TEARDROP | Douglas Wolk on Family Fodder’s SAVOIR FAIRE | Elina Shatkin on Marianne Faithfull’s BROKEN ENGLISH | Steph Burt on Altered Images’ HAPPY BIRTHDAY | Greg Rowland on Jilted John’s JILTED JOHN | Gordon Dahlquist on XTC’s RESPECTABLE STREET | Adrienne Crew on D-Day’s TOO YOUNG TO DATE | Jonathan Lethem on The Blue Nile’s I LOVE THIS LIFE | Josh Glenn on Tim Curry’s I DO THE ROCK | Molly Wright Steenson on Missing Persons’ WORDS | Anthony Miller on The Nails’ 88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN | Luc Sante on The Normal’s WARM LEATHERETTE | Mimi Lipson on Dolly Mixture’s HOW COME YOU’RE SUCH A HIT WITH THE BOYS, JANE? | Tim Carmody on Talking Heads’ LIFE DURING WARTIME | Ingrid Schorr on Ian Dury’s CLEVOR TREVER | Adam McGovern on Lene Lovich’s LUCKY NUMBER | Deb Chachra on Rough Trade’s HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL | Tor Aarestad on Oingo Boingo’s LITTLE GIRLS | David Smay on The B-52’s’ DANCE THIS MESS AROUND | Jessamyn West on Blondie’s HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE | Drew Daniel on The Human League’s MARIANNE | Erik Davis on Tuxedomoon’s TIME TO LOSE | Dan Fox on Thomas Dolby’s EUROPA & THE PIRATE TWINS.

MORE ENTHUSIASM SERIES at HILOBROW

Quirk Your Enthusiasm (7)

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