‘I’ll never retire, it’s not in my blood. I’ll die dancing. I’ll die right on stage,” Alan Vega, who passed away in his sleep a year ago this week, defiantly told me in 2015. Vega, one half, with Martin Rev, of pioneering electronic proto-punk duo Suicide, may not have died on stage, but came close over the years. The levels of animosity, rage and violence that he faced while performing would have finished off lesser artists decades earlier.
He was right about not retiring, making music right up to his death; IT, a posthumous album, has just been released. The recent single DTM shows that even in his final moments, Vega’s commitment to creating uncompromising throbs of industrially charged electronic noise remained potent, and recalls, too, the often brutal intensity of some of Suicide’s earlier work and live shows.
One live show that teemed with such intensity took place in 1978. Suicide went to Europe for the first time to support Elvis Costello and the Clash. The duo’s 1977 self-titled debut album – a wildly original concoction of malevolent ambience, pulsating electronics, distorted doo-wop and howling vocals – had been relatively well-received by the UK press, but the band were still ostensibly unknown and stood as a seething, sneering antithesis to conventional guitar-based punk. “Going to Europe, I felt like that finally we were going to get some of the recognition that American artists have traditionally gotten there,” Rev says.
However, what they faced was not recognition but flat-out hostility. On 16 June 1978, they were in Belgium, and played a show that would be immortalised in the recording titled 23 Minutes Over Brussels – because that was how long they lasted on stage before a riot broke out. It is a document of a group operating so far ahead of their time that the police had to be called to tear-gas an angry mob, who were incapable of processing the sounds they heard.
The tour’s opening night was at a science-fiction festival in Metz, France. It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts. “The audience just flipped out and started throwing stuff,” Rev recalls. “I felt something hit me, I looked down and someone had taken off their boot and thrown it.” Howard Thompson, who recorded many of these shows and was the band’s UK label rep, also recalls seeing “a wooden chair get slung at them” that night. This, though, was merely a warmup for Brussels. As Rev himself says: “After that, it was like going into the trenches.”
When the singer of a band is screaming, only eight minutes in, “I hate your fucking guts” over a sea of boos and chants of another artist’s name, it suggests the gig isn’t going so well. In Brussels, from the off, Suicide were fighting against the audience. Smatterings of claps can be heard on the recording but the boos tower above them. As the gig goes on, the crowd’s impatience and antagonism builds and soon the band respond with their own venom, brewing up a perfect storm of tension and angst.
“Alan’s yelping and screams – magnified and echoing repeatedly via the mix – only inflamed them,” Thompson reflects. “It was like Alan was taunting them to react.” Initially, Rev was thrown by the extreme reaction. “At first, I was disappointed, but you just play stronger. You’re left with either getting off stage or just playing right into it.” They did the latter.
“Then the shit hit the fan,” Thompson tells me. A crowd member became so enraged that they stormed the stage and stole the microphone. After great applause for the interjection and more chants of “Elvis, Elvis, Elvis”, Vega is heard saying: “We’re just a fucking bunch of poor musicians, like every one of you. We’d like to have our microphone back otherwise the show doesn’t go on. Please, please! Ah, fuck you, man!”
Vega ended up with a new microphone and began to sing the song again a cappella, but it was met immediately by a booming echo of boos. “Shut the fuck up, this is about Frankie!” Vega screeches with a guttural and lung-busting scream as though he were trying to punch every audience member in the chest with the force of his words. The Frankie in question being the protagonist from Frankie Teardrop, a song as potently harrowing as it is bleakly poignant. He then drops the microphone and leaves the stage as the crowd erupt in euphoria at their exit.
Thompson remembers being backstage after the show. “Everyone was a little shell-shocked, nervously making jokes, asking if it was going to be like this all the time. But they were unafraid and certainly not about to give up.”
The pair had worked the crowd into a state and when Elvis Costello didn’t perform an encore, the crowd’s anger erupted once more. “The audience were tearing the tiles from the walls,” Rev remembers. “Bouncers had kids in full nelson headlocks as we were rushed out the side door because we were told it was too dangerous. The place was a mess; it was a total riot.” Soon the police stormed the room and discharged tear gas. Thompson recalls the chaos: “Fans were tearing the place apart. They were throwing whatever they could at the security and the cops. We got to the car, but we’d been spotted by angry fans so we reversed at speed up an alley and drove straight to Paris to get out of there.”
The evening was a first in Suicide’s career, but not the last, as Rev remembers: “Every night was like Brussels, and a lot of them were worse.” Thompson echoes this. “The Clash tour was pretty tough. Their fans mostly hated Suicide. A lot of them were plastic punks who just thought punk rock was guitars, safety pins and bin bags. Every night, Alan’s shiny purple suit would be so stained and covered with gobs of spit that it appeared black by the end of their set. Vega prowled the stage and got as close to the audience as he could. He wasn’t scared of anything. Everything that wasn’t nailed down got thrown at them: coins, shoes, beer glasses, ashtrays”. Apparently even an axe made its way whizzing past Vega’s head in Glasgow, while a member of the National Front broke Vega’s nose in Crawley.
For Thompson, that night in Brussels and some of the other dates that followed were pinnacle moments of “excitement, vision and originality”. “They were spectacularly powerful in the face of outright hostility,” he says. “Alan and Marty stood and took everything the crowd could batter them with without flinching.”
“Performing can often give you a false sense of power and strength,” Rev says of those days. “Even when you have two or three thousand people wanting to string you up alive, I still felt like I could have taken them all on with one hand.”
• Martin Rev’s new album, Demolition 9, is out now. Alan Vega’s posthumous album, IT, is out now.
