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Charlie Carter

Flaunt It
Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Parlophone
In the mid-1970s, Britain's punk rockers warned there was no future; a decade later, some were laughably boasting they were the future.
In 1985, two bands dominated the music press with claims that they would transform the pop landscape. One of them, Big Audio Dynamite, was led by sacked Clash guitarist Mick Jones. Despite their claims of originality, they were a pretty conventional outfit that combined hip hop (which was still yet to be a musical force), reggae and pop.
The other band was Sigue Sigue Sputnik, one of the most vilified bands of all time and a classic case of an act surviving on self-belief, hype and outrage rather than talent. Named after a Soviet Russian street gang, SSS exploded onto the scene in a hail of make-up, outlandish haircuts and bondage gear. Though the brains behind the band was former Generation X guitarist Tony James, it was frontman Martin Degville, a loud-mouthed fashion designer with no band experience, who grabbed the nation's attention.
Unrecognisable behind lacy face masks, heavy make-up, shades and huge plumes of dyed red hair, Degville could barely sing but was a master at pulling rock 'n' roll shapes on stage and making crass and outrageous utterances to the press.
James' vision for the band was akin to Malcolm McLaren's for the Sex Pistols. With the iconoclastic slogan "Fleece the World", coined in response to Band Aid's "Feed the World" call for starving Africa, he manufactured a band - dictating everything from its lurid DayGlo cyberpunk attire to its future-shock lyrics - that he hoped would shake up the pop world. Like the Pistols, he based SSS in a fashion shop, Degville's Yaya store in the midland town of Walsall. That, however, was where the comparisons with McLaren ended. While the Pistols had a bona fide cultural terrorist in singer John Lydon, SSS had a laughable mannequin who would become the whipping boy of the music press.
The band became a hit in February 1986 when its first single, Love Missile F1-11, went to No3 on the British charts and No1 in Europe. Produced by disco genius Giorgio Moroder, its four-to-the-floor beat and electronic flourishes were supplemented by samples taken from a variety of sci-fi movies.
Moroder, however, couldn't do similar wonders with the band's debut album, Flaunt It, which briefly made the British top 10 before falling out of sight amid a string of negative reviews. That pretty much ended the SSS story: they lacked real talent and never replicated the surge of public interest after that initial appearance.
But SSS may now be having the last laugh, as Flaunt It contained a range of 20-second ads for a range of company products between its tracks. Three decades later, with online music services placing adverts between streamed tracks, concerts being sponsored by huge commercial interests, and bands selling out by allowing their music to advertise products on TV, it seems Sigue Sigue Sputnik really were ahead of their time.
Charlie Carter


Rewind, album: 'Flaunt It' by Sigue Sigue Sputnik (1986)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik

Lifestyle

Arts & Culture

In the mid-1970s, Britain's punk rockers warned there was no future; a decade later, some were laughably boasting they were the future.
