When we think about the creative process we normally think of people coming up with the best ideas they can and executing them to the best of their abilities. There’s another way of working that isn’t as widely discussed, but under the right conditions can produce equally good results, and that’s taking your worst, dumbest ideas and blindly smashing them together. And that’s apparently how the Mothmen made their 1981 album Pay Attention!, an interestingly strange post-punk artifact that’s being reissued by Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound.
The band obviously had musical smarts. Three of its four members were in the original lineup of the Durutti Column, and all three quit together after Factory records founder Tony Wilson proved himself to be too meddlesome a boss. (The fourth, tellingly, came from a comedy band called Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias.) Three of them went on to have lifelong careers in the music industry that included producing records, managing artists, running labels, and, for two of them, stints in the rhythm section of Simply Red. (Guitarist David Rowbotham fell on hard times and was brutally murdered in 1991, but earned a measure of musical immortality as the subject of the Happy Mondays’ "Cowboy Dave".)
During their time in the Mothmen, though, all four seem to have ignored those smarts, or possibly consulted them solely to do the opposite of what those smarts said. In the reissue’s lengthy liner notes, drummer Chris Joyce describes their creative process as centering around getting tremendously stoned and having unpremeditated free-form basement jam sessions that they recorded on cassette tapes in case anything worth saving emerged.
Between their outre composition methods, the UK post-punk scene’s permissive attitude toward genre combinations, and the band’s high amounts of music nerdiness, Pay Attention! covers an impressive amount of stylistic ground, and produces a number of fascinatingly strange juxtapositions. Intergalactically chill dub reggae turns on a dime into anxiety-riddled Kraftwerk impressions. Syd Barrett’s naive psychedelic twee pop collides with bombastic prog rock. "Dr. Who" sound effects are recruited to make Moroccan-style trance music.
As you should expect from such helter skelter creative means, some of the material falls short. The 20-minute-long Captain-Beefheart-meets-the-Master-Musicians-of-Joujouka jam "Mothman", for instance, is at least 19 minutes too long. (Although both the song itself and the band’s decision to give it its own side of the album say a lot about the quality of hash they were smoking.) But a respectable number of Pay Attention!’s songs, and the various bonus tracks included with the reissue, manage to get off the ground, even if they’re a little ungainly in flight. Even at their stoner goofiest the band had a knack for channeling a particular kind of electric discordant charge that gave their work an unpredictable but potent vibrancy—the same kind of crackle that you get from acts like Thee Oh Sees and Liars who seem to take similar delight in being counterintuitive. So while the Mothmen have always been a footnote in the history of post-punk (something this reissue’s not likely to change), it’s a footnote that adds a fascinating kink to the bigger story around it.
