At the end of [Remain in Light], though, modernity’s malaise reasserts itself with “The Overload”, a droning dirge inspired by Joy Division in uniquely oblique fashion - Talking Heads had never heard Joy Division’s records, but had been intrigued by the record reviews [italics mine]. The whitest-sounding music on the album, the song is appropriately the most angst-racked, with Byrne numbly intoning lyrics about missing centres, terrible signals, “a gentle collapsing”.

Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up And Start Again

Anyone my age who used to read the NME in their teens will be familiar with the experience of being intrigued by record reviews for bands one has never heard. The oblique influence that this sense of intrigue can exert, becoming itself an aesthetically compelling or propelling force, is I think the presiding spirit of a certain kind of “music writing”. It points towards a future moment at which music, having become writing, starts to become music again (without thereby ceasing to be writing…).

I think I may have heard some Scritti Politti, once; it pretty much passed me by at the time (they are somewhat ludicrously confused in my mind with Milli Vanilli, a quite different prospect). Reading Simon Reynolds’ account of their life and times certainly makes me want to go back and listen to them more carefully; but at the same time it makes me think that a better way forward would be to forget completely what I might have heard before, and to isolate instead the very idea of Scritti Politti and let it work freely on the imagination.

It would be a pity if Rip It Up And Start Again were as widely read as it deserves to be, but incited only further stylistic plagiarism in the manner of (the perfectly amiable and enjoyable) Franz Ferdinand. True, the book contains fairly clear instructions on how to make guitars sound “angular” and “spiky”, along with much enlightening coverage of the radical-lifestyles-cum-compositional-techniques of the artier post-punk groupuscules, from Scritti Politti to Throbbing Gristle. There’s no harm of course in lifting whatever looks Good Enough To Steal (GETS, an acronym Burroughs used to scribble in the margins of books he was reading whenever he found a simile he liked the look of), from whatever sources seem promising. But the most affecting thing about Rip It Up… remains the sense of social and aesthetic possibility it conjures up. It leaves you wondering what You Could Have It So Much Better might have sounded like, had it been really open to the promise of its title.