Music

When you think about pioneering punk bands, you probably wouldn’t rank The B-52’s alongside the Pistols and the Dolls. But you’d be wrong. You should also find something more rewarding to think about, like a design for a cantilevered bridge, or an excuse for your herpes.

They’re now best known, of course, for ‘Love Shack’, which conquered the hearts and ears of a country waking up to the glories of revivalism through a diet of Nick Kamen jeans ads and the California Raisins. But The B-52’s were contemporaries of New York new wave acts like Talking Heads and this week’s cover stars, Blondie. Where Blondie’s brand of cool was influenced by Warholian insouciance, The B-52’s took their cues from the manic iconoclasm of Dada, serving up subversion with a smile. While British punk of the time wrapped its humour in a spiky, extroverted hatred of hypocritical ‘traditional values’, The B-52’s were all acid in the Kool Aid and B-movie schlock, like an Ed Wood movie reworked by John Waters. This zany outlook was the result of their isolation in Athens, Georgia, a cultural desert in which you made your own entertainment, or else. ‘We were the outsiders in Athens,’ recalls their nominal frontman Fred Schneider. ‘We’d go to parties and people would, like, bolt the door.’
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This weirdness ultimately mutated into a form of coolness, in turn kickstarting the Athens ‘scene’ which would bring us REM and, to a lesser extent, Pylon (whose debut album is shortly to be rereleased on James Murphy’s DFA label). Of course, thrift-store chic, kitschery and ironic appreciation are cultural mainstays these days, but The-B-52’s were doing it when being kitsch was dangerous, rather than the easiest way to protect yourself from social criticism. But the friendly and, so far, gregarious Schneider semi-bristles when hearing his band described as ‘camp’: ‘Well… it’s more surreal. Camp sort of means you don’t know what you’re doing, and we know what we’re doing. There are a lot of people who are considered camp who have no idea how ridiculous they are. But I just see us as sort of like surreal. It’s a different level.’

Of course with some bands – cough! KAISER CHIEFS cough! – a little humour can grate a long way, but The B-52’s carried it off through force of sheer gleeful perversity, splicing extreme ’50s teen normalcy with nuclear weirdness, like cutting the prom scene from ‘Carrie’ into ‘Gidget’. This week, the Bs (as they prefer to be known) return to Britain for the first time in 15 years, to play the Time Out Lovebox Weekender which, in our unbiased opinion, is going to be the most incredible party the world has seen since that orgy from ‘Asterix In Switzerland’. Along with former B-52’s touring partners Blondie, the line-up also features some of their favourite new bands (and former touring partners), such as The Rapture. As you might expect, they’re looking forward to returning to London.

‘We’ve been trying to come over for a while,’ says Schneider ‘But the last time we wanted to come over our stupid President decided to bomb Iraq, so that put a dampener on things.’

The band is also preparing to drop its first album of new material since 1992. Written and recorded over the course of a few months during which the band moved back to Georgia, Schneider maintains that the self-styled ‘World’s Greatest Party Band’ (that’s them, by the way) has ‘updated’ its sound to produce a more ‘danceable’ album which marries guitars and electronica. It’s also, apparently, The B-52’s sexiest record to date. ‘Yeah,’ deadpans Schneider. ‘We are a bunch of oversexed middle-aged people. It’s pretty tongue-in-cheek but every song is about sex, I think, except one.’

Lovebox attendees will be treated to the European unveiling of five new B-52’s songs which – if their recent US gigs are anything to go by (which they are) – will include mall-culture anthem ‘Funplex’, which features the almost stereotypical B-52’s lyric, ‘Faster pussycat, thrill thrill/I’m at the mall on a diet pill’. Schneider also promises a ‘kick-ass’ reworking of ‘Mesopotamia’, which might not mean anything to you, but is good news nonetheless.The early indicators are that this will go down very well with a new generation raised on the schlock-cabaret of the Scissor Sisters.

‘Yeah, definitely,’ says Schneider. ‘We’re kindred spirits.’ Schneider, it transpires, has known the Sisters for around a decade, drummer Patrick having played on his Steve Albini-produced solo album ‘Just Fred’. ‘They’re very original; they don’t fit in the pop-plop niche of whatever they want to play on the radio here – that’s what I like. Although they call me Uncle Fred and it’s like, “Hello, I’m not that much older.”’

Scissor Sisters also pulled off the trick of simultaneously straddling the underground and MTV, something which The B-52’s were doing when both were relatively new phenomena. Despite having sold 20 million albums, there was never a point, Schneider maintains, when they felt like proper pop stars. ‘Somehow we managed not to make as much money as we should have, so I didn’t feel that much different from when I was scraping by. God knows where it went, although I have ideas. But that’s what happened to every band back then. We still created our own crazy universe; our own sensibility.’

It was this originality and gang mentality, Schneider insists, which kept the band going, not just as a business, but as a partnership of friends. ‘We’ve always shared everything – writing credits, all the royalties – and there’s no real leader because if there was one we’d immediately depose them. We’ve never tried to fit any mould because we already broke the one we started.’

The B-52’s play the Time Out Lovebox Weekender this Sunday.