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British leftist dance-punk may've peaked with Gang Of Four, but it's not complete without DELTA 5.
Alternative Press - Rob Ortenzi on 3/29/06 @ 3:25 PM - altpress.comYEARS OF EXISTENCE: 1979-1982
RECORD TO START WITH: Singles & Sessions 1979-81 (Kill Rock Stars, 2005)
AFTER THAT, CHECK OUT: The newly released two-DVD, 480-minute-long (!) documentary The History Of Cock Sparrer: What You See...Is What You Get (TKO; tkorecords.com)
GO DOWNLOAD: "Mind Your Own Business," "You," "Try," "Colour," "Delta 5"
THE MUSIC, THE MESSAGE: Though most of the people reading this sentence (including yours truly) aren't fortunate enough to have experienced England's microcosmic 1979-1983 post-punk explosion firsthand, we've still—thanks to contemporary post-punk revisionists like Block Party, Moving Units, Radio 4 and whatever new angular punk-funk band just formed via a Brooklyn art student's trust fund—learned to dance beneath its long, tall shadow. Rising out of the same Leeds University art-school scene that produced their most obvious musical sibling, Gang Of Four, as well as their harder-to-pigeonhole contemporaries Mekons (whose Jon Langford once sat in with them), Delta 5 are arguably the one Leeds post-punk band whose sound—herky-jerky, politically ambiguous and irresistibly danceable—most closely predicts today's "dance punk" cash cow. Ironically, save for a few modest compilations (including the new Singles & Sessions 1979-81), the quintet's work has gone all but unnoticed by the generation that followed in their wake. At least in terms of people actually owning the records…
PUNK-ROCK RELEVANCE: While they never got as explicitly political as Gang Of Four, Delta 5 still wore their leftist ideals on their sleeves (attending art school in Leeds back then, it would've been hard not to). In fact, you could argue that they did it literally, letting their two-man, three-woman lineup (complete with two bassists and two guitarists) say all that was needed about the band's views on gender equality. And while some Delta 5 lyrics—see the line "Can I lick the crumbs from your table" from "Mind Your Own Business"—can be interpreted as almost socialistic in the skewed hindsight of history, the band focused more on skewering the quirky, age-old complexities of male-female relationships in their lyric sheets. In other words, they wrote some gloriously fucked-up little love songs.
CURRENT WHEREABOUTS: While there's no reason Delta 5 shouldn't have reformed to tour the U.S. after calling it a day in 1982—they were always more popular over here, and American record labels (Razor & Tie, Kill Rock Stars) have always been first to throw them onto compilation CDs—the band seem content not to tarnish their legacy, at least if the notes issued with Singles & Sessions are to be believed. "The early days were best," writes guitarist Alan Riggs, "and although we did argue a lot (what band doesn't?!), we also had a lot of laughs. For a couple of years, we got to play live and make some records, and then that was enough." —Aaron Burgess
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