The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Lora Logic

June 2003

Lora Logic isn't an obvious collect-and-reissue candidate. As part of the experimental post-punk London scene from 1978 to 1982, her one-woman, four-man combo, Essential Logic, never had the profile of Gang of Four, the Raincoats, or the Mekons. She never made the cover of NME.

And yet in 1977, as the 16-year-old saxophon­ist in Poly Styrene's X-Ray Spex, Lora Logic had been where Gang of Four and their like had not: on punk's first stages. Like the people who climbed up before and after her, feeling at once brave and ridiculous, she had no idea what she was doing and was thrilled to do it anyway. "Imagine the ensuing centuries of Judeo-Christian moral debate," the U.K. critic Mark Sinker once wrote, "had Moses returned from the mountain carrying not two stone tablets inscribed with five commandments each, but the first Siouxsie and the Banshees LP." Well, what if he had? That's what you can hear in the saxo­phone solos circling around Poly Styrene's vocals on X-Ray Spex's first single, "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" and that's what you can hear across the 35 tracks brought together on Fanfare in the Garden: An Essential Logic Collection, being released this month by Kill Rock Stars (for which I wrote the liner notes—the music pulled me back for another try).

It's the sound of "What if?" as no one else has ever quite gone after it. No one expected a saxo­phone in a punk band in 1977. And, that said, no one expected saxophone playing that sounded so "Indian"—though it wasn't like what you might hear playing in a London curry joint, or even that fabulous piece of Bollywood rock 'n' dance music Thora Birch's Enid is shaking to in the opening scene of Ghost World (2001); it was more like something that might have been picked up from the soundtrack to Gunga Din (1939). But that was it: the pursuit of unlikeli­ness. "If Thora Birch wasn't playing a version of the young Lora in Ghost World," the critic Howard Hampton said to me recently, "you have to think she was playing a version of the ideal listener the music hoped to find."

---

---

That listener is smart, but as depressed as she is smart. She's Zooey Deschanel's punk sales clerk muttering "Fuck you very much" under her breath to a customer in last year's The Good Girl, with the will to somehow say something just as strong out loud, so everyone can hear her—so, if only in the fantasy of being onstage, everyone has to hear her, and then respond. How else can you find out if you have anything to say that everybody else isn't already saying?

That's the impulse behind the art that punk threw up, and the impulse that Lora Logic never dropped, perhaps because she never gained the pop fame that might have led her to take the notion that she had something to say for granted. You don't hear doubt or hesitation in "Aerosol Burns," the first Essential Logic single, from 1978; you hear someone throwing off dig­nity like dirty clothes. From song to song on the 1979 Essential Logic album Beat Rhythm News, a voice that is silly-high goes down so low it sounds stupid—and then a guitar whisks the voice off with a snapping riff, the whole band begins a rush to an invisible finish line, the singer's saxophone floating above the race as if she knows how it will come out or doesn't care, and you have no idea how you got from the one place to the other.

There is a freedom in the music Lora Logic made that comes loose from any scene, any style, from any of the shibboleths and deep beliefs that define a cultural place and time. Is that why it's not a surprise to find that what might be the finest recording on Fanfare in the Garden, "The Beautiful and the Damned," was made in 1997 and went unheard until last year, when it was posted on the Internet and still nobody heard?

The sorrow in the muted saxophone notes that state the opening theme can be heard as regret for what, in the moment when Lora Logic briefly was a public name, she never got across. The melody, and the way the singing tries to fol­low it, is a drift, just as those first saxophone solos, 20 years before, were drifts. The differ­ence is that those drifts found their ending—when Poly Styrene took the song back—and these go into the air, the way Thora Birch gets on the empty bus at the end of Ghost World. The way you leave the theater arguing over whether the scene means she's dead or alive.

---

Originally published in Interview Magazine, June 2003