The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

I was searching for something that summed up the enduring appeal of The B-52’s. Something silly, but oddly touching, all at the same time. And fittingly it was gifted to me by Kate Pierson, beehive-toting, harmony-singing, goofy dress-wearing icon of post punk popness. It’s halfway through the interview and she is trying to explain why her band’s first album in 16 years refuses to act its age, mellow out, calm down.

“We call ourselves ‘The World’s Greatest Party Band’. And even though that’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there’s still something magical when we play that allows people to just bust loose and party and be crazy. There’s this thing on YouTube called ‘Rock Lobster Guy’ where this guy just does the most bizarre dance. But it feels like I’ve seen this dance before when we play.”

So, post-interview, I check out Rock Lobster Guy. He has two clips on YouTube. The first, from 2005, opens at what looks like an office party, or maybe a wedding reception. Lots of very straight-looking people, crew-cut men in suits, WASP women in sensible dresses. Studio 54 it ain’t. The DJ has other ideas, though. He puts on the debut B-52s single - originally released in 1978 on their own Boo-Fant label, re-released in 1979, 1980 and 1986, and a hit every time. The scuzzy, ringing riff from ‘Rock Lobster’ kicks in and, from out of nowhere, the straightest-looking guy there literally spins into the centre of the room and… ‘dances’. When I say dances, I mean a total flailing, wailing wig-out of lashing limbs and shameless spazzing. The room stops to watch, at first bemused, but gradually applauding and cheering. He suddenly stops and wanders sheepishly to the edge of the frame, presumably wondering what got into him.

The second clip, ‘Rock Lobster Guy Strikes Again’, from 2007, is even better. It could be the same party - same squares, same wedding disco vibe. ‘Rock Lobster’ comes on and Lobster Guy appears like a speeding bullet. I mean, we assume he’s the same guy, ’cos you can’t see his face on either clip. But anyway, this time, the assembled residents of Straightville refuse to let him have all the fun, and there ensues a post punk dance-off, as everyone competes in turn to unleash the stoopidest set of Lobster-associated moves in existence. At one point, a female spectator can be heard uttering a horrified, “Oh dear God in Heaven,” as she surveys the dancefloor carnage. It’s a joy to watch - an orgy of lifelong workaday inhibitions suspended for four golden minutes. As Ms Pierson puts it: “We give people a license to ill. So why do something slow?”

Which neatly sums up the spirit of new B-52’s album Funplex. Possibly their finest since 1980 second album Wild Planet, Funplex sees the four surviving founder members of Athens, Georgia’s trash-new-wave-go-go-kitschmeisters hook up with veteran dance pop producer Steve Osborne for 11 subtly electrified slabs of prime B-52-ness. And when the party comes to town, you’d be a fool not to track it down and ask it questions.

So, inevitably, you find yourself patiently waiting in the lobby of Shepherd’s Bush rock hotel K West while a harassed EMI press officer attempts to juggle an over-packed schedule that allows Fred Schneider, Cindy Wilson, Keith Strickland and the aforementioned heroine Ms Pierson enough time to rest up and eat before they all head off to do an exclusive DJ set at trendy London nightspot Punk. In order to facilitate a few dozen interviews in a couple of days, The B-52’s have been split into pairs: Fred and Cindy, and Kate and Keith. I’ve got Kate and Keith, which is cool, but I’m still disappointed that I won’t get to talk to Schneider, rock’s greatest ever frontman-cum-fairground barker.

So it’s a minor delight when Fred wanders down to grill the PR for schedule info. He’s trim, dressed in unfussy black roll-neck and chinos, and shakes my hand in a brisk manner, all business. At age 50, he looks no older than the bushy-haired eccentric on the ‘Rock Lobster’ video, but then he’s one of those men with a face that always looked 50. He seems irritable, but that could be down to what looks like a nasty case of conjunctivitis: his left-eye is bloodshot and swollen. All in all, I’m suddenly glad I got Kate and Keith.

Almost as soon as Fred leaves I’m shown to the suite where Pierson and Strickland are holding court. Again, the age thing kicks in, because that’s inevitable when you meet heroes who can’t help being trapped in a time bubble of your own making. You project all the stuff about being a happy teenager onto them, and still want to see them as they were; fresh-faced and bushy-tailed, just as you want to continue seeing yourself. And, despite her crazy-coloured dyed red hair, I’m somewhat taken aback by how old Kate Pierson looks. That is, I am until I do my research post-interview and clock her birth date: April 1948. One of the few out lesbian stars of her generation was already 30 when the band got signed, and is three months short of claiming her bus pass. Thankfully, the queue at the post office will have to wait while the harmonising co-star of REM’s ‘Shiny Happy People’ continues to tour the planet adding nutty organ trills and blissfully youthful vocals to the world’s greatest party band.

As for the comparatively junior 54-year-old Keith, the guy must have hidden Dorian Gray’s portrait amongst the vintage bric-a-brac that The B-52’s use as artistic inspiration. Dressed in a dark suit and not looking a day over 35, he’s the very model of the suave, successful, gay American. When original guitarist, and brother of Cindy, Ricky Wilson died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1985, it was Strickland who moved from the drum stool to become the B-52’s guitarist and de facto musical director. And, as he explains the context for Funplex, the softly-spoken but talkative adopted New Yorker sounds very much the leader of the band.

When The B-52’s began touring again in the late nineties, playing lucrative shows with the likes of Blondie and The Pretenders, it was Strickland who realised, in 2002, that a B-52’s without new material would eventually be consigned to both personal boredom and the horrors of the eighties nostalgia circuit.

“I put a lot of thought into the direction we were going to go in,” he explains. “In the period between Good Stuff [the last, somewhat disappointing B-52’s album from 1992] and this album I’d been listening to a whole lot of electronic dance music. I love the energy of club music and we’ve always made a form of dance music. But I also love rock’n’roll and I wanted to bring more of the rock’n’roll element back. This record is sharp, lean, no muss, no fuss. That part of us is still there, even though I’m not in my twenties anymore. But I still feel it when we play. I don’t feel a day over 25. Until I walk offstage. Then I do.”

The six-year gestation was partly down to the members’ busy separate lives, a death in Strickland’s family, the band’s decision to hold out for the availability of KT Tunstall producer Steve Osbourne in the wake of Strickland’s love of his work on 2001’s Get Ready album by New Order… and careful navigation of a whole new post-file-sharing music business. They decided to use their own funds to make the album and simply license it to EMI once completed. I ask the pair if anyone makes any money from making albums anymore. “No idea,” Pierson answers, with theatrical bemusement. “I guess we’ll soon find out.”

The pair give credit for much of the album’s energy to suddenly finding themselves as role models for young bands. Lest you hadn’t noticed, every new kid on the rock block sounds like the eighties these days, and The B-52’s dance punk aesthetic is writ large all over the likes of New Young Pony Club and CSS. Kate: “It was Junior Senior that made us realise. We played South By Southwest in Austin, Texas about five years ago and they opened for us. Then we saw The Rapture in Athens, Georgia and then they opened for us at a showcase in New York. And this was and is great for us, because there’s a cross-pollination.”

Keith: “You feel this kinship with new bands. Even though there’s this big age gap, it doesn’t feel like that ’cos we just really relate and get on. For the first time, there are a whole bunch of young bands who acknowledge our influence and share our aesthetic. It’s interesting that it’s only happened now.”

In the wake of The Strokes, and with t’internet giving young musicians unprecedented access to old music for no money, the best of the current rock and dance scenes have united over a fascination with seventies/eighties New York - CBGBs, Studio 54, and the downtown fusion of the punk and disco aesthetics at the likes of the legendary Danceteria and Mudd Club. The B-52’s were a key part of all this, after their relocation from bohemian college town Athens to Manhattan in 1978. Keith and Kate are happy to reminisce.

Keith: “The downtown scene attracted artists like Warhol. And, of course, Max’s Kansas City was the first club we ever played in New York, and The Velvet Underground played there, and the Warhol crowd would hang out. There’s always been that interaction between rock’n’roll and art in New York. One of the first shows we played at CBGBs, William Burroughs came… Kate! You saw him, right?”

Kate: “Yeah, he came to our soundcheck at The Mudd Club. It was Burroughs and… who’s that other writer? He wrote, uh, it’ll come back to me… Who wrote Candy? [Terry Southern]. Anyway, Burroughs came with an entourage and he had a long raincoat and a fedora. And he was just sitting at the bar writing and writing during our soundcheck. Frank Zappa came to a show. David Bowie came to a show… We’d always get people saying, ‘Andy’s coming! Andy’s coming tonight!’ And I don’t think Andy ever came. Ha Ha!”

Keith: “It was pretty amazing. I remember we had just finished our set at The Mudd Club, and someone came and told us, ‘David Bowie’s here.’ And Cindy screamed, ‘DAVID BOWEEE!!!’ She had her back to the door and, as she screamed, he was walking in. She was like, ‘Oh No!’ But he was great. He just laughed. It was very exciting. But when we played that show at Max’s Kansas City, we thought we’d reached the pinnacle ’cos The Velvet Underground had played there. We just thought that was it.”

Kate: “Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf were just starting out and we realised they were our visual equivalent. We went to a Kenny Scharf show at the time and the centrepiece was a big giant painting of this doughnut covered in chocolate and icing. It was amazing. He comes from the same place we do and did one of our album covers - Bouncing Off The Satellites [their fifth album, from 1987]. Artists then really shared this sensibility and it really was the beginning of a scene that was allowed to grow in an organic way in New York. It’s hard to have a scene now that isn’t immediately splashed all over YouTube.”

Keith: “We did a public service announcement for AMFAR (The Foundation For AIDS Research) in 1987, I think. We recreated the Sgt. Pepper album cover. The flowers spelled out the word ‘Believe’, as in ‘believe you can make a difference’. And we had to have all these people standing behind us, and I was asked who I wanted to invite, and I said, ‘Allen Ginsberg and Quentin Crisp’. And they came! So we’re filming and the whole time Allen is standing behind me talking to me, asking, ‘So, do you have a boyfriend?’”

Kate: “You could just hear him saying to Keith, ‘So… how’s your sex life?’”

Keith: “I was just, ‘Oh my God,’ y’know? And Ginsberg had just put out this anthology of 40 years of his poetry, and I brought it along for him to sign. And Ginsberg says, ‘Sure,’ and signed it and drew a beautiful picture for me. And Quentin Crisp is sitting opposite us on the same table and he goes, ‘My, that is a lot of words.’ And that’s the only thing he said the whole day. New York is great that way, because many artists and whatnot are just… out in the world. Allen lived down on East 12th Street and people would see him all the time… this legend, this poet who helped change the world.”

But when hedonistic New York finally succumbed to a bad morning after, it was the mother of all hangovers. AIDS ended much that was great about New York in the eighties, and the death of Ricky Wilson almost ended The B-52’s.

Keith: “It was 1985. We’d just recorded Bouncing Off The Satellites. It was released after his death. We were expected to tour and promote it but we just couldn’t do it. We walked away from it. We all felt that it was the end.”

Kate: “We didn’t really say that out loud. But we just couldn’t do anything. We felt like jumping off a cliff. It was such a shock. But then we eventually came back to do Cosmic Thing.”

And, in the weird way that pop sometimes has of being utterly perverse, it was The B-52’s 1989 comeback album that made them into unlikely mainstream pop stars. The irresistible ‘Love Shack’ slayed MTV, and these college friends tried to enjoy the vindication of global success without the buddy who’d shaped their sound.

Keith: “It was very bittersweet. For this to come after Ricky’s death. Reaching that low and then having this swooping upwards success immediately. It was very strange. It kinda happened before you realised it. And our audience changed immediately. All of a sudden we had people who were just standing there the whole show, and then when ‘Love Shack’ and ‘Roam’ came on would suddenly get into it.”

Kate: “That album became this way of healing, and really bringing back Ricky’s spirit. It was informed by Ricky’s aesthetic, which was unique. Keith started playing guitar and… you have your own style, but you also had to incorporate the way Ricky played.”

Keith: “Right. I just felt it would be impossible to find someone outside who’d understand Ricky’s sensibility. But I do think Cosmic Thing was very much a celebration of Ricky’s life, and our lives as a group with Ricky. That album’s reflective of all those happy memories. I don’t see it as nostalgic. But it’s about the impermanence of life and the preciousness of life. It celebrates a fleeting moment in time. I mean, Ricky died at 32. He was so young. When you’re 32 you don’t realise how young you are. I hadn’t lost someone of my age that I was so close to before.”

Kate: “In between Ricky’s death and the time we began recording Cosmic Thing, we lost lots of other friends to AIDS.”

Keith: “It was a heavy time in New York. I was living in the city at the time, but after all that I moved out to Woodstock, and Kate moved up there soon afterwards. It was a… nice change.”

Kate: “And that was the end of the party for New York.”

My half hour is up. But who wants to finish a B-52’s interview on a downer? Let’s flag up the fact that the first single from Funplex is the title track, that it’s about America as a giant shopping mall and refers to a real incident where a father and son were banned from their local mall in Albany, New York for wearing a homemade peace-sign t-shirt during the Iraq war, and that it boasts remixes from Scissor Sisters, Peaches and CSS who I hope did ’em for discount, because all of them owe The B-52’s a very great deal, aesthetically speaking. Keith says that a hit would be nice, but Kate admits, endearingly, that, “I don’t know what a hit means in this day and age.” One suspects they won’t be too perturbed if a hit is not forthcoming. After all, they’ve succeeded where most bands fail - still together, original spirit intact, no hideously embarrassing sell-outs in their locker, still making fine upstanding members of the community dance like gibbering fools.

“We came out of our own time and space, our own internal universe,” says Keith. “We’re fortunate to not be as typecast as many artists from that era. No-one sounded like us in the eighties. And no-one sounds like us now.”

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