I only own one MaA record, it's the difficult second album that they almost all tended to hate, Espresso Bongo.* I must get it out and have another listen. I think it's probably my kind of thing in the way that the second Sunnyboys album is my kind of thing. But I should take on more of their oeuvre because I always liked them and I know they had some great stuff.
MaA were a really fascinating group in part because they were parallel to the pop industry (here and to a much lesser extent internationally) but while they didn't necessarily hoe their own row all the way (there's a bit of concentration on 80s production values for instance) they did maintain an originality that stood them in good stead for a long time. I had never really entirely cottoned on to the fact that their origins were prepunk (1975, essentially) and I wonder if they'd kind of muddied that reality so as to not seem that old.
It's clear that the group were a bunch of five distinct personalities (after Pete and Reg left, everything spilled out into not temporary but certainly far less permanent replacements - and this was more or less the time they stopped having hits and, while they kept writing new songs, they became a bit of a nostalgia good-time band - still very hardworking though, it would seem) and although the influence of things like, obvs given their age, the Beatles in Hard Days Night mode and the Monkees, the notion of a host of different - conflicting characters in a band was a trope, I doubt they really manufactured this. Maybe played it up a bit.
Lloyd's account, which to his credit is very based in personal testimonies and includes a lot of input from the wives, etc, so even though MaA was a sausage fest itself there is a lot of good and balanced context, is lighthearted in the main and often quite diplomatic. The best example of this is the curious situation of the dismissal of David Twohill aka Wayne 'Seabird' DeLisle who they tend to refer to as Bird throughout. It seems Lloyd couldn't really draw Martin Plaza out on the whole situation, at the same time, Twohill appears to have been somewhat traumatised by his house burning down and the end of his marriage which maybe did make him difficult to be around - or at least - set these two up for conflict. Maybe Lloyd knows something we're not being told, or that he can't tell us? I don't know. I don't mind, I don't need to know, it doesn't diminish the narrative exactly - we all have to understand that when we're being told stories about still living people (people who have taken the time to inform extensively about themselves) there are some things that need to be private. So I suppose I feel that ultimately there's a lot of pages spent on something that we can't really get to the bottom of.
Martin Plaza is the real cipher here; I wonder who he is!?** Greedy Smith appears to be a lot more open, unfiltered, though I guess you never really know. By the end of MaA he was the only original member and he was singing both his and Plaza's songs. I suppose it became his band. Everyone loved him. That's probably the take away from this book - don't be a dick.
PS: One thing I really liked about this book was the details on the group's tendency in, I guess, the 80s to augment the murals and friezes of the chintzy hotels/motels they stayed in with tiny joke details eg. a shark's fin in a puddle or a gutter. They were not just artists but also they had an idea of the wider value of conceptual art/pranking.
*I played one side of it this evening, it's pretty good
** The MP album of Lou Reed covers is dismissed in half a sentence, which is irritating as this is something I really would like to know more about, and if not here, where?!
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