Sigue Sigue Sputnik arrived in an explosion of silly hair and sci-fi costumes as a postmodern pastiche of the ultimate Eighties band.

I love the succinct summary of Sigue Sigue Sputnik on their biog at Allmusic.com which describes them as having “raised selling out to an art form.”

At the time, it was hard to believe the band formed by former Gen X bassist Tony James was anything more than an arch conceptual joke at the expense of Eighties excess.

The hair, the make-up, the costumes – an Eighties update on The New York Dolls – and the “futuristic” video… it all made me hate them the moment I saw them. And yet, their debut single, Love Missile F1-11, is fantastic!  

The throb of the synth, the crunch of the guitars, the glitchy movie samples and computer-game effects, the Cold War vibes of impending nuclear destruction, and the dub-influenced production with more echo on the yelping vocals than even Lee Perry might have attempted.

It might have been ludicrous, it may have been comical, but it was also thrilling; at least over the course of three-and-a-half minutes.

I’m not sure Tony James ever intended it to be more than an ironic postmodern joke, saturating the media with slogans and interviews with no purpose beyond creating enough waves to be offered a record deal.

And it worked, with EMI snapping them up for a record sum, even though the band members he recruited to realise his project were not musicians in any conventional sense.

Vocalist Martin Degville was a clothes designer, brought in as much to create the costumes as to write and sing, while Jane Ferriman, trying her hand at keyboards and a multitude of special effects, called herself Miss Yana Ya Ya, primarily to promote his store, YaYa, which became the band’s base.

James’s fellow Gen X drummer, Mark Laff, was on board for a while, and his old pre-Clash bandmate Mick Jones took on the task of live sound engineer, manipulating their sound in a way that he would expand upon in Big Audio Dynamite (also with James).

, guitarist Neal X, drummers Chris Cavanagh and Ray Mayhew, and a certain Miss Yana Ya Ya (aka Jane Ferriman) on keyboards and special effects – were not musicians in any conventional sense. 

This debut single, released in early 1986, shot straight to No.3 in the chart; it ws followed by an album produced by no less a name than Giorgio Moroder (after being turned down by Bowie, Prince, and John Carpenter).

The LP, titled Flaunt It (of course!), furthered the conceptual joke, by selling the space between tracks to advertisers. That was a first, and a wry comment on the commodification of culture in that decade of untrammeled capitalism. But it didn’t work.

Despite a huge and hugely expensive promotional campaign, the album flopped: the recorfd-buying public, it seemed, had liked the initial joke but like all jokes, it stopped being funny after a while.

They had another hit with the T. Rex tribute 21st Century Boy but their second album, Dress For Excess, was another flop, despite the somewhat desperate move of plastering the phrase “This time it’s music” on the cover, and they split up, with James joining Sisters Of Mercy before resurfacing in BAD.

I’ll leave the last word on Love Missile to Allmusic again: “The band sound like the feral offspring of the unholy merging of Eddie Cochran, a car salesman, and  Commodore 64” (those very early 8-bit computers).

I imagine they took it as a compliment. And a version of the band, with Degville the only original member, is currently on tour under the name Sigue Sigue Sputnik.