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The most shameless scam in music history
This band has been called a scam by many critics over the years. They prioritised image over music, hype over talent and even sold advertising space on their album. But were they actually a good band underneath it all? This is a really weird story…
'Love Missile F1-11' was Sigue Sigue Sputnik's best-selling single, and it's not a bad song. It's fun and has a really great, futuristic New Wave energy to it. It was innovative, too, particularly in the way the band used sampling. Even David Bowie covered it.
And that's the sad, but also fascinating, thing about this story. They did make interesting, different music, but the media circus and hype surrounding the band's image seemed to bury the actual music. What resulted was one of the most polarising bands of the 1980s.
This article might sound like I'm slating the band all the way through, but I'm not. I know plenty of people love their music. I just think the story of how they rose to fame and subsequently fell from popularity is fascinating. It's a look at how a high-stakes musical experiment completely exploded, for better or worse.
So, let's start with Tony James, former bass player in Generation X. He conceived Sigue Sigue Sputnik in the early 1980s as what he described as a kind of fantasy band. The concept was deliberately constructed around image, publicity, slogans, fashion, technology and commercialism. Think T. Rex meets Donna Summer meets sci-fi fantasy.
The band was more like a corporate brand than an actual musical outfit. They were essentially one big, science-fiction-themed marketing trick.
When researching this story, I came across one publisher that went as far as to say they had 'raised selling out to an art form'.
Sputnik focused on the power of an image rather than the power of music. Plenty of bands at the time used image and persona to sell themselves; that's just part of the craft. Think punk and glam rock. But the issue some people had with Sputnik was that they felt this was the band's main trick. They simply didn't have the talent to back it up.
James recruited Martin Degville on vocals, Neal X on guitar and a woman called Yana Yaya on keyboards. There were also two drummers: Ray Mayhew and Chris Kavanagh. Not the football referee.
Degville was a clothes designer by trade and actually made the outfits for the band.
The members were chosen partly, if not mostly, for their looks. The guitarist and both drummers were, at best, relatively inexperienced with their instruments. In a 1986 interview with One Two Testing, the band's recruitment philosophy was summed up pretty well with this gem:
"It's much easier to teach someone to play the drums than it is to teach them to be thin."
— Sigue Sigue Sputnik, One Two Testing, 1986.
What a completely bizarre thing to say, right?
We all know and love the crazy outfits and hairstyles of 1980s rock, but Sigue Sigue Sputnik took things to another level. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
The band was engineered purely for maximum spectacle, combining cyberpunk aesthetics, synth-punk and high-fashion shock tactics.
Before releasing a single note of music, James had already talked the band into generating massive press coverage, boasting about their eventual world domination and famously securing an extraordinary record deal with EMI. More on that in a moment.
Their slogan was literally 'Fleece the World', while James described them as 'Hi-tech sex, designer violence, and the fifth generation of rock 'n' roll'.
What they were trying to sell was the entire Sigue Sigue Sputnik experience, and, to be fair, it worked for a while.
'Love Missile F1-11' reached number three in the UK charts, while their debut album, Flaunt It, made the Top 10. For a brief moment, this bizarre band was everywhere, making as much noise as possible.
They promoted the hell out of their music and exaggerated just about every figure they could. At one point, they claimed to have been given a £4 million record deal, although many sources suggest this wasn't actually the case.
They even came up with the idea of putting adverts between the songs on their debut album.
Which, as music fans, I'm sure we can all agree, is an awful, awful idea.
Once the initial excitement and confusion wore off, quite a few critics began to question whether there was actually all that much substance behind the spectacle.
One particularly interesting aspect of this story is just how much of their publicity campaign began before they'd released any music. In fact, that's how they attracted the attention of EMI Records and secured the deal that became known as the mythical £4 million record contract
As one band member explained in the same 1986 One Two Testing interview:
"We were selling tee-shirts about two years before the band was together."
They would gatecrash business meetings and music industry parties. It was almost more of a parody of a band than an actual band. They weren't even playing music.
In fact, James has openly admitted that he found their sound while making the music video for 'Love Missile F1-11', stitching together movie soundtracks rather than jamming on instruments or sitting down to write songs.
Another rather revealing quote from the One Two Testing interview sums up their attitude:
"It's not important to be able to play an instrument at all. That's a lie."
One thing worth clearing up, though, is that although they hadn't released any music before being signed, they had at least recorded a demo of 'Love Missile F1-11'.
They also hired a professional PR woman with strong industry contacts who helped get them in front of music journalists so they could spread their message. That message was essentially that if record companies were going to sell music as a product, they were going to treat it like one.
And, as we've already seen, they weren't afraid to say things specifically designed to provoke and outrage the music industry.
Eventually, all this noise attracted the attention of EMI Records. The label must have seen enormous value in the band's brand because, in 1986, they signed them for approximately £350,000.
The band, however, encouraged people to believe the figure was actually £4 million.
Why? Well, why not?
That's a massive amount of money for a band that hadn't even released any music yet. Most bands have to demonstrate an incredible live show or release a number-one single to attract that kind of attention.
It's like buying a house for £350,000 without knowing whether it has a roof.
But at least Sputnik took that money and started making some music, which brings us back to 'Love Missile F1-11'.
They had actually approached Prince to produce the track, but he turned them down. Giorgio Moroder ended up taking on the job instead, which wasn't a bad second choice!
The song came together while the band were experimenting with ideas, with an old VHS player showing films in the background. As Tony James explained in a 2016 interview with Electric Sound:
"Things like 'Firefox' and a pirate copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' and John Waters films like 'Pink Flamingos', and the lyrics were inspired by what we were seeing on the screen. I always said that Sputnik's lyrics were like an action painting of film and TV images."
They then realised they could take their demo of the track and play clips from all these films over it. That's where all those explosions, machine guns and movie samples came from.
Funny thing about those samples, though: they hadn't obtained permission to use any of them. They actually ended up having to pay Stanley Kubrick a considerable amount of money for using audio clips from A Clockwork Orange.
The samples were completely removed from the US release of the song.
Despite that, 'Love Missile F1-11' worked pretty well for the band. It was the perfect audio-visual representation of everything they'd been building up to that point. It was all about futuristic warfare, Cold War nuclear anxiety, the media and destruction. It was like Blade Runner meets Mad Max.
The song reached number three in the UK charts and, as I said earlier, wasn't a bad song by any means. It looked as though months, or even years, of hype, image-building and marketing had finally paid off. It was a massive hit and generated an enormous amount of attention.
Their second single did pretty well, too. '21st Century Boy' explored hyper-commercialism, advanced technology and sci-fi dystopian realities. The song mentions a whole host of brands, including Coca-Cola, Fender and Cartier, highlighting how corporate branding dominates everyday life. It reached number 20 in the UK charts.
The music-buying public was clearly curious about this bizarre new band, and they enjoyed some pretty impressive sales.
However, rock journalists had largely seen through them from the beginning, dismissing them as talentless visual posers exploiting sample manipulation.
So, two singles had been released, they were generating plenty of buzz and then… the album arrived.
Flaunt It was released in July 1986 and, amazingly, reached number 10 in the UK album charts. The curiosity generated by those first two singles had clearly helped. But quite soon after its release, the band's popularity began to decline.
Critics largely rejected the album, dismissing it as little more than a commercial stunt.
They argued that there simply wasn't enough variety. Critics quickly pointed out that if you'd listened to 'Love Missile F1-11', you'd pretty much heard the whole record. The same beat, the same guitars, the same movie samples. Reviews repeatedly complained that every track seemed to move at exactly the same relentless pace.
To be fair, the band didn't exactly help themselves with quotes like this from the same interview:
"We're not really interested in making records. Seven inches of plastic is a stupid way to get your ideas over."
But the single most controversial aspect of the album, and the reason many people hated it, was the decision to sell advertising space between the songs.
That's right. Actual adverts. Lasting around 20–30 seconds, they were inserted between the tracks.
Brands such as L'Oréal and i-D Magazine signed up, but the band struggled to find many more companies willing to pay for what was undoubtedly a rather risky investment. As a result, they ended up creating their own spoof advertisements instead.
The record's inner sleeve even featured small printed adverts.
And I get it. They were trying to play up the irony, right? They were making a statement about commercialism and capitalism, turning the whole thing into an artistic commentary on the music industry.
But at the end of the day, there were adverts on the record. It doesn't matter how self-aware or meta you're trying to be; that's going to annoy people.
And it did.
The critics absolutely tore them apart. Of course, there were some who understood the gimmick and praised their abstract approach, but overall, the reception was overwhelmingly negative.
The media backlash did its job, and you could say that Sputnik had crashed.
It would be over two years before they released their second album, Dress for Excess, this time with a revised image and business model. The message was clear: This Time It's Music.
I think the fact that they felt the need to put that on the cover says everything.
The single released alongside the album somehow managed to reach number 31 in the UK charts, but the album itself was a massive flop.
A 1989 review from Billboard summed things up pretty well:
"Cover legend, 'This Time It's Music,' on SSS' second album is almost laughable; while silly hype that surrounded band's 1986 debut has dissipated (no commercial space for sale this time), music remains in short supply as well. Standard dance-pop stuff won't move anybody."
Shortly after its release, EMI pulled its funding and the band split up in 1989.
Tony James actually went on to join the Sisters of Mercy that same year.
I do wonder whether, had they gone about things a little differently, Sigue Sigue Sputnik could have enjoyed a more successful career. Was there genuine musical talent buried underneath all the image-building and publicity stunts, or were they simply never as good as the hype suggested?
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