It was 1984 when the American music and cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote in an essay for Social Text: »The sexual revolution has loosened the grip of conservative sexual morality, but it has not fundamentally altered its psychological underpinnings«. In her view, it was internalized masculine and feminine gender roles that limited the repertoire of behavior and thus oppressed subjects. This view also found its way to Europe. That same year, Camouflage Heart, the debut album by Cindytalk, was released on the British label Midnight Music – and the band, led by Scottish musician Gordon Sharp, seemed to have tapped into just such psychic foundations.
Sharp had previously played with David Clancy in Edinburgh in the punk band The Freeze. At the same time as moving to London, the two were looking for a new place for their music. For Sharp, this also meant finding his own gender identity. In 1982, the two formed Cindytalk: the band name alludes to Barbie’s counterpart at the time, Sindy. From then on, Sharp called herself Cinder and performed in dresses. Most of all, his voice – which some may recognize from It’ll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil – expresses a special, asexual desperation that transcends clichéd heteronormative worlds of experience.
So Camouflage Heart actually created their own musical place of existential disillusionment; independent of the disillusionment limited by social norms. And that place is somewhere between post-punk and noise. With squeezed vocals, cutting guitars and percussion elements that move between powerful hits and noises like scratching on a tin pan. As ostentatiously dark as the music is, it makes little distinction between black and white in the subtext. Now the US label Dais has reissued the record. Camouflage Heart stands for the absolutely necessary socio-political impact of music and is therefore frighteningly appropriate for today.
