100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Uncontrollable Urge

02 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

03 Praying Hands

04 Space Junk

05 Mongoloid

06 Jocko Homo

07 Too Much Paranoias

08 Gut Feeling/(Slap Your Mammy)

09 Come Back Jonee

10 Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Getting)

11 Shrivel Up

It took Devo two decades to earn Gold certification (500,000 units sold) in America for their 1978 debut, an album of the most uptight new wave music ever put on record, and that feels about right. A timespan of 20 years allows for successive generations of the curious, and those who refused to be cowed, to discover this still remarkable set. It continues to spread by word of mouth as its belief in the banal plasticity of mass culture only appears to grow stronger. Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo! still makes perfect sense which means that, while there’s no joke, something is definitely still on us.

This is another Brian Eno production – he graces this book multiple times – and it’s testament to the strength of Devo’s vision that his input is felt so lightly. What Devo needed wasn’t someone to remake them, just a producer who actually understood them. The group’s gestation lay in Kent State University, where art theories underpinned the initial line-up that came together after the infamous campus shootings by National Guard members in 1970. Devo’s early performances were humorously confrontational, and it’s fairly certain that in the middle of the 1970s they were the most un-prog rock band on the planet.

The band’s public image remains resolutely fixed in the song and attendant video clip for their 1980 hit ‘Whip It’ – the matching outfits, the viral synths and declamatory vocals, the flowerpot hats. But two years and two albums earlier the band was mixing guitars, live drums and keyboards, making them a vital if unexpected part of the punk breakthrough. The band – frontman Mark Mothersbaugh, guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh, keyboardist Bob Casale, bassist Gerald Casale and drummer Alan Myers – shared the same surrealist humour as punk’s instigators, but it played out in a completely different way.

‘Got an urge, got a surge/And it’s out of control,’ Mark Mothersbaugh sings on the spiky ‘Uncontrollable Urge’; but the cathartic never gets a look in on this album, where modern life is perceived as a force that saps and depletes the means of expression and pleasure. Part of Devo’s genius is to pursue this idea of being merely a cog in society’s bland machine and turn it into a covert means of expression. On their cover of the Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ the libido is replaced by herky-jerky rhythms and Mothersbaugh’s regimented squawk – the song isn’t a pose, it’s a statement of fact, and the more Devo pursued this the stronger they sounded.

Devo took their name from the theory of de-evolution, and it made for mordant social criticism, especially as they came up against middle American audiences. A riot was the furthermost thing from Devo’s mind. Instead they put together the proto-industrial groove and eerie synths of ‘Mongoloid’ to describe the life of a man with Down Syndrome and suggest that his comparative happiness was a reflection of society’s debilitating nature. On the caterwauling ‘Jocko Homo’, where the massed vocals sound like robots on the military parade ground, the group joyously announced ‘we are not whole’.

The opening two minutes of ‘Gut Feeling’, a surging, quicksilver instrumental, is typical of their ability to surprise, and the restlessness of Q. Are We Not Men? extends to stylistic reliability. Devo will rarely be what you expect them to be. But once you fall into their way of thinking, their debut is a fascinating and incisive song cycle that sounds like a template for so much of what was to follow, even as the band dutifully swear that they’re the end of the road. A dead end has never sounded so inspirational.