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their records – but equally, after 30 years of scraping
together enough money to get on to the next album,
their new success only comes from doggedly sticking
to what they wanted to do. At one point, Vega talks
quite poignantly about his 1980s solo career, where he
became huge in France of all places, had a major label
deal with Elektra – and then suddenly got dropped. He
admits it felt really painful to be kicked off the label
after struggling so long to get paid anything for making
music – but also reckons it was for the best. It’s not
often you hear a musician openly admit he misses the
money that a major label brings.
Nobakht does a sterling job of chronicling Suicide’s
rise over 30 years with a cast of thousands describing
what a huge impact listening to or seeing the band had
on them – Marc Almond, Henry Rollins, Moby, Michael
Stipe, Bono (eh?) – among many others. You’re left in
no doubt about the huge impact they had. There’s the
received wisdom that the first Velvets album sold very
badly, but that everyone who bought a copy started a
band – and Jim Reid from The Jesus And Mary Chain
says as much about the first Suicide album. People
like Marc Almond say it was the second, more heavily
produced and disco-tinged Suicide album that actually
laid the blueprint for many of the one keyboardist, one
singer synth bands that were to follow – either way,
neither album had much success at the time of their
release. Either way, while Suicide’s records are great,
BUY Suicide music online from and
they simply don’t capture the sheer euphoria of what
they do live.
Beyond Suicide themselves, No Compromise provides
an evocative description of decaying 70s New
York and the emerging punk scene around Max’s and
CBGB’s, mixed up with the artist lofts where Vega and
Rev first hung out and played their first tentative gigs
alongside the likes of the New York Dolls. If Vega and
Rev seem like New York clichés at times – summoning
up death, darkness, lust and disgust, all the usual motifs
of that city’s music – it’s because they were the ones
helping create that now-overused vocabulary to begin
with. And, as several people point out in the course
of the book, others may throw the same shapes or try
to adopt the same postures, but very few get near the
intelligence that radiates from Suicide’s own sardonic,
sonic howl.
Nobakht himself stays pretty much out of the text
– he doesn’t really talk about Suicide’s own impact
on his own life or the process of writing the book – it
would have been interesting to see a more personal
slant at times and some ‘behind the scenes’ comments
on talking to so many pop stars about Suicide’s influence
on themselves. Likewise, the personal lives of
Alan Vega and Martin Rev remain firmly out of the
spotlight, which is both good and bad – reading the
book, you do develop a certain affection for them both
and it naturally leads you to want to know more of their
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