Sigue Sigue Sputnik - 'Love Missile F1-11' (1986)

"Soon the whole world will know my name."

Sigue Sigue Sputnik were a UK act active from 1982 to 1989, being the brainchild of Tony James, earlier of Generation X fame (the band that gave the world Billy Idol), with Martin Degville on vocals and also featuring guitarist Neal X (a.k.a. Neal Whitmore), keyboardist Yana YaYa (a.k.a. Jane Farrimond) and two drummers, Chris Kavanagh and Ray Mayhew. The debut single 'Love Missile F1-11' was unleashed on the unsuspecting world on the 17th of February, 1986, with a music video in tow, directed by Hugh Scott-Symonds.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik, supposedly named after a Russian street gang (though it seems the name originates from the Philippines and literally means in Spanish "Go, go, satellite"), were the ultimate 1980s gimmick band and hype act. Their sound can be described a sort of electronic rockabilly. They cited Suicide, the pioneering electropunk act of Alan Vega and Martin Rev, as one of their major influences. Inspiration was also derived from The Cramps, the notorious "psychobilly" band of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach, the original rock'n'roll of Elvis, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, also Marc Bolan's early-70s glamrock with his band T Rex.

Added with spacy dub effects, videogame-like bleeps and film samples, Sigue Sigue Sputnik's early singles and the whole first album were produced by the legendary Giorgio Moroder (whose 1977 'I Feel Love', performed by Donna Summer, had formed the basis of all new electronic dance music).

Conceptual ideas and the overall visual image were copped from such sci-fi films as A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, Escape from New York, Mad Max II (a.k.a. The Road Warrior) and The Terminator, with Brian DePalma's 1983 version of Scarface also working as an inspiration. Alongside the violent trash sci-fi aesthetics, "video nasties", the 60s and 70s grindhouse cinema and the intentional bad taste of the films of John Waters were also familiar to the band. Ultravixens, the female road crew of the band, borrowed their name from the notorious buxotic B-movies by Russ Meyer. (As part of the Sputnik entourage, the Ultravixens were often featured on the music videos and other promotional material of the band, as was Sigue Sigue Sputnik's promoter Magenta Devine.)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik interviewed by Jose Antonio Abellán and Silvia Abrisqueta of RTVE, Spain (4 June 1986)

Sartorially, Sigue Sigue Sputnik looked like a futuristic update of the most outlandish stage outfits of the 70s glamrock era and David Bowie. Wearing a mohawk wig and fishnet mask, heavy eye make-up and facepaint, Martin Degville reminisced a combination of a character from a Mad Max movie and Kabuki actor, increasingly adopting the campy mannerisms of Divine in the films of John Waters. Tony James had a dyed purple "pineapple" hairdo, even on those occasions he wore a formal suit as the band's spokesman; Yana YaYa being a peroxide blonde Jayne Mansfield lookalike, Neal X a Teddy boy from outer space and Ray Mayhew a mutant Billy Idol clone. The band's fetishwear style of clothing consisted of customised leather jackets, glaring fire-engine red PVC trousers, custom-made T-shirts with such slogans as "Rambo Child", everyone walking in pink patent ankle boots with high stiletto heels, with liberal amounts of hairspray used.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik called themselves "The 5th Generation of Rock'n'Roll". According to the Sputniks, the first generation had been, of course, the original rock'n'rollers of the 1950s, such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and so on. The second generation in the 1960s were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and other "British Invasion" bands. The third generation had been the early-70s glamrock acts and the fourth, naturally, punk.

As an afterthought, if we try to figure out Sigue Sigue Sputnik's own place in the timeline of musical subcultures of the 1970s and 80s (or even earlier, noting also their rock'n'roll and glam influences), they were not only an obvious offshoot (or a bastard child, if you want to put it that way) of the preceding punk, new wave and postpunk scenes but also of the 1979-80 "Blitz Kids"/New Romantic movement which combined the sound of electropop with some wildly hedonistic and outlandish fashion designs. In fact, the Sputnik vocalist (and also the original stylist of the band's look, as designer of their stage costumes) Martin Degville had been an active participant in the Blitz Club of Covent Garden, which his former flatmate Boy George was also seen frequenting.

By 1986, the New Romantic movement had faded a long time ago and only such acts from the original scene as Depeche Mode had managed to show their resilience and ability to evolve musically. At least, as to their image (and compared to the more stark look of their most contemporaries in music, excepting perhaps such people as Prince), Sigue Sigue Sputnik could be seen as a sort of throwback to the stylistic extravagance of some glitziest New Romantic-era bands (which, as said, already derived from the days of Bowie, Roxy Music and glamrock).

Though musically far removed in their sound, image-wise, Sigue Sigue Sputnik shared a similar visual shock value (as if custom-made for the music video era) with such contemporary "hair metal" bands as Mötley Crüe, though again, harking back to the early 70s, the obvious influence of the New York Dolls may have been one specific thing shared by both bands. (When they were living in London, Tony James had been friends with the ex-Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, even shared the stage with them).

As far as self-mythologising went, the band's collective image was as if Andy Warhol's late-60s "superstars" had been reborn for the 1980s as sci-fi movie/Japanese Manga style of action figures, with every band member a different character in the Sputnik franchise. This was emphasized by the Flaunt It album inner sleeve which, when individually describing everyone in the band, namechecked such Anime cartoons as Gundam. (Also on the album cover, made in the style of a Japanese model kit package artwork, one could find a menacing "Kaiju" monster film-like giant battle robot, created by the famed British airbrush artist Syd Brak.)

Tony James wielded a Roland G-707 guitar synthesizer customised with the legend "Elvis 1990", an instrument he had received from Mick Jones of The Clash, subsequently called the "space guitar" on Sigue Sigue Sputnik's record sleeves, responsible for the band's distinctive sequencer bassline sound that can be heard on Sputnik's best known tracks.

Whereas postpunk acts such as Mark Stewart, formerly of The Pop Group, warned of the grim prospects of the dystopian future society of surveillance, Sigue Sigue Sputnik approached them with a carnivalistic, joyful abandon. In retrospect, Sigue Sigue Sputnik are often seen as part of the 1980s "cyberpunk" movement, even though at the time their actual connection to it may have been more superficial and tenuous, although sharing many similar stylistic traits and sources of inspiration (especially cinematic).

The term "cyberpunk" itself was coined in 1983 by Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke. The literary genre was populated by streetwise hacker characters living in dystopian noir future worlds à la Blade Runner or Escape from New York. By 1986, with the books of William Gibson (especially his Neuromancer in 1984) and Bruce Sterling gaining popularity, cyberpunk had already become a household word, not being just a genre of science fiction literature any more but now expanded into an all-encompassing trendy umbrella term or aesthetics which covered everything in popular culture from cinema to comics, graphics, fashion and so on.

Whatever the case, these films by Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott and John Carpenter would also find their way to the band's recorded sound. To quote the famous William Gibson line from Burning Chrome of 1986, "The street finds its own uses for things" (which is also found on the second album cover). Early Sigue Sigue Sputnik's approach could be called "DIY multimedia", where, in the true punk style, they designed everything themselves, from their stage clothes (Martin Degville used to run his own street fashion boutique) to promotional graphics to their recorded sounds.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - The Pirate Trailer (1985)

In avantgarde "tape music" had been around ever since the 1940s, but in popular genres the use of samples became really commonplace only after the Fairlight CMI synthesizer was launched in 1979. However, it was a regular off-the-shelf videocassette recorder Tony James used to dub snippets of film dialogue and soundtrack music into Sigue Sigue Sputnik's demo recordings. Two VCRs were also used to create the band's original scratch video "demo tape" to present to the record companies (see above). Actually, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were to become one of the earliest artists on whose records samples, not only from films but also from television's newscasts and other programming, would play a prominent part.

The 1980s was the golden era of "high concept" bands, with the record labels like ZTT, of the producer Trevor Horn and publicist Paul Morley, concocting highly-planned marketing strategies and artistic record sleeve "manifestos" for their acts such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Propaganda. Sigue Sigue Sputnik were no exception here, having been conceived by Tony James as a carefully planned and ambitious, image-conscious original idea, where the first phase had been finding the exactly right-looking members for the band, later to add to the concept "designer violence", meaning both the sounds and look influenced by the aforementioned action-filled futuristic movies. The basic idea was to translate the fictional, stylised violence of cinema and TV into the overall image and music of the band. Whether the band's audiences and media would eventually understand it was really about the context was a completely different matter.

One cannot separate Sigue Sigue Sputnik from the time they were born. It was the era of Cold War and Yuppie economics, of Reagan and Thatcher. As far as their influences go, what may have been overlooked in the Sigue Sigue Sputnik saga is how much they were also a product of the early-1980s home video boom (VHS or Betamax) which enabled a new kind of instant access, not only to some of the most undeniable film classics – Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock, Welles, and so on – but also into that dark cinematic underbelly (horror, violence, porn) which so far had existed only in the seedy grindhouse theatres of the sleaziest and most criminal urban areas, populated by winos, junkies, the raincoat brigade and that ever-reckless youth.

Now at your local video store you could rent not only the latest Schwarzenegger or Stallone flick but also the most obscure, goriest horror and action movies made in such exotic locales as Italy, Spain, Hong Kong or Japan (and while you were at it, perhaps during the same visit get from under the counter the latest installment of the Swedish Erotica series), and watch all this in the privacy of your home, minors present or not.

This was also the time of the "video nasties" scare in England, and similarly all over Europe, there was a growing concern over the material released on videotape, possibly harmful to its watchers, grown-ups or not, with increasing demands of censorship.

With Sputnik's "designer violence" concept there were not only references to the dystopian sci-fi films but also to the action movie franchises such as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo or Charles Bronson's Death Wish sequels. These were spattered all over the band's tracks and their remixes, as film dialogue and soundtrack samples, song titles, lyrics or even T-shirt slogans ("Rambo Child"). Eastwood's sole foray into science fiction, Firefox (1982), a Cold War thriller of a futuristic neural network-guided jet fighter stolen from the Soviets, also found its way to the Sputnik lore, as film snippets on their pirate demo video.

De Palma's Scarface (the origin of the "First you get the money, then you get the power" sample) had also inspired Miami Vice, cited by the Sputniks as yet another influence, the TV series created by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich that with Armani suits, pastel colours, neon lights and stylised action scenes represented the 1980s aesthetics at its purest.

As had been the case with the infamous 'Relax' single of Frankie Goes To Hollywood back in 1983, with numerous remix versions to saturate the market, also 'Love Missile' received endless extended versions and mixes to fleece the money off the fans and collectors. Among these were the "Ultraviolence Mix", "Bangkok Mix", "Trailer Mix", "Video Mix" and so on; there were also record sleeves in different languages such as German, Spanish, Japanese and Russian.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - 'Love Missile F1-11 (Ultraviolence Mix)' (1986)

The 'Love Missile F1-11' single had its origins with a Roland TR-808 drum machine that was synched together with a Sequential Circuits Pro One synthesizer, over which Neal X improvised on guitar some variations of a sped-up Eddie Cochran riff. Based on that demo, the 7" single version was produced in London by Giorgio Moroder who then created the extended 12" mixes at his studio in Los Angeles.

Martin Degville had finished the song text from some lyrics sketches by Tony James. Written in the brief telegram style or with "cut-up" type of snippets, the lyrics were both a nihilistic and playful take on the Cold War-era Western culture where the power politics, illicit sex, psycho maniacs, fashion and the original rock'n'roll's nonsensical lyrics enmeshed: "The U.S. bombs cruisin' overhead / There goes my love rocket red / Shoot it up / Shoot it up ... Blaster bomb bomb, bomb ahead / Multi-millions still unfed ... Hold me, shake me, I'm all shook up ... Psycho maniac, interbred, shoot it up... / Teenage crime, now fashion's dead / Shoot it up / There goes my love rocket red / Shoot it up / Shoot it up / Shoot it up."

With all the sci-fi/action movie/"ultraviolence"/pop & trash culture visual references abound, the music video for 'Love Missile F1-11' was Sigue Sigue Sputnik's ultimate showcase, musically and image-wise putting into the game everything that the band was all about. As an exercise of stylish cynicism and with the rapidly-edited imagery of war and violence, both imaginary and real, added with glamour, fashion and sleek "international" style, it sounded and looked like Marshall McLuhan's worst nightmare, which penetrated directly into one's central nervous system, that nagging sequencer sound left reverberating in one's brain.

It was nearly ten years since the Sex Pistols' infamous "Filth and the Fury" interview with Bill Grundy on Thames TV in December 1976. Though being bands of different magnitude and eventual overall influence, and having a decade of temporal distance in between their respective careers, one can still draw certain parallels between the Sex Pistols and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, especially when Tony James obviously had taken notes also from Malcolm McLaren, the controversial Pistols manager and impresario. It's interesting that the Sputniks often seemed to follow, though with their own style, in very similar footsteps (and missteps) that the Pistols had already taken ten years earlier. In The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, a Julien Temple-directed Sex Pistols "mockumentary" of 1980, McLaren had famously given his ten lessons (or "commandments") on how to make it in the music business. Whether following McLaren's instructions was a smart move or not, one can only take a guess.

"Ten Lessons"

1. How To Manufacture Your Group.
2. Establish the Name (Sex Pistols).
3. Sell the Swindle.
4. Do Not Play, Don't give the game away.
5. How To Steal as much money as possible From the Record Company of your choice.
6. Become the World's Greatest tourist attraction.
7. Cultivate Hatred, It's your greatest asset.
8. How to Diversify your business. What a business.
9. Taking Civilisation to the Barbarians.
10. Who Killed Bambi.

Inspired by the Situationists and their idea of the "Society of Spectacle", what McLaren was saying was meant as satirical, though in the reality of music business and daily media, a lot of the intended irony only fell on deaf ears. Tony James was to bitterly find this out himself when his "Fleece the World" slogan brandishing the Sputnik T-shirts, meant to satirise the celebrity charity events such as USA for Africa (which had spawned the mid-80s anthem 'We Are the World'), was taken literally by the press as yet another sign of the band's unabashed greed.

Punk rock had made waves, then waned away in its due time, and one would have thought the public was already accustomed to these music-related scandals, which sometimes seemed to follow the logic of "any publicity is good publicity", in other words, anything to incite the record sales, or then not, as there was always the danger of any controversy-inducing PR strategies seriously backfiring.

And Sigue Sigue Sputnik were no stranger to controversy themselves. For the 'Love Missile' video, a couplet from the song that had been on the original single version, "A mondo teeno giving head", was censored and shortened to merely "A mondo teeno giving, giving". Later, also the part "Ultraviolence in Japan, wham-bop-a-lula, thank you, ma'am" was removed from the album version as there had been accusations of Sigue Sigue Sputnik inciting violence. (There had been the infamous bottle-throwing incident when some audience members pelted the band with bottles. Drummer Ray Mayhew retorted, hitting a hapless punter in the head with a bottle. A court case ensued, eventually with the Sputniks finding their planned Japanese tour cancelled as the stories of violence during their gigs had spread like a wildfire.)

Incidentally, Stanley Kubrick sued the band for the use of the spoken word sample "Ultraviolence", a concept taken from the original book of Anthony Burgess and recited by Malcolm McDowell in the film version of A Clockwork Orange, that the band had used on the original single and its extended mix. Kubrick still felt sensitive of having been personally the target of accusations concerning some gang-related incidents of violence, allegedly inspired by this 1971 film of his, and subsequently had taken the movie off the cinemas.

As none of the film samples originally used on the Sigue Sigue Sputnik tracks had been given an official clearance, the band received some extra grief as those parts had to be re-recorded for the album by voice actors.

Tony James of Sigue Sigue Sputnik interviewed by Terry Wogan (30 July 1986)

Dave Ambrose was the music company executive responsible for A&R (artists & repertoire) at EMI Records in London, and it was him who negotiated for the rights to sign the Sputniks for the label. Hype was the name of the game, including such claims in the press that EMI had signed Sigue Sigue Sputnik for £4 million (in fact, only £350,000).

There were also audio ads that were heard in between the songs of Sigue Sigue Sputnik's summer 1986 debut album (the idea in itself was nothing new as The Who had already done the same for their 1967 Sell-Out LP), with further plans for the whole "Sputnik Corporation", featuring (as heard on one of their audio ads) video games, real estate, whatever, in the true 1980s entrepreneurial spirit; the biggest joke thrown around by the Sputniks at the time being, of course, that the band eventually intended to buy the whole EMI corporation!

'Love Missile F1-11' advert 1986

Sputnik Corporation - TV spot 1986

Adverts from the Flaunt It album 1986

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - 'Buy EMI (£4 Million Mix)' ('21st Century Boy' 12" B-side, 1986)

The 'Love Missile' single reached number three on the UK Singles Chart. It was followed by '21st Century Boy' (26 May 1986, No. 20) and the full-length album, Flaunt It (28 July 1986, No. 10 on the UK Albums Chart). 'Sex Bomb Boogie' from the album was released as a "video single" (in VHS tape format) in September 1986, featuring footage from The Terminator.

The double A-sided 'Rockit Miss U.S.A'/'Teenage Thunder' (October 1986, No. 121) came out under the pseudonym Sci-Fi Sex Stars on Who M I?, Sigue Sigue Sputnik's own independent label. There was one more single from Flaunt It, 'Massive Retaliation', that was released only in America, on Manhattan Records later in 1986.

Sputnik Network Television Part 1 - Hosted by Tony James of Sigue Sigue Sputnik (MTV USA, 1986)

The Sigue Sigue Sputnik debut single 'Love Missile F1-11' had been featured in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, directed by John Hughes, a hit film that had its US premiere on 11 June, 1986. No official soundtrack album was released for the movie (that is, not before 2016, when there was one published on La-La Records, as a limited edition of 5,000), meaning a huge financial loss for the band as far as the royalties were concerned.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - '21st Century Boy' (1986)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - 'Sex Bomb Boogie' (1986)

Not to mention the UK's evening tabloids who for years had expected for another Sex Pistols to arrive in order to create a public scare for the concerned parents and lawmakers and now finally received a suitable scapegoat with Sigue Sigue Sputnik, British music papers, notorious for their "build them up and bring them down" policy towards any upcoming artists, found themselves especially bitchy whenever SSS were concerned.

"It's a test designed to provoke an emotional response." This Blade Runner sample keeps repeating on one of the 12" mixes of 'Love Missile', taken from the scene where Holden (Morgan Paull) gives Leon (Brion James) a Voight-Kampff test, as its purpose to find out if the respondent is a replicant (android) or not, leading to a near-fatal shoot-out: "I'll tell you about my mother".

With that constant, never-ceasing nag of a sequencer bassline putting the listener into a trance-like state, it's as if Tony James had designed Sigue Sigue Sputnik as a human experiment, a test to elicit reactions from the audiences and media alike. If this was the purpose, it was an overwhelming success. On the gigs bottles were hurled at the band like in the good old Sex Pistols days, there were accusations that Sigue Sigue Sputnik couldn't play (that's what they used to say about the Pistols, too) and that the Sputnik shows were mimed.

Music critics of the time almost universally panned Sigue Sigue Sputnik. There was just too much in the band's very premises to rub the taste-makers the wrong way. When compared to the musical acts championed by the UK press at the time, such as The Smiths of Morrissey or Billy Bragg, as artists the Sputniks were not "authentic" and "serious" enough, there was also too much media hype and brouhaha to make them look only suspicious. All through the year of 1986 Tony James had been seen as a frequent guest on TV's talk shows, explaining the whole idea and mythos behind Sigue Sigue Sputnik to his bemused hosts, the band members even visiting the children's morning shows in the UK.

It didn't help, either, when on the album's inner sleeve notes (with an "info file" of each band member) for Tony James there was an enigmatic post-scriptum that read: "A sense of humour is always essential", obviously addressed at the band's harshest critics, as if to possibly assist to decode the band's essence as an elaborate conceptual joke, perhaps even in the best McLaren-Situationist spirit, though in the end it only felt ambiguous.

Here in Finland Erik Ahonen of Soundi magazine called the band "awful trash, and even on The Beatles' old record label" (referring to EMI/Parlophone). It also didn't take too long before Sigue Sigue Sputnik was started to be considered a musical one-trick pony. The critics complained that the band's other songs (one exception being 'Atari Baby', a "ballad" inspired by Suicide's 'Cheree') follow pretty much the same format established by 'Love Missile' (the band's trademark sequencer bassline with "space guitar", samples and FX), only in slightly differing variations. ('Love Missile', '21st Century Boy', 'She's My Man' and 'Teenage Thunder' also all share exactly the same beats-per-minute count, 192/193 BPM.)

Still, there seems to have been enough to capture the imaginations of certain core audiences, among them indie people, punks, goths, techno and electro fans, to make a lasting impression. From today's perspective, the accusations and backlash towards the band feel a tad unfair. Listened now, the whole Flaunt It album has stood the test of time and remains entertaining from start to finish.

Sleeve art by Syd Brak.

The second studio album of Sigue Sigue Sputnik was called Dress for Excess. It came out in April 1989, preceded by the single 'Success' in November 1988. This time the band were produced by the Stock-Aitken-Waterman trio which had enjoyed multiple British Top Ten successes, but it seemed a more "chart-friendly" sound and Sigue Sigue Sputnik didn't really mix, the album reaching only No. 53 on the UK Albums Chart. Sigue Sigue Sputnik split in July 1989. Years later there have been different SSS revivals, though not featuring all the members of the "classic" line-up. One of the original drummer duo, Ray Mayhew, sadly died in 2025, aged 60. Magenta Devine, the promoter of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, had already passed away in 2019.

Martin Degville and Neal X of Sigue Sigue Sputnik interviewed on Be Bop A Lula of Italia 1 (4 August 1986)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Neal X said on the August 1986 TV interview for Italia 1 channel: "One very famous Radio One DJ smashed our record on the air. He was so offended at it, but I think that makes it kind of interesting. He's one of the older DJs. I never made records for my parents' generation. I make records, you know, for younger people."

Perhaps there was indeed a generation gap. When you were a teenager in the mid-1980s, at an impressionable age, and saw Sigue Sigue Sputnik's music video for the first time, you were just blown away. When glamrock and punk took place, you had been too young to fully comprehend their impact. Now something exciting was happening for your own generation.

Music critics had a more cynical and jaded view. Older listeners found the band too alien.

It wasn't what they were used to considering "real" music. The same pattern keeps repeating decade after decade. In the movie Quadrophenia, a father watching The Who on TV in the mid-1960s with his enthusiastic teenager remarks that the guitar is not played like that.

In order to truly appreciate this music, you had to be at the right age. You had grown up in some dreary concrete jungle, in the atmosphere of the Cold War and in constant fear of the nuclear holocaust, and seen all the changes that took place (for better or worse) as we moved from the grey and bleak 1970s to the neon-coloured world of the 80s. Perhaps also you had been voraciously watching Mad Max II, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Miami Vice, and action movies on your parents' VCR, reading Judge Dredd and Heavy Metal comics and playing video games, maybe even had one of the first home computers, and you understood exactly the kind of world that Sigue Sigue Sputnik was talking about.

Martin Degville of Sigue Sigue Sputnik interviewed by Gian Sammarco (Get Fresh, ITV, 19 July 1986)

Were Sigue Sigue Sputnik just a glaring example of the 1980s most lurid music industry hype, or did they aptly capture the exact Zeitgeist of their media and fame-obsessed violent era, filled with dark fantasies of the future, and somehow even managing to be ahead of their time? The opinions still remain divided.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik were called out on being style over substance but what if style was their actual substance here? Were they merely a novelty act, their "shock of the new" having a limited shelf life, being easily replaceable? I don't think so. Their problem was that they were out of the place, didn't easily fit into the expectations, it was hard to read them. Were they dumb or too clever for their own good? Were they a sell-out or were they just making fun of the rampant commercialism? ("I am the ultimate product.") Maybe they were actually from the future.

Despite their contemporary detractors, perhaps in hindsight Sigue Sigue Sputnik could be seen as a genuine 1980s pop art statement that put in one neat (even though oftentimes capricious) package all that was characteristic of the decade – hype, design, pyrotechnics – their "ultraviolence"-inspired flashy imagery somewhat comparable to Whaam!, a 1963 painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Based on a comic book panel, it depicts a fighter plane firing a rocket – shoot it up! – that hits a second plane which then explodes in flames, the Cold War-era tropes of war and violence turned into one snazzy work of art to be hanged on a gallery wall and then printed into millions of brightly-coloured posters adorning countless student flats and hip cafés around the world.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - '21st Century Boy' Extended Mix (1986)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik were a contradiction in terms, a phenomenon that wouldn't be possible today. Basically, they were a conceptual underground band project put together by Tony James, mostly comprising members with no actual musical background but with a potential for a cult following à la The Cramps (and it's fair to say a cult status the Sputniks also reached, at least). Instead of being happy to stay in the margins and perhaps gradually progressing from those premises, they found themselves signed on one of the largest record companies in the world.

In the end, it was a question of too much too soon. "Designer violence", instead of remaining a sanitised fictional concept, threatened to become all too real. The band members, bar Tony James, already a seasoned punk rock veteran and almost a decade older than the rest, were all too inexperienced to handle the pressures of being constantly in the public eye, incessant touring, 24-hour partying and everything that comprises the so called rock'n'roll lifestyle. And there was always the pressure to create the next hit record, to remain constantly innovative, to keep the company shareholders happy; ideally, to keep changing like a chameleon, in the exact way Bowie had done year after year. It all became just too hard to pull off. The Warhol way, Sigue Sigue Sputnik had had their fifteen minutes in the limelight which was now spent. It was time for the record label executives to start searching for that next sensation.

Of course, now they can be perceived and appreciated as another revered nostalgia act of a bygone era, so the eventual outcome for Sigue Sigue Sputnik was not too bad. Along the years the cult reputation of SSS has grown only stronger, the band now remembered fondly and nostalgically as a prime example of the 1980s excess and visual flare.

Several bands have covered 'Love Missile F1-11', among them UK's Pop Will Eat Itself, even David Bowie recorded his own version, giving the song a Bo Diddley-esque twist, that was released as a bonus track of Reality album in 2003. This was excitedly commented by Neal X of Sigue Sigue Sputnik in The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg:

"We were absolutely thrilled when David covered us. What a compliment! The single biggest influence on my life and career had heard of us, and liked our work enough to do his own version. As Tony James put it at the time, 'The bastard sons of Ziggy covered by Ziggy Stardust himself.'"

David Bowie - 'Love Missile F1-11' (2003)

What was Sigue Sigue Sputnik's influence on later artists and music, then? At least, the SSS audiovisual experience was reflected in several upcoming industrial techno/EBM and goth acts of the late 1980s and 90s. It can be argued that Sigue Sigue Sputnik did their own part in paving the way for the electronic dance music revolution from the late 1980s onwards, but in which manner exactly, that remains a bone of contention.

"Rave culture and acid house exploded in between our first and second albums", Neal X told Classic Pop magazine in 2025. "Suddenly we went from being cutting edge outliers to suddenly we couldn’t get arrested."

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - 'Success [Balaeracidic 12" Mix]' (1989)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik's sole contribution to the ongoing UK acid house boom were the "Acid" and "Balaeracidic" remixes for 'Success' (November 1988), the single produced for the second album by Stock-Aitken-Waterman, but nothing more came out of the Sputniks' brief acid house connection and the opportunity to expand the band's sound in the direction of the new electronic dance music culture was eventually missed.

In any case, sampling had by now become a mainstay in the 1980s music. Film and TV samples increasingly found their way to the chart records of M/A/R/R/S, Bomb the Bass and S'Express. The late J Saul Kane famously based the tracks of his Depth Charge around samples from horror films, kung-fu flicks and Italo Westerns. Meat Beat Manifesto of Jack Dangers remains another legendary, sample-heavy act from the same era. Of course the fêted hip-hop acts such as Public Enemy built their whole sound around the samples. And so on. But whether any of these artists had listened to Sigue Sigue Sputnik and actually became influenced by them remains a question of some considerable dispute.

At the same time, there were also more bands who built their sound as a sort of rock'n'roll/electronic dance music hybrid: Pop Will Eat Itself, The Shamen, EMF, Jesus Jones, Primal Scream (whose 1990 'Loaded' was reworked from one of their old rock ballads into a dancefloor monster by DJ Andrew Weatherall). The KLF of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, coming from a rock background and with an ironic take on the electronic dance music spectacle, may have possibly also taken some lessons from Sigue Sigue Sputnik and published in 1988 The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), clearly following in the best McLaren "Swindle the Music Business" tradition. And yes, even U2 openly admitted their debt to Sigue Sigue Sputnik, with their "ironic" Zoo TV incarnation of the early 1990s.

P.S.

Even we did our modest part in paying our respects to Sigue Sigue Sputnik with our own Kompleksi when Hannu Haahti, head of Helsinki's CD-R label 267 Lattajjaa asked for a contribution to Love Missile F2-67, a 2006 tribute compilation of 'Love Missile F1-11' cover versions. The end result can be heard here. A mutual acquaintance told that at one point Tony James himself had heard our version through Kompleksi's MySpace page. As we say in Finnish, "kiitos ja anteeks" (thanks & sorry)!