Rikki Sylvan

Whenever old punk rock fans gather to chew over the debris of their youth, sooner or later someone inevitably mentions Rikki & the Last Days of Earth. And the others all laugh. Even among people who've never heard the group, Rikki Sylvan and his barely remembered cohorts are generally regarded (and almost universally derided) for having released one of the most reviled albums of the entire late-'70s punk explosion -- as one critic put it, when your best song is a cover of an old Rolling Stones song, you know you're in trouble. In fact, "Street Fighting Man" wasn't even close to being the group's best number -- they themselves buried it away on the B-side of their second single. Rather, Rikki & the Last Days of Earth were among the tiny handful of bands leading the charge towards the synthesizer-crazed years which followed punk's initial breakthrough, and comparing their early media coverage with that shared by fellow pioneers Ultravox, there really wasn't much difference between the two. The British press hated both bands. But Ultravox had Brian Eno produce them and subsequently went on to considerable success. Rikki & the Last Days of Earth put out one album on an unfashionable label, DJM -- best known for bringing the world Elton John -- then broke up. It was only later, when Sylvan's name surfaced alongside that of Gary Numan in the small print of the latter's Replicas album, that many people even remembered what he'd been doing in 1977, while any fame that attends the singer today owes more to his groundbreaking work alongside the young William Orbit than to his own early career. Rikki & the Last Days of Earth formed in mid-1977, immediately setting themselves apart from the pack with their synth-heavy sound and Sylvan's unmistakable Bryan Ferry-esque vocals. Their...