Punk singer Alan Vega provoked Suicide audiences to riot

Alan Vega stalked the stage menacingly while delivering lyrics about mayhem in a series of bloodcurdling screams.

US punk singer Alan Vega performing in Nantes, France, in 2004.

As one half of punk provocateurs Suicide, Alan Vega freely admitted he was the singer with “the band everyone loved to hate”. The New York duo he formed with Martin Rev in the early 1970s created a throbbing, antagonistic aural onslaught and their live performances — more extreme exercises in confrontational performance art than conventional rock concerts — were notoriously challenging.

Clad in leather and resembling what one critic described as “a feral Elvis”, Vega stalked the stage menacingly while delivering lyrics about mayhem, murder and insanity in a series of bloodcurdling screams, howling over Rev’s primitive synthesiser drones. Goading his audience, swinging a bike chain and sometimes cutting his face with a broken bottle, Vega regularly ended his concerts with orgies of violence.

At one early gig he stood defiantly in front of the doors to prevent disgusted audience members from leaving. “We challenged them,” he said. “We weren’t entertainers and it wasn’t an escape from people’s problems. They would walk through the door of the venue and they’d be in hell. We were angry and we wanted to wake people up. We were the ultimate punks because even the punks hated us.”

The nightly riots at their concerts led Joe Strummer of the Clash, who toured with Suicide, to call Vega “one of the bravest men I have ever seen on a stage”.

At a show in Glasgow in 1978 an axe was hurled from the audience at Vega’s head. In France he was punched on the nose during a stage invasion and a gig in The Netherlands ended in pandemonium when the police used tear gas in the theatre. For the most part Vega was delighted by the violent reaction. “When they were throwing shit, I knew things were going pretty good,” he said. “I knew we were agitating somebody, which is what Suicide was supposed to be.”

Yet if Vega and Rev were originally regarded as pariahs by the rock establishment, Suicide went on to exert a profound influence on popular music and its undergrowth of cultish sub-genres from synth-pop to post-rock. REM, Bono and Radiohead all cited the band as an influence and Bruce Springsteen covered their song Dream Baby Dream.

At times their grating extremity was too much even for New York’s bohemian, avant-garde elite. The band’s name earned Vega a rebuke from Allen Ginsberg for its “negativity”. Fearing more of the same he refused to meet Andy Warhol. Yet those who dismissed Suicide as semi-literate, delinquent nihilists promoting chaos and anarchy for the hell of it were wide of the mark.

Sensitive and intelligent, Vega was almost 40 by the time Suicide released its first album in 1977. Before making rock music the primary vehicle for his work, he was a fine arts graduate who exhibited his paintings and sculptures — pieced together from street junk and electronic debris — in some of New York’s most prestigious galleries. It was at an art gallery event in 1971 that Vega staged an early Suicide show, which borrowed a term coined by music critic Lester Bangs to become the world’s first acknowledged “punk” gig. “I was showing my sculptures at this pretty big gallery,” Vega recalled. “I asked if we could do a show there and they agreed, which blew me away because no one else was giving us a show. We billed it as a ‘punk music mass’.”

Although in principle he welcomed the hostility that Suicide aroused, at the height of the group’s notoriety the pressure became almost intolerable. “There were times when we thought we were insane. It almost pushed me towards a nervous breakdown,” he confessed.

He was born Boruch Alan Bermowitz in 1938 in Brooklyn, New York. His Jewish immigrant father was a diamond setter but little of the lustre trickled down and he was brought up in straitened circumstances. His parents could not comprehend his artistic leanings. “They were from another planet,” he noted. “Fortunately they didn’t ever get to see me perform, otherwise they would have put me in a mental hospital.”

After studying at Brooklyn College he entered New York’s avant-garde art world, working with the Art Workers’ Coalition, a co-operative of radical artists that harassed centres of “high art”. He was inspired to shift his focus to making music after seeing a gig by Iggy Pop and the Stooges in 1969 and teamed up with Rev the following year. Having shared the bill with groups such as the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, they released their first album in 1977. It is now regarded as a left-field classic.

Vega continued making music with and without Suicide for the rest of his life and, although he never lost his commitment to experimentation, he enjoyed his status as the grand old man of punk in his later years.

His wife, Liz Lamere, who survives him, is a music producer who frequently collaborated with him. Vega credited their teenage son Dante with keeping him abreast of modern musical trends.

A series of strokes left Vega struggling to sing or stand on stage but he still managed to reunite with Rev to perform Punk Mass at the Barbican in London last year.

The Times