Dead Boy, Lord of the New Church, Sir Stiv Bators: So Far Ahead of His Time (And Many in Our Time)

Divide and Conquer - That's Their Game...

I was recently listening to the Special Edition version of the debut, self-titled Lords of the New Church album, and was struck by lead singer Stiv Bators’ rant on the bonus 1982 live version of the song “New Church”.

The album was released via Illegal (UK) and I.R.S. (US), both record labels co-founded by Miles Copeland III, who also managed the band. Copeland is the son of the late Miles Copeland Jr, a CIA officer who "participated in numerous covert operations, including the March 1949 Syrian coup d'état and the 1953 Iranian coup d'état."

In a 1986 Rolling Stone interview, Copeland Jr. stated that "Unlike The New York Times, Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, my complaint has been that the CIA isn't overthrowing enough anti-American governments or assassinating enough anti-American leaders, but I guess I'm getting old."

I.R.S. Records' roster was a who's who of new wave/punk rock, featuring bands like The Bangles, Concrete Blonde, The Cramps, The Go-Go's and perhaps not ironically at all, The Dead Kennedys.

Bators mentioned in an interview once (one that I haven't been able to find since I saw it on YouTube a few years back), that his manager's dad was in the CIA, and that they were told they couldn't show Agent Orange being dropped on civilian populations in their "Russian Roulette" video, so it was censored on MTV for depicting just that.

Copeland also played a part in the band's later song "Method to My Madness", after Stiv sings:

Said we should be nice boys
Like all those other wimps
I talk about conspiracies
Then you crack the whip

Copeland chimes in for the second half of the verse:

Well boy, you better shut your mouth
You can't afford to bail
Now don't go telling secrets
This record's gotta sell

I feel like there’s a lot more to this story. There are a few illuminating interviews with Bators online where he talks about punk rock “anarchy”, and how it was sold as fashion to keep the kids from rising up. I can’t help but question the coincidence of the Sex Pistols promoting “anarchy” and “chaos” simultaneously. Was there a hidden hand guiding this message through the management of Malcolm McLaren? Stiv seemed to think so.

Stiv was always ahead of his time and ultra perceptive about the means of social control that were being exacted upon us, as even casual fans are aware of from one of the Lords’ biggest hits, “Open Your Eyes.”

Video games train the kids for war
Army chic in high-fashion stores
Law and order's done their job
Prisons filled while the rich still rob
Assassination politics
Violence rules within' our nation's midst
Well, ignorance is their power tool
You'll only know what they want you to know
The television cannot lie
Controlling media with smokescreen eyes
Nuclear politicians picture show
The acting's lousy but the blind don't know

Open your eyes, see the lies right in front of you

They scare us all with threats of war
So we forget just how bad things are
You taste the fear when you're all alone
They gonna get you when you're on your own
The silence of conspiracy
Slaughtered on the altar of apathy
You gotta wake up from your sleep
'Cause meek inherits earth six feet deep

Stiv sometimes would tell a hilarious deep politics joke before playing the song live, referencing Hinckley and the Kennedys. Hear him tell it here. (I like to think of him as a “rock ‘n’ roll Bill Hicks.”)

I think the “divide and conquer” message of “New Church” is especially relevent for the “new normal” now, and the Democratic Party under Uncle Joe Biden (Because they are now the party of CIA, and the demented POTUS has essentially written the intelligence community a blank check to incur any damage they please upon the world.) Here's the extended rant from the live version I mentioned above, and you can hear it yourself by clicking on the video link below.

"Do you remember when, in the '60s, all those hippies you hated, through music, they started something, a very subversive threat, it was called 'young people'. They gave us power, started getting information. We changed a lot of things then. Vietnam. They were afraid of the youth. So they brought in drugs and disco. Made it seem to be hip to take drugs. Turn us into robots. Then along came punk. Punk tried to change a lot of things. They made it self destructive. They got everybody fighting each other: Skinheads hating punks, punks hating teddy boys, teddy boys hating hippies... they subdivided all of us. But there's one thing we got together. Music unites us because we are young. We outnumber 'em. Cos they're old. There's a lot of old people we need to get rid of right now. Cos they're causing trouble and they're going to blow us all to Hell. So it's up to us. They got you fighting among yourselves. We gotta become one again."

Divide and conquer - that's their game
Beneath the hair and clothes we're all the same
They threaten our lives with nuclear war
Gonna crucify us just once more
Join the New Church
Be a lord of the New Church
Hey!