On demand: "Devo"

You might expect Chris Smith's documentary on the wacky, borderline cartoonish New Wave funsters Devo to be all wacky, borderline cartoonish fun times. Not so: barely ten minutes have passed before we find founder members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh recalling how their outlook was shaped by being on campus during the Kent State massacre of 1970. Like their fellow students, these were kids born into that post-War idyll, raised to believe the future was theirs, only to find themselves coming of age in an America where everything appeared to be going murderously backwards. (Heaven knows how today's kids are supposed to relate.) So the pals invented a philosophy of their own - de-evolution - collaged together from cult texts, old movies, cool images and odd sounds, intended either to meet the moment head-on or blow a giant raspberry in the moment's direction. Whether it made sense or not was a moot point: did Nixonism make any sense, or Vietnam, or Kent State? The whole endeavour was far out from the off. Smith has dug up footage of the group's first college gig, wherein Mothersbaugh proceeded to play a self-described "headache solo" for the first fifteen minutes, whittling a crowd of twenty down to just two; the tyre factory workers of their native Akron, Ohio soon chased Devo off the local bar scene, angered by their refusal to play conventional blues covers. (A later, skittering Stones deconstruction would be as far as they travelled in that direction.) They were arguably lucky to get a leg up into the business at the moment of punk and post-punk, when heads were being expanded and rulebooks ripped up. Suddenly anything was possible again - and yet, even then, Devo came to occupy a curious position in American pop culture.

They were anti-punk, for starters: thinkers rather than snarlers, more nerd than jock. The band's unlikely guest appearances on the late-night talkshow circuit, collated here, reveal they weren't burn-it-all-down nihilists but sometime poptimists who'd actually been given reason to believe in something: a better, brighter future for all. They bamboozled the industry's suits, at this point more accustomed to selling Boston and Bad Company records. But their fellow artists got them, which helped: illustrious boosters included Bowie, Iggy, Lennon, even the relatively straight-edged Neil Young, who cast the band in one of his fillums. The public, for their part, were largely perplexed, ignoring the subversive undercurrents of the musically irresistible "Whip It" to make it a big hit in the US (in the UK, it barely registered either on radio playlists or the charts), but then looking on somewhat askance, as if Devo were a joke they didn't entirely get. Sustained commercial success was therefore beyond them, but they found some sort of niche after the newfangled MTV revealed this merry band of pranksters as fully-formed visual artists; stumbled across on the outer reaches of the cable dial, they might have seemed like a new Spiders from Mars, aliens who'd landed at the right time in the right place to disrupt and otherwise undermine the heavily commercialised dumbness and reactionary nostalgia of Ronald Reagan's America. Smith now encourages the group's surviving contingent to interrupt the Netflix schedule of fear-sowing true crime, fatuous comedy specials and flimsy, instantly forgettable stunts in order to report back on the failure of their initial mission.

For a while, Devo were able to fold their own co-option by the mainstream back into their work: the closer they got to the heart of showbusiness, the more de-evolution they could identify, record and lampoon. The camera withdraws from an apparently fractious press call where the message is "we're not having any fun right now" to reveal the messengers of the band are, to a man, reclining on beanbags. Create your own world and your own logic, as Devo did, and you can either stand to the side of or hover above everybody else's. They remain a fascinating study for what they had to say about America: as the country passed all too rapidly from its civil rights era through deindustrialisation to adopt a new, wholesome corporate-lifestyle sheen, the music - all riddles and puns, slogans and sightgags, boneheaded riffs and banal repetitions - took on the air of a Dadaist commentary on the backwardness of things. (There was no immediate British equivalent: you'd have to mash up elements of Madness, the Art of Noise, Half Man Half Biscuit and the Fall - and a little of the KLF's self-mythologising - to get close.) Almost as interesting is what these refuseniks in silly hats have to say about pop itself: that it can be simultaneously smart and dumb, conceptual and lowbrow, that it often gets into your head by punching up from your gut. These now-seasoned musicians are better placed than their dorky former selves to evaluate the band's ambitions and ideas, and to express their disappointment at the way this project - and the world that went unchanged by it, de-evolving now for a full half-century - turned out. But it's not all bad news: Devo generated a whole archive's worth of funny, peculiar, provocative images and sounds, just waiting for the right filmmaker to raid it. Smith's very engaging retrospective ends with a Max Ernst quote that doesn't at all feel out of place, and it's also the only corner of Netflix where you're going to find trace remnants of a Bruce Conner film: 1978's Mongoloid, no less.

Devo is now streaming via Netflix.