Post by Fuggle on Mar 11, 2006 19:19:05 GMT -5
Way of the world
By Craig Brown
(Filed: 11/03/2006)
From safety-pin to anorak
Measuring time in 30-year leaps is an excellent way to make yourself giddy, or at very least depressed. If you kick off in 1916, for instance, the sequence goes: 1916, 1946, 1976, 2006.
I mention this because it is now a full 30 years since the birth of punk, which is generally dated to the first time the Sex Pistols were mentioned in the New Musical Express.
"Don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming" wrote Neil Spencer in the NME. "They've played less than a dozen gigs as yet, have a small but fanatic following, and don't get asked back."
Thirty years before, on March 8, 1946, bananas had just become available in Covent Garden for the first time since the war; on a trip to Missouri, Winston Churchill was warning of the "iron curtain" of communism falling across Europe. Later in the year, 12 Nazi war criminals were sentenced to death at Nuremberg. A Gal in Calico and It's a Pity to Say Goodnight were the year's big hit records. How time flies!
Such is the British love of nostalgia that veterans of punk have been gathering to reminisce about the events of 1976, and to chew the cud over who spat what at whom, how, when and why. I switched on Richard and Judy the other day; a panel of portly middle-aged experts was discussing something-or-other. At first, I couldn't understand who they were or what they were talking about. Were they representatives from the CBI, or senior figures in some abstruse field of medical research, or possibly Chelsea Pensioners in civvies?
On closer investigation, it turned out that they were all punks, 30 years on, among them Captain Sensible from the Damned and Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks (nowadays looking spookily like a pre-diet Nigel Lawson).
A "punk historian" called John Robb was also on the panel, his enthusiasm for the most obscure songs by X-Ray Spex or the Slits untempered by three decades of newer music. I have since read his 500-page Punk Rock: an Oral History (Ebury, £14.99); it has more information than even the most advanced student of the subject could possibly need to know.
Take, for instance, the vexed question of how Rat Scabies of the Damned got his name. This is not something I knew, but my ignorance had never troubled me. Here, the subject is given a full two pages. "We gave Rat Scabies his name," confesses Mick Jones of the Clash. Mr Scabies himself adds: "I did have scabies at the time and, you know, they said there was a rat in the room as well and Mick gave me the title."
"He had scabies when he came down," chips in Tony James of Generation X, "and there was a rat in the rehearsal room sitting behind the drum stool - I dropped a brick on it. I feel really bad about it now. I hate to hurt animals. So we now had a dead rat in rehearsal, then Rat came down and he had scabies, and I remembered Bernie putting newspapers down where he sat 'cause he thought he was going to catch something. So we christened him Rat Scabies, and then we found he was calling himself Rat Scabies."
And so on and so forth. No doubt The Naming of Rat Scabies will soon turn up as an A-level course of its own. Scabies's real name, it emerges, was Chris Miller. The real names of prominent punks often have this bathetic quality: Captain Sensible was born Ray Burns, and Sid Vicious was born John Ritchie, changing his name to the peculiarly un-punk John Beverley when his mother
re-married. He was, it emerges, finally re-christened Sid Vicious after Johnny Rotten's hamster, Sid the Vicious, who was in turn called after Syd Barrett, the missing member of Pink Floyd. Are you still with me? Oddly enough, the original lead singer of the Sex Pistols had the real name Wally Nightingale. Small wonder his position in the band became untenable, and they had to replace him with Johnny Rotten.
Old punks can rattle on like this for ever. How swiftly the revolutionary turns into the trainspotter! A more appropriate title for John Robb's history of punk might have been From Safety-Pin to Anorak. Though he does his level best to shower punk with hyperbole ("It changed everybody's life who was touched by it… its energy never dissipated. It goes on forever, worldwide: great gigs, great festivals, great people"), he seems far more comfortable fussing over the scholarly postgraduate footnotes ("Early French punk band the Stinky Toys were fronted by Uruguayan-born vocalist Ellie Medeiros").
I suspect, anyway, that punk is more suited to genealogy than to sociology or politics. Robb claims, among much else, that punk had "the best clothes, the fiercest debates, the most idealistic politics". The most idealistic politics? It is hard to forget that the title of one of the Sex Pistols' songs was Belsen was a Gas.
For these past three decades, I have imagined myself older than the Sex Pistols; I now discover that all four of them were born in 1956, a year before I was. In the summer of '76, I was still a teenager - unlike them - and had aspirations towards punkdom. But though I took a few tentative steps in punk's direction - I wore red plastic shoes, plus skinny black trousers with zips galore, and I bought the Damned's first album - I was in truth a namby-pamby university student, rendered fraudulent by education.
Did it all amount to anything? In recent weeks, there have been huge claims made for punk, most of them untrue. The most bogus, it seems to me, is the notion that punk toppled the pretentious triple-album progressive rock that was predominant at the time. In fact, the mid-1970s charts were full of fast, energetic rock groups, many of them infinitely more innovative than the Sex Pistols; and it's worth remembering that the American punk group the Ramones formed way back in 1974.
Many other pop movements have come and gone, from the Mersey sound to glam rock, from bubblegum to ska. However absurd they might have appeared at the time, they have all left records behind to which people still listen. The same cannot be said of punk. Thirty years on, only the most battle-scarred veterans, hell-bent on an evening of nostalgia, could possibly want to play God Save the Queen or Anarchy in the UK. To adapt the words of Neil Spencer's pioneering review: don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols have gone.
By Craig Brown
(Filed: 11/03/2006)
From safety-pin to anorak
Measuring time in 30-year leaps is an excellent way to make yourself giddy, or at very least depressed. If you kick off in 1916, for instance, the sequence goes: 1916, 1946, 1976, 2006.
I mention this because it is now a full 30 years since the birth of punk, which is generally dated to the first time the Sex Pistols were mentioned in the New Musical Express.
"Don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming" wrote Neil Spencer in the NME. "They've played less than a dozen gigs as yet, have a small but fanatic following, and don't get asked back."
Thirty years before, on March 8, 1946, bananas had just become available in Covent Garden for the first time since the war; on a trip to Missouri, Winston Churchill was warning of the "iron curtain" of communism falling across Europe. Later in the year, 12 Nazi war criminals were sentenced to death at Nuremberg. A Gal in Calico and It's a Pity to Say Goodnight were the year's big hit records. How time flies!
Such is the British love of nostalgia that veterans of punk have been gathering to reminisce about the events of 1976, and to chew the cud over who spat what at whom, how, when and why. I switched on Richard and Judy the other day; a panel of portly middle-aged experts was discussing something-or-other. At first, I couldn't understand who they were or what they were talking about. Were they representatives from the CBI, or senior figures in some abstruse field of medical research, or possibly Chelsea Pensioners in civvies?
On closer investigation, it turned out that they were all punks, 30 years on, among them Captain Sensible from the Damned and Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks (nowadays looking spookily like a pre-diet Nigel Lawson).
A "punk historian" called John Robb was also on the panel, his enthusiasm for the most obscure songs by X-Ray Spex or the Slits untempered by three decades of newer music. I have since read his 500-page Punk Rock: an Oral History (Ebury, £14.99); it has more information than even the most advanced student of the subject could possibly need to know.
Take, for instance, the vexed question of how Rat Scabies of the Damned got his name. This is not something I knew, but my ignorance had never troubled me. Here, the subject is given a full two pages. "We gave Rat Scabies his name," confesses Mick Jones of the Clash. Mr Scabies himself adds: "I did have scabies at the time and, you know, they said there was a rat in the room as well and Mick gave me the title."
"He had scabies when he came down," chips in Tony James of Generation X, "and there was a rat in the rehearsal room sitting behind the drum stool - I dropped a brick on it. I feel really bad about it now. I hate to hurt animals. So we now had a dead rat in rehearsal, then Rat came down and he had scabies, and I remembered Bernie putting newspapers down where he sat 'cause he thought he was going to catch something. So we christened him Rat Scabies, and then we found he was calling himself Rat Scabies."
And so on and so forth. No doubt The Naming of Rat Scabies will soon turn up as an A-level course of its own. Scabies's real name, it emerges, was Chris Miller. The real names of prominent punks often have this bathetic quality: Captain Sensible was born Ray Burns, and Sid Vicious was born John Ritchie, changing his name to the peculiarly un-punk John Beverley when his mother
re-married. He was, it emerges, finally re-christened Sid Vicious after Johnny Rotten's hamster, Sid the Vicious, who was in turn called after Syd Barrett, the missing member of Pink Floyd. Are you still with me? Oddly enough, the original lead singer of the Sex Pistols had the real name Wally Nightingale. Small wonder his position in the band became untenable, and they had to replace him with Johnny Rotten.
Old punks can rattle on like this for ever. How swiftly the revolutionary turns into the trainspotter! A more appropriate title for John Robb's history of punk might have been From Safety-Pin to Anorak. Though he does his level best to shower punk with hyperbole ("It changed everybody's life who was touched by it… its energy never dissipated. It goes on forever, worldwide: great gigs, great festivals, great people"), he seems far more comfortable fussing over the scholarly postgraduate footnotes ("Early French punk band the Stinky Toys were fronted by Uruguayan-born vocalist Ellie Medeiros").
I suspect, anyway, that punk is more suited to genealogy than to sociology or politics. Robb claims, among much else, that punk had "the best clothes, the fiercest debates, the most idealistic politics". The most idealistic politics? It is hard to forget that the title of one of the Sex Pistols' songs was Belsen was a Gas.
For these past three decades, I have imagined myself older than the Sex Pistols; I now discover that all four of them were born in 1956, a year before I was. In the summer of '76, I was still a teenager - unlike them - and had aspirations towards punkdom. But though I took a few tentative steps in punk's direction - I wore red plastic shoes, plus skinny black trousers with zips galore, and I bought the Damned's first album - I was in truth a namby-pamby university student, rendered fraudulent by education.
Did it all amount to anything? In recent weeks, there have been huge claims made for punk, most of them untrue. The most bogus, it seems to me, is the notion that punk toppled the pretentious triple-album progressive rock that was predominant at the time. In fact, the mid-1970s charts were full of fast, energetic rock groups, many of them infinitely more innovative than the Sex Pistols; and it's worth remembering that the American punk group the Ramones formed way back in 1974.
Many other pop movements have come and gone, from the Mersey sound to glam rock, from bubblegum to ska. However absurd they might have appeared at the time, they have all left records behind to which people still listen. The same cannot be said of punk. Thirty years on, only the most battle-scarred veterans, hell-bent on an evening of nostalgia, could possibly want to play God Save the Queen or Anarchy in the UK. To adapt the words of Neil Spencer's pioneering review: don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols have gone.