Post by Fuggle on May 4, 2007 18:01:25 GMT -5
Never mind the bollocks, here's to punk music
May 5, 2007
years after the Sex Pistols turned England on its head, their legacy still thrills, writes Suzy Freeman-Greene.
God save the Queen - the fascist regime
They made you a moron - potential H bomb
God save the Queen - she ain't no human being
There is no future - in England's dreaming.
THE SHIP SAILED DOWN THE Thames, flanked by police boats, and the band played on. As the Queen Elizabeth pulled into the dock, where even more police waited, Johnny Lydon kept singing, his eyes bulging, his mouth a snarl.
Almost 30 years ago, on May 27, 1977, the Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen. Britain was awash with celebrations for Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee. Lydon had written the lyrics in the kitchen of his Hampstead squat, originally calling the song No Future. It was a call to arms to anyone disenfranchised by class-ridden England, a place of dole queues and grim housing estates for those not sharing the dream.
These days the popular media has an obsessively '60s take on rock's radical legacy; newspapers run a constant stream of stories about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But the anniversary of God Save the Queen deserves to be noted. And at a time when many bemoan the lack of contemporary political songwriters, it's worth asking whether any song today could have quite the same impact.
The Pistols' June 7 performance on the boat Queen Elizabeth ended with 11 arrests. You can see footage of it in Julien Temple's film The Filth and Fury: in one frame Lydon sings while a London bobby puts an authoritative arm on the shoulder of Pistols drummer Paul Cook. Exactly what did the cops think was going to happen? This over-reaction to a promotional stunt showed just how spooked the British establishment was by the band.
The Sex Pistols formed in November 1975. Lydon, first seen walking down Kings Road in an "I Hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt, became the group's focus (at least till Sid Vicious showed up). With his orange hair, hunchback-like singing posture and jagged, quavering voice, he was an absurd, impish truth teller. "The band wasn't about making people happy," he has said. "It was about attack."
This contempt for the music industry, the labels and even the audience, was a radical feature of punk. "History is made by those who say 'no'," observes Jon Savage in his classic book on punk, England's Dreaming.
And it took the impudence of youth, the outsiders' reflexive dissatisfaction with the existing order, to make a band such as the Pistols. Watching footage of them today, one of the most striking things is how young they were. Pasty-faced English lads - all aged 21 or under in May 1977.
Lack of musical ability added to their jarring sound, fuelling punk's DIY aesthetic. Vicious brought a stagey toughness: snarling, picking fights, spitting on fans. As media reactions to the band became increasingly hysterical, one TV pundit dubbed punk "a bigger threat to our way of life than Russian communism or hyper-inflation".
God Save the Queen was banned from the airwaves. Three big chain stores (Woolworths, Boots and W. H. Smith) refused to stock it. By the end of Jubilee week, writes Savage, the song had sold 200,000 copies. But that week, the music charts either showed no top-ranking track or had Rod Stewart at number one.
Though pessimistic, Lydon's lyrics are also rousing. The second verse goes: "When there's no future how can there be sin? We're the flowers in the dustbin/we're the poison in your human machine/we're the future, your future". The tone, observes Savage, "was confident, clear, unapologetic". Recalled Lydon: "we declared war on England without meaning to".
Listening to the Pistols' best music today, it remains bracing and thrilling, with a real sense of danger. Thirty years on, their legacy is still being discussed, with journalist Clinton Heylin the latest to examine the lineage from punk to grunge in his new book Babylon's Burning (Penguin).
Punk, argues Heylin, was an attitude of mind, not tied to a specific sound or tempo. It attempted to restore a prelapsarian era in rock and roll, when the rules of commerce did not apply.
Heylin makes some interesting points but his book quickly becomes bogged down by great slabs of quotes from notables. In tracking every relevant band from the Stooges to Nirvana, it's the literary equivalent of trainspotting - strictly for aficionados.
The Pistols dissolved in 1979. In an updated introduction to his book's 2005 edition, Savage considers punk's impact. Bands such as the Pistols, he writes, "expressed raging emotions from behind a blank, sarcastic, hostile facade".
There was a great deal of unexpressed hurt in punk and a powerful vein of anti-consumerism. Its "utopian heresies" remain its gift to the world.
"Punk was at its most powerful when impossible to define," he notes. "This is not a weakness but a source of strength."
The fact that it was discouraged if not banned between 1976 and '77 resulted, he says, in an underground production and distribution network. "These ideals of access, since expanded on by the internet - have become one of punk's enduring legacies."
Punk has been revived again. It's also being sourced by more melodic, instrospective genres such as emo. The internet offers unprecedented opportunities for independent creation: you can put a video on YouTube; release a song online. You don't need record labels or radio playlists or TV stations.
These days, however, any sniff of a subculture is jumped upon by marketers, swamping punk's original anti-consumerist message. As for the Queen, well, she's still here, her dignity and power largely intact.
ACMI is running a "Focus on Punk" film season from May 11-20.
May 5, 2007
years after the Sex Pistols turned England on its head, their legacy still thrills, writes Suzy Freeman-Greene.
God save the Queen - the fascist regime
They made you a moron - potential H bomb
God save the Queen - she ain't no human being
There is no future - in England's dreaming.
THE SHIP SAILED DOWN THE Thames, flanked by police boats, and the band played on. As the Queen Elizabeth pulled into the dock, where even more police waited, Johnny Lydon kept singing, his eyes bulging, his mouth a snarl.
Almost 30 years ago, on May 27, 1977, the Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen. Britain was awash with celebrations for Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee. Lydon had written the lyrics in the kitchen of his Hampstead squat, originally calling the song No Future. It was a call to arms to anyone disenfranchised by class-ridden England, a place of dole queues and grim housing estates for those not sharing the dream.
These days the popular media has an obsessively '60s take on rock's radical legacy; newspapers run a constant stream of stories about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But the anniversary of God Save the Queen deserves to be noted. And at a time when many bemoan the lack of contemporary political songwriters, it's worth asking whether any song today could have quite the same impact.
The Pistols' June 7 performance on the boat Queen Elizabeth ended with 11 arrests. You can see footage of it in Julien Temple's film The Filth and Fury: in one frame Lydon sings while a London bobby puts an authoritative arm on the shoulder of Pistols drummer Paul Cook. Exactly what did the cops think was going to happen? This over-reaction to a promotional stunt showed just how spooked the British establishment was by the band.
The Sex Pistols formed in November 1975. Lydon, first seen walking down Kings Road in an "I Hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt, became the group's focus (at least till Sid Vicious showed up). With his orange hair, hunchback-like singing posture and jagged, quavering voice, he was an absurd, impish truth teller. "The band wasn't about making people happy," he has said. "It was about attack."
This contempt for the music industry, the labels and even the audience, was a radical feature of punk. "History is made by those who say 'no'," observes Jon Savage in his classic book on punk, England's Dreaming.
And it took the impudence of youth, the outsiders' reflexive dissatisfaction with the existing order, to make a band such as the Pistols. Watching footage of them today, one of the most striking things is how young they were. Pasty-faced English lads - all aged 21 or under in May 1977.
Lack of musical ability added to their jarring sound, fuelling punk's DIY aesthetic. Vicious brought a stagey toughness: snarling, picking fights, spitting on fans. As media reactions to the band became increasingly hysterical, one TV pundit dubbed punk "a bigger threat to our way of life than Russian communism or hyper-inflation".
God Save the Queen was banned from the airwaves. Three big chain stores (Woolworths, Boots and W. H. Smith) refused to stock it. By the end of Jubilee week, writes Savage, the song had sold 200,000 copies. But that week, the music charts either showed no top-ranking track or had Rod Stewart at number one.
Though pessimistic, Lydon's lyrics are also rousing. The second verse goes: "When there's no future how can there be sin? We're the flowers in the dustbin/we're the poison in your human machine/we're the future, your future". The tone, observes Savage, "was confident, clear, unapologetic". Recalled Lydon: "we declared war on England without meaning to".
Listening to the Pistols' best music today, it remains bracing and thrilling, with a real sense of danger. Thirty years on, their legacy is still being discussed, with journalist Clinton Heylin the latest to examine the lineage from punk to grunge in his new book Babylon's Burning (Penguin).
Punk, argues Heylin, was an attitude of mind, not tied to a specific sound or tempo. It attempted to restore a prelapsarian era in rock and roll, when the rules of commerce did not apply.
Heylin makes some interesting points but his book quickly becomes bogged down by great slabs of quotes from notables. In tracking every relevant band from the Stooges to Nirvana, it's the literary equivalent of trainspotting - strictly for aficionados.
The Pistols dissolved in 1979. In an updated introduction to his book's 2005 edition, Savage considers punk's impact. Bands such as the Pistols, he writes, "expressed raging emotions from behind a blank, sarcastic, hostile facade".
There was a great deal of unexpressed hurt in punk and a powerful vein of anti-consumerism. Its "utopian heresies" remain its gift to the world.
"Punk was at its most powerful when impossible to define," he notes. "This is not a weakness but a source of strength."
The fact that it was discouraged if not banned between 1976 and '77 resulted, he says, in an underground production and distribution network. "These ideals of access, since expanded on by the internet - have become one of punk's enduring legacies."
Punk has been revived again. It's also being sourced by more melodic, instrospective genres such as emo. The internet offers unprecedented opportunities for independent creation: you can put a video on YouTube; release a song online. You don't need record labels or radio playlists or TV stations.
These days, however, any sniff of a subculture is jumped upon by marketers, swamping punk's original anti-consumerist message. As for the Queen, well, she's still here, her dignity and power largely intact.
ACMI is running a "Focus on Punk" film season from May 11-20.