Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews by Simon Reynolds (Soft Skull Press 2009)

Simon Reynolds: Thinking about the city’s post-punk scene, it struck me that none of the Manchester bands inspired into existence by punk were particularly political. Certainly there was no protest punk, no agitprop.

Tony Wilson: I always thought the Pistols were the greatest band because they weren’t really agitprop. The more overtly agitprop lines were thrown in by Jamie Reid. None of real punk was Red Wedge. That would be too reasonable. Agitprop is socialist, but the whole background to punk is situationist. Punk was more simple and brutal, which is why post-punk had to happen. One of my only regrets is that Bernard in New Order is clever, and that so fucked me off. So, 1990, Radio One, I’m listening to a programme on the Joy Division/New Order story, and Bernie says, ‘Punk was wonderful, it got rid of all the shite. You can’t really remember how bad music was in the early seventies. It was diabolical, a total wasteland. Punk was an explosion that blew it all away, but it was simple and simplistic. All it could say was, “I’m bored.” Sooner or later someone was going to use the simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions.’ I was like, ‘Fucking hell, the bastard’s right again!’ My reworking of Bernie’s comment is, ‘Punk was wonderful, but all it could say was this one simple emotion: “Fuck you.”’ Sooner or later someone was going to have to use that music to say, ‘I’m fucked.’ And that was Joy Division.

I see Joy Division as the first band of post-punk and U2 as the second. Sure, they can be soap boxy and sermonizing.

Simon Reynolds: Oh yeah, you can hear PiL’s ‘Public Image’ in the early U2 sound. Talking about PiL, there’s a story about the Factory people driving around Manchester at night, stoned, listening to the first PiL album.

Tony Wilson: We loved PiL. We loved them so much, I rang them up and said, ‘Will you do a number on Granada Reports?’ This is early PiL. They came to Manchester and did some songs on the show. And then at 3.40 in the afternoon, John turns to me and says, ‘You still do that fucking club of yours?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ John says, ‘While we’re up here might as well do a fucking gig. Organize it.’ I asked Keith Levene, ‘Is he serious?’ and he says, ‘Yeah.’ So I called Alan Erasmus and asked if he could open the club that night. We’re running around like idiots. Got the news on Radio Piccadilly. At 7.30 in the evening I got A Certain Ratio out of bed to support them, and that night was Manchester’s first PiL gig. Fucking great. Another big band in Manchester was Suicide. Manchester loved Suicide. They played the Factory club at the Russell twice. When they supported The Clash, in every other city in Britain they got booed. But in Manchester it was ‘Fuck The Clash, we’re here for Suicide.’

But back to post-punk – I always think of Joy Division and U2. Two months after Ian died, U2 still hadn’t broken. There was this wonderful kid who was a radio DJ and plugger, and he used to bring U2 to every radio station and every TV station in the north of England every three months to break his beloved U2, whom no one cared about then. I remember him bringing Bono into my office, and Bono sat on the desk and said to me how incredibly sorry he was about Ian’s death. How it had really hurt him. How Ian was the number-one performer of his generation and he knew he was always going to be number two. And he made some statement – it didn’t sound as silly as ‘Now he’s gone, I promise you I’ll do it for him,’ it wasn’t as awful as that, but it was something like that. I thought, ‘Yes, thanks a fucking lot, fuck off.’ Until the afternoon of Live Aid. I was watching, so angry because all the dinosaurs at Wembley were playing and going out to the world, and they were all utter shite. And then U2 came on and they were good. And then a girl fainted, and Bono began to move off the stage to help her. I actually leapt out of my seat and said, ‘All right, I give in! You did it, you did it for Ian! God bless you.’ So God bless U2. They were fantastic at the Superbowl. Edge’s guitar was unbelievable.

The great line about U2 is Bernard’s again. It’s Rapido in 1989, and he’s asked whether as a pop star you can take yourself too seriously. And Bernard says, ‘Yeah, you can. You can get a bit above yourself. Like that guy, what’s his name . . . Bongo.’

Simply Thrilled: The Preposterous Story of Postcard Records by Simon Goddard (Ebury Press 2014)

In need of cheap soup and rich gossip, most lunch times Alan would wander to the Victoria Cafe, the social heart of the art school, open to students and casual interlopers, where the vain and resplendent gathered in conspicuous segregation according to their different artistic disciplines. Alan and Edwyn's catchpenny clothes stirred scornful laughs from the puffy new romantic posters of  the fashion school, but complemented the surrounding second-hand fixtures and fittings, plucked from an original site in Govanhill which had been due for demolition until rescued and reinstalled by the architecture students. The queen of the Vic was a big Irish woman called Mona, who specialised in assuring all patrons that the soup was vegetarian as she hauled the thigh bone of some poor slain unspecified beast from the same bubbling cauldron, and whose short-fuse hospitality blew at regular intervals in her cutlery-bending yell, 'Get outta ma cafe!'

The aloof fashion fops and their equilateral hair-dos aside, the art-school crowd and those who buzzed around its cafe and weekend discos were a sweet, oblivious antidote to the nice bores Alan had suffered at university. They were funny, nutty, fascinating and, to Steven's barely concealed annoyance, invariably 'greeeeeeat!'

The roll call of human specimens read as follows:

A candied darling who called himself 'Lucy Lastic'; who knew 'they' could never touch him for dragging up Sauchiehall Street as long as he didn't wear women's knickers; who knew no fear when it came to roaring 'fab doll!' at men the size of shipyards; who knew no shame when it came to recounting the gory details of his latest straight-corrupting conquest with his starter for ten, 'I've just been shafted'; and whose ultimate destiny in certain surgical procedures was beyond all reasonable doubt.

Jill Bryson, a pretty polka-dot Alice looking as if she'd missed the bus for Wonderland and ended up in Glasgow by mistake, living on the Great Western Road with her boyfriend and the rampant 'Lucy' in a flat below a dentist's surgery which rattled daily to the sound of drilling enamel.

Peter McArthur, Jill's boyfriend, a photography student and Southside punk who'd first befriended Edwyn at Glasgow College of Building and Printing, and later bewitched Alan with his shared love of Fellini, Pasolini, Cabaret and his unused ticket stub for the Pistols' phantom Apollo show. 

Drew McDowall, a performance poet from Paisley, and his young wife Rose from The Wee Scone Shop. When not surreptitiously handing out free pies to fellow punks under her boss's nose, Ross also played drums in Drew's band The Poems, once joined on stage by Edwyn and James for 'a musical recitation' of the hunting scene from War And Peace.

Gerry Hanley, Alan's usual lunchtime companion, who allowed him to join her cafe table of angry women in boiler suits, monkey boots and cropped hair, who shared a flat with the painter Adrian Wiszniewski and who herself, sometimes, could be coaxed on stage by Alan for a spot of performance art.

The tweedy man out of time called Malcolm Fisher, sufferer of untold allergies and pianist of unending jazz flourishes, who danced with his hands glued inside his raincoat pockets, whose flat, a chintz flock and floral eyesore like something from 101 Dalmatians, he shared with his similarly allergic sister.

And a punk graphic designer called Robbie Kelly, whose brother had very briefly strummed chords for the mythical Oscar Wild, and whose girlfriend, Anne, was usually seen pushing a shopping trolley down the street with a doll sat up front like a genuine baby.

As far as Alan was concerned, his new art school associates' rapturous reception to Orange Juice was an exploding plastic inevitability. He wouldn't be disappointed.

Detonation date was Friday 20 April 1979, as James Callaghan took forlorn stock of his final hours in Number 10 and as Art Garfunkel's 'Bright Eyes' bunny-hopped at number one somewhere above the shaking body of Michael Jackson, the wondering why of Sister Sledge and recently deposed yet eternally resilient Gloria Gaynor. The 1980s were but one catastrophic landslide victory and a few spins of the  glitterball away. The perfect time for Orange Juice, a name so wrong that it had to be right, to yodel their first Lifebuoy-scrubbed 'hello' to the universe.

God Save The Kinks by Rob Jovanovic (Aurum Press 2013)

Raymond Douglas Davies was born 21 June 1944 and, with six older sisters to coo over him, was instantly the star of the show. The girls used to take turns walking around with him to try and get him to sleep, and would play the gramaphone to help him settle. But his position as baby of the family did not last long.

Shortly after the end of the war, Annie was pregnant again, and Ray's brother, David Russell Gordon Davies, arrived on 3 February 1947. 'Ray's probably resented me since he was three years old,' said Dave. 'I fucked it up for him. He was the baby of the family, the centre of attention for three years. Then I cam along and stole his thunder.'

Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s by Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein (Abrams Books 2014)

Lori Majewski: Not sure if you realize it, JB [Jonathan Bernstein], but The Lexicon of Love is the reason we became friends. When you told me it was your favorite album of all time—back in the early nineties, when we were the only people who’d admit to liking new wave while working at a grunge-obsessed Spin magazine—I thought: Now, here’s a guy I can hang with. While I love Spandau and Culture Club, neither ever released a flawless long-player like Lexicon. The talky bits were my favorite parts, like in “The Look of Love,” when Fry says to himself, “Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love.” He always came across as such a hopeless romantic—it was the beautifully tailored suits, the way he referenced Cupid and Smokey Robinson in his songs, how he pined for a more chivalrous era. For an eighties teenager experiencing the thrill (and then heartache) of her first crush, ABC offered a vision of love that I could only hope the real thing would live up to.

MARTIN FRY: Decades don’t always begin at zero. They begin a couple of years in, the mood and style. A couple of years into the eighties, when I was forming ABC, I realized no one could be more Sex Pistol–y than the Sex Pistols or more Clash than the Clash. I loved punk, but it never seemed to go as far as it could have. Maybe Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes or Tony Hadley and Gary Kemp might say something different, but for me and for a lot of my generation, it was really frustrating the Clash were never on Top of the Pops. I wasn’t going to try and be a proto-punk. I wanted to do the opposite.

That’s why I got so excited by disco, which was a really dirty word at the time. I wanted to make music that was funky and radical. The early ABC was the “Radical Dance Faction”—that’s what we called ourselves. I’d also grown up loving Motown, Stax, and Atlantic, along with Roxy Music—Roxy performing “Virginia Plain” on Top of the Pops in 1972 was my road to Damascus. So it made natural sense to try and fuse those worlds. When I think back, looking at stuff like the Pop Group, James Chance and the Contortions, Pigbag, and all the bands that came through just before and just after ABC—Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode—there was a whole generation itching to make dance music, populist music. I don’t think it was any accident that all those bands became internationally known.

I interviewed Vice Versa for my fanzine, Modern Drugs, in 1979. They were kind of a fledgling Human League, only younger and less revered. When I went to interview Steve Singleton and Mark White, they said, “We’re going on a train from Sheffield to Middlesbrough to open up for Cowboys International. We’ve not got a drummer, but we’ve got lots of synths in our holdalls. You can stand onstage with us.” We got bottled off by these skinheads who didn’t get us. We were mohair sweaters and post-punk and ironic, but I loved it. After that, they let me join the band.

Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall by Luke Haines (William Heinemann Ltd 2009)

Colonel Klutz

December 1993. End-of-year round-ups in the music press. American bands still holding up – all polls feature Nirvana, Lemonheads, Belly and the Juliana Hatfield Three. Tindersticks by the Tindersticks is album of the year in Melody Maker. New Wave is at number 19. In the NME Writers' Top Fifty Albums of the Year Bjork's Debut is number one, and New Wave comes in at 18. In Select magazine New Wave is voted the seventh-best album of the year. And the best album of 1993 as voted for by the writers of Select: Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys. Suede lurk around the top three of most critics' polls, and Mr Blobby gets the Christmas number one in the singles chart.

The singer – who could now pass for an East End villain – has me pinned against the wall. After our, ahem, early-evening opening slot there had been an ominous knock on the dressing-room door.

'Can I have a word – outside?' says the singer, gesturing grimly towards me. Drunk and stoned post-gig, I follow obediently. I know what's coming. I orchestrated it so I'm looking forward to it. Quick as a flash the headline act pulls off some nifty pugilistic footwork and squares up to me. Jesus, what a knucklehead. I hadn't imagined his reaction to my onstage comments would be quite as physical. True, last night, with righteous anger and adrenalin raging through my veins I had been spoiling for a fight, but now I just wanted to be sacked – minus pasting.

'How much of a fucking prick are you gonna look when I kick the shit out of you onstage?' the singer asks unreasonably. It's a good question, and one that I assume is rhetorical. I drift off into a vision of myself being chased around the stage by a man in a gorilla suit, the gorilla's clumsy paws finally managing to grab me by the scruff of the neck before drop-kicking me high into the air to the whooping delight of the audience. Oh man, that would be entertainment.

'Well, answer me, you fucking cunt.' Not rhetorical then. I snap out of my reverie and slump back against the wall. I'm back in the playground about to take a hiding from a dim bully. There's nothing to do but let the scene play out. Shouldn't take long.

. . .

On paper it was unpromising. In real life it looked even worse. The Auteurs are booked to support Matt Johnson's band The The on a UK tour. All of this organised months in advance, before the recent setbacks, when life was a breeze and I would skip over lawns of freshly mown grass without a care in my head, laughing and doffing my hat to a cartoon bluebird as I bent down to pick a buttercup.

Tour with The The? Sure, if it keeps everyone happy and it sells some more records, why not? My levity lasts for about a day and a half. Reality dawns. The truth is, I don't care too much for Matt Johnson. He's some guy who sold a ton of records in the 80s, and now he's got some new dreck he's trying to flog. Coincidentally, some of the work on the new Auteurs album has been done at a recording studio owned by one Matt Johnson. The studio walls are covered in terrible paintings: some recognisable originals of The The album sleeves, others perhaps specially commissioned. The theme of the paintings seems to be ghastly men and ghastly women giving in to all manner of bodily functions with grim abandon. Oh, and imminent nuclear destruction. A clear indication of Johnson's faultless yet simplistic world view. Human race: awful. Never mind, will probably be extinguished in some sort of self-inflicted Armageddon. Told you so. The bastards deserved it. As I said, sold a lot of records in the 80s.

On no account attempt to tour the UK in December. Your limbs will become brittle with cold as you trundle up and down the country in a freezing tour bus and no one will come to your gigs as they are attending Christmas parties. Christmas parties in your hotel. Oh yes, the late-night bars of the Holiday Inn, Ibis and Radisson hotels – the après-gig drinking stations of the lower- to mid-level rock band. Every nook and cranny of these corporate flophouses taken over by drunken reps and violent drones from the frightening world of real honest work. Civvy Street – pissed up, embittered, trying to get over another empty year and on your fucking case.

Killing Bono by Neil McCormick (Pocket Books 2004)

I always knew I would be famous.

By the time I left school, at seventeen, my life was planned down to the finest detail. I would form a rock band, make a series of epoch-shifting albums, play technologically mind-blowing concerts in the biggest stadiums on the planet until I was universally acknowledged as the greatest superstar of my era. And I would indulge in all manner of diversions along the way: make films, write books, break hearts, befriend my idols . . . oh - and promote world peace, feed the poor and save the planet while I was at it.

You might think I was just another teenage airhead with fantasies of omnipotence. Indeed, there were plenty around me at the time who did their best to persuade me that this was the case. But I wasn't about to be put off by lesser mortals jealous of my talent. Because I knew, deep, deep in the very core of my being, that this wasn't just another empty dream. This was my destiny . . . 

So there I was, thirty-five years old, sitting in a shabby, unheated little excuse for an office above a bookie's in Piccadilly, watching the rain drizzle down my single, grimy window, wondering where it had all gone wrong. I'd wanted to be a rock star and wound up becoming a rock critic. To compound my torment, I was suffering from a bad case of writer's block with my newspaper deadline looming and the fucking telephone hadn't stopped ringing all morning with a succession of PRs pestering me about their shitty rock bands, all of whom I secretly resented for, I suppose, just being more famous than me. But at least talking on the phone gave me an excuse for not writing my column.

"It better be good," I snapped into the receiver.

"This is the voice of your conscience," announced my caller in a gravelly, wasted Dublin accent that reeked of smoke, late nights and fine wines.

"Bono," I said in recognition.

"You can run but you can't hide," he laughed.

"The way I feel right now, I don't think I could even run," I sighed.

It was, indeed, Bono: rock legend, international superstar, roving ambassador for world peace and (though it is unlikely to feature prominently on his CV) a schoolfriend of mine from Mount Temple Comprehensive.

Bedsit Disco Queen: How I grew up and tried to be a pop star by Tracey Thorn (Virago Press 2013)

I had never met anyone quite like Ben before. He was on the one hand simply posher than anyone I was used to, while at the same time less conventional and suburban through having grown up in a bohemian household. His dad had been a jazz musician and big-band leader, his mother an actress-turned-journalist and he was the fifth child in the house, the other four being half-brothers and a half-sister from his mother’s first marriage. Though three months younger than me, he had somehow managed to cram in a year off between school and university, during which time he had worked as a groundsman at a sports club, mowing lawns and marking out pitches. He seemed older than me, infinitely more self-confident and assured (which he wasn’t), and at first, after he interrupted a lecturer to correct a mistake the poor man had just made in his introduction to Beckett, I mistook him for an intellectual (which he certainly wasn’t). The displacement of the desk by the record player in his room should have alerted me to that fact, but it took me a while to realise that all he cared about was music, and it wasn’t until I noticed he was choosing his courses purely on the basis of which ones required the least reading that I finally let go of my initial misapprehension that he was cleverer than me.

So we would never share a passion for reading long Victorian novels, but at least he liked Vic Godard. As for the rest of his record collection, well, it reflected the fact that punk itself had largely passed him by. There were no Sex Pistols or Clash records. The band who really first inspired him was Joy Division, followed by other archetypal post-punks like Magazine, Wire, This Heat. Along with these bands Ben had records by people I had barely even heard of: Eno, Kevin Coyne, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart. In 1977 Johnny Rotten had famously broadcast a show on Capital Radio where he played his eclectic record collection. Many of the records he had played were also in Ben’s collection, alongside Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box. Then there were things like Neil Young’s Decade, and John Martyn’s Island albums, Solid Air and One World, all records Ben loved for their emptiness and sonic open spaces. A sprinkling of soul – Stevie Wonder, George Benson, Chic, Earth Wind and Fire. And jazz, of course, via his dad – Roland Kirk, Bill Evans, Clifford Brown. Not much pop, though. No Undertones, Buzzcocks or Orange Juice. Ben had more albums than me, but fewer singles. I thought that might need addressing.

He had played guitar in a couple of bands during 1979 and 1980. First, the startlingly named Fléau Moderne (French, apparently, for ‘modern scourge’), who dressed in grey sweatshirts and digital watches to look like David Byrne, except for the lead singer who was allowed to get away with wearing make-up and red trousers. They played one triumphant gig in front of an audience of two hundred and fifty at a church hall in Twickenham, at the end of which the drummer performed the customary salute of throwing his drumsticks into the crowd, only to have one thrown back and catch him in the eye as he left the stage. The local rivalry inspired by this gig was such that another nearby school formed a band called Macabre.

In 1980 Ben met Mike Alway at Snoopy’s, the club in Richmond where Mike promoted gigs, and asked if he could do a solo slot there one night.

‘Sure,’ said Mike, ‘what do you sound like?’

‘I sound like The Durutti Column with songs,’ said Ben, and on the strength of this Mike offered him a slot supporting the then unknown Thompson Twins, in ten days’ time. At this point Ben had never played a solo live set, or recorded anything, or in fact even written any songs. Surely this was audacity gone mad? But remember, the DIY ethos, still firmly entrenched, suggested that you could and should do anything you wanted, so he simply went home, wrote ten songs in ten days and did the gig. Performing under the name of The Low Countries (possibly to avoid identification, should it all go horribly wrong) he stood up with an electric guitar, a cassette player playing pre-recorded drum-machine patterns and sang desolate, atmospheric songs with titles like ‘Communion’, ‘A Darkness So Deep’, and ‘Ice’. It wasn’t hard to spot the Joy Division influence, and it all sounds about as far removed from the Marine Girls as you could possibly imagine. But the common strand came from the philosophy of the moment, which embraced more or less anything as long as it wasn’t hoary old rock music. Both of us were making quiet, minimalist music but within the context of rock-gig venues, where playing at low volume was in itself a confrontational thing to do. Music journalist Simon Reynolds quotes Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants replying to a heckler, who demanded some rock ’n’ roll, with the words: ‘Anyone can do that. They’re doing it all over town. But we want to do this.’

Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran by Andy Taylor (Grand Central Publishing 2008)

There was worse to come. "New Moon on Monday" was our least favourite video of all. Everybody in the band hates it, particularly the dreadful scene at the end where we all dance together. Even today, I cringe and leave the room if anyone plays the video. We shot it just outside Paris on the third of January 1984, and we were all miserable because we hadn't had a long enough Christmas holiday. Our management had convinced us to theme it on the French Revolution, and it also had historic references to the French Resistance - but, to be honest, it was just a load of gibberish. The set was dark and cold, and we spent most of the day drinking alcohol. By the time we were dancing at the end I was half cut. It is one of the few times I've seen Nick dance (watch his shoulders moving up and down if you ever get another chance to see it!). We were very uncomfortable with the whole thing. After "New Moon on Monday," we all thought, Bollocks - let's do something that's fundamental and solid.

The answer was a spectacular live video in the form of "The Reflex."

In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran by John Taylor (with Tom Sykes) (Dutton 2012)

Steve Jones is open about the influence Thunders's playing style had on him. In the documentary The Filth and the Fury, there is a hilarious sequence where film of the two guitarists is intercut, showing quite clearly just how much of Thunders's attitude Steve knocked off.

Something similar could be done with me. I would learn to take Thunders's signature slurs and guitar runs and transpose them to bass, along with the accompanying sneers. The first time I saw the Thunders's magic was on-stage at Birmingham  University. The opening act was a band I had not heard  of before, The Police. At that time I would sneak a cassette recorder into every gig I went to, and I set the machine to record when they began to play, even though I had no idea who they were. It was quite possible a band you had never heard of yesterday could become your favourite band tomorrow.

The singer with The Police also played bass, which struck me as quite clever and quite "un-punk." After the second number, he struck up a rapport with the audience of mostly students. A little too familiar, I remember thinking at the time, not knowing then that Sting had been a teacher and spoke "student" way better than he would ever speak "punk."

Sting: We've got the Heartbreakers coming on next.
(Cheer from me and one or two others)
Sting: They can't play, you know.
Me: Fuck off!
Sting: Who said "Fuck off'?
Me: I did. (all of this going down onto the cassette tape)
Sting: It's true. They're great guys but they can't play.
Me: Fuck off, you wanker!
Sting: You'll see. This next song is called "Fall Out"! 1 2 3 4 . . .

He was wrong about the Heartbreakers. They were awesome that night. At the BBC in 1993, filming "Ordinary World" for Top of the Pops, I was standing next to Sting watching a playback of our performance on a monitor. I thought to myself, I've got to tell him about that night, but before I opened my mouth he half-turned to me and said, "I wish I'd written that song."

Let's leave it at that then, I thought.

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook (Simon & Schuster 2012)

I’ve always read the Manchester Evening News cover to cover, ever since I was a kid. Don’t ask me why. Same with watching Coronation Street; it’s just something I’ve always done. Home is Becky and the kids, Corrie and the MEN.

Reading the small ads in the MEN was how I found out that the Pistols were playing at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, 50p a ticket.

Now my mates – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – have always been dead normal, so they weren’t interested. But I’d been going to gigs with Terry and Bernard and (apart from the infamous toothache incident) having a laugh, so I phoned Bernard up.

‘The Sex Pistols are on – do you want to go and see them?’

He went, ‘Who?’

I said, ‘Oh, it’s this group. They have fights at every gig and it’s really funny. Come on, it’s only 50p.’

‘Yeah, all right, then.’

Terry was up for it too, so it ended up being me, him, Barney and Sue Barlow, who was Barney’s fiancé. I think they’d met at Gresty’s house when he was sixteen or so. They’d been going out for a few years and used to fight like cat and dog. With the possible exception of Debbie and Ian, they had the most tempestuous, argumentative relationship I’ve ever known in my life. And they ended up getting married . . .

So that was it anyway, the group of us who went and saw the Sex Pistols at Lesser Free Trade Hall. A night that turned out to be the most important of my life – or one of them at least – but that started out just like any other: me and Terry making the trip in Terry’s car; Barney and Sue arriving on his motorbike; the four of us meeting up then ambling along to the ticket office.

There to greet us was Malcolm McLaren, dressed head to toe in black leather – leather jacket, leather trousers and leather boots – with a shock of bright-orange hair, a manic grin and the air of a circus ringmaster, though there was hardly anyone else around. We were like, Wow. He looked so wild, from another planet even. The four of us were in our normal gear: flared jeans, penny collars and velvet jackets with big lapels, all of that. Look at the photographs of the gig and you can see that everybody in the audience was dressed the same way, like a Top of the Pops audience. There were no punks yet. So Malcolm – he looked like an alien to us. Thinking about it, he must have been the first punk I ever saw in the flesh.

Wide-eyed we paid him, went in and down the stairs into the Lesser Free Trade Hall (the same stairs I’d laid down on many years before). At the back of the hall was the stage and set out in front of it were chairs, on either side of a central walkway, just like it was in 24 Four Hour Party People – although I don’t remember many sitting down like they are in the film. I don’t think there was a bar that night, so we just stood around, waiting.

The support band were called Solstice, and their best number was a twenty-minute cover version of ‘Nantucket Sleighride’. The original, by Mountain, was one of my favourite records at the time so we knew it really well, and we were like, ‘This is great. Just like the record.’

Still, though, nothing out of the ordinary. Normal band, normal night, few people watching, clap-clap, very good, off they went.

The Sex Pistols’ gear was set up and then, without further ceremony, they came on: Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Paul Cook. Steve Jones was wearing a boiler suit and the rest of them looked like they’d just vandalized an Oxfam shop. Rotten had on this torn-open yellow sweater and he glared out into the audience like he wanted to kill each and every one of us, one at a time, before the band struck up into something that might have been ‘Did You No Wrong’ but you couldn’t tell because it was so loud and dirty and distorted.

I remember feeling as though I’d been sitting in a darkened room all of my life – comfortable and warm and safe and quiet – then all of a sudden someone had kicked the door in, and it had burst open to let in an intense bright light and this even more intense noise, showing me another world, another life, a way out. I was immediately no longer comfortable and safe, but that didn’t matter because it felt great. I felt alive. It was the weirdest sensation. It wasn’t just me feeling it, either – we were all like that. We just stood there, stock still, watching the Pistols. Absolutely, utterly, gobsmacked.

I was thinking two things. Two things that I suppose you’d have to say came together to create my future – my whole life from then on.

The first was: I could do that.

Because, fucking hell, what a racket. I mean, they were just dreadful; well, the sound was dreadful. Now the other band didn’t sound that bad. They sounded normal. But it was almost as though the Pistols’ sound guy had deliberately made them sound awful, or they had terrible equipment on purpose, because it was all feeding back, fuzzed-up, just a complete din. A wall of noise. I didn’t recognize a tune, not a note, and considering they were playing so many cover versions – the Monkees, the Who – I surely would have recognized something had it not sounded so shit.

So, in fact, sound-wise it was as much the sound guy who inspired us all as it was the Sex Pistols, who were, as much as I hate to say it, a pretty standard rock band musically. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that they played straightforward down-the-line rock ‘n’ roll, but it didn’t make them special.

No. What made them special, without a shadow of a doubt, was Johnny Rotten. The tunes were only a part of the package – and probably the least important part of it, if I’m honest. Close your eyes and like I say you had a conventional pub-rock band with a soundman who either didn’t have a clue or was being very clever indeed. But who was going to close their eyes when he, Johnny Rotten, was standing there? Sneering and snarling at you, looking at you like he hated you, hated being there, hated everyone. What he embodied was the attitude of the Pistols, the attitude of punk. Through him they expressed what we wanted to express, which was complete nihilism. You know the way you feel when you’re a teenager, all that confusion about the future that turns to arrogance and then rebellion, like, ‘Fuck off, we don’t fucking care, we’re shit, we don’t care’? He had all of that and more.

And, God bless him, whatever he had, he gave a bit of it to us, because that was the second thing I felt, after I can do that. It was: I want to do that. No. I fucking need to do that.

Tony Wilson said he was there, of course, but I didn’t see him, which is weird because he was very famous in Manchester then; he was Tony Wilson off the telly. Mick Hucknall was there, and Mark E. Smith and everyone, but of course we didn’t know anybody – all that would come later. The only people we knew there were each other: me and Terry, Barney and Sue. I don’t know what Sue made of it all, mind you; I’d love to know now. But me, Barney and Terry were being converted.

The Pistols were on for only about half an hour and when they finished we filed out quietly with our minds blown, absolutely utterly speechless, and it just sort of dawned on me then – that was it. That was what I wanted to do: tell everyone to Fuck Off.

Pet Shop Boys, Literally by Chris Heath (Da Capo Press 1990)

Someone mentions the reviews. Neil says it was stupid to invite the press to an added, unsold-out show. 'They all had to gleefully mention it wasn't full, but no matter. It was a major PR mistake but to be honest,' he laughs, 'tough bananas.'

'A lot of people went home very happy and that's what counts,' says Carroll. 'It's very expensive. They make a choice sometimes between buying the tickets and paying their bills. It's a great honour.'

This is said with such honesty and feeling that you can sense everyone present drawing breath, taking stock, storing this away.

Neil reflects on the Daily Telegraph's comments. 'It was written from Olympian heights. It was so patronizing. They're jealous. And of course the reason is because I'm a journalist . . .'

'Tossbag,' mutters Danny, succinctly.

Carroll begins once more. She says that these people are stupid, that they've no idea why people do these things. They're always looking for stupid motives. 'They think you do it for the money or something. The reasons are obvious,' she declares. 'You do it for entertainment and self-expression.'

This statement, casually tossed out to a half-drunk, back-of-the-bus rabble, makes a lasting impression.

A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage by Joe Jackson (Public Affairs 1999)

I'm listening to an album called Look Sharp, by a guy called Joe Jackson. Despite the fact that he has the same name as me, and even looks a bit like me, I'm trying to pretend that I've never heard of him, and that I'm hearing this music for the first time.

So how does it strike me?

It positively reeks of the year 1978, although it wasn't released until the beginning of '79. It sounds like it was made in just a few days, and I laugh as I'm reminded that most of the time it's actually in mono.

As for the style of the music: There is no style. The late '70s vintage, and the general rawness of the sound, place it more or less in the New Wave. But a genre-spotter could find bits of jazz, reggae, latin, '60s pop, R&B, punk, funk, and even disco. There are echoes of the Beatles, Steely Dan, and Graham Parker. What I hear, I think, is a guy with eclectic tastes, who, by sticking mostly to just guitar, bass, and drums, and by keeping everything almost obsessively simple, has created the illusion of a style - and a style that would have been very much in sync with its time. He's also created the illusion of being a bratty rocker with a few snappy tunes. In fact, as his choice of chords and his jazzy piano-playing suggest, he's a much more accomplished musician.

I hear a voice that is a bit strained, and has a limited range, but is quite distinctive. I hear some good tunes and some awkward, childish lyrics, although they at least demonstrate, here and there, the saving grace of humor. And I definitely hear the cynical worldview of a man in his early twenties. At twenty-three or twenty-four it seems very clever to say that the world is just a bag of woe. By the time you get to, say, forty, you've seen some woe, and it's not so funny anymore.

Along with the cynicism I hear a lot of irony, which is not the same thing. Irony is a legitimate device, a way of being funny and serious at the same time, a subtle way of making a point. But irony should be handled with care. All too often, it's used as a defense. We use it to hide the fact that we don't have the courage of our convictions, the nerve to say what we really think or how we really feel. If irony hardens into habit, we become stiff, restricted, emotionally constipated. I like to think that hasn't happened.

All in all, I like Look Sharp. It makes me smile more than it makes me cringe. But it surprises me, in retrospect, that more people didn't see through the illusions - illusions that I wasn't going to be able to keep up for more than another album or two. Once the fuss died down, and I was no longer the flavor of the month, I would have two choices, neither of them easy. I would either have to turn Look Sharp into a formula and crank it out indefinitely, becoming a cartoon character in the process; or do some growing up in public.

London's Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977 by Dave Thompson (Chicago Review Press 2009)

Somebody—I don’t know who, but they didn’t look impressed—pointed out Siouxsie Sioux, the dominatrix-clad queen of a gang of fashion horses known to themselves as the Bromley Contingent, über-followers of the Pistols machine, who were fast garnering as much notoriety as the band itself. Someone else nodded pityingly toward a beanstalk by the stage, leaping up and down on the spot and clearly in danger of crashing through the ceiling. Muted by the din of the band, you could lip-read their contempt nevertheless.

“Look at that idiot.”

I looked. I knew him. Bev . . . John Beverley . . . lived in Finsbury Park, close by the station where I swapped my bus ride for the tube. A total Bowie nut, which is why a mutual friend introduced us, he enjoyed nothing better than a lager-fueled argument over which of the master’s songs was the best. Neither, at the time, did I. But whereas I was willing to change my opinion, depending upon what kind of mood I was in, Bev was unyielding.

“‘We Are the Dead’?” I would suggest.


“Fuck off! ‘Rebel Rebel.’”

“‘Drive In Saturday’?”

“‘Rebel Rebel.’”

“‘Cygnet Committee’?”

“I said, Fuck off!” And so it would go on until Bev fucked off, usually lured away by one or other of the pimply weasels who’d renamed him Sid, but who themselves were also named John: Wardle, who was sufficiently pear-shaped to be rechristened Wobble; Gray, who was anonymous enough that his surname already suited him; and Lydon, who was now up onstage with the Pistols, flashing the teeth that first gave him his nom de guerre. Sometimes you wondered what Bev saw in them. He hated it when they called him Sid, he hated it even more when they added the surname Vicious. And it was pretty obvious that his main attraction to them was to see how many outrageous stunts they could prompt him to rush into, simply by reminding him what a “great laugh” he was, and letting his overdeveloped need for attention to take over.

But he never shrugged them off, and you saw less and less of Bev these days, and more and more of Sid Vicious. One day, a few worried friends prophesied, Bev would vanish altogether and Sid would take over completely. Tonight, for sure, Sid was in total control, bouncing up and down on the dance floor, grinning wildly at the noise that his mates were making, and utterly oblivious to the fact that whatever rhythm he was hearing in his head was inaudible to everyone else in the room. Somebody said it looked like he was riding a pogo stick. Somebody else thought it looked like fun. The next time you saw the Sex Pistols, half the audience would be doing it.

Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello by Graeme Thomson (Canongate Books 2004)

Ironically, the two stand-out tracks on the record were the sparsest, the ones that mostly steered clear of sonic gimmicks. 'Pills and Soap' was a stark, stabbing piano track based on Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message', rush-released as a single in May on Elvis's own IMP label and then supposedly deleted - in actual fact, it never was - on the eve of the 1983 general election. Loosely inspired by a film about the abuse of animals which had made Elvis turn vegetarian, it hid a scabarous - if obscure - political viewpoint beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, 'Shipbuilding' stood up against the very best of his recorded output. While always conceding that Robert Wyatt's version was the original, Elvis liked the song so much he wanted it to be heard by the widest number of people possible. To make his version even more distinctive, he visualised a trumpet solo on the track.

Chet Baker wasn't the first choice. Langer recalls that Wynton Marsalis was discussed but wasn't in the country, while a typically undaunted Elvis had Miles Davis as his original first pick, but it so happened that Baker was in London in May playing a residency at The Canteen. His melancholy, melodic trumpet sound and remarkable good looks had made him a 1950's poster boy, but he had since descended into a grim cycle of cocaine and heroin addiction which gripped him until his death in 1988.

By his own admission, Baker had never heard of Elvis Costello, but when Elvis sounded him out at The Canteen, he quickly agreed to play for scale. 'It was a cash deal,' recalled Elvis. 'He just came in; it may well have been the next day.' Elvis offered to double the jazzman's standard union fee, and few could doubt he was worth every penny.

'One of the best things we ever did was 'Shipbuilding',' recalls Bruce Thomas, still moved by the experience many years on. 'That was probably one of the musical high points. Chet Baker, this wizened corpse on death's door, strung out, just played. He followed this bass line and played his solo, so simple, with so much soul in it. It really touched me. It was one of those things that really made me think about how you judge people.'

While Langer concurs that Baker's final contribution as heard on the record was inspirational, he remembers the session being a tough one. 'We recorded the track live, but he kept blowing bum notes when we got to his solo. He was going, "This isn't jazz!" so he couldn't quite get it. That solo is three whole takes - the band as well - edited together, to get it to work. He was pretty spaced out.'

The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck (Continuum Books 2007)

I'm not sure of the exact reason Gary Usher chose "Artificial Energy" as the first track on The Notorious Byrd Brothers, but it sure sounds like that's exactly where it belongs. A few swift cracks of the snare drum and the arrangement instantly springs to life. It feels as if the band are so charged up they can hardly wait to count the song off and go. The instrumental approach is hard and aggressive, and stylistically it relates to the recently released "Lady Friend" in that a horn section is featured. But while "Lady Friend" comes off sounding all strident and regal, "Artificial Energy" has a darker edge. This is mostly due to the song's lyrical imagery, which deals with the horrors of amphetamine use. Strangely, whereas their 1966 single "Eight Miles High" was banned because it supposedly contained overt drug references, no one batted an eyelash when the Byrds actually did write an honest-to-God drug song.

In "Artificial Energy" the song's protagonist takes his "ticket to ride" (okay, there's a drug reference and a Beatles reference all rolled into one), and sits alone waiting for it to take effect. Slowly he feels an "artificial energy" welling up inside, but as the drug takes hold something horrible happens. Instead of achieving some kind of enlightenment, our hero ends up losing control and, in the song's stark final imagery, kills a homosexual and winds up being thrown in jail.

Head-on: Memories of the Liverpool Punk Scene and the Story of the "Teardrop Explodes", 1976-82 by Julian Cope (Thorsons 1994)

A bunch of guys I'd seen loads were going crazy about Subway Sect. Actually, most of them were standing looking at just this one guy, who was going crazy on his own. This guy was a bit of a loudmouth. I'd noticed him in Probe before. But his face was so animated, I stood and gazed at him. He wore a black leather jacket and black combat pants. He had a Clash T-shirt under the jacket, which was zipped halfway. His hair was a natural black and gelled into a boyish quiff. In fact, everything about him was boyish. He was the most enthusiastic person I had ever seen. Beautiful. On his leather was a home-made badge. It said: "Rebel Without a Degree".

The Modfather: My Life With Paul Weller by David Lines (William Heinemann 2006)

Getting inside the Pavilion was like stepping into a furnace. The floor swam in warm beer and the air was thick with smoke. The noise from the chanting, baying crowd drowned out the support act - a skinhead poet who went by the name of Seething Wells. I could hardly believe it, I mean, putting on a poet to entertain The Jam Army? Then I got it. I got it right there and then what Paul was trying to do. He could have stuck anyone on as support and they wouldn't have survived the audience who were so desperate to see The Jam they would have even booed The Beatles off stage. Paul was also trying to make his audience see that by having someone as support come on and recite poetry, he was distancing himself from the 'Jam Army'. Seething Wells, however, was on fire. I don't mean he was on top form, I mean the man had been set alight. The record company were handing out album sleeves on the way in, and someone had set fire to one and sent it, flaming, spinning through the air, skimming the heads of the crowd like a fiery frisbee onto the stage where it caught the sleeve of his green bomber jacket and in precisely three seconds flat the thing went up like a bonfire. Seething was seriously seething and frantically tried to get his jacket off but it had started melting into him, a roadie ran on with a bucket of water and chucked it all over the poor fat poet and then Seething ran off - it was like a trip to the fucking circus - and then, from nowhere, John, Paul's dad, was on stage and a mighty, mighty cheer went up . . . 'For those of you sitting down at the back, please be upstanding for . . . The Jam! The place exploded.

This Little Ziggy by Martin Newell (House of Stratus 2001)

We have no extradition treaties with the past. That is, we can't bring our younger selves back into the present to account for our doings there. At best, all we may have are a few scribbled notes on faded paper and perhaps a handful of faded Polaroids to tell us that events ever really happened at all. These recollections begin in the late summer of 1964 and end in the early spring of 1975. They are not, therefore, an autobiography as such.

'77 Sulphate Strip by Barry Cain (Ovolo Books 2007)

The Jam

Royal College of Art, London

It's a godawful small affair . . .

Stage as long as Platform six at Victoria station. Baggageless porters The Jam 40 feet apart and monitorless. Full house. Lights! The Tyla Gang before and the Cimarrons after.

An artless audience at the Royal College of Art show their appreciation of the white-soul boys up there on the stage with the huge Union Jack backdrop depicting the three moods The Jam take you through at a gig - red hot expanding into white heat, contracting into teenage blue.

In case you’ve forgotten, guitarist Paul Weller, bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler are The Jam. They are not, I repeat not a recycled Who. They write concise, contemporary songs like ‘ln The City’, ‘Bricks & Mortar' and 'I’ve Changed My Address’ enhancing the overall effect with a shrewd selection of old material 'Batman’, ‘So Sad About Us’ and ‘Midnight Hour'. The result? A well-equipped show; incisive, dynamic, piebald. Black suits, white lights, black ties, white shirts, black thoughts, white rock. They won't blow it now.

The Jam always come across as much younger than other bands, like Brian Kidd in a team of Bobby Charltons. They have the pace and the sneer - Paul Weller could hardly be described as ‘this smiling man’. He drinks but refuses to take drugs on the grounds that they are immoral, debilitating and, well, uncool. Drug-induced confidence is unnecessary for the cool dude that's Paul Weller. But he gets more hangovers that way.

Paul is cool because he's a man with a genuine talent who hasn't quite realised it yet. And that's when the good stuff comes.

Document and Eyewitness: an Intimate History of Rough Trade by Neil Taylor (Orion Books 2010)

Geoff Travis: Alan Horne used to come in and play his Andy Warhol games. He was always a bit miffed with me because when he originally came down looking for a distribution deal and played me Orange Juice's 'Falling and Laughing'. I listened to it and quite liked it but didn't say it was the best single I'd heard in my life and that reaaly annoyed him. He went back to Scotland and Orange Juice made 'Blue Boy' and it got Single of the Week in Melody Maker. I read the review, listened to the record and loved it and said to myself that maybe I had been wrong about them. So I called up Alan and offered him a distribution deal. I think that not having embraced Alan's genius immediately counted as a big blow against me.