20th Century Women (2016)

Monday Toonage #4

I'm currently plowing through a doorstep of an e-book that purports to be the definitive oral history of punk so, in light of that wee morsel of literary information, for Monday's Toonage I have to plump for  'Nobody's Scared', the Subway Sect's debut single from 1978:

One of the great lost punk bands from that era. And Mr Godard and assorted friends are still doing the business 35 years on. First class!

Ramones by Nicholas Rombes (Continuum 2005)

The quality that insured the Ramones' first album would become one of the most important records in modern rock was the same quality that guaranteed they would never have the mainstream success in their time: a unified vision, the force of a single idea. There is a purity to Ramones that is almost overwhelming and frightening. Basically, the Ramones are the only punk group from the 1970s to have maintained their vision for so long, without compromise -  a vision fully and completely expressed on their very first album. In America, there is a skepticism and wariness about any artistic or cultural form that doesn't evolve, that doesn't grow. There is no more damning critique than the charge of repeating yourself. And yet punk was precisely about repetition; its art lay in the rejection of elaboration. And nowhere is this more evident than on the Ramones' first album, whose unforgiving and fearful  symmetry announced the arrival of a sound so pure it did not require change.

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.

'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.

Perhaps I'm the only one?

'Another Girl, Another Planet' is so fucking overrated.

Granted, it's a good song, but in no way does is it qualify as great. It's nothing more than the bastard cousin of Richard Hell doing the guest vocals on a Motors song.

It's taken me 15 years to pluck up the courage to voice that opinion out loud. Even know, I expect Pitchfork to turn up at the front door with the . . . erm, pitchforks. Knowing my luck, Peter Perrett will break a guitar string tomorrow and his fan base will hunt me down via google alert.

Someone disagrees. That person needs to put on a loud shirt and listen to Wham!'s debut album.

File this post under 'An iTunes Shuffle Epiphany'.

All The Years Of Trying: An Ode To Patrik Fitzgerald (2009)

From the Velvets to the Voidoids - A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World by Clinton Heylin (Penguin Books 1993)

Being 'more suburban', they had something in common with other CBGBs favourites that existed largely outside the scene. The Shirts, like those other local faves the Tuff Darts, were more interested in securing a record deal than in reviving rock & roll.

Annie Golden: We were the hicks from Brooklyn, never aspiring to go across the bridge, but we had read about the Mercer Arts Centre, which had just crumbled, and the back room at Max's, and we went down to see Patti Smith at CBGBs . . . We were holed up in Brooklyn, we all had day jobs, we were rehearsing eight to ten hours into the morning, saving money for equipment. Bands in Manhattan were doing it another way. They were like artists; they were doing minimalist rock and they were starving. But we had this big light show and a big PA.

The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi (Penguin Books 1990)

I soon realized that Eleanor's main guardian and my main rival for her affection was man called Heater. He was the local roadsweeper, a grossly fat and ugly sixteen-stone Scot in a donkey jacket whom Eleanor had taken up three years ago as a cause. He came round every night he wasn't at the theatre, and sat in the flat reading Balzac in translation and giving his bitter and big-mouthed opinion on the latest production of Lear or the Ring. He knew dozens of actors, especially the left-wing ones, of whom there plenty at this political time. Heater was the only working-class person most of them had met, So he became a symbol of the masses, and consequently received tickets to first nights and to the parties afterwards, having a busier social life than Cecil Beaton. He even popped in to dress rehearsals to give his opinion as 'a man in the street'. If you didn't adore Heater - and I hated every repulsive inch of him - and listen to him as the authentic voice of the proletariat, it was easy, if you were middle class (which meant you were born a criminal, having fallen at birth), to be seen by the comrades and their sympathizers as a snob, an elitist, a hypocrite, a proto-Goebbels.

I found myself competing with Heater for Eleanor's love. If I sat too close to her he glared at me; if I touched her casually his eyes would dilate and flare like gas rings. His purpose in life was to ensure Eleanor's happiness, which was harder work than roadsweeping, since she disliked herself so intensely. Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed. But she reported it to me, saying, 'D'you know what so-and-so said this morning? He said, when he held me, that he loved the smell of me, he loved my skin and the way I made him laugh.'

When I discussed this aspect of Eleanor with my adviser, Jamilla, she didn't let me down. 'Christ, Creamy Fire Eater, you one hundred per cent total prat, that's exactly what they're like, these people, actresses and such-like vain fools. The world burns and they comb their eyebrows. Or they try and put the burning world on the stage. It never occurs to them to dowse the flames. What are you getting into?'

The Story Of Crass by George Berger (Omnibus Press 2006)

While Steve Ignorant had no qualms about describing himself as an anarchist back then, he's more reticent now. "I've realised now that I don't know what to call it, where my political thing comes from. My 'anarchism' - or whatever it was - didn't come from an anarchist background. I tried to read Malatesta once and I just got bogged down in it. And I've never read Kropotkin and Bakunin or any of those people, it just didn't appeal to me. It didn't make sense to me. I know that for reference if I need to look at those books I can, and I know they're making important points, but I know that for me, where I was coming from was the black and white sixties movies like A Taste of Honey, John Osbourne and a film called To Sir With Love.

"One day we were talking about books around the table," continues Steve. "Pen was talking about Tolstoy and I chipped in with To Sir With Love, and was met with roars of laughter, it was quite a joke. When there was the yearly clear-out of books, out it went. But the Maigrets stayed. That book To Sir With Love is about one of the first black men to go into the East End of London and teach unruly white kids how to respect themselves and other people as human beings. Which I thought was the basis of anarchism, wasn't it? . . .

Fast Forwarding Through The Adverts

As their recent bulletin that I reposted on the blog indicates, Robert and Piers over at the SPGB page on MySpace have been good enough to repost Danny V's excellent article, Punk Rock's Silver Jubilee, on their blog.

I've posted the article myself a few times on the Socialist Standard page on MySpace but Robert and Piers, being more savvy than myself, have also had the good sense to break up the text with YouTube clips from such groups as X-Ray Spex, Sex Pistols, The Clash and Crass. One of their regular commentators on the page has also chipped in with the addition of a playlist of some of the songs mentioned in the article as a comment. (Nice Devoto version of 'Orgasm Addict', by the way.)

Therefore, just like the bloke you knew at school who always got into stuff the day after everybody else had moved on to something else (I was that bloke - how was I to know that the SPGB legwarmers were out of fashion in 1986? I didn't get the bastard memo.), I thought I'd get in on the act fashionably late by posting a couple of mp3s on the blog from some of the bands mentioned in the article.

As Piers, Robert and Terry have mostly focused on the early punk stuff, I thought I'd chime in with some post-punk material. It also saves me having to come up with a plausible explanation as to why Danny V's can love The Adverts so much, but can't bring himself to mention The Undertones in the article.

The mp3s are just for sampling purposes, and I'll only have them up for a few days. I urge you to check out the albums of the bands featured. All good stuff, and you can always take out a subscription to the Socialist Standard at the same time that you're buying the back catalogues of the featured artists on Amazon:

Au Pairs - 'Dear John' (John Peel Session) mp3

Delta 5 - 'Mind Your Own Business' mp3

Kleenex - 'Nighttoad' mp3

The Flowers - 'After Dark' mp3

The Au Pairs' track is from their 1980 Peel Session. Delta 5's 'Mind Your Own Business' was released in '79 by Rough Trade, and Kleenex - otherwise known as Liliput - were a post-punk band from Switzerland. I'm not sure when 'Nighttoad' was originally released, as I found the track on a compilation album. I'm guessing it dates from round about '78/'79.

I'll put my hands up to cheating with the last track included. Danny V doesn't mention The Flowers in his article, but I have enough faith in him that if he had known about them at the time, he would have given them a namecheck in the article.

Sadly, not a lot is known about The Flowers but what I do know is that they were from Scotland and signed to Bob Last's Fast Product label. Some of their early tracks are featured on the first Earcom compilation.

The featured track, 'After Dark', was originally released as a b-side to the single 'Confessions' in '79, but this version is from the Mutant Pop compilation that was released in 1980. A compilation which also featured The Mekons, Human League and the Gang of Four.

I personally think the song is a lost classic of the post-punk era, but maybe it wasn't lost to everyone. I can't help hearing traces of 'After Dark' in the PJ Harvey track, 'Dress', from her 1992 album, Dry. Maybe it's just me.