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 Wednesday
EVER GET THE FEELING YOU’VE BEEN REPEATED?
A decently enough put together PUNK documentary the other night on ITV 4. All the usual suspects: chirpy voiceover by Robert Elms, measured & intelligent enthusiasm from Jon Savage, quotes from various Upstarts, Shams, Damned etc
It was nice to (literally) see who has worn well and who hasn’t; who looks as if they have been on drugs for 25 years and who looks like they have found another passion in life that makes them glow.
Good that due attention was played to New York.
Nice that Mark P was allowed a yarn.
And so on.
But still and all, such programmes make me restless in my very soul. Because the very thing they are supposed to reflect – the life changing spirit of Punk – is notably absent…
Now, that spirit, as so many of the participants were at pains to point out, does not necessarily have anything to do with music, or the length of your career as judged by conventional muse-biz tenets. (Perhaps because if it did … too many of those concerned would look as if Punk actually changed nothing. Mates fall out over money or image or “musical differences”. Mates go broke and stage disturbing and chilly and farcical and shaming and fat trouser’d ‘comeback’ tours. Or, same teetering mates pal up with other junkies and riff-raff together albums of wanly awful rock n sludge that only the French could ever hold to their evil hearts.)
Perhaps the most wonderful thing is when the original 1-2-3-4! legacies remain untouched, perfect in some abrupt and clamorous distillation. The Slits, or The Raincoats for example. (Is this a coincidence, or no coincidence at all – that the women are sensible enough to sense and to say no? That the girls here look like the smart long suffering Marge n Lisas to the fat bellied dim headed Homer n Barts?)
I don’t really know – but it might be nice to speculate.
And that is just my point – that this programme, and these programmes, never did, never do. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone involved that simply burping ”punk” back up as a lump of lumpy sinewy grisly “History” – and bickering about who was the first to rip a t shirt or rip an acetate, etc – is about the most UN punk thing you could do. There was an uneasy sense here of who was absent – and what their reason might be; and so likewise, for those who “agreed” to be interviewed. Not to put too fine a point on it, about 2/3 of the talking heads (not Talking Heads) here looked like they might not have much else to do. But were in some way or another still “haunted” by some kind of rock n roll role playing or diabolism or addiction or habit or phrase it how you will. Maybe that’s OK. Maybe ending up in far flung pubs playing a rock n role version of the old guys who used to play Dixieland jazz or Elvis-altar type rockingannarollin (and spare tyre hidin') is OK, is even healthy, as some kind of “culture” in which the participants are at least involved, doing it rather than merely consuming it. Although again, I’m not sure, and would – just once – like to hear the toss, so to speak, argued in one of these programmes, rather than just having a parade of now balding thickening unhealthily complexioned 48 year olds repeating the wisdom/banality that still comforts them through long cold nights of life measurement and crisis: “I’d like to think I still AM a punk…” “... that the spirit of Joe 'n' The Clash still DOES flow through me veins…” yadda yadda yeah, gabba gabba bleary blah, that sort of thing.
It would be nice to have a history of “punk” theory maybe, an AFTER to go with the BEFORE of (roughly) Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, say.
Or some new perspective.
It occurred to me last night, for instance, that the real “winner” as it were, in terms of subversion and infiltration of the “mainstream”, massively, and imaginatively, and preposterously, and gloriously, and globally… well, take three iconoclasts:
John Lydon
Malcolm McLaren
Vivienne Westwood.
Now, who would YOU say has had the most interesting, the most enlivened, the least predictable career? Who has stuck utterly to her guns? Who hasn’t scrabbled around at the bottom of certain barrels and gone back on her words and sold shoddy half-limp rip-offs of the original mythos?
(The “her”, as they say, isn’t generic, ha ha ha. Ever get the feeling you’ve been pleated?)
Over the years I’ve read so many chummy all-mates-together profiles of McLaren – always written by smitten bloke writers, who duly trot out almost identical anecdotes and characterisations. (A bit like a rock version of Hunter S Thompson, only a bit more Wildean and twinkly, East End not Old West.)
Malcolm is a great night out.
Malcolm is a great yarner. (Yeah: yarn, that is what Malcolm has always sold. Never mind the accuracy, relish the wit ...)
Malcolm could sell ping-pong balls to Bangkok!
Malcolm – o lucky shameless twinkly wicked man! – loves to run out on cheques at restaurants! Which is, you know, just SO punk, man! (Er, can I just say: no it isn’t, it really isn’t at all?)
Malcolm is so well dressed, and even in a muddle Malcolm is the eternal imp and optimist faun and revisionist fun.
Malcolm is the Unreliable Narrator personified.
O, what a great night we had, my new pal Malcolm and me!
And so, blearily, on, blarney upon blarney, shtick leavening shtick, on into the early hours of ... the still empty dawn.*
And I have no doubt all this is true.
But what does it mean to most of us?
The same thing happens with Bono, doesn't it? Otherwise sane and critical male writers of a certain age go off to interview U2 (i.e., Bono) and for some reason their brain turns to mush – because he's so much more intelligent and charming and never stops and full of ideas and so much empathy and yadda yadda. Well, yeah, great. And so are loads of people you or I might know. But … your point is? I tried listening in to various bits of U2 live on C4 and environs at the weekend. I just DO NOT GET IT – U2 in terms of the actual music/sonics. I do not, and never have, and I suspect never will get it. It sounds like the dullest thing on earth to me. And Christ only knows how much more dull they’d be if they'd never had Eno!
(Not to mention the 3 trillion dollars worth of graphics and design and techno techno techno that constitutes their ever more ridiculous stage shows … er, isn’t that a bit of a King Kong carbon footprint you leave there every time you tour Bono?)
Anyhoo…
Where was I?
O yeah, being all punk drunk and iconoclastic – yeah yeah.
It was better than average, this programme.
Fred Vermorel mentioned the Situationists**, albeit only passingly.
B.P. Fallon mentioned Ian Dury (and how much the whippersnapper Lydon had imbibed from Kilburn and The High Roads gigs, allegedly.)
Someone mentioned Bernie Rhodes (how come… so little is known about him, still, now?)
Ari Up (with a v. fetching Gorgon 'do) and Viv put in vivid appearances, chalk and cheese, although both obviously full of singular and hard won and arduously maintained kinds of 'health' or life force or Eros)
Vivienne got more archive gab time than Malcolm.
(I LOVE the footage of her dancing at that early - St Martin's? - Pistols gig: she looks SO unaffectedly so unselfconsiously happy!)
And then it came to a bit of awkward end (just like in real life?).
Plenty of the interviewees said – 'Yeah, OK, the Man and the Man's monolithic seducing Biz clumped down hard on things the minute they started to look inspirational and insurrectionary and so on ... but the real point was DIY, that you could do it yourself, didn't need to wait for approval or money, that whatever your throw of the dice, be it fashion or music or writing, just go ahead, don't need to learn just do it,' etc.
Which doesn't explain why so many floundered once their record company life support was taken away.
Mark P was still smarting, nearly 30 years on, about The Clash signing to CBS, which he seemed to feel, still, was the Day the Music died, and who's to say he isn't right, in his own way, or little world, or personal dialectic?
And at just such a point as this, wouldn't it be nice to have - instead of the usual footage of ham-fisted Clash smash, maybe a blast of Evan Parker or Derek Bailey, contemporaneous, inspirational and Indie and unsigned and signature free and signature frenzy'd in *their* own way... ? I mean, even a bit of archive of The Fall or ATV wouldn’t go amiss, such things do exist I presume; or also contemporaneous movies, politics, you know, Fassbinder, RAF, the beginnings of Terror, the Mohawk of St Travis, whatever, a bit of contextual (h)air.
Billy Bragg, of all people, was the only one here to at least HINT at certain fault lines and contradictions, such as one of the ones that always got me: to wit, The Clash, I’M SO BORED WIV THE YOU-S-AY, but the minute they turn the corner out of sight of a Camden rehearsal studio or West way reggae shop, they go more American than America, they SWOOON into James Dean and Elvis and Bickle poses and all cockabillet-doux and ICONIC, yes, ICONIC, in the truest (and at the time, I thought, most pathetic) way, as if posing were the first the last the only grasp you had on culture, and it is suddenly all Cadillac fins and monochrome quiffs and oh my yes all those so “iconic” Penny Smith shots, and all those 19 page features by Salewicz and Morley and Bangs and Murray, in fact, I think I may have been the only NME writer who didn’t re-write Thomas Wolfe on the endless American road wiv the lads, instead, I got sent shit in the mail by disgruntled fans when I belched “The Clash are a dying myth,” whatever the hell I meant by that...
Rather, in hindsight, The Clash were definitely DYING INTO MYTH, yes, and making of their falling out & falling asunder a great American myth in 19 essential poses: I fought (rather than thought) the Law and the Imaginary won …
And the same thing with the Pistols, it was the American (m)id-West and its dance of huge empty desert-filled loss and ridiculous stunt gigs pulled by McLaren that betrayed the Pistols up on a plate to the hungry slavering pain-beast of rock n roll a rama lama swan song.
The gates were then open for the LEAST subversive elements to be taken up and flogged to death. The sad canonization of Sid e.g., as Pope of … well, sumfink. Something less than merely mischievous, unfortunately, and more like pure limping burned-out monomaniacal death drive.
Maybe Sid became an unfortunate template – just as Siouxsie and Slits were magnificent and enduring templates that changed the way young women looked at and to and out of themselves and dressed and the momentous way they did their makeup and thought about the stage as a Pandora's Box rather than a Pan's People cage, somewhere to start a ruckus from rather than silently go-go to, a place to reflect upon themselves rather than have other peoples misconceptions beamed back at them to the point of blinding no return –
Maybe Sid became the worst youth icon ever. E.g., I can't really remember, can you, seeing YOUNG beggars on the streets of London before Sid. Can’t remember ever seeing people still in their all-to-live-for teens who so apathetically limply EMBRACED complete self-abnegation as a way of “life” (or slow death, exit, real and true and shattering “alienation”).
Someone glib here (ah, yes, it was Alan McGee) told a silly anecdote about Captain Sensible falling over like a plank, bass in hand, and how this was wonderful; how it (and this was his precise word) showed such wonderful “nihilism”.
But that isn’t nihilism - it’s panto.
Nihilism is dying slowly because you can't think of a reason to live, or a way to live with even half a toe in the mainstream, and your heart like a sail full of some wind or other, even if it's a black wind, a blue and sidereal wind, but some kind of air in your sails each morning. Those who put on leather jacket and chains and slogans like a squaddie's uniform, like some kind of Tenants Extra and downers fuelled ‘national service’ duty, WAS that really rock n roll, or isn’t it rather everything punk or rock n roll or call it what you will was supposed to be against? Wasn’t the NO in No Future and the _____ in Blank Generation supposed to prompt some kind of ornery affirmation?
'Do it yourself' was an invitation to do something, not yourself in.
The subsequent history of an 'iconic' band like The Ramones, say, was not a happy one, in – it seems – any way whatsoever: they didn’t even remain friends. Heroin and greed and stupid ‘loyalty’ to rock as code decimated those who couldn’t see rock n roll as much more than a stylistic and (‘anti’) social straitjacket, arty-ficial lung, a crutch or prop.
Maybe it’s better when things firework and disappear, than when they hang around forever.
E.g. – Riot Grrrl here-and-gone is a zillion times better than Courtney Love's fourteenth 'exclusive' interview this month.
A few DIY 7 inches better than a whole lotta box sets and Mojo 50 greatest lists and so on.
I don’t know for sure.
But like I say – just for once, it would be nice to hear some of this explored – history as contradiction, dance of step and not, this that and antithesis, small and big… rather than a lumpy pudding, pressed into a homogeneity it was never meant to countenance.
And maybe instead of ending on lumpy affable Mani (Angelic Upstarts not upstart Roses) and shamelessly hammy Pursey (always the air, somehow, of a misplaced youth-club activities co-ordinator) and so on, we might have – a few strands of the weeds and thistles that grew, Throbbing Gristle, Daniel at Mute, genuien independence taht DID endure, all the things that have had a long and genuinely subversive effect …
All that isn’t so easily compressed into slogan and icon.
Yeah?
All that wasn't no future, and became this (and that and the other) future.
_______________
* {there was also jsut a squeak here, from Rat Scabies I think, about how The Damned were ripped off (at an early stage, on an early stage) by McLaren - and how disillusioned they were by this. And this is actually a constant refrain among people who have had dealings with McLaren - how he waltzes out leaving huge phone bills unpaid, rent upaid, royalties unpaid (which Lydon had to go to court to get, remember). It's one thing to rip off conglomerates - but when it is a pathology, a sneaky steal-and-run tic that you pull even on closes friends ... it feels a little less 'subversive', no?
**{21st Century joke: my Spellcheck blanked there, on 'Situationists', and suggested ... "Seditionists"! 'Ignore All Seditionaires?'}
posted by Ian 12/06/2006 11:29:00 AM
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THE PILL BOX 
