by Boff Whalley.
The music that really woke me up – that shook me out of a self-imposed adolescent rebellion full of Frank Zappa and the Bonzo Dog Band, in itself an antidote to the prevailing schoolboy flared-trouser post-hippy hangover typified by Genesis and Pink Floyd – was punk. Specifically, the Sex Pistols. Not on an intellectual level (after that initial burst of energy I rarely listened to their records) but in a visceral bolt-from-the-blue whooooosh! of fun and danger, of championing a new music that every agent of the straight, conservative world hated. From the Pistols’ whooooosh it was an easy tumble into a fizzing new landscape that wasn’t just men with guitars but poets, all-women bands, artists, shouters, street-politicians, all the beautiful freaks from Joe Strummer to Elvis Costello to The Slits, belligerent and clever with it, a kick up the arse of the 1970s and a pointer towards the next decade.
It wasn’t until years later – ten, twenty – that I could put my finger on why this new music had felt so different, so exciting. I mean, I’d already been flirting with the weirdos by buying imported Fugs and Zappa albums before punk came along. I would’ve bought those Residents records too, even though I’d never heard the music, if I could have afforded them.
Why punk felt so different for me wasn’t its wildly varying and varied sound or its eccentric sense of style (though I loved both) but its words. I’d always loved words. I grew up devouring books and decided in my early teens I ought to write poetry. My first ever out-of-town show was to see Roger McGough, a Liverpudlian poet, playing in a depressing red-brick working men’s club in some freezing outpost of northern England. Words. That’s why I loved the early Frank Zappa albums – the lyrics were clever and cynical, barbed and witty. My childhood heroes The Beatles had a way with words, and brief flings with The Doors and Leonard Cohen led me to believe that rock ‘n’ roll had a place for poetry, too.
But before punk, the lyric – and specifically the rock lyric – seemed to consist almost entirely of love songs. And no matter how well you write a love song, there’s a point when the thrill of innovation and surprise just isn’t there anymore. Even rebellious figureheads like Hendrix, Joplin and MC5 dealt mainly in love songs of one form or another. CSN&Y and Joni Mitchell sometimes dealt with social issues, but lyrically they were less about rallying cries than about pleas for change. Dylan’s politically-charged, Guthrie-inspired early songs were what he’d call ‘observations’ rather than direct attacks (and he gave up on them as soon as popularity reared its head). There was so much in the world to sing about, but in retrospect, despite a few notable exceptions, the soundtrack to those times was, at its spikiest, full of little more than admonishing and cajoling, finger-pointing and tut-tutting.
Punk was different. From its very inception, it roared in anger. It spat and swore and sneered its hatred. I was fifteen years old when the Pistols made their television debut on local TV (I was lucky to live in Lancashire, home of the pioneering maverick television host Tony Wilson, who would later found Factory Records. He insisted on having the band on his weekly arts/pop show). They sang ‘Anarchy In The UK’, live, and frankly I could make out little of what they were saying. But whatever they said, the little I could understand, was delivered with such an amount of anger that I was completely captivated. I’d read about them in the New Musical Express, and dismissed them; I can’t remember why. But watching them, I suddenly understood what the fuss was about. There’s a You Tube video of that first TV performance which I’d urge you to watch. Wilson introduces the band, hilariously, as ‘one of the most reviled bands of recent weeks.’ There’s a rumble of bass and feedback. Wilson shouts ‘Take it away!’ as the noise builds behind him, and then there’s Rotten, hanging onto the mic stand, yelling over the cacophony. The first few words he screams are practically inaudible – something sarcastic about flowers, romance and Woodstock – but what’s clear is that infamously manic stare and the roared, bellowed line ‘Get off your arse!’ before a guitar intro and the opening lyric:
I am an anti-Christ
Blimey. Right there in my living room in Burnley, in our devout Mormon family home, was a man declaring himself the anti-Christ. Previous to this I’d had to play the Beatles’ White Album in secret, never mind having some bloke blaspheming all over our green nylon carpet. I believed him, too, this man in the torn pink jacket, hair chopped and scruffed, eyes blazing.
And this was what I eventually came to realise had been missing: anger. Not a theatrical or reasoned or delicate or poetic anger; a furious, in-your-face anger. The pattern was set; now music could look at the real world and allow its anger to come barrelling out of the speakers and the records, allow itself to go on the attack. Instead of ‘Everybody look what’s goin’ down’ we got ‘I wanna riot’; and for the next few years I was able to form a worldview, a gradually-informed critique of capitalism and neo-liberalism to a perfect soundtrack of what the outraged Daily Mirror newspaper headline referred to as ‘The Filth and the Fury!’
What was significant about all this rage was that it picked its targets well; it wasn’t just aimless pissed-off youth railing against their parents or their girlfriends, it was focussed on those who wielded power, whether it be government, press, police or corporations. In the hands of lyricists like Elvis Costello, Ari Up of The Slits and Joe Strummer of The Clash, the anger could be given narrative and drama, could be beautifully-crafted.
In December 1977, Elvis Costello was invited to appear on America’s Saturday Night Live as a late replacement for the Sex Pistols, who were having trouble with travel visas. Costello decided to use his first US TV slot to play ‘Radio, Radio’, an unreleased song attacking the power of corporate commercial broadcasting in the States. The producers decided otherwise; he was requested to drop the track in favour of ‘Less Than Zero’, taken from his newly-released US debut album. This he did, for a few bars, before suddenly halting the song, turning to his band and shouting ‘Radio, Radio!’ – whereupon he sang what he’d intended to sing all along, spitting out his hatred with a venom reserved not only for the powerful conglomerates but for the show’s censorious producers behind the cameras.
I wanna bite the hand that feeds me
I wanna bite that hand so badly
I want to make them wish they’d never seen me
The Slits took the anger of punk and wound it up tightly with the fury of the embattled 1970s feminist movement. They refused to play by any rules that rock ‘n’ roll had concocted for them as females, doing the dirty on decorum and style and welding their brittle reggae together with spittle and self-confidence.
Don’t take it personal
I choose my own fate
I follow love
I follow hate
Here was a new pop language, a language not of urging and requesting, but a language of demanding and refusing. It informed the best of what was to follow into the 1980s, gave an edge to the best of rock ‘n’ roll’s lyricists – it’s fair to say that, beneath the last few decades of Madonna/Jackson pop sheen, there’s been a healthy dollop of anger lacing some of the best music, from the in-your-face fury of Black Flag and Dead Kennedys to the gently seething rage of The Smiths and The Specials, from the upper-class-baiting Paul Weller to Billy Bragg and Crass, across a wealth of musical stylings through to The Prodigy, Nirvana and Green Day and of course right into the heart of hip-hop.
As Rotten/Lydon himself sang in 1986 on the anthemic ‘Rise’, ‘anger is an energy’. I’m a reasonably firm believer in Beatles biographer Ian MacDonald’s loosely-described theory that sees today’s western art and culture in decline; that sometime during the 1970s the Anglo-American model of ‘culture’ reached its pinnacle and since then has been in an irreversible cycle of repeating and regurgitating itself as it struggles for new forms. If it’s at all true (and time will tell) then the advent of punk, with its temper-fuelled antagonism, might be seen as the last great kick of new and shocking creativity.
But what’s possibly more important is that punk made it commonplace, and normal, to use anger in inventive and original ways; to put tunes to the critiques. Punk didn’t replace the radical movement’s pamphlets and marches, chants and sit-ins; but it added a genuinely new and noticeable voice. As Tony Wilson, host of that first Pistols appearance, says when the last cry and hum of feedback has ended in that TV studio in Manchester:
“Bakunin would have loved it”
*
Sex Pistols first appearance on TV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94DNV6oM8HU
Elvis Costello plays ‘Radio, Radio’ on SNL: