by Bob Stanley
When Chuck Jones was once asked who he made cartoons for, adults or children, he said, ‘We made them for ourselves.’ Desperate Bicycles’ ‘Smokescreen’, released in the spring of ’77, was a record entirely about itself (‘It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it!’). The group admitted they were formed ‘specifically for the purpose of recording and releasing a single on our own label’. Their second single, ‘The Medium Was Tedium’, railed against the industry (‘Just another commercial venture!’) with as much righteous anger and humour as ‘Anarchy in the UK’, only this time the drums were made of cardboard, and Steve Jones’s guitar had been replaced with Nicky Stephens’s Winfield organ: the sleeve boasted that the complete cost of recording and pressing a few hundred copies of ‘Smokescreen’ was £153. ‘If you can understand, go and join a band.’ The floodgates opened.5
DIY related to punk in the way skiffle had to rock ’n’ roll. Strange, redundant keyboards were a common feature, as punk had laid waste to anything outside the guitar/bass/drums set-up and this old gear was going cheap (Martin O’Cuthbert’s Vocal Vigilante EP lists a Dubreq Stylophone and a Crumar Performer as his instruments, both highly desirable now but obsolete technology in the post-punk heat of February ’78). The look was monochrome, handmade, an A4 photocopied sleeve wrapped around a hand-stamped seven-inch single.
Like the folk-rock scene of a few years before, DIY was fiercely localised, largely because the music industry and London were so closely tied. One of the genre’s most directly emotional singles was by Hornsey at War. Then there was the Good Missionaries’ ‘Deranged in Hastings’, and ‘Wickford’s So Boring’ by Grinder. These were truly private projects. No one expected their records to reach beyond their home town’s boundaries, so contact addresses rarely appeared on the sleeves. It was far more common to find a list of pressing plants, printers and costs worked out to the penny – the Desperate Bicycles’ £153 was the real benchmark of DIY. Competition over who could function on the smallest budget was intense.
If the DIY side of punk had a centre, it was the Rough Trade shop at 202 Kensington Park Road, which opened in ’76. Some of the new independent labels, like Small Wonder (in London), Factory (Manchester) and Fast Product (Edinburgh), had collectivist ideals and a profit-sharing relationship with their acts. An infrastructure was built of independent labels and independent distribution. The NME and Sounds soon had weekly columns on cassette albums. This was about as far removed from corporate rock as you could ever get. To quote Hornsey at War, ‘They won’t play this on the radio because it poses a threat.’ Far closer to the Situationist International – hand-printed, self-promoted – than the Clash and their deal with CBS, DIY was the last hurrah of the Angry Brigade, and good hippie aesthetics.
Even the DIY aspect of punk can cause an argument in an empty room. It had been there at the start of punk, with its fanzines (Sniffin’ Glue first appeared in the summer of ’76, swiftly followed by Ripped & Torn, Jon Savage’s London’s Outrage and Jonh Ingham’s London’s Burning) and record labels (the London-based Stiff and Chiswick led the way, New Hormones and Fuck Off followed). But the release of the Clash’s ‘Complete Control’, a tirade against CBS on a CBS single, though seen as a victory, only showed how hard it was to overthrow the major labels. DIY can be viewed as either a situationist solution – overturning rival orders – or a retreat, a concession of defeat, which would lead directly to the indie ghetto.
It began to wind down when the leading bands either got writer’s block (like Lincolnshire’s Instant Automatons) or became musically proficient (Scritti Politti). Between ’81 and ’83 there was a growing focus on dance rhythms, a move away from outsider attitude and tactics, and the music began to close in on the mainstream. Bristol’s Pop Group provide a case study as they splintered in 1980, producing a batch of new groups, all heavily rhythmic – the Mafia, Maximum Joy, Pigbag and Rip Rig and Panic, whose singer, Neneh Cherry, completed the process by becoming a star at the end of the decade: how to get from the Rough Trade shop to Buffalo Stance in three easy stages.
The way punk was perceived in people’s houses, on the radio and on television, was quite different from how it was seen in the Rough Trade shop. Jon Savage has argued that punk was primarily about sexuality and gender, but the misogynistic Stranglers were in the charts, and on Top of the Pops, on a regular basis. This is how 1977 looked to Joe Public:
Dec. ’76 The Sex Pistols, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, no. 38
Apr. ’77 The Clash, ‘White Riot’, no. 38
Apr. ’77 Television, ‘Marquee Moon’, no. 30
May ’77 The Ramones, ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’, no. 22
May ’77 The Stranglers, ‘Peaches’/‘Go Buddy Go’, no. 8
June ’77 The Sex Pistols, ‘God Save the Queen’, no. 2
June ’77 The Jam, ‘In the City’, no. 40
July ’77 Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, ‘Roadrunner’, no. 11
July ’77 The Sex Pistols, ‘Pretty Vacant’, no. 6
July ’77 The Jam, ‘All around the World’, no. 20
July ’77 The Saints, ‘This Perfect Day’, no. 34
July ’77 Television, ‘Prove It’, no. 25
July ’77 The Stranglers, ‘Something Better Change’, no. 9
Aug. ’77 The Ramones, ‘Swallow My Pride’, no. 36
Aug. ’77 Eddie and the Hot Rods, ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’, no. 9
Aug. ’77 The Adverts, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’, no. 18
Sept. ’77 The Boomtown Rats, ‘Looking after Number One’, no. 11
Sept. ’77 Generation X, ‘Your Generation’, no. 36
Oct. ’77 The Stranglers, ‘No More Heroes’, no. 8
Oct. ’77 The Clash, ‘Complete Control’, no. 28
Oct. ’77 The Sex Pistols, ‘Holidays in the Sun’, no. 8
Oct. ’77 The Tom Robinson Band, ‘2468 Motorway’, no. 5
Nov. ’77 Elvis Costello and the Attractions, ‘Watching the Detectives’, no. 15
Nov. ’77 The Jam, ‘Modern World’, no. 36
Nov. ’77 Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, ‘Egyptian Reggae’, no. 5
Nov. ’77 The Tubes, ‘White Punks on Dope’, no. 28
Nov. ’77 The Boomtown Rats, ‘Mary of the Fourth Form’, no. 15
Dec. ’77 The Banned, ‘Little Girl’, no. 36
This list includes any Top 40 hit that could loosely be described as punk or new wave: the Tubes were pranksters whose song title alone was enough to incur a Radio 1 ban, and the Tom Robinson Band’s trucker boogie was somehow enough to convince NME writers Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons (in their book The Boy Looked at Johnny) that he was the future of punk, however wrong-headed that may now seem. Those quirks aside, it’s interesting to see just how open-minded first-generation punks were. No safety-pin and mohair clichés, and only the Boomtown Rats and the Banned (with a reedy cover of the Syndicate of Sound’s garage hit) seem like chancers. Of the American acts, it’s heartening to see the uncommercial Television as the most popular prior to Blondie’s arrival with ‘Denis’ (UK no. 2 ’78) the following spring, and odd that the Ramones couldn’t crack the Top 20. The belated success of the Modern Lovers, led by Velvet Underground groupie Jonathan Richman, influenced the nascent Postcard acts and the UK jangle pop that emerged in the early eighties; they had one more hit with the hopelessly romantic, very gentle ‘Morning of Our Lives’ (no. 29, Jan ’78), and even managed a Top of the Pops appearance later in ’78 singing the virtually a cappella ‘New England’ live in the studio.
Considering 1977 is punk’s year zero, this doesn’t seem a long list, and absentees (the Damned’s non-appearance, even though they had been first out of the blocks with ‘New Rose’ in November ’76) are immediately apparent. The chart positions aren’t mindblowing, either, but consider two things: almost none of these records received any airplay beyond John Peel’s late-night Radio 1 show; and sheer weight of numbers (thirteen Top 40 entries over the school summer holidays) made punk
a needling but unavoidable presence.
Now let’s take a look at the records that hit the Top 40 in the three months leading up to Public Image’s post-punk green button:
Aug. ’78 The Stranglers, ‘Walk On By’, no. 21
Aug. ’78 Jilted John, ‘Jilted John’, no. 4
Aug. ’78 Plastic Bertrand,6 ‘Sha La La La Lee’, no. 39
Aug. ’78 The Rezillos, ‘Top of the Pops’, no. 17
Aug. ’78 The Jam, ‘David Watts’, no. 25
Sept. ’78 Blondie, ‘Picture This’, no. 14
Sept. ’78 Siouxsie and the Banshees, ‘Hong Kong Garden’, no. 7
Sept. ’78 Buzzcocks, ‘Ever Fallen in Love’, no. 12
Oct. ’78 The Boomtown Rats, ‘Rat Trap’, no. 1
Oct. ’78 Sham 69, ‘Hurry Up Harry’, no. 10
Oct. ’78 Public Image Ltd, ‘Public Image’, no. 9
Aside from a late-flowering classic punk 45 (Siouxsie and the Banshees – the last of the first wave to put a record out), these can be divided up into power pop (Blondie, Buzzcocks), cover versions of sixties hits (the Jam, Plastic Bertrand, the Stranglers), and novelty records (Jilted John, the Rezillos, Sham 69). Daytime Radio 1 was still happier playing singles from the Grease soundtrack, which dominated the summer charts with sixteen weeks at number one broken only by a five-week spell for the Commodores’ grandparent-friendly ballad ‘Three Times a Lady’. ‘Rat Trap’ ended this run, effectively becoming the first ‘new wave’ number one, though this multi-part, saxophone-led Springsteen knock-off suggested Bob Geldof’s group had been using punk as a foot in the door, waiting for the moment when – after four Top 20 hits – they could unleash what they really wanted to do. Given things had come to this pretty pass, Public Image Ltd were a necessary new start – punk had done its job, now the fun could really begin. As John Lydon sang on ‘The Flowers of Romance’, ‘I’ll take the furniture, start all over again.’
Did punk wipe out all of pop’s prehistory? Clearly not. Was that what everybody wanted? Probably not. Danny Baker was co-editor of Sniffin’ Glue. Did he get his hair cut off for the cause? Did he hell. The girls thought his thick dark curls were reminiscent of David Essex and he wasn’t going to mess about with his pulling power just because he quite liked Subway Sect – pop was still about teenage boys trying to get into teenage girls’ knickers, even after punk.
As with most popular uprisings, punk didn’t conquer – it had been an impossibly wide coalition that began to crumble as soon as the media built punks up to be Britain’s folk devils. The disparate elements behind its ascent had only ever agreed on the fact they were against the status quo. The Sex Pistols and the Clash were diametrically opposed. Public Image Ltd suggested one way out of this impasse. Buzzcocks and New Hormones provided another, the dawn of a new sensibility, with their graphic designers Linder and Malcolm Garrett as precursors to post-punk’s visual sensibility. For those who wanted to eliminate rock from the equation completely, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ gentility provided a third way, which would evolve in the eighties and beyond.
Disco had a far broader base of support than punk, and its chart positions were vastly more impressive, yet it was the latter which shaped British culture (music, TV, comedy, art, personal politics) for decades to come. Punk rock, the Sex Pistols and the DIY boom gave a free pass to kids to start making music again, and the opportunity for female musicians and writers (Caroline Coon, Julie Burchill, Jane Suck) to work towards equal status. Beyond this, punk’s intertwining with reggae and dub had consequences which reverberate through to the end of this story and beyond. Disco’s influence remained firmly on the dancefloor.
1 The Human League’s Phil Oakey had long hair in 1980, but only on one side of his head.
2 ‘Punk rock’ was the terminology used in 1977, and this is more than just a technicality: ‘punk’ was what it became during the anti-rockist early eighties.
3 This may be a good time to mention that the word ‘punk’ is slang that refers to weak or poor kids acting tough. The term ‘punk rock’ initially related to 1960s garage punk, was referenced by Nick Tosches and Dave Marsh (in 1971, when writing about? and the Mysterians in Creem), and was also in usage in Britain (it has an entry in Dave Laing and Phil Hardy’s 1975 Encyclopedia of Rock) before it was reappropriated in 1976. The phrase possibly hung in the air because the Sex Pistols and Eddie and the Hot Rods were playing 1960s garage-punk covers in their live sets: the Monkees’ ‘Stepping Stone’, Dave Berry’s ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’,? and the Mysterians’ ‘96 Tears’. Besides, ’76/77 British punk had more in common with the Trashmen’s crude, intense, hyped-up 1963 hit ‘Surfin’ Bird’ (US no. 4, also reissued in the UK in ’76 on a K-Tel album called Goofy Greats) than it did with Television, Talking Heads or early Blondie.
4 It should be remembered that, before punk, any alternative to chart pop was a secret, something that was given, at best, a small weekly slot on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test and coverage in the NME, Sounds and the monthlies Zig Zag and Let It Rock. But rarely in TV adverts, and barely on the radio. Punk wanted pop to be everywhere, for everyone. In time this happened – though whether you really want to hear the Damned as you shop in Sainsbury’s or Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ as you wait in the family-planning clinic is a moot point.
5 John Hammond claimed that Bob Dylan’s first album cost $402 to record, his point being that great music doesn’t need excessive time and money. Likewise, the raw-throated, thrilling vocal performance John Lennon turns in on ‘Twist and Shout’ only came about because the Beatles had to record all fourteen songs for their debut album in a day – ‘Twist and Shout’ just happened to be the last one.
6 Belgium’s Plastic Bertrand was the unlikely cover star of the first issue of Smash Hits in September 1978, while Sham 69 provided its first centre-spread poster. A spiritual successor to Fabulous, it was the idea of Nick Logan, who had been editor of the NME and would go on to launch The Face in 1980. The instant success of Smash Hits indicated how much pop had revived since punk – just as the Beatles had launched and helped to sell magazines in the mid-sixties, so Blondie, then Gary Numan, and then the stars of new pop would make Smash Hits an irreverent, essential alternative to the weekly papers. In the eighties it spawned imitators including Number One, Big! and the BBC-sponsored Top of the Pops magazine.
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PLEASANTLY ANTAGONISTIC: NEW WAVE
Some people didn’t use the term ‘punk’, or even ‘punk rock’. Some people got it confused with the kind of music that the Daily Mail referred to as ‘punky’, and called the whole thing ‘new wave’. It had originally been coined by French cinema-savvy Malcolm McLaren as a term for the new British music before Caroline Coon cemented the phrase ‘punk’. It was then used in Sniffin’ Glue’s October ’76 issue as an expression to encompass the whole scene – not just the music, but the clubs and the clothes. Phonogram Records then released a compilation called New Wave in 1977 that included proto-punk American acts like the Dead Boys, Ramones, Talking Heads and girl group the Runaways, and the name stuck as a modern pop-genre term.
In America, ‘new wave’ isn’t seen as a half-cocked term at all, but instead as a catch-all for British music in the immediate post-punk era, usually with an electronic element to it. Minor acts from the early eighties like the Thompson Twins would later be hailed as ‘new wave’ by house and techno pioneers. Some of the more stereotypically new-wave acts who had one foot planted firmly in pre-punk soil, like the Fixx and Wang Chung, unsurprisingly did much better in the US than they did at home.
In Britain, though, ‘new wave’ was a term used by A&R men and softer DJs and journalists; they referred to all punk rock as new wave, as well as the loosely related music which wore similar clothes. This lumping together of a bunch of different musical strands certainly made things simpler for the likes of Radio 1’s old guard and, commercially, it made sense for the acts: you had actual punk rock (the Sex Pistols); you had new musi
c that would have happened anyway, that was perhaps reluctantly dragged through the new-wave door (Television); there was not-quite-new music that would have happened anyway and opportunistically pushed its way through the new-wave door (Boomtown Rats); then there was not-quite-new stuff that would have happened anyway, but recognised that punk had opened a door for it (Elvis Costello); and, a little later, you had genuinely new stuff with an electronic pulse (Buggles, New Musik).
In 1977 new wave meant overgrown kids raking it in by impersonating nasty little kids. Step forward the Stranglers, formerly known as the Guildford Stranglers, who amassed a tidy run of twenty hit singles between 1977’s outrages and 1983’s return of the old order, including six top tenners. Formed in ’75, they gigged constantly and had a sizeable following for their Monday-night residency at the key pub-rock venue the Nashville by the summer of 1976. One night the Sex Pistols supported them and, without needing to update their brutish image, the Stranglers fell naturally into punk’s slipstream. They were nasty bastards. ‘Five Minutes’, a no. 11 hit from ’78, had some of the ugliest lyrics – ‘they killed his cat and they raped his wife, and in their eyes there was screaming hate’ – ever heard on Radio 1.
Who ‘they’ were wasn’t exactly clear. The Stranglers certainly didn’t seem to share the leftist leanings of most first-generation punks. Their first hit, ‘Grip’, had included a line about doing a two-way stretch and, looking at them, you’d guess there might have been an element of projection in ‘Five Minutes’. They looked like they’d do Top of the Pops, jump into their Cortina, pull stockings over their heads and hold up a chippie on the way back to Surrey. A gang, but not the way the Clash were a gang: there was no romance with the Stranglers. It seemed likely they had no friends, none at all. On top of this they seemed really old – singer Hugh Cornwell had been the bass player in a sixties Highgate band called Emil and the Detectives, alongside Fairport Convention’s Richard Thompson, playing Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf covers;1 drummer Jet Black was a year older than the Shadows’ Jet Harris, a guitar hero when most ’77 punks were still being bottle-fed. Only French bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel looked under thirty, and his rumbling, aquatic basslines – like a pub-brewed Duane Eddy – were what gave their beefy songs a unique flavour, topped off by human walrus Dave Greenfield’s organ sprigs. Their thuggishness was compelling, their singles like a set of dirty postcards, and a 1978 take on ‘Walk On By’ was one of the half-dozen most effective Bacharach covers. They even mellowed in time, showing their advanced age with the ’67-sounding pop-psych lullabies ‘Golden Brown’ and ‘Strange Little Girl’, both Top 10 hits in ’82. Quite possibly they had been listening to Pink Floyd and Donovan while they were in Wormwood Scrubs.
