Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  What all these adjectives shared was the power to eradicate the music that had gone before – from the British pop papers, if not from the charts. In their enthusiasm to ride this frenzied wave wherever it might take them, many journalists effectively wiped their memory clean. Regardless of their age and style, pre-punk acts were ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘boring old farts’, unless (like Lou Reed and David Bowie) they could claim some allegiance to the punk movement. (Desperate to be included, Marc Bolan claimed wildly: ‘I was the originator of punk rock43.’) This was both an overdue piece of iconoclasm, forcing bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Who to respond (as they did with ‘Shattered’ and ‘Who Are You?’ respectively); and also a total irrelevance in the eyes of the general public, who continued to support ELO, Led Zeppelin and Genesis as if nothing had happened. It merely heightened the ‘us and them’ rhetoric of the times. But there were fierce debates about how to treat such borderline punks as Elvis Costello, the Jam and Tom Robinson, all of whom were suspected of leanings towards rock traditionalism, despite the righteous fury of their early releases.

  In retrospect, what’s apparent about the first brigade of British punk bands is that they represented less of a schism from the past than a form of rejuvenation: an electric shock applied to the exhausted carcasses of mid-1960s British pop or early 1970s glam-rock. The first punk hit in America was Plastic Bertrand’s ‘Ça plane pour moi’, not only sung in French but a seamless blend of Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ with the sound of the Beach Boys c.1963. The Clash were already so removed from their milieu by late 1977 that their songs began to document their corporate struggles with the record business. With the Sex Pistols a spent force by spring 1978, dozens of bands emerged to imitate their sound: Sham 69, Angelic Upstarts, Ruts, UK Subs, and soon an entire wave of aggressive skinheads who were dubbed ‘Oi!’ by the press (perhaps the most evocative genre definition in music history). In their hands, punk was a weapon wielded with brute force: a never-changing, ever-tightening form of self-confinement which would continue for decades to wave a flag bearing the slogan: ‘Punk’s not dead’.

  If pure punk was easy to identify, unpredictable only in its ability to attract political extremes of left and right, other musical traits which emerged between 1976 and 1978 were more malleable. The Stranglers were initially regarded as punks, despite their debt to mid-1960s American rock (never more obvious than on their cover of ‘Walk On By’, a pastiche of the Doors’ 1967 hit ‘Light My Fire’). Likewise the Jam, with their roots in the Who and the Kinks, and Elvis Costello, his passion for the same era apparent in every note of his 1978 album titled (ironically) This Year’s Model. Eddie & the Hot Rods and the Boomtown Rats soon revealed more of an affinity with Bruce Springsteen than the Clash. Meanwhile, there was a recognisable school of ‘new wave’ with jerky, spiky song structures and vocals which were mannered in the tradition of David Bowie and Bryan Ferry – XTC being the most enduring example. While laddish inarticulacy and violence were perfectly acceptable punk characteristics, there was much suspicion in the press about artists who displayed any hint of intelligence or learning. The punk fanzine Sideburns had attempted to inspire its readership with the simplest of instructions: ‘This is a chord44. This is another. Now form a band.’ But although two chords might be sufficient to write a punk anthem, this manifesto was never intended to be used as a weapon against anyone who dared to employ a third chord or, heaven forbid, a fourth. Musical incoherence and incompetence could spark genuine excitement or, at the very least, diverting performance art (the career of the Slits veering between the two); but as soon as punk swapped its rhetoric of liberation for the tyranny of the closed mind, all of its original impetus and significance was lost.

  Fortunately, the moment when punk became a cultural prison was also, bizarrely, when it allowed a thousand metaphorical flowers to bloom. The siren of post-punk was the extraordinary Poly Styrene, who proudly wore dental braces at a time when they were an object of shame, and who launched a one-woman (and one-band, X-Ray Spex) assault on consumerist society, decades before the birth of the anti-globalisation movement. Like novelist Norman Mailer, she viewed plastic as a symbol of the inauthenticity of modern life – the irony being that she preached this gospel via the grooves of records manufactured from PVC.

  Like Patti Smith before her, Poly Styrene sidestepped the two most prevalent stereotypes for a female performer in a male-dominated industry: the sensitive folksinger and the bruised and troubled blues shouter. Few of their predecessors had been able to escape these cages, and the exceptions had suffered for their refusal to compromise. Jefferson Airplane singer/composer Grace Slick maintained a stridently independent persona for more than a decade, before succumbing to alcoholism. Yoko Ono was forced to endure ridicule which frequently veered into racist contempt. Joni Mitchell’s struggles to abandon her early image by exploring social satire and jazz came at the expense of commercial success. It is perhaps emblematic that both Poly Styrene and Patti Smith chose to walk away from the music business at their peak of popularity.

  But the jazz-tinged, raucous defiance of X-Ray Spex did much to revive punk as an expression of freedom rather than a musical straitjacket. In her wake, Britain’s final eighteen months of the 1970s were stunningly diverse, artistically courageous. It was a time when the inspiration of punk could fuel a dozen different methods of exploring and exploding pop, by merging it with Jamaican rhythms (from the ska revival to the Police’s reggae/power-pop hybrid) or heavy metal (Motörhead); approaching it in the guise of a robot (Gary Numan) or a gothic princess (Siouxsie Sioux); or by living out the darkest implications of Malcolm McLaren’s anarchist manifestos, as did John Lydon with the eerie, volcanic howl of ‘Death Disco’, his second release with Public Image Ltd. This was pop robbed of all its melodic appeal and song structure; punk stripped of its rhythm and rhetoric; music so nihilistic and forbidding that it could only have been commercial at this moment, from this man. There was no room for punk traditionalism in Lydon’s disco. But this was not the denouement to punk’s narrative which posterity chose to remember.

  It’s the small bands that interest me45 most. Springing up from unfashionable, obscure towns all over the country. Dark, sleepy towns that have been ignored or just forgotten by the trendy rat-race of the pace-setting big cities. In these places, in the local clubs, pubs and discos, heavy metal is thriving.

  Mick Middles, Sounds magazine, 1980

  Commercial punk was a sham46, part of the whole rock ’n’ roll circus … it was basically finished by late ’77 … I mean, they were playing a Clash record on the radio earlier on today, and it struck me that you couldn’t really tell the difference between that now and the Rolling Stones. It was just rock ’n’ roll at the end of the day, just music.

  Penny Rimbaud, Crass

  Punk cracked open a fault line in the history of popular music. Like rock ’n’ roll twenty years earlier, it polarised the mass audience between those who were offended by its raucous effrontery, and those who were prepared to acknowledge it as a timely renewal of music’s innate exuberance. These two invasions of noise shared another characteristic: they represented a ‘year zero’ for future generations, the point at which a new culture could be said to have begun.

  In both instances, the dividing line was as much tribal as musical; affiliation with the lusty invader entailed acceptance of an attitude and a look as well as a fresh approach to the mechanics of rock. Nothing illustrated the cultural significance of what seem, in retrospect, to be minor differences of style than the uneasy and frequently antagonistic relationship between punk and heavy metal. The success of Motörhead in the late 1970s clouded the issue; visually, they epitomised metal; musically, their amphetamine pace and sonic attack suggested punk (as did their early affiliation to independent record companies). Their ability to satisfy both tribes was not matched by those who emerged in their wake. While punk dominated London’s rock underground in 1976–8, the British provinces spawned a m
elee of equally driven, loud and ferocious young bands, who unashamedly pledged themselves to the standard of heavy metal. Stylistically, there was little to separate Iron Maiden’s ‘Invasion’ or Def Leppard’s ‘Getcha Rocks Off’ from punk, except their creators’ firm refusal to stand alongside the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Not all of their contemporaries roamed as close to the border, but the influx of youthful energy was so pronounced that Sounds – the first of the British weekly papers to pledge itself to punk – declared that it represented a movement, which the magazine dubbed in 1979 ‘the New Wave of British Heavy Metal’ (or NWOBHM).

  Few of the bands who were forced under this banner – Maiden, Leppard, Saxon, Girlschool, Angel Witch, Diamond Head and dozens more – recognised the existence of a ‘new wave’, let alone their own role in it. Heavy metal being a more inclusive and communal genre than punk, it did not employ any equivalent to the ‘boring old farts’ invective which was hurled at rock bands over the age of 25. But NWOBHM did act as a transfusion of fresh blood, albeit at a time when the metal mainstream was thriving, with little of the decadent decay visible elsewhere in the pre-punk-rock community.

  The 1970s ended with the punk movement divided between those addicted to the classic sound of 1976–7, and those (led by the Clash) attempting to maintain their ethical and tribal identity while escaping the rigidity of that formula. This crusade would lead the Clash simultaneously backwards towards the image-mongering of previous decades, and forwards into a world where a London rock band could immerse itself in the emerging culture of hip hop. Both factions were content to exist within the framework of the corporate rock business – a system which the Sex Pistols had briefly seemed capable of destroying. A handful of British bands refused to compromise so easily. Grouped under the retrospective label of anarcho-punk, the likes of Crass, Poison Girls and Conflict pledged themselves to the principles which Malcolm McLaren had employed as an art-project gesture. ‘Punk is dead,’ Crass declared in 1978, ‘it’s just another cheap product for the consumer’s head.’ Their ethics were not consumerist but collective; their record releases and gigs offered at little more than cost; their aim a genuine social revolution rather than celebrity. For them, punk was not a musical style which had to be maintained at all costs, but a statement of opposition to every form of collaboration with capitalist society.

  This was still a positive application of punk; music being used as a tool for progress, however removed from the mainstream. In New York, an equally vehement denial of commercialism was apparent in 1978, from the bands grouped under the negative description of ‘no wave’. Punk historian Nicholas Rombes described this art-graduate movement as ‘music for people who hate music47’; less pejoratively, as ‘a disavowal – even a betrayal48 – of punk insofar as it rejected the populist, melodic streak that animated punk’s first wave’. In its place, ‘no wave’ offered the atonal, the grating, the structure-free, the crushingly repetitive: a musical cul-de-sac, which almost against its own principles produced a band (Sonic Youth) who would inspire Kurt Cobain and hence the grunge explosion.

  While America’s East and West coasts sparked local punk conflagrations from 1977 onwards, great swathes of the United States remained unaware for several years of what had been happening in Britain. (‘We got everything so late49’, recalled Nashville-based Jason Ringenberg, who didn’t stumble across the Sex Pistols until 1981.) If there was an American new wave beyond the New York boroughs, it was a throwback to the spirit of 1964–5 – the pop song-craft of the Beatles, the attitude of the Rolling Stones, the sleek harmonies of the Byrds. While most of its protagonists settled for reviving the past, the Cars and the Knack placed themselves midway between the AOR dynamics of Boston and Journey, and the punk pop of Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello.

  Ronstadt’s ‘Alison’, Blondie, Tom Petty, the Cars’ ‘Good Times Roll’, the Knack’s ‘My Sharona’: however shockingly modern they sounded to the American heartland, none of them attempted to rival the earth-quaking impact of the original British punks. They redecorated rock in a slightly quirkier shade, rather than whitewashing the past from collective memory. If they wanted scorched-earth rhetoric, American kids had to locate an underground which was effectively ignored by radio and print journalism alike.

  For 16-year-old Ian MacKaye in the US capital, punk rock ‘seemed incredibly nihilistic50’ when he first read about the Sex Pistols in 1978. When he was finally exposed to the records emanating from Britain, he was ‘really struck by the fact51 that this was completely non-commercial music … Punk rock introduced me to this whole underground, and in that there was this incredible array of ideas, philosophies, approaches to life – I was challenged on all these different levels.’ Forming a succession of bands to ape what he had heard, he fell into a milieu of bands and venues operating beneath the radar of the rock industry. Eager to escape being co-opted into the mainstream, these acts comprised a scene which by 1981 was being described as ‘hardcore’ – uncompromising, relentless, viciously dissecting personal and political life with a freedom only available to those who never expected to taste commercial success.

  Hardcore was all about extremes – of sound, of behaviour, of belief. Some participants followed Darby Crash, the self-annihilating vocalist of the Germs, into heroin addiction and despair. Others channelled their ferocity into an ethos which rejected all the trappings of rock stardom, especially drink and drugs. MacKaye’s band the Slinkees were at the heart of this so-called ‘straight edge’ movement, with their formative (and unmistakably tongue-in-cheek) anthem, ‘I Drink Milk’. ‘We were definitely pissing off52 an enormous amount of people’, he recalled. Becoming straight edge was no passing flirtation: it was a commitment for life. ‘It really seemed like total rebellion53,’ explained Youth of Today vocalist Ray Cappo, ‘against the typical high-school kid, the typical teenager, who would just walk around stoned and drunk with his concert jersey on, Timberland boots, going from keg party to keg party, date-raping girls.’ Yet the rigour of the straight-edge philosophy embodied a conservative way of thinking which was totally at odds with punk’s potential as a form of aesthetic and spiritual liberation.

  Punk, then, was freedom and conservatism; experimentation and conformity; a manifesto for changing one’s life, or a comfort trap which would never require one to change. It would also become, like rock ’n’ roll, an all-purpose catchphrase, which stood for anything from do-it-yourself self-reliance to the most clichéd repetition of familiar musical and lyrical motifs – as hackneyed as any of the boring old farts and dinosaurs who were punk’s inadvertent inspiration. By the 1990s and beyond, it would be brandished as the ultimate standard of authenticity and coolness, by everyone from depressive heavy metal fans to cute boy bands, all of them convinced that they alone were punk’s truest legacy – and, in a strange way, they were.

  * * *

  fn1 The NME’s Phil McNeill noted cynically that the so-called ‘dole-queue rock31’ was ‘laughable’: ‘almost every musician in the genre is making a living, an unprecedented phenomenon’.

  1, 2

  A CLASH OF cultures was evident as early as August 1958, when gangs of working-class white men, mostly sporting the distinctive drapes and winklepickers that marked them out as Teddy boys, launched random attacks on Afro-Caribbean residents of Notting Hill in West London. Thereafter, the shadows of crime, violence and intimidation lingered over Britain’s West Indian community, reinforced by scaremongering press coverage.

  Yet the opposing currents were often confused and contaminated. The fighting which scarred London clubs such as the Ram Jam and the 007 in the mid-1960s was territorial rather than racial, pitting North London immigrants against their Brixton counterparts. A decade later, there was a similar division between those attempting to establish a Rasta community in the heart of Babylon, and those whose role models were the gangsters of American ‘blaxploitation’ movies.

  When Jamaican reggae music crossed into the British pop charts in autumn 1969, five singles
charting almost simultaneously, its core support outside the black community came from skinheads – their heads shaved or cropped to accentuate an air of menace which materialised in the flash of a switchblade or the crunch of a knuckleduster or ‘bovver boots’. The archetypal skinhead was a white working-class male who would target Asian immigrants for brutal assaults, but who adopted West Indian rhythms as his own. A decade later, when a ska revival spawned multiracial outfits such as the Specials and the Selecter, shaven-headed disciples of British fascist parties focused their loyalty on the all-white ska band Madness. On one notorious night at the Lewisham Odeon in June 1980, skins hailed the support act, Jamaican reggae veteran Desmond Dekker, with a salute more appropriate for Adolf Hitler.

  Beyond the skinhead community, the response to reggae during the punk era was equally ambiguous. At the 1976 Reading Festival, an audience drawn by the gently anarchic hippie collective Gong and former members of Captain Beefheart’s experimental band – not exactly an inflammatory combination – responded to the appearance of several Jamaican artists with a shower of cans and bottles. (This debacle was one of the sparks for the formation of the Rock Against Racism collective later that year.) The punk movement regarded Rastafarian roots reggae as a kindred spirit, and audiences at British punk gigs grew accustomed to a Jamaican soundtrack, provided by such fellow travellers as Mikey Dread (who toured with the Clash) and Tapper Zukie (championed by Patti Smith). Home-grown reggae acts, often with a strident political edge (as on Steel Pulse’s ‘Ku Klux Klan’), were arguably a more authentic voice for Britain’s streets during the late 1970s than many of the middle-class punk acts masquerading as working-class heroes. Yet as the NME’s Bob Woffinden noted, there was still a cultural chasm between London’s Jamaican community and its white aficionados, the capital’s reggae stores appearing ‘dark and uninviting3 as the grave for any passing white boy’. In 1976, when the reggae/punk crossover was in its infancy, one of London’s most renowned concert halls, the Hammersmith Odeon, placed a blanket ban on any future reggae concerts, after outbreaks of pickpocketing and petty violence at a show by Bob Marley and the Wailers.