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| Me, ten years after Punk |
Listened to interviews with Jon Savage and Viv Albertine at The British Library today. I don't know how I got there. How do we get places?...........
Oh yeah, I just searched for Savage on YouTube because I'd looked at a book of his yesterday in a shop and almost bought it, then decided to resist the old tendency to buy music journo collections which briefly returned because I do like his writing but don't buy that sort of thing so much now....
................................they're talking about Punk. I don't really want to hear anyone talking about Punk any more but I was at Work, so _ and _ I'd not heard Jon Savage talking. He was as erudite as I'd expect, even playing for larfs and getting them a few times, although, to be honest, the one about mid-70s albums as the anti-christ/inspiration (partly) for Punk is a cliché - I should know, I've used it often enough..........
do people really ask Viv when/if Punk will happen again? They probably do, the useless wretches. I feel sorry for them. sat there with iPhones & EVERYTHING at their fingertips - they've become bloated with product & information to the point where their brains drown in the digital tsunami so they loll (and LOL) around like the broken victims of capitalist consumer culture that they are - yeah...............
............as they say, my generation had to work a bit harder to find the culture we craved. And as Viv points out, we all stank. Is that part of the problem today? Everyone's too busy showering (I didn't have a shower until the 90s because we (proles) only had baths) & spraying themselves & getting their beards clipped - thus, you see, the personal cleansing mirrors the cultural cleansing, the musical world reeking of chemical odours - no stink, no dirt, no crusty pubic hair (as Viv also mentions)..........like Jazz today, bereft of substance abuse (you can't even smoke in the clubs! Imagine Charlie Parker et al having to go outside for a fag!) - all the players are 'clean' and won't die from heroin....although I wish most would...........(no, I don't mean that)..........
...............if anyone asks me what Punk was like I don't know what I'll say - I wasn't 'there', I was in Aylesbury, which did host a lot of the bands, so I was there, in a way, as an observer (even with trousers from Boy), but partly, not part-time, just uncommitted, although I could see and hear a lot of good in what was going on. Unlike Jon Savage, I followed The Clash well after their first album, partly because I became very Left politically (Sandinista!)..................what young folk will never appreciate is how threatening Punk was to ordinary people. Just the very act of wearing straight-legged trousers as opposed to the flares everyone else wore was a red rag to a bull. I ain't kidding. Every drunken twat in town enjoyed the sport of Punk hunting. All these years later, the same ones no doubt sing along to The Jam given the chance....so it goes..........
TTFN
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