Wired For Punk

I've just finished reading an absolutely outstanding book – England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage. England’s Dreaming is generally regarded as the definitive account of the Sex Pistols and the rapid rise and collapse of British punk rock. It’s one of the few books I've read where the comments on the sleeve heaping plaudits and praise on the author and the book are totally spot on. Well, apart from one that described the book as ‘achingly funny’. That I couldn’t agree with. Unless you liken the Sex Pistols – as the unpopular face of this once-controversial musical strain – to the kind of farce that Spinal Tap so cleverly conveyed, there was very little humour to be found in this book. Certainly there was something delightfully shambolic in Malcolm McLaren’s ultimately unsuccessful bolting together of Machiavellian political meddling and pseudo-Dada agit-art, but as far as I know it was never intended to be funny.

Prior to England’s Dreaming, I’d been reading I Swear I Was There, which recounts the story – in a much less sophisticated manner than Savage’s eloquent discourse – of the two Sex Pistol’s concerts at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the impact that the first concert had on the Manchester music scene, spawning the likes of Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Up next in my reading list is Fashion Is A Passion, which is Pat Gilbert’s equally-definitive story of the Clash.

I find the whole concept of punk so incredibly alluring, perhaps because I was born in 1976, punk’s Year Zero, and was therefore far too young to have been able to participate in this incredible period of music. I have no doubts, however, that if I’d been born a decade and a half before I'd have embraced the sound of punk wholeheartedly. I may have even formed a band. Who knows? Perhaps it’s the disappointment at not having been there the first time around that makes me so intrigued by firstly the music, but secondly the reaction that straight-laced conservative folk had to the aggressive sound of a genuine teenage riot; perhaps it’s because punk is the closest we’ve got in the past thirty years to the creation of rock ‘n roll back in the fifties with its similar effects on the youth (excitement) and adults (fear). Nothing in music subsequently has had anything like this impact.

This all said, I can’t stand the Sex Pistols. Perhaps it’s because their entire genesis and portrayal was handled by McLaren, described in Savage’s tome as a failed artist desperately seeking to make a reactionary mark on culture in some – any – way, and so I can’t help but think of the Pistols as a contrived, constructed entity in much the same way as any of the manufactured pop boy and girl bands which are a recurring theme in the last thirty years of music’s chequered history. Aside from a couple of genuinely outstanding songs, the Pistols should have received virtually no attention whatsoever, but McLaren made damn sure that his puppets received the lion’s share of punk’s dim limelight. Aside from cultivated controversy and a confrontational attitude, musically the Pistols were worthy of less acclaim than some of the worst bands to be heard on the seminal punk compilation of the time, The Roxy, London WC2.

In actual fact, aside from a fondness for Buzzcocks, which has more to do with their pioneering independent aesthetic, the musical output of much of UK punk fails to move me. What is far more appealing is the New York punk scene which developed around iconic clubs like CBGBs on the now rapidly-gentrifying Lower East Side. The Ramones, while at first listen a loud, moronic and childlike band, were in their own formulaic way deconstructing classic rock ‘n roll in a disciplined, Calvanist, manner which is every bit as ‘arty’ as the NYC bands that those art-rock plaudits are more generally heaped upon – Television, Patti Smith and so on. New York punk had genuine connections into the city’s reactionary art scene which leant their punk credibility and conviction. In comparison to UK punk, NYC punk had a sense of purpose and self-belief which UK punk lacked, explaining why New York’s protégés have endured whereas UK punk’s forerunners rapidly shuffled away from their aggressive stance with a veritable sense of near-embarrassment. This lack of longevity can be attributed directly to McLaren whose vision of a punk aesthetic was driven by a brief period of interaction with the New York Dolls who, though important, were the goofball model for the Pistols.

I mentioned above that my attraction to punk was driven by missing out the first time. The issue I had growing up was that my ears could not tolerate loud, guitar-fuelled music. In fact, my route to punk arose from an interest in techno music and electronica which itself grew out of a love of synthpop from my earliest music purchases. Techno, in particular the minimalist techno generated by the likes of Richie ‘Plastikman’ Hawtin was for me a natural distillation of the synthetic sounds which excited me in electronic pop. I used to think that my ship-jumping from the nagging sounds of the dancefloor to punk was unusual, but I've since come across many people who made the same journey.

It happened during my first year at university; I’d spent more money than ever on records by the tail end of that year and my appetite for dance music, from a listening perspective alone and not a club-going one, was at an all-time high. My friends worried that I was spending too much on records that I was only buying on the strength of vaguely knowing the label, and they were probably right. I was in the Our Price store in Colchester’s town centre with my friend Kit when I came across a copy of Pink Flag by Wire in the racks. Wire had come to my attention before, during their eighties electronically-augmented era when they were signed to Mute Records (then, as now, my favourite label), and I’d read in Vox or Select or some other now-redundant rag that Pink Flag was an excellent album; perhaps I was hung over or just looking for an excuse to spend yet more money that I didn’t have, but despite Kit’s cautionary attempts to curb my spending that day, Pink Flag was bought, bagged and on my stereo within a couple of hours.

In the straight-ahead, mechanistic curt little punk tracks like ‘Field Day For The Sundays’ I found similarities between punk rock’s rhythmic repetition and techno’s endless cycles of regular beats and hooks. In Colin Newman’s vocals I found similarities to Underworld’s Karl Hyde; Newman, too, was and still is heading up the Swim~ label which explored his own interest in electronica and the techno of the likes of Gez ‘LFO’ Varley’s solo works. Pink Flag opened my eyes and ears and gradually my interest in electronic music was replaced by more and more guitar-based music. I even recorded a copy of the album for my younger sister, then enjoying her own musical epiphany thanks to Pink Floyd and The Beatles. I wrote in the accompanying note that I thought it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard and that Menswe@r’s ‘Daydreamer’ wouldn’t have existed without Wire’s ‘Lowdown’. Natalie thought it was too heavy for her, whereas I just found it thrilling.

The attraction for me of Wire as an entry-point into punk rock was that they were actually anything but punk; while Pink Flag nods to the nascent punk scene, Wire were much more informed by artistic sensibilities; Newman had built a relationship with Brian Eno, whereas Graham Lewis remarked that the band were principally influenced by Marcel Duchamp. This was refuted by other members of the band, but you don’t have to listen to Pink Flag for long to hear tracks that leant toward experimentalism and delineated structures which would bait and goad the punks when delivered live. The following two Harvest albums, Chairs Missing and 154 further moved the quartet away from their contextually convenient punk routes toward more extreme aesthetic gestures, culminating in a series of shows at Holborn’s Cochrane theatre wherein they wore their art colours defiantly on their sleeves.

Wire, unlike some of their more well-known punk contemporaries, have endured. Their most recent album, Send, was a thrilling and uncompromising record and Newman’s Githead project has further blended his love of oblique lyrics with art-rock backdrops. Githead’s second album, Art Pop, could not be more appropriately named. Wire’s continued existence owes much to the reasons explored above for NYC punk rock’s longevity – artistic, rather than rebellious, roots and an ‘attitude’ or ‘way of life’ informed more by musicality than confrontational opposition. UK punk could never survive while the bands’ only offering was to challenge the old guard. It’s satisfyingly ironic that Johnny Rotten’s reaction against the dinosaur rock and experimentation of Pink Floyd via a defaced T-shirt should have been suppressed so quickly as punk lurched effortlessly and uncontrollably into art’s embrace.