Rockhunter, Issue 19, September 2005 — Post-Punk Special
Brighton, 26th September 2005: The Day Taste Broke
I wandered out into daylight to get a wholemeal loaf and some coffee beans, expecting something and nothing to happen. It didn’t. But something else a lot less interesting did.
As a mincing self-confessed phile-ing cabinet, I’m used to braying in aid of arguments pertaining to antiquarian sounds too frail and elderly to make it into most people’s ears and much too filthy for most people to finger through. But even I, a veteran of the retro era and usurper of the common sense and historicism usually invoked to validate revisionism, was revolted at the spectacle of 25 or so teenagers, led by three grown men, mincing through the streets of in favour of a musical taste revival.
Oh yes, it was the day of the long-awaited Brighton Post-Punk March!
The flyer advertising this sorry event reads as follows:
WE WON!
SO GIVE YOURSELF A MEDAL!
WEAR IT WITH PRIDE!
THE ROCKISTS SAID IT WASN’T PROPER ROCK ‘N’ ROLL!
THE PUNX SED IT WAS TOO INTERLLECTUAL!
THEY ALL SAID IT WAS BORING!
And there they were, some with banners sloganned poorly with modernist saws, others re-appropriating Franco Marinetti for the umpteenth time, still more others handing out homemade ‘records’ made of liquorice, cardboard and black paper.
One wee man even had the temerity to stop me and ask in French, simpering wildly back to his mates, “Aimez vous disco ou punk rock, grandpére?” I replied, in my best French, “J’aime les haricots, j’aime le sauce, j’aime le relations sexuelles!” Naturally, he failed to appreciate my proletarian lyrical-linguistic pun in opposition to his genre-bound ironic supposition of my taste position. (My beard uncombed, my hair unwashed, I was sashaying along the street wearing the jeans I’d bought when 3 stone lighter and my “I Lyke Psyke ‘n’ Punke” T-shirt.)
It seems that the jerky guitars and off-centre haircuts have won in the great competition of music taste. Post-punk is back, fronted by Franz Ferdinand, with his ‘emotive’ Bowie voice. The Detournement crowd in Brighton, thanks to the educationalists, Jim Smith and Steve Sexton, have swept the thicko retro opposition aside and set the world back on its angular axis. I guess they’ll not be going back to DJ-ing crappy old 60s tunes now. When they get bored of Detournement (it’s been going three years already), they’ll probably rehabilitate Acid House and make a fortune, retire and go to university to get educated properly.
Ce reprise qui n’en est pas un
So, post-punk, then. What’s it all about? I’m a bit in the dark about this current fuss. Other than it’s one of those 20-odd-years-on taste resurge happenings. But don’t call interest in post-punk a matter of taste hierarchies or a revival, because those who know will pin you to a wall and tell you it’s progressive music made by conscious people. And you can’t revive the progressive, because it’s already and always progressing.
Oh, come off it! It is a revival, really, isn’t it? Only you can’t call it one. It’s a revival that isn’t.
Post-Punk or Retro? Vote Now!
So what’s going on? It’s nothing more than a version of the rip-off game of “Who d’you like best?” on daytime TV. Vote now!!! Tommy Steele or PiL? Walls or windows? Up or down? Bird shit or dog shit?
How did we get to a point where post-punk came to be like forgotten psychedelia or something?
Drowning In A Fog Of Word-Breath
I should’ve known post-punk would be coming back. It’s been a long time coming — been a long, lonely time since Elastica.
Its formation and suppression in the late 1970s to early 1980s was the first gleaming of seriousness emerging in popular culture in Britain in a long while. But this scene comprised of people taking themselves too seriously was an ideological response to the ’serious culture’ of grotesquely over-entitled elites as targeted by Stewart Home and the Smile gang, among others, during the Art Strike of 1990 to 1993, among other things. Post-punk was a self-contained outburst of the everyday music history fan, borne of the more heroic autodidactism of punk rock.
Most importantly, post-punk was to a great extent music created under erasure. Think Joy Division. If you’re thinking for yourself in a world with no models to mould yourself to, you’ll probably become over-serious. If no one else will take your opinions seriously, you have to. And you may even go crazy and die trying. Consider Spike Milligan, made mad by not being able to take his funniness seriously. And something similar happened to Ian Curtis. Killed by serious culture. No one ever wore their autodidactism lightly.
Accordingly, due to the autodidactism of its proponents, post-punk also sung about explorations of individualism through historical images and everyday narratives. Joy Division, for instance, set themselves up as if projected upon by ancient newsreels, giving their songs a feel like fresh reportage from the simultaneous past. In one respect, historical music.
On Thinking I Might Have To Like Only What’s Available
I missed the point of post-punk first time round, even though I first started getting into music in 1978, and I’m not sure I’m ready to accept the music press hype — then and now. There was a general feeling of “What now?” in the aether between 1978 and 1979 that manifested itself in bands and music writers invoking art and literature — and music thoughts other than rock ‘n’ roll ones — in aid of their works.
I could see and hear the differences in the forms of songs, with increasing use of caesura and syncopation, for example, and between bands with a group mentality and those with an alternative idea of branding their sounds at a time when picture sleeves were a big deal. Magazine was clearly a different beast from the Buzzcocks. But I was rolling with the changes and using the differences to navigate by.
I came to know all about post-punk, because that’s what they were calling it in Sounds and the NME. Generally speaking I didn’t like music as a thing in itself, and I wasn’t interested in labels being attached to sounds, but I liked listening to tunes and hearing them as if at random, whenever the radio was on and when I was round friends’ places with records and tapes being played. If I was into anything, I was into individual tunes. And I was more into the sounds bands made, hand crafting their feelings with industrial tools, than I was into particular kinds of bands or one band in particular. Except I liked the The Damned a lot — but even there it was the first album, Damned, Damned, Damned, that got to me.
I was worried that, having missed out on punk rock and not liking the thing that was replacing it, I might have to start liking what was available. The thought was terrifying. My hair stood on end. Etc. I distinctly remember listening to the radio in 1979 and wondering which tunes I should like.
It didn’t take long for me to make my mind up. I liked plain-sung/spoken vocals, melodies, hooks and arrangements, like those in Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” and Young Marble Giants’ “Radio Silence”, that altered the very ecology.
I didn’t like cod-reggae guitar stabs — although I heavily dug reggae and dub then, and still do — and I hated jerky effect-ridden funk, singers with overblown ‘emotive’ ’soul’ voices and muso bullshit.
Given my likings, it came as something of a relief to hear bands concentrating on making individual tunes. PiL were great, Joy Division, as I’ve mentioned already, were beyond great, verging on fucking brilliant. The Fall were funny and terrifying. The Dead Kennedys were inexplicably nailed down in political presentism masquerading as dystopic counter-futurism and they had a great sound.
You better believe I was listening under erasure. And I liked the good stuff.
But what of the competition in that brave new beat era. Yes, folks, the bands still had guitars, basses and drums. Not so ‘post’, then, these punks… Echo and The Bunnymen didn’t move me much. I loathed The Teardrop Explodes due to the quality of Julian Cope’s voice. I liked a couple of The Psychedelic Furs’ singles, but I finally saw them play in 1984 and was revolted by their overblown rock-star drivel. Thinking back, it’s strange, given my past/present preference for guitars, that I noticed and dug the dark, electronic, confessional and sexual underside of post-punk, best done by The Passage, Suicide and Soft Cell, more than the stuff bunged out by the jerky guitar bands.
From Modernism to Modernist Populism to Popular Modernism
In an exciting cultural twist, punk rock, which burst out of the transatlantic metropolitan music scene to the provinces in 1976 through 1977, had itself became a culture of the provinces.
The impact of post-punk bands revealed how intensely the punk rock experience had changed Britain’s music cultures; it also emphasised the long-lasting effect of the counterculture in Britain — focused in art schools and informed by consciousness of the transformational potential in re-appropriating past movements, like Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, Fluxus, and the rest — which persisted in youth-oriented music culture even though the musical and general cultural earth had supposedly been scorched by ‘proletarian’ punk rock.
However, it’s important not to promote post-punk to a position of highness in a bygone cultural hierarchy, imposing a high/low dualism based on supposed opposites that actually exist, play and affect each other simultaneously in space and sometimes in time.
Mark Fisher, on his excellent K-Punk blog, comments on Mark Smith’s popular modernism, saying that, “Instead of the high modernist appropriation of working class speech and culture, Smith’s pulp modernism reacquaints modernism with its disavowed pulp doppelganger.”
I agree that there was not just one modernism, but many modernisms. But how far can we get by invoking the grotesque or pulp in opposition to a monolithic ’serious’ culture and setting one against the other? I prefer to view cultures as simultaneous discourses. I would, like K-Punk, happily listen to The Fall before or after anything else I chose and I’d set The Fall alongside any ’serious’ composer if I wanted to. Although I don’t want to. But surely an effective and affective version of an idea, whether regarded as pulp or proper, is a discursive rejoinder. Do we still have to define political positions to things and assign taste judgments based on a supposedly empowering trash aesthetic? I don’t want to do that.
Referring back to the modernists of the past, I have read Freud, Eliot, Pound, Lovecraft and Buchan, all of whom were aware of the others’ works, whether they mention them, and I regard all of them as participants in the creation of modern culture, whether they were/are regarded as Modernists. I don’t want to keep on having to narrate Lovecraft as a pulp modernist. Writing in the present, his work was modern, even if his antiquarianism set him against fashion.
Accordingly, if I were asked to name my favourite post-punk band hyperthetically, I’d reply, “The Milkshakes”.
From Counterculture to Multicultures
And despite the influence of reggae and dub on music post-punk, we’re stuck with Franz Feckin Ferdinand. So much for The Specials. So much for “the post-punk drive for a reinfusion of blackness.”. So much, then, for UB40. Can you believe that there were people in 1980 — in the middle of a massive international depression with record unemployment — who didn’t even know what UB40 meant?
Let’s widen the perception of post-punk to include other popular post-punks. But what are the chances of that happening if modernism — for Pete’s sake! — continues to be represented by an oppositional discourse between the high/serious and the low/grotesque?
Neither Ventriloquism Nor Mummery
Started by art school graduates and students aware of its prole-potential, then snatched away by the proles themselves, later punk rock — hardcore punk for punx — became a focus for affective disaffection, not necessarily in opposition to post-punk acts of sensible beauty. And being in the hands of the people, who were enjoying versioning it in their image, punk rock became a less desirable commodity.
Post-punk became the new urban sound for aspirational provincial types with brains, as punk had been before it. However, centralist music journalism required metropolitan-based sounds, because that’s where the industry was located (London and Manchester). The fact of its disappearing off the popular radar, unlike punk rock which persisted, tells its own story.
The bits of post-punk that made it out to the provinces and stayed in the aether were the bits that mattered: the funk of bands like the Gang of Four and the ever-awful Shriekback and the tribal drums of Adam and the Ants, Killing Joke and Southern Death Cult, among others. But the funk had never really gone away. The ’smoothies’, for example, — where I grew up in Cambridgeshire, in the mid 1970s and early 80s, the clean-cut sworn enemies of all punk rockers, queers and anyone not a smoothie — were listening to soul, disco and all things black all along.
X and Y Unite and Fight!
Amidst the increasing opportunities for independent record distribution, punk and post-punk bands were, from 1980 onwards, competing for sales in the newly formed independent chart.
The Apocalypse Punk Tour of 1981, named after an ongoing attempt in Sounds to define the early 80s hardcore punk scene, brought together bands — Discharge, The Exploited were the big names — with a more or less nihilistic take on punk rock, which was proletarian, but not altogether lumpen, and political, although not always conscious. In fact, it was a indicator that people were making life choices based on music made by bands. For the first time, large groups of itinerants were following bands around the country.
The 1981 Christmas on Earth event in Leeds was the first punk rock festival in Britain. It was massively successful, even three long years after the Sex Pistols packed it in. And a year is a long time in punk rock — much longer than a year in these late days of retro, which seem to go on for longer and longer but with less effect.
But were the hardcord punx as grotesque as they should not doubt have liked to be regarded? Was their voicing themselves a carnivalesque episode or an act of discursive engagement? Or both. With a laugh on the side.
Discharge, the band for whom Apocalypse Punk was named, had internalised anti-nuclear and anti-state discourses to such an extent that their being as a collectivity and their recorded works produced a unitone monolith of protest. Discharge’s song titles, including “You Take Part in Creating the System”, “Two Monstrous Nuclear Stockpiles” and “Maimed and Slaughtered”, need no explanation, then or now. There’s little room for doubting that Discharge were offering reflexive responses, documenting in a slow rolling news format the degradation of representational politics and the concomitant rise in opportunities for self-representation despite the former.
The other bands on the Apocalypse tour were less effective rhetoricians, but showed the extent to which punk rock as a thing beyond music genres had provided a space for inspired, clever and energetic people without publishers to vocalise their concerns and revealed the extent to which people without social or cultural entitlement, through gaining a university or polytechnic degree, could say something to an audience and put the hurt on their narrative targets.
Lest we forget, the hardcore punk scene, like post-punk, was also a fruitful place for women to express themselves in music. Although that’s not to say that sexism wasn’t rife. Bur there may have been a bit less in punk rock circles.
On that tack, in the early 90s I read an interview with one of the ladies from Huggy Bear, who said that one of the elements of Riot Grrrl was about getting women to expropriate the space at the front at gigs. I clearly recall swearing and burning the offending music paper, as I remembered seeing young women fighting for space at the front at hardcore punk concerts. And she had obviously never attended a performance of the Sex Gang Children. Her Punk, empowered as it undoubtedly was, was not the only punk, as many women would have told her, had she asked or even thought about it for a bit.
Folk Radicalism Chord Change
It’s right to view engaged post-punk artistes, notably the Pop Group and the Gang of Four — and The Fall, and loads of others, including some of the hardcore punk bands, come to think of it — as exponents of a kind of folk radicalism. Live music cultures were the pulse of political activity in the late-70s and early to mid 80s — Rock Against Racism being the most well known. That’s where the political action was. And many of those involved had taught themselves all they knew about music and politics, not to mention art and literature. Which I won’t.
Beyond party politics, Discharge and Joy Division were engaging locally at a time when political internationalism was the arena in which the fashionable were activising. In the long term, and globally, the creation and maintenance of radical ecologies can be seen to be happening everywhere. But in the short term, and locally, it’s the voices nearer to home that speak the loudest, and anything else sounds like ventriloquism. Listen to the voices.
Anyway, I di’n't like being told how to feel by political types. And I hated even more being told how to connect together the stuff I liked. The whole Movement movement thing gave me the creeps.
Past-Foward
I gave up on contemporary music fashions in 1982 at 16, after I realised that psychobilly was a music fashion too far, and started pursuing antiquarian sounds and listening to contemporary pop music and punk rock all at the same time. By doing so, I relinquished by defauly any claim I’d had on identity, and I’ve had nothing to do with identity since then.
I’d found that then unfashionable old musics had thrown up sounds and tunes at least as interesting as those being made during my youth. The new punk rock and skinhead bands of the early 1980s were churning out some really fiery tunes. Pop music was also a lot of fun. Joe Meek had made already made loads of exciting pop records. So had many other bands in the 1960s, in the UK and the US. GBH were fusioning metal and punk and the Bad Brains had exploded the whiteness of punk and given it a new fastness.
It seemed I was more into the long-term — past/future — than the more fashionable short term. Distancing myself and mixing sounds obsessively, I was becoming a version.
And that’s that.
Next time: more about the boredom/repetition nexus. Plus reviews of re-releases, including in-depth sideways and lengthways looks at Odysseus and The Herdge and Phil’s Phellers!!
Gitsum!
Ed.
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