Rockhunter, Issue 21, 19 September 2006
Tunnel Riffing
Right then, over the past few years, I’ve had innumerable inquiries about the lost art of tunnel riffing. What does this phrase mean? Who was doing it? And when? Where did it come from? Why has it been forgotten? I’d like to take this opportunity to lay this hoary subject to rest, once and for all.
Well, during the days of the ‘post-punk against rockism’ debate in the early 1980s, few intelligent voices could heard above the hubub of shitbag drivel in the Ism Factory (a vile Stasi-contemporary wilderness, where good tunes were abolished and you had to have bummed the corpse of God to be allowed admission — Cultural Revisionist Ed.), and there were still fewer intelligent dissenting opinions offered up against the assertion that rock was the problem and post-punk was the (final) solution to the rock problem.
Tony Wilson’s version of modernism was a laff-riot — serve up Situ-actions as a Marxian final solution to the cultural problem of fun. Yeah, alright already, Anthony. We got it.
Christ! Some berks still think there’s mileage in the Wilson’s analysis. There’s myriad webspace devoted to the moribund culture-thread called ‘post-punk’ that dares not evoke ‘rockism’ for fear of it rising to devour them. And in these revisionist days, one could actually be forgiven for thinking that post-punk won. See them all pouting a bit too self-consciouly, wrapping their messy-prissy hair round their noggins one more time, like so many Bobby Charltons, then sashaying louchely around the revolving door of the dismal club scene. They’re too busy collecting their clever-medals to see the future coming on like a hungry ogre. Anyway, who cares? Such obvious nonsenses have to be fought against, but this is not the time or place to do so. (We’ll be having a word about this in the not-too-distant future — Features Ed.)
Anyway, as bad as it was then, it wasn’t even half as bad as it is now, in these latter days of Lore-Bore mags — yer Mojos, Uncuts, etc. Gadzooks and forsooth! can it really be 20 years ago, today? Or was it 25? (Enough, already, of this gay folderol, back to the subject in hand!! — Ed.)
Lest we forget, the early 80s were also the time of NWOBHM, when the Iron Maidens, Girlschools and Witchfinder Generals stalked this fair land of Albion, wielding their Axes of Evil (I wrote that when it was topical and funny — Ed.). It’s hard to say how the likes of yournBauhaus’s, Joy Division’s, Virgin Prunes’s, or Scritti Politti’s ever came to rule the roost of retrospection, amidst the cacophony of metal grinding against metal, but that’s lifestyle choices for you. That’s a wake-up call!!! Must get round to my Roots of Goth special, as promised in the pub last year. Ho blemmin’ hum.
So, there we were, all confused after Johnny Rotten decided to flaunt his Bowie trousers in PiL, with punk going national in dayglo and the provinces fighting back in black, when lo and behold!, who should appear on the parapets, with one eye on the football results and another on the treasure trove of Britain’s riff-heavy musical past? Enter the Cockney Rejects, the lost link missing between punk and rock, in whom lived the canny proletarian gifts of vulgar wit and self-worth.
Now, Steve Jones had boogied the Pistols into the charts with his string-damping technique lifted right off the Chris Spedding versions of his own riffs. (And that’s a recursive conundrum that I really can’t be bothered to go into!) It’s a fact that the early punkers preferred the Stooges-style open-attack rhythm riffs. Check out the Fen-edge favourites The Users for a right old Stoogian death-river racket. But that’s as maybe. See, my view is Spedding was only doing what came natural after his years on the blues-in-a-basket circuit in the pubs, rocking, like. Pub rock was more than just self parody. Imagine versioning your own stuff at the same time as actually playing it! OK, so Lee Perry was doing it all over the place already, but Jonesy, via Spedding, was doing it culture-jam style!! I reckon Lydon couldn’t believe his luck when he saw the power of Version running through Jones’s guitar-playing and, as soon as he’d had a listen to Jah Wobble’s ragged-arsed dub collection, he did “2+2″ and went “4″! And that’s where post-punk started, with self-Version. But as I said, I really ain’t ‘aving this conversation.
Okay, so there was the Rejects, bouncing off the walls with bathtub speed, terrace chants, Nazareth and all sorts of other hard rock nightmares inside their branes. They’d got into the punk sound by mistake, thinking the Pistols were a boogie band, which of course they were, but no one else knew it yet, that’s all. Everyone else was loving the Punk Rock hype! They saw right thru!! Like the Small Faces before them — small of stature, working class, own little world — the Rejects got all excited and done themselves a favour by transforming and accelerating the sound they loved. You could say they went amplic. Of which more a little later.
All right? That’s where it started. Gary Bushell, Jimmy Pursey and that ended up producing the boys after EMI gave them some studio time. Enter the most powerful guitar sound ever — the best use of string damping in rock, in my humble fucking opinion. Bar none. Not even Sabbath. This is one better; it’s like Black Sunday, if you will (if you take Sabbath to refer to the Saturday, as me and the Hebrews do).
Lest not forget that Bushell was, with Ross Halfin, one of the faces of NWOBHM, nor that the Rejects were in with all the same gang. These youngsters were doing punk through a heavy rock filter. They’d Sabb-otaged the Sex Pistols’ trademark sound, the wee scamps!
So, firm-handed as you like, the West Ham riff-raff offloaded a job lot of riffs in a raffish manner. They’d stumbled upon the one artefactual sound-motif that could encapsulate their understanding of what the rock was going on! In doing so, they led myself, and possibly many others, to scurry off looking for more of the same, only to be disappointed. For theirs was the one of a kind! Years later, perhaps foolhardishly, I linked their monomaniac ur-power-chords with Isidore Isou’s concept of lettrisme. Of course, having done so, I needed a critique of this flawed analysis of materialist culture-streaming. I’m still looking!!
Excuse me if I’ve misunderstood Asger Jorn’s statement that:
“It is time to become aware of the drawbacks of all the systems of perspective derived from classical geometry. Many errors arise from a major illusion of modern savants: a distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ geometry was made in the belief that the autonomy of classical geometry could be saved, and that it could be taught as geometry and that which had superseded it were simultaneously true. In the geometry of Euclid, and this has been transmitted to the non-Euclidean systems, the point is defined as a spatial location with no spatial dimension. This omits the fact that the point, bereft of spatial dimensions, still represents the temporal dimension, thanks to its duration. The point thus introduces the dimension of time into spatial organisation, which is the basis of a new elementary geometry. (It is this new study of the point which enables the situation to be understood as a spatial-temporal work alien to the old properties of art).
“When the point is considered as a pure idea, geometry is infected with metaphysics and lends itself to the emptiest constructions of metaphysics. Nothing is left of it.”—and I don’t think I have—The Rejects, or more specifically, Mickey Geggus, their guitarist, happened upon the pivot-point of rock as they saw it, turning one time-bound artefactual trope into a virtuous moment, thereby possibly consciously realising Isidore Isou’s will to assimilate “the innovating truth of the immediate past and present, by openly recognising the forms of future evolution of the aesthetic disciplines that will truly be born for the history of culture and for the place of each author in this history.”
Of course, as your man Jorn said, in his critique of the original Lettriste,
“Human creation does not resemble this sort of French garden, such as Isou would want to embellish, the centre of which he believes he will come to definitively occupy, simply because, preaching untiringly in the emptiness, he foresees (in his own words, ‘the opening of a new amplic’) the completely symmetrical reproduction of the other side of Isou.”
So, who was responsible for this lost art, this nigromansiery, this black-handed, Black Sabbathatian last gasp of working class Resurrection Funk? After a second bottle of grog the other night, I recalled, through the Scotche Mystes of Tyme, that me, Rob and Neale were always going on about tunnel-riffing back in the early-80s, only a couple of yeras after the Rejects had done the do. We used to say it was the great lost art of rock ‘n’ roll, was Mickey Geggus’ favourite guitaring methodology — the old string-damping chug-a-lug. I was led to believe by my synapses that tunnel-riffing was promoted way back when in the pages of Sounds by Garry Bushell, an ex-Trot, who, it turned out, had a soft ear for the yesteryear connective factor in pop culture. Presumably, in the Rejects, he found himself unable to withdraw far from his materialist roots and ended up finding a properly proletarian historical moment to work with. Blimey, where did that come from?
Given all that, it should be clear to even the most dimwitted of the current slew of post-punk numbskulls that in making amplic the object and cause of Geggus’s desire — string damping a la Sabbath — the Rejects were consciously emptying the rock-sound fabrication industry as much as any of Tony Wilson’s supposedly more conscious friends and prole ‘finds’, who may or may not have been as up on Lettrism as he claims to have been.
Oh, the 1980s!! All bollocks, of course. Just another strand of Bore-Lore, as Andy Jackson calls it.
Imagine the scene, my pretties! On one hand, Tony Wilson, on the other, Bushell — one a pro-situationist, the other a party man. Two materialisms clash. But that really is a fairytale for another time, as Louis Ferdinand Céline said. Phew!
To cut the story even longer — (Bear with him, it’s been a long year — Self-Help Ed.)—I emailed Bushell, who I remembered as the Mush who christened the ensuing racket ‘tunnel-riffing’. After all, it was he who invented Oi! after the Rejects’s tune, ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’ Or was it the other way round? But that’s another kettle of.
Imagine to my surprise on opening my Hotmail inbox one fine morning (Mail me, you lot, I kinda like it!!!!!), only to vada a messagette from the Lord o’ Oi! Hisself!! Unfortunately, it seemed I’d barked up the wrong journo. Gazza’s pithy response said (and I quote verbatim, so history can judge): “Sorry, never tunnel riffed in me life. Are you mixing me up with Deaf Barton?”
Of course! The thot plickens!! Geoff “Deaf” Barton, inventor of the term NWOBHM, Satan’s little helper, lover of metal, supporter of Venom, Angel Witch and Diamond Head, Lord High Kreator of Kerrang! The former Sounds man. Could I find Barton’s e-mail address so I could ask him? Could I bollocks?!?!
Looks like we’ll never know. I, for one, have absolutely no intention of trawling through 1000000000000000000 back issues of Sounds, looking for references. If you know anyone who’s that way inclined, get ‘em to write in on a postcard, addressed to someone who gives a toss!!
So, tunnel-riffing it was, is and ever shall be. Arseholes!!
All the beast
Ed.
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