Arts
The year of punk
Sebastian Faulks
The night of July the fourth 1976, the American bicentennial, was hotter in London than in Beirut or Mexico City, and there can have been few places hotter than the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, where a sweat-drenched crowd cheered to the echo of three groups — the Stranglers, the Ramones and the Flamin' Groovies — who had just produced the most exhilarating two hours' music I have ever heard. The songs were short, fast, loud and dirty; nihilistic in flavour and technically banal. And if you thought pop music was always like that, then you're both right and wrong. As well as being a new style and a new departure, punk was also a return to the traditional rock virtues which had been neglected for a long time.
The decline set in after the heady days of Woodstock and the late 'sixties: the causes were many but the chief culprit was Delirium Emersonium Grandiosum. Following the discovery that many rock musicians could actually play their instruments quite well, there was a sudden move • towards large-scale 'works' and 'concept albums' (records in which a common theme unites the tracks). Emerson, Lake and Palmer's first appearance, at the Isle of Wight in '1970, centred around a version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition which ended with two cannons being tired from the stage. Emerson was an adequate pianist with a taste for the pop classics and a weakness for rippling arpeggios, Palmer a drummer who did weightlifting exercises to increase his 'attack' and Lake a cherubic singer and bassist who liked to play standing on a Persian rug. They were hailed as the new messiahs and throughout the 'seventies their records have sold in millions. I am ashamed to admit that I liked them too: their bombast really was impressive, and it is only with hindsight, knowing what followed, that one can see what a disaster it all was. Meanwhile Pink Floyd, a psychedelic group of the 'sixties, had lost their leader Syd Barrett and set about trying to conceal the creative vacuum he left with enormous light shows, clouds of dry ice and lengthy works full of sound and fury. They became very rich with the release of Dark Side of the Moon in 1971, as heartless and banal a piece of musak as was ever produced by four actors in search of an accountant. It sold chiefly to tourists in London and French motorists whose rock horizons stopped at Johnny Halliday.
In many ways the worst culprits were Yes, a band with real rock roots who made an excellent record (The Yes Album) in 1971 but subsequently moved into the dreaded concept albums with offerings like Tales From Topographic Oceans complete with cover by Boots-surrealist Roger Dean. Their keyboard player, Rick Wakeman, was given to mounting spectaculars like 'Journey to the Centre of Earth on Ice' with the massed choirs of the cosmos lending weight to his three-chord trick . . . well, almost. Everywhere quantity was confused with quality; everywhere self-indulgence reigned supreme. Ageing trendies on the Sunday papers threw their weight behind the movement (how much the Beatles' Sgt Pepper has to answer for; or rather the critical afflatus that greeted it), and with the help of Melody Maker, which turned from a compendious and worthily dull weekly into a Yes fanzine, these megagroups rolled on, crushing all beneath them in an inexorable advance of bombast, pretension and mediocrity.
In the nadir years of '73'74 many true rock punters hung up their leather jackets and traded in their aviator shades. But in America people still remembered the MC5, a maniacal foursome from Detroit, and on the East Coast the remnants of the bisexual glamour movement, bands like the New York Dolls and Television, were still tough and entertaining. Then in late '74 maverick individuals like Patti Smith and Iggy Pop began to have more attention paid to them. Meanwhile in England a handful of diehards like Dr Feelgood, working-class and dirty, were playing the pubs which were nqw the only places you get to hear real rock music. A groundswell started. Take into account the flabby and effete nature of mainstream rock, the economic crisis, the desperate need for music that people under twenty could understand, add the influence of the freaks and a touch of magic (there is always magic; these things are otherwise not quite explicable) and pow, . . punk.
If the spark came from the States, Britaill very soon made punk her own. By the end of '76 the commercial machine had started up and fashions and crazes were born. The clothes — safety-pins, bin-liners, jeans pumps and leather — reflected the music. being a utilitarian mix of old and new with the emphasis on shocking the average SO reader. The groups played songs of the dole. England in the 'seventies, boredom and often of nothing at all. Wretched was beat* iful. Perhaps the best definition of the punl; mentality can be given in a story about the Ramones who were asked how their music was progressing. They replied that the). could now play their set in thirty-six minutes whereas a month ago it had taken 0101 thirty-eight.
Stories like this one led some critics to wheel out the big words like 'minimalist' but they don't seem to me to be appropriate fof such an anti-intellectual movement. Punk is nothing; it is now; it is disposable, but, foc the moment, indispensable. The most sue' cessful of the punk bands has been the Stranglers, ex-university and technicalh' quite proficient. But their first album war derided as sexist (or phallocratic, to he more precise) and they are in many ways the acceptable face of punk whose albums can sometimes be found nestling between Dave Brubeck and the. Faure Requiem in Flo' chley drawing-rooms. The most famous are the Sex Pistols, who are almost universalb. banned from playing because of their behaviour. Their first album is slightly clis' appointing but it has been a long time since anyone has made a single of such anarchic frenzy as their glorious 'God Save the Queen'.
Outside the pure punks, of whom the Clash are the purest, the energising nod liberating influence of punk has been Or' reaching. The new wave, as well as be inl genuinely new, has revitalised the whole rock scene by turning it back to its elerne°' tary virtues: attack, rebellion, simplicity'. excitement. The result is that now band5 like Graham Parker and the Rumour have been able to flourish in a sympathetic di' mate.
That sweltering night in the Roundho0 seems to be more and more a turning poin; The relief and the exhilaration that for lowed were not misplaced: the long nigh'. mare of self-indulgence is over. The effect can be felt even outside the confines ° music itself; as Rob Tyner, formerly of th MCS, wrote on an October visit to Londoo 'The bands are hotter, the folks in the still seem happier and the pubs are rowdief And if this is decadence and decay, wher4 do 1 sign up and take my blood test?' The is a good deal more to punk rock the safety-pins and four-letter words. The 11 wave has broken now. Maybe another so follow but before it does we should at lea take stock of how the first one has alteeet the shores of our consciousness. In short punk has changed and revitalised the wh°1 face of our contemporary culture. And OA as the French would say, is already not bay
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