Nothing Ever Happens To People Like Us, 'Cept We Miss The Bus.
I used to feel like a fraud. I grew up in the 80's, in the afterglow of Punk's moist squib. Punk had penetrated society's consciousness profoundly: a tame bogey-man, a household devil. Kenny Everett had a punk character, Gizzard Puke, who was just a shit version of Sid Snot (which is also a better Punk name). Postcard Punk Matt Belgrano was bothering the pigeons and shilling the the American tourists in Trafalgar Square. In the sit-com "Keep it in the Family" former Black Beauty star, Stacey Dorning, joined a leather, studs and comedy hair Punk rock band and was asked to sing a song called "Anarchy", only to find before the closing credits that it was a wistful piano ballad to a girl named "Anna Key".
In the park near my house growing up in Portslade there was a red brick toilet (don't go looking for it, its not there any more) that had a giant phallus daubed along the exterior that was pierced at intervals with safety pins. It bore the legend "Punk Cock".
Punk was everywhere. And so were its thick proponents. They used to hang around The Great Western pub at the bottom of my road, day-drinking and larking about, with their capped sleeves and that peculiar "I've-just-shit-myself-ha-ha-its-cool-though-cause-its-punk" walk. All that snakebite. All those hedgehog flavoured crisps. Somewhere amongst those gooning clowns was the teenage Liz Hurley, slumming it hard. Barely a day goes by without me thinking about that. If I hadn't been wearing my school uniform, steel framed specs and carrying an over-sized sports holdall with the word "Head" written on it, who knows what might have happened.
I was too young for Punk, really. It was all over before I'd even entered my teens. Adam Ant was my first big pop passion and had been a punk, but he was no longer anything like the farting bum-cleavaged bores who lingered round the Great Western trestle tables like wasps at a bin. He was fast, clever, beautiful. He wore makeup and he made the rest of the band wear make-up, even poor old Marco. He looked like a tin of quality street and sounded like nothing on earth. He actually sounded like lots of things on earth but I didn't know that then.
By the time I was taking a serious interest in music Post-Punk had come in and everyone had big coats and bigger hair and wanted to be from the sixties, or they were clumping up speaker stacks wanting to be from America. At the indie discos you still heard bits of punk: Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Toy Dolls. As far as I was concerned The Toy Dolls were as big a band as the other two. And suddenly, from nowhere, bigger boys would appear, deodorant free, to beat each other up in three minute spurts on the dance floor, to the tuneless, bellowed dirges of the Clash, the pub rock boogie of the Pistols. It seemed to me that the major innovation of the Sex Pistols was to make ordinary rock music sound a bit sarcastic; not much to pin a revolution on really. It was all such macho bullshit. There was no glamour, nor excitement, no sexiness, just one note blarts of people being angry over and over again for money. It was all so girl afraid. You couldn't dance to it.
I owned no records of my own. I had no money so any music that I did get was a carefully thought about birthday or Christmas gift. One Christmas I got a Walkman and two cassettes. I had thought long and hard about the cassettes because I couldn't afford to fuck it up. There would be nothing new till March, which was my birthday. After that it was the full gestation period until Christmas again. I got the Rolled Gold Collection by The Rolling Stones and Singles Going Steady by Buzzcocks. I never listened to Buzzcocks and I was heartbroken because I'd spunked my chance. Someone must have recommended them to me. It could just have been the drummer being called John Maher that swung it; you had nothing to go on in those days - I hadn't started reading the music press.
The Stones I loved. They were huge, sexy, dangerous and somehow I knew all their songs! They sounded dangerous and evil: "Midnight Rambler" "Sympathy for the Devil" (in my Catholic home!) "Gimme Shelter". And if you wanted sarcastic check out "We Love You"! Fuck you, Johnny Rotten - that's how you ladle it on! They were my favourite band then. I wore out battery after battery listening to that one tape. I even liked the early blues ones.
Then we had to go to Ireland on holiday. It wasn't really a holiday - it was the occasion of my Grandparent's 50th Wedding anniversary - so it was a real gathering of the tribe: beacons were lit, horns were sounded, beers cracked open. I remember two things about that holiday: having to sit at the children's table even though I was sixteen, wearing a Cosby jumper to make me look normal. And forgetting my Rolling Stones tape. I'd brought "Singles Going Steady" by mistake.
Look at them. Look at that shitty cover. Four little blokes in black against a beige background. Beige! It looked like they were playing a school hall. The shitty title didn't even mean anything. ("Singles Going Steady" is actually a lovely and typical oxymoron, you teenage arse.) But it was a long trip and I'd have to listen to something or talk to my family AND THAT WASN'T GOING TO HAPPEN. I took a vow of silence during my teenage years, at home at any rate.
I slipped the cassette into the machine, popped on my spongey headphones and pressed play.
FUCKING HELL.
"Butchers' assistants and bellhops
You've had them all here and there
Children of God and their joy strings
International women with no body hair"
FUCKING HELL.
The song was called "Orgasm Addict"! It had a mad bit about "the lady who puts the little plastic bobbins on the Christmas cake." (I thought it was "robins"). There was a bit where he pretended to be coming! There was talk of stained jeans and dirty magazines. I turned it off and looked around to see if anyone in the car had overheard this filth. No sign. Eyes wide I pressed play again.
Every song on that album was brilliant. Every one. Hit after hit they came: "What do I get?" "I don't mind." "Ever Fallen In Love With Somebody (You Shouldn't've Fallen In Love With)" (great parenthesise there!) "Noise Annoys" "Lipstick" "Why Can't I Touch It" and my favourite "Something's Gone Wrong Again" which I didn't know at the time sounded like The Stooges if Iggy really was a dog, and contains the line "Try to fry an egg/ but the yolk broke, no joke", and a fucking monster of a guitar solo.
It was extraordinary stuff. The band were incredibly tight, the songs stripped down, honed. There wasn't an ounce of fat on them, leaving room for singer Peter Shelley to be raw and sloppy and whiny and miffed and horny and thwarted and sexy all over them, smeared like blood from a hammered heart. He was probably the best lyricist of all time. Conversational, common-place, and absolutely precise. He threw them away, yelped or spat 'em out, and they were always just right:
"I only get sleepless nights,
Alone here in my half-empty bed,
For you things seem to turn out right,
I wish they'd only happen to me instead."
Its that "half-empty" that makes it so right. The "only" that turns it from self pitying to peevish. His precision is poetic but these are very definitely pop lyrics.
I've loved Buzzcocks ever since. They were the best of everything: great tunes, fierce attacking guitars, simple songs played cleverly, stupid mocking guitar solos. Brilliant words sang in a fey nasal whine, none of that stink of lumpshness, or beery nonsense. Buzzcocks were quick, clever, non specifically sexual. They looked as though they washed. Pete looked like you could take him home and he's charm everyone into bed.
He was a great punk. A great pop singer. A great lyricist. And a great pop "thing".
I like SOME other punk records now. But not the ones they played in Martines in Basingstoke.
In the park near my house growing up in Portslade there was a red brick toilet (don't go looking for it, its not there any more) that had a giant phallus daubed along the exterior that was pierced at intervals with safety pins. It bore the legend "Punk Cock".
Punk was everywhere. And so were its thick proponents. They used to hang around The Great Western pub at the bottom of my road, day-drinking and larking about, with their capped sleeves and that peculiar "I've-just-shit-myself-ha-ha-its-cool-though-cause-its-punk" walk. All that snakebite. All those hedgehog flavoured crisps. Somewhere amongst those gooning clowns was the teenage Liz Hurley, slumming it hard. Barely a day goes by without me thinking about that. If I hadn't been wearing my school uniform, steel framed specs and carrying an over-sized sports holdall with the word "Head" written on it, who knows what might have happened.
I was too young for Punk, really. It was all over before I'd even entered my teens. Adam Ant was my first big pop passion and had been a punk, but he was no longer anything like the farting bum-cleavaged bores who lingered round the Great Western trestle tables like wasps at a bin. He was fast, clever, beautiful. He wore makeup and he made the rest of the band wear make-up, even poor old Marco. He looked like a tin of quality street and sounded like nothing on earth. He actually sounded like lots of things on earth but I didn't know that then.
By the time I was taking a serious interest in music Post-Punk had come in and everyone had big coats and bigger hair and wanted to be from the sixties, or they were clumping up speaker stacks wanting to be from America. At the indie discos you still heard bits of punk: Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Toy Dolls. As far as I was concerned The Toy Dolls were as big a band as the other two. And suddenly, from nowhere, bigger boys would appear, deodorant free, to beat each other up in three minute spurts on the dance floor, to the tuneless, bellowed dirges of the Clash, the pub rock boogie of the Pistols. It seemed to me that the major innovation of the Sex Pistols was to make ordinary rock music sound a bit sarcastic; not much to pin a revolution on really. It was all such macho bullshit. There was no glamour, nor excitement, no sexiness, just one note blarts of people being angry over and over again for money. It was all so girl afraid. You couldn't dance to it.
I owned no records of my own. I had no money so any music that I did get was a carefully thought about birthday or Christmas gift. One Christmas I got a Walkman and two cassettes. I had thought long and hard about the cassettes because I couldn't afford to fuck it up. There would be nothing new till March, which was my birthday. After that it was the full gestation period until Christmas again. I got the Rolled Gold Collection by The Rolling Stones and Singles Going Steady by Buzzcocks. I never listened to Buzzcocks and I was heartbroken because I'd spunked my chance. Someone must have recommended them to me. It could just have been the drummer being called John Maher that swung it; you had nothing to go on in those days - I hadn't started reading the music press.
The Stones I loved. They were huge, sexy, dangerous and somehow I knew all their songs! They sounded dangerous and evil: "Midnight Rambler" "Sympathy for the Devil" (in my Catholic home!) "Gimme Shelter". And if you wanted sarcastic check out "We Love You"! Fuck you, Johnny Rotten - that's how you ladle it on! They were my favourite band then. I wore out battery after battery listening to that one tape. I even liked the early blues ones.
Then we had to go to Ireland on holiday. It wasn't really a holiday - it was the occasion of my Grandparent's 50th Wedding anniversary - so it was a real gathering of the tribe: beacons were lit, horns were sounded, beers cracked open. I remember two things about that holiday: having to sit at the children's table even though I was sixteen, wearing a Cosby jumper to make me look normal. And forgetting my Rolling Stones tape. I'd brought "Singles Going Steady" by mistake.
Look at them. Look at that shitty cover. Four little blokes in black against a beige background. Beige! It looked like they were playing a school hall. The shitty title didn't even mean anything. ("Singles Going Steady" is actually a lovely and typical oxymoron, you teenage arse.) But it was a long trip and I'd have to listen to something or talk to my family AND THAT WASN'T GOING TO HAPPEN. I took a vow of silence during my teenage years, at home at any rate.
I slipped the cassette into the machine, popped on my spongey headphones and pressed play.
FUCKING HELL.
"Butchers' assistants and bellhops
You've had them all here and there
Children of God and their joy strings
International women with no body hair"
FUCKING HELL.
The song was called "Orgasm Addict"! It had a mad bit about "the lady who puts the little plastic bobbins on the Christmas cake." (I thought it was "robins"). There was a bit where he pretended to be coming! There was talk of stained jeans and dirty magazines. I turned it off and looked around to see if anyone in the car had overheard this filth. No sign. Eyes wide I pressed play again.
Every song on that album was brilliant. Every one. Hit after hit they came: "What do I get?" "I don't mind." "Ever Fallen In Love With Somebody (You Shouldn't've Fallen In Love With)" (great parenthesise there!) "Noise Annoys" "Lipstick" "Why Can't I Touch It" and my favourite "Something's Gone Wrong Again" which I didn't know at the time sounded like The Stooges if Iggy really was a dog, and contains the line "Try to fry an egg/ but the yolk broke, no joke", and a fucking monster of a guitar solo.
It was extraordinary stuff. The band were incredibly tight, the songs stripped down, honed. There wasn't an ounce of fat on them, leaving room for singer Peter Shelley to be raw and sloppy and whiny and miffed and horny and thwarted and sexy all over them, smeared like blood from a hammered heart. He was probably the best lyricist of all time. Conversational, common-place, and absolutely precise. He threw them away, yelped or spat 'em out, and they were always just right:
"I only get sleepless nights,
Alone here in my half-empty bed,
For you things seem to turn out right,
I wish they'd only happen to me instead."
Its that "half-empty" that makes it so right. The "only" that turns it from self pitying to peevish. His precision is poetic but these are very definitely pop lyrics.
I've loved Buzzcocks ever since. They were the best of everything: great tunes, fierce attacking guitars, simple songs played cleverly, stupid mocking guitar solos. Brilliant words sang in a fey nasal whine, none of that stink of lumpshness, or beery nonsense. Buzzcocks were quick, clever, non specifically sexual. They looked as though they washed. Pete looked like you could take him home and he's charm everyone into bed.
He was a great punk. A great pop singer. A great lyricist. And a great pop "thing".
I like SOME other punk records now. But not the ones they played in Martines in Basingstoke.
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