by Bob Stanley
Then there was Talking Heads, whose odd vibe resulted from a bunch of male musicians all trying to impress bassist Tina Weymouth with their chops. Television attempted to reinvent guitar solos with zero flash, and Patti Smith was a hippie poet who ended up in the CBGB gang by dint of having a song called ‘Piss Factory’. Which leaves Blondie, who were Brill Building pop reinvented for a John Waters movie, catfights in velvet. Aside from the Ramones, Blondie were the most photogenic and the most vital of the new New Yorkers. Television had the technical ability, Talking Heads had the brains, but Blondie had the lot. Patti Smith used to stand at the front of their CBGB shows just to stare out singer Debbie Harry – I imagine she might have been jealous.
The past was being raked over, reanimated. A New Yorker of a previous generation, Phil Spector, had sat out most of the seventies, feeling – justifiably – that he’d done his work and he’d done it well. In 1975 he began to reissue his early-sixties productions, most of which had been out of print for the best part of a decade. In a masterstroke of self-publicity which doubled as disaffection with FM radio and the predictability of classic rock, he started to wear a button badge that picked up on a different strand of ’75 conservatism: it read ‘Back to Mono’. Backing him up was an underground network of pop fanzines which, while hoping and trusting that something fresh and energising would soon emerge, were in thrall to the sixties. Greg Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp, his successor to Mojo Navigator, led the way. Britain had Dark Star, led by Steve Burgess, a cheerleader for Big Star and former Byrd Gene Clark.
In the north of England, a mutation of late mod lived on. There was a BBC radio programme in 1975 called Northern Soul: Fact or Fiction? This fierce local scene was all about secrecy, cover-ups, and the folk heroes weren’t the singers but the DJs. Its centres were unlikely venues in unfashionable provincial towns – Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca, the Torch in Stoke. Aside from the Mecca, which spun contemporary but obscure records like Voices of East Harlem’s ‘Cashing In’, it was all about sixties soul, slight variations on the classic Motown sound. Occasionally, a record would become big enough to warrant a reissue and then chart – Tami Lynn’s ‘I’m Gonna Run Away from You’ (UK no. 4 ’71) was originally released on Atlantic in ’66, while Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ ‘The Night’ (UK no. 6 ’75) had been a flop during their brief stay with Motown in 1972. Northern soul was all about obscurity, one-upmanship, the subtle, the impenetrable. You could see this as outsider art, or purism, or as unbearably precious. In New York Lenny Kaye, guitarist in the Patti Smith Group, put together a double album of garage-rock 45s called Nuggets which made forgotten 45s like the Remains’ ‘Don’t Look Back’ available to a new generation, and ignited a new interest in garage punk.
What Nuggets and northern soul signified was that there was an almost bottomless well of great sixties records – way too many for even the best ten per cent to have all been hits – and that what had occurred on the fringes just a few years earlier was more worthwhile than pretty much anything happening in the Top 10 in 1975. Just a year earlier the Stylistics had cut the heart-stoppingly lovely ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New’ (US no. 2, UK no. 2 ’74) with the cool, classical help of producer Thom Bell. But, after splitting with him in late ’74, they had taken soul into grim new territory with ‘Sing Baby Sing’ (UK no. 3 ’75), a hideous song of forced jollity with a soft Eurovision underbelly. Possibly sensing endgames, James Brown had recently decided it was time to stake out his place in pop’s lineage and had taken to calling himself the Godfather of Soul. It was a fair shout. He had been there back in 1956 with the Little Richard-inspired R&B ballad ‘Please Please Please’; again with his barked dancefloor orders on ‘Night Train’ (US no. 35 ’62); he had sung high and sweet on the soul ballad ‘Prisoner of Love’ (US no. 18 ’63); and he had slowly moved into ever harder, crisper polyrhythmic singles, his vocals operating on a purely percussive level, culminating in ‘Give It Up or Turnit a Loose’ (US no. 15 ’69). By 1975, though, he was increasingly sidelined, first by silky soul (he wrote ‘Get Up Offa That Thing’ as a dig at Barry White), and then by disco, while self-destructive comments (he publicly supported Nixon in ’72 and lost a swathe of his audience) and tax debts burdened him further. For the first time in a decade, he failed to score a number one on the R&B chart. He turned to ballads (the exquisite ‘People Wake Up and Live’, the slightly unsettling ‘Kiss in 77’), but his career seemed to be in decline. Kids in parts of bankrupt New York City, however, deified him. Fans of Philadelphia and aspirational disco associated Brown’s music with bad times, with poverty, a lack of civil rights, with the ghetto; the soundtrack in the South Bronx in ’75 wasn’t ‘Sing Baby Sing’ but the harsher, tricksier ‘Give It Up or Turnit a Loose’, ‘Funky Drummer’ and Brown’s early-seventies productions for Lyn Collins (‘Think’) and Bobby Byrd (‘I Know You Got Soul’). These weren’t especially old records – just three, four, five years – but they had been discarded and reclaimed just as surely as the obscurities on Nuggets or the manic Detroit soul being played at Wigan. James Brown’s ghetto deification would have long-term repercussions.
The drug of the day in Laurel Canyon in 1975 was coke, enough to take your septum out. Its high price reflected its users’ wealth. At Wigan, and in other northern-soul strongholds, the drug was speed; on Canvey Island it was beer. Cheap and, in moderation, cheerful. The earliest backlash against staid Laurel Canyon rock in Britain came from the London hinterland – Essex, the most ridiculed county in England, the Anglo equivalent of Staten Island. It made perfect sense that Dr Feelgood were keen to convey their Canvey, Essex, locale on their debut album, Down by the Jetty (a clever title which also evoked Baltimore docks and Louisiana swamps), and to wrap the record inside a monochrome jacket with a clean, simple typeface in the era of bubble writing.4 On the sleeve they wore Southend suits and ties, and grimaced in the face of a North Sea gale; musically, they revisited the London R&B scene of the mid-sixties, energetic and boozy, with no songs lasting over three minutes. Growing up in a town full of modified shacks, out in the Thames delta, it was easy for Dr Feelgood to fantasise about the States and, in turn, write their own Canvey Island blues songs – jagged 45s like ‘She Does It Right’, ‘Roxette’ and ‘Back in the Night’ were enough to fuel the pub-rock scene twenty-odd miles up the Thames.5
Singer Lee Brilleaux looked a good deal older than his twenty-five years; he was the original Essex spiv, in a gravy-stained white suit, and had the kind of voice you might hear if Ford Cortinas could sing. His foil was guitarist Wilko Johnson, who – bug-eyed, mouth agape – looked like an oversize, menacing Muppet as he darted back and forth across the stage. Wilko also played brutal guitar lines with great precision, as economical as Steve Cropper – his sharpness on songs like ‘She Does It Right’ would be echoed in the post-punk rhythmic riffs of XTC and Gang of Four a few years later.
Against the grain, with Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same and Rod Stewart’s A Night on the Town just behind them, Dr Feelgood’s third album, Stupidity, was a UK number one in ’76. It looked like their future was secured. Then, just before an electrifying performance of ‘Lights Out’ on Top of the Pops in May ’77, Wilko quit. Lee Brilleaux’s growl and Sweeney-like charisma alone weren’t enough to keep up the momentum and their star dimmed. Yet their brief burst of success in ’75 and ’76 suggested people really, really wanted something a little more energetic than Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, something more immediate, a little more violent.
Dr Feelgood’s commercial success was an exception: most random bursts of disaffected 1975 noise disappeared into cardboard boxes – discarded by critics, underpromoted by the industry – and were only unearthed two or three decades later by modern pop archaeologists. A few of these isolated attempts to break free, to extemporate mid-seventies angst, are astonishing. Spunky Spider had maybe the ugliest name ever; their bawled tale of sexual failure, 1973’s ‘You Won’t Come’, features a gargled Lee Brilleaux-like vocal over a wall o
f fuzz guitar, pierced by dive-bombing electronic shards. No one has any idea who Spunky Spider were or what they were hoping to achieve. Almost as unlikely is ‘Do the Clapham’, a piece of ’75 thug rock played by the fictitious Kipper in the soft-porn comedy Confessions of a Pop Performer. Meanwhile, Cleveland, Ohio, gave us ‘Agitated’ by the Electric Eels (‘I’m so agitated, I’m so agitated, I’m so agitated that I’m so agitated’). In Brisbane, the frigid, isolated capital of Queensland, Australia, a bunch of stout lads called the Saints had heard quite enough stodgy rock – ‘As long as you had a satin jump-suit and a copy of [Free’s] Fire and Water,’ said singer Chris Bailey, ‘you could probably make it on some level or other.’ They set about recording a primal, two-minute 45 called ‘(I’m) Stranded’ which arrived by ship months later in a very different Britain, one crying out for such acts of open rebellion. Across the world, pop lovers were agitated. Monthly magazine columns, compilation albums and button badges were a start, but the fun had only just begun.
1 The term ‘classic rock’ was not bandied about at the time; it was a given that this was simply ‘real music’. It wasn’t until 1983 that KRBE in Houston was set up to play nothing but album tracks from the late sixties to the early seventies. Classic rock in late-seventies Britain only meant a series of huge-selling albums by the London Symphony Orchestra. Their track listings – ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Nights in White Satin’ – neatly reflected the still nebulous American definition.
2 I can’t hear much difference in the sound of the groups, aside from industry in-tray shuffling. One of them was marketed as an albums band and one as a singles group. One for teenagers, one for kids. It seems astonishing now how easily people were taken in by the packaging, without trusting their own ears.
3 Václav Havel’s battered copy of the Velvet Underground’s second album, White Light/White Heat, did the rounds in communist Prague in the early seventies, inspiring local art-rockers the Plastic People of the Universe; it could be claimed that the Soviet bloc was ultimately broken up by the power of the guitar solo on ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’.
4 The monochrome simplicity of both picture and layout of the Patti Smith Group’s Horses bore a startling similarity to Dr Feelgood’s Down by the Jetty, an album Blondie drummer Clem Burke had picked up on a trip to England and was loudly touting to his scenester mates. Already, in a very small way, there was a kinship felt between the London and New York undergrounds.
5 As a reaction to the stadiums the likes of the Who and the Rolling Stones were now playing, a bunch of pubs – the Nashville Rooms in Hammersmith, the Hope and Anchor in Islington – started to put on regular nights. The music was initially undemanding country rock – American band Eggs Over Easy started the trend with a residency at the Tally Ho in Kentish Town in 1971, where they were soon followed by Nick Lowe’s Brinsley Schwarz and the slightly more aggressive Ducks Deluxe – but Dr Feelgood upped the ante, playing faster and harder, and were soon followed by Southend’s Eddie and the Hot Rods, who cracked the Top 10 in ’77 with the perfect pub/punk/power-pop amalgam ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’. The pub-rock scene created a ready-made gig circuit for punk.
PART FOUR
39
COURAGE, AUDACITY AND REVOLT: THE SEX PISTOLS
There was a time when John Lydon was a Pink Floyd fan. Living in a council flat in Finsbury Park, he listened to Pink Floyd, to Can, to Jamaican dub and to Van Der Graaf Generator. Outside his window, London was wasting away. The post-war shine of socialism, the optimism evinced by the Shadows’ ‘Wonderful Land’ just over a decade before, was tarnished and muddy. Public housing was mean and colourless. Buildings were filthy, bins overflowed, everything smelt, everything was dirty. No one seemed to care enough to do anything about it. Hanging on in quiet desperation – it was the English way.
Pink Floyd certainly didn’t appear to care, or intend to do anything about it. They seemed content to point out, from a distance, that people frittered their lives away, owing their souls to the company store. Moneyed and pretentious was how Lydon started to read their stance; Floyd had a cocksure, self-satisfied aura of greatness – it suddenly struck him that they thought they were so great, in fact, there was no room for anybody else. One day, he cut off his Gilmour-length locks, got a marker pen and wrote ‘I hate’ across the top of his Pink Floyd T-shirt.
The Sex Pistols were, initially, a figment of Malcom McLaren’s imagination. One of the most divisive figures in this saga, McLaren had been at Croydon Art College in 1968 and organised a sit-in; he was the perfect suburban situationist. He believed in Guy Debord’s maxim, ‘In the future, art will be the overturning of situations or it will be nothing.’ The situation McLaren wanted to overturn, he soon realised, was how pop was being created and consumed. Kicked out of college, by 1971 he was running a clothes shop called Let It Rock (nothing to do with the magazine), and selling vintage fifties gear. Larry Parnes was in the mix with Guy Debord in shaping McLaren’s stance. He didn’t want to be Billy Fury – he knew he was too pasty, curly and puffy-cheeked – but he could be an impresario.
Let It Rock became Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, and then, when McLaren tired of the oikish Ted clientele, it became Sex. With Vivienne Westwood, he stocked ever more outrageous clothing under the Seditionaries label – one shirt featured the hood worn by the Cambridge Rapist, then terrifying the city, and beneath it the legend ‘Brian Epstein found dead August 27th 1967 after taking part in sadomasochistic practices … S & M made him feel at home’. McLaren was in awe of his forefathers, but at the same time had a Freudian desire to destroy them.
By the mid-seventies modern pop had become part of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, uninvolving, uninspiring, just there, on supermarket shelves offering you the lame beats of the Bay City Rollers, the numbing muzak of Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn, the whinnying of wealthy west-coast hippies. McLaren knew that no one really wanted this, that he couldn’t be the only one who’d had enough, who wanted to kick over the statues. What he needed was a group to mould, and he thought he’d found them in the New York Dolls on a trip to the States. Closer to home, though, was a bully beef of a lad called Steve Jones who frequented the Sex store – he had a band playing covers of Small Faces and Who songs with amateurish gusto. McLaren thought they could take on the Bay City Rollers if only they could find a front man. John Lydon, in his customised ‘I hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt, walked in one day and got the job by leaning on the shop jukebox and miming to Alice Cooper’s ‘Eighteen’. He was rechristened Johnny Rotten.
Punk brought the issue of class back into pop. What the Beatles had started, the Sex Pistols carried on. Johnny Rotten said, ‘I regard myself as working-class, but I know damn well working class doesn’t regard me that way,’ and later, ‘Why are the working class so angry, lazy and scared of education? Why are they so scared of learning and stepping outside their clearly defined class barriers?’
Johnny Rotten, like no one since Elvis, affected the cultural temperature. ‘I had no ambitions. I knew I was just sick of a lot of things and had no way of expressing it.’ The Sex Pistols’ music and nihilist stance expressed revulsion at a passive country on its knees, with Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language passing for entertainment on TV, with BBC Radio 1 avoiding anything that could be construed as underground (including ninety-five per cent of reggae); they sounded as sore and angry as an unlanced boil. ‘I was frightened going near a microphone,’ said Rotten, ‘I was shocked the way it sounded, what I sounded like.’ Not as shocked and frightened as everyone else would be.
Rotten called things as he saw them, which could have been embarrassing – he could have sounded like a finger-wagging student or a terrace yob or a junior Enoch Powell, but he was clever. Bored and clever. And he dealt with the press by ignoring them as much as he could, calling them ‘spiteful and childish and stupid’.
There was plenty to rail against in the Britain of 1976, and the irritation popped up in the strangest places.
A children’s comic called Action – featuring killer shark Hookjaw and post-apocalypse teen-gang story ‘Kids Rule OK’ – caused outrage and was pulled a year later. Before Action, the number-one boys’ comic in Britain was Warlord, which still had World War Two as its key source. Action, with its heavy anti-authoritarian tone and extreme violence, was launched in February ’76 and was the perfect ten-year-old schoolkid’s primer for the musical upheaval ahead.
The upheaval was crystallised by an appearance on Thames Television’s Today programme, an undemanding early-evening show with a Moog version of the Association’s ‘Windy’ as its theme and an avuncular presenter called Bill Grundy. The Sex Pistols only appeared because Queen dropped out at the last minute and EMI’s promotions man Eric Hall, not wanting to miss a promotional TV slot, put another group on the show. Grundy appeared to be drunk. He goaded the band into swearing. He chatted up their mate Siouxsie Sioux. ‘You dirty fucker!’ said an unimpressed Steve Jones. ‘What a fucking rotter!’ Action comic was stronger stuff, but this incident was enough to cement the legend. ‘THE FILTH AND THE FURY’, ran the Daily Mirror front page the following day. EMI, panicking, withdrew the Pistols’ first single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, which was at a lowly number thirty-eight. McLaren was beside himself with joy. Here was the situationist event he had craved, turning the mushiest teatime TV show into an antagonistic event which so enraged one viewer he put his foot through the TV screen. And it only happened because Freddie Mercury and Brian May were out Christmas shopping.