by John King
Praise for Human Punk
‘In its ambition and exuberance, Human Punk is a league ahead of much contemporary English fiction.’
—New Statesman
‘Evokes the punk era superbly.’
—Independent On Sunday
‘The long sentences and paragraphs build up cumulatively, with the sequences describing an end-of-term punch-up and the final canal visit just two virtuoso examples. These passages come close to matching the coiled energy of Hubert Selby’s prose, one of King’s keynote influences…. In the resolution of the novel’s central, devastating act, there is an almost Shakespearean sense of a brief restoration of balance after the necessary bloodletting.’
—Gareth Evans, The Independent
‘King’s eye for detail is as sharp as his characters’ tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and fucked up the next. Like real people, then.’
—The Face
‘Unique and brutal fiction. King is a master of idiom and street slang. He appears with a voice that appears to be the true expression of disaffected white British youth.’
—The Times
‘A novel dedicated to good literature lovers. Rough, violent, scary, visionary, true, political, raw, aggressive, totally moving, this novel has got the anger of the Sex Pistols, the energy of the Clash and the pumping lines of the best dub courtesy of King Tubby.’
—Pop Culture Detox
‘King’s most accomplished and compelling story to date.’
—Esquire
‘An ode to satellite towns that Paul Weller will love.’
—Q Magazine
‘John King’s achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely literature.’
—Charles Shaar Murray
Human Punk
John King
© John King 2000
First published by Jonathan Cape, a division of The Random House Group Ltd
“Two Sevens Clash” © John King 2015
This edition© 2015 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
John King has asserted his right to be identified as the Author of the Work.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–115–8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900711
Cover design by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Two Sevens Clash
SATELLITE
Slough, England Summer 1977
Boots and Braces
Dodgems
Sound of the Westway
Kicking for Kicks
ASYLUM
Beijing, China Autumn 1988
DAYGLO
Slough, England Spring 2000
Sitting Pretty
Loud and Proud
Version
Against the Grain
For Amanda and Sam
The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes—everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns—the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming pools.
—‘England Your England’, George Orwell
I clambered over mounds and mounds of polystyrene snow,
Then fell into a swimming pool, filled with Fairy Snow,
And watched the world turn dayglo, you know,
You know the world turned dayglo, you know.
—‘The Day The World Turned Dayglo’, X-Ray Spex
TWO SEVENS CLASH
The memory is razor sharp. I was standing by the bar at a Friday-night dance in the West London satellite town of Slough, aged sixteen, sipping at a can of bitter-tasting lager. This was no Travolta-like disco, nor was it an up-market club full of coke-snorting celebrities, just a scruffy British affair flavoured with beer, perfume and some Jam-style Doctor Martens leather—‘blended in by the weather’. The records played by the DJ saw chart hits backed up by some rock and plastic soul, and then out of nowhere came ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ by the Ramones. It singed the air, changed the atmosphere in seconds, my skin tingling same as it did when I heard ‘Liquidator’ by Harry J & The All Starts at my first football match. Life had changed.
In those popular chart songs, with their music-hall delivery and vaudeville humour and singalong football-terrace choruses, lay the roots of our version of punk. Slade, Sweet and Cockney Rebel … T. Rex, Mott The Hoople, Roxy Music … Alvin Stardust, Gary Glitter, Wizard … Punk was the next step on from what is now labelled ‘glam’—via Dr Feelgood, those speeding rhythm-n-blues merchants from Canvey Island to the east of London. Older kids knew about Detroit’s Stooges and the New York Dolls, but not us. Our music was the sound of the English suburbs.
Other records had already made their mark, the biggest influence being David Bowie and a series of LPs that include Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs. Bowie sang in an English accent, didn’t try to mimic the American greats, which was unusual at the time. Punk would do the same. The Rolling Stones and the Who were going strong, as were Elton John and Rod Stewart. There was plenty of rock ’n’ roll about and Elvis Presley still ruled the working man’s clubs. The girls wore pencil skirts and stockings and danced to Motown and Hot Chocolate. The lads brooded at the bar in cap-sleeve T-shirts and DMs, doing their best to look tough. We were boot boys. Hated hippies and soulboys. Disco was the enemy. The year was 1977.
The media had a different take on punk. For them it meant the fashionable and expensive King’s Road in Chelsea, a wealthy area of Central London, the pose of entrepreneurs Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, a collection of art-school students and older hippy chancers. The clothes these self-promoters pushed belonged on a catwalk in Milan. For us, it was a load of bollocks. We hated that side of things with a vengeance. Punk was supposed to be anti-fashion, that was part of the attraction, and so a split was there from the start.
What really mattered was the music and without four proper herberts in Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook punk might never have existed. The Pistols were the guvnors, seemed to come out of Slade and Sweet, though in reality it was more like the Stooges. Everything changed when the Sex Pistols exploded onto vinyl. Four massive singles—‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Holidays In The Sun’—set a standard that has never been bettered. Steve Jones’s guitar is definitive. The B-sides were also excellent. Their one and only album—Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols—was perfect. Then suddenly they were gone, ruined by the publicity-seeking of McLaren.
The Clash were the other big band. They were all about their albums and live shows, brilliant 45s such as ‘White Riot’, ‘Complete Control’ and ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’ never seriously damaging the charts. They lasted into the 1980s and produced five LPs with their normal line-up—one of those a do
uble, another a magnificent triple. Sixteen slabs of 12-inch vinyl. The Clash stuck together, overflowed with ideas, changed and mutated, could be seen on tour again and again. Each show was a spectacle. I saw them three times in a week at the Lyceum, two nights running at the Electric Ballroom. Life didn’t get much better. Joe Strummer delivered the lyrics and vocals while another Jones—guitarist Mick—pushed the sound in different directions. Reggae and dub were two Clash loves, the popularity of the music generally clear in the bass of so many punk bands. And then there was X-Ray Spex. Like the Pistols, they released a single LP, but Germfree Adolescents was also perfect.
The vocals of their lead singer Poly Styrene freeze the skin, cut across a room the same as those Ramones guitars. Poly was a punk rocker, Sheena in the flesh. When she talked about diamond dogs in ‘The Day The World Turned Dayglo’ the Bowie connection was fixed. Swimming pools and dirty canals—the emotions that filled our homes, schools, churches, workplaces was tapped. Bowie’s Major Tom roamed the streets of Slough under another name. And it is here that Human Punk is based. Some see Slough as grim and grey, a flatland of petrol-soaked aggravation, but Joe Martin knows it is exciting and alive and thick with an inner colour. It is the people who are important.
Slough could be a rough old place in the 1970s. It still can be. The town has been insulted and dismissed by snobs of all persuasions. It has never been fashionable and will never be trendy, and while it is far from alone, its name has become synonymous with the notion of a new sort of concrete jungle. But there is an honesty about the place. It is direct and diverse, part of the surrounding area. There are fields and woods on the margins, big homes and housing estates. A series of arteries run through it, goods moved by rail and road, but there is also an arm of the Grand Union Canal—overgrown and dirty and full of rubbish in 1977, symbolic of the decay of post-war Britain, raging industrial strife and an escalating clash between labour and the bosses, a conflict that would see the emergence of Margaret Thatcher. Punk is a child of the seventies.
Four miles away is Uxbridge, where the sprawl of Greater London ends, home to punk legends the Ruts and the Lurkers. The Clash and the Sex Pistols operated at the far end of the road running out of Uxbridge to Shepherd’s Bush in Inner London. In the other direction from Slough is Windsor with its castle and army garrison and the most notorious Hell’s Angel chapter in the country. Next to Windsor is Eton, where the ruling class is educated. The difference with nearby Slough could not be more dramatic. Heathrow Airport is also close. This is part of the larger area surrounding London, a swath of land where city meets country, past and present easing into each other. Today, a circular motorway acts as a symbolic wall. Welcome to London Country.
This is Joe Martin’s world. In his name he is part Strummer and part Doctor Martens, but really he is shaped by family and place. Punk is not separated off but comes out of everyday life, the bands acting as funnels, expressing feelings he carries but hasn’t bothered to articulate. He is an individual and can stand outside the group, but that doesn’t make him an outsider. But perhaps everyone is an outsider? There is a way of doing things here, but an open-mindedness also. This doesn’t extend to appearance. Attention-seeking is not appreciated. If a male walked the streets in a Westwood costume he would not last long. Wearing the wrong badge can also be dangerous.
Slough may be dismissed for its lack of grand architecture, for its warehouses and factories, for its ranks of functional homes, but the reality is jobs and housing. The trading estate’s post-war need for labour means it has always had a mixed population—in the 1970s long-term local families, a big overflow from London, people from the Wessex counties to the west, Welsh and Irish migrants, wartime Poles, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and Indians. There are settled gypsies in both houses and caravans. More recently, immigration from Eastern Europe has added to the mix. Today, it is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the country. There is a powerful sense of Britishness here. The worker’s dream survives.
Joe roams the streets of his older Slough with friends Smiles, Dave and Chris. In the summer of 1977 they are off school and enjoying their freedom. Normal teenagers with the usual urges, Joe finds work picking fruit with the gypsies in an orchard. One night he steals a car with the other lads and drives into Camden in North London to see a band. They joke and laugh and are protective of Smiles who has had things hard. Joe and Dave argue and their love-hate relationship drifts through the story. Human Punk looks at the nature of friendship and how it can last the decades, how it is expressed through the good and bad times. Allowances are made, but disagreements can fester.
Punk is a big part of Joe’s education. School holds little interest and so like the majority his learning is informal, comes through family and culture. Music is everywhere, a form of expression that hasn’t been stifled by those who censor literature, film and theatre. Punk coincides with his core teenage years. It is personal. Previous generations had similar obsessions—Teds, mods, skinheads … rock ’n’ roll, beat and blues and soul, ska and rocksteady. But punk is different. While the Ramones may have drawn his attention with their chainsaw guitars, lyrically they have little to offer, which is at odds with the storytelling he finds in the lyrics of Rotten, Strummer and Poly Styrene. He wants songs that reflect his life and feelings and the state of the nation. This is Joe’s literature. It is what sets punk apart.
The title Human Punk pays tribute to the Ruts, a local band for me growing up. Best-known for their ‘Babylon’s Burning’ 45, they were another outfit that only produced one album, but The Crack is a masterpiece. It includes a live of version of ‘Human Punk’, a favourite with Ruts followers of the day. At the end of a show, lead singer Malcolm Owen would stick the microphone into the crowd and those nearest grabbed it and chanted ‘human punk, human punk, human punk’. A charismatic, much-loved character, Malcolm tragically died in 1980 from a drugs overdose, two months after Joy Division’s Ian Curtis committed suicide. There is no romance in Bowie’s Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide, as Smiles well knows.
Soon after the publication of this novel I become friendly with the remaining Ruts—Paul Fox, Dave Ruffy and John ‘Segs’ Jennings. Paul lived in a houseboat on the Grand Union Canal in Uxbridge, a few minutes from the General Elliott pub, and we would drink in there sometimes before his own sad death from cancer in 2007. Others from the area might include Manic Esso, drummer with the Lurkers and God’s Lonely Men; Leigh Heggarty, guitarist with the Price and now Ruts DC; Geno Blue, skinhead-reggae DJ and Club Ska bossman. The original punks are still busy. A couple of miles back along the water towards London the Slough Arm cuts off from the main route. It is towards the end of this spur that an incident occurs that changes the lives of Joe and Smiles. It was odd standing in the General Elliot, next to the same canal I had written about, talking with Paul, sitting on his houseboat after the pub closed. Life repeats. Fact and fiction blur.
In 1986, I went off travelling. Excitement replaced disillusionment. My own restlessness comes out in Joe. He has to get away and leaves England, the second section of the novel focusing on his journey back to England on the Trans-Siberian Express. The year is 1988 and his memories flow, the motion of the train and the miles of grassland and forest giving him the peace and time to consider the recent past. The speed of punk and Joe’s youth is slowed down as he is pulled back to 1977 and the intervening years. He wonders what he will find when he gets home. There is a letter in his pocket, horror scratched into the paper.
Travel changes a person, but not always in the ways you expect. As well as the brilliant sights and sounds, the people and their philosophies, it made me appreciate my own culture even more than I already did. I had long been told about the failings of the British as if they were unique, as if those in power translated as the masses, but everywhere I went I saw unfairness—from the race-based caste system of India to the mass prostitution of Thailand to the treatment of the non-Han and non-Communist in China and Tibet to the Spanish suppression of native p
opulations in Central America to the racial splits in American cities. Everywhere I went people were dirt poor. I was rich in comparison. Neither did they have our welfare state, a wonder that had been fought for and was now increasingly under threat, a selfishness infecting the Westworld, two figureheads established in Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This shift in values has continued across the following decades.
Human Punk was first published in 2000, the same time as the third section of the book is set, but I wish I had written it this year. Punk has reemerged in new forms and is full of life, much of the credit belonging to US bands such as Rancid and Green Day. In Britain it was forced to the margins. Too many of the first wave of bands disappeared up their own backsides, so it was left to their fans—the real punks—to strip the music back and live the life. Labelled Oi! in the UK and street punk in the US, these bands refused to bow down to any political doctrine and so they were destroyed. Their influence on Black Flag and Nirvana is clear, and a great deal of recognition has been given to Cock Sparrer, the Cockney Rejects, the Business, the Last Resort in recent years by the Americans. This mirrors the Clash’s promotion of local musicians such as Bo Diddley and Lee Dorsey when they toured the States in the late seventies and early eighties. This is the real Special Relationship.
At the same time a self-reliant anarchist scene kept growing and prospering in Britain, pushing animal rights among a series of genuinely held, brave beliefs. Some would later leave the cities behind and taken to the open road as travellers, and while the connection to hippy is clear, this was real hippy, not the slumming, tight-fisted rich kids who would end up running so much of society, as we always knew they would. On the surface the two strands may appear very different, but there is a shared localism and a refusal to be told what to think or how to behave. These are just two of the many types of punk, what makes it unique. When we are young we cling to our own version, but over time people mellow and it becomes clear there is a plenty of common ground.