He got an Icepick

The BBC has begun showing a series of programmes about Punk Rock – Punk Britannia.  So far so good.  The first offering was on the precursors of Punk – the Bowie/New York Dolls influences and the pub-rock scene. 

I possessed only a cursory knowledge of some of this, particularly the minutae of pub-rock, so it was both enjoyable and instructive.  As with all TV documentary, however, it is only when you watch a programme on a topic that you are really familiar with that you realise the corners cut, the omissions of inconvenient truths, the unchallenged re-stating of the legend, and the stock-footage employed out of context.  Most other punk documentaries I have seen have used images of rubbish piling up in the streets from the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79 to illustrate London circa 1976 in much the same way as lazy or ignorant producers of documentaries about the Great War almost always turn to the same bare half-dozen sequences of Tommies going over the top and of exploding mines to represent any and all points between 1914 and 1918.

It remains to be seen, then, how good, or bad, the rest of the series will turn out to be.  Well worth a watch, though, was the feature on TV Smith, one-time singer of The Adverts.  A true-punk believer, still lugging his guitar case about from stage to stage, this treat of a programme offered a crash course to any budding musician in the tropes of musical-differences, money worries, bad management, the fickleness of the music-press, the incompetence of the record-industry and ill-advised cover art.

Aged 9 or 10, Punk was my thing, mine and a few of my school mates.  In retrospect this was more or less accidental and I might just as easily have become an early adopter of Disco.  But lacking the influence of any siblings my musical influences were the hand-me-downs of friends’ older brothers, mediating the NME and Sounds and Melody Maker, and since they were into Punk I inevitably was too.

 I can see now how the ripple effects of this have affected me down the years.  Sticking with Punk and post-Punk and New Wave and Alternative music through the remainder of my school years inoculated me in large part to the mainstream culture of the 1980s.  It meant that when I first started going out to clubs and to gigs, when I was 17 or so, I made a beeline for the left-field and many of the friends that I made then are still my friends now, albeit rather broader in the beam, with more sensible haircuts and less wild-eyed than they once were.

The first three singles that I went out and bought for myself, as opposed to having them bought for me at birthdays and Christmas were:

Like Clockwork by The Boomtown Rats, bought I remember in Woolworths in Blackpool;

If the Kids are United by Sham 69;

Identity by X-Ray-Spex.

Classics all, as it turns out, and ones that I wear as something of a badge of pride.  They were followed, through 1978 and 1979, by singles from Blondie, Generation X, the wonderful Rezillos, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, The Undertones, The Clash and The Pistols, in their, seemingly, final pantomime phase.  If this all sounds far too impossibly cool for someone not even in their teens, I dare say that there were some howlers too.  Even now, I blush at the thought of having bought a single by The Rich Kids, Glen Matlock’s underwhelming post-Pistols outfit and the school-yard scorn that descended upon me as a result.

The past is a foreign country.  They did things differently there.  The British seventies were lived out in what was more or less a monoculture.  There were only three TV channels, with a very limited amount of music beyond Top of the Pops, and really only one radio station – Radio 1.  There was the music press too, of course, but essentially one’s awareness of what was out there, musically, was filtered through that mainstream heavy gauze.  And in that long-ago age, before free downloads were even thought of, constrained by the economics of pocket-money, I probably spent a lot of time weighing up one purchase against another and astutely catching the bus into town in order to get into Woolworths on the day that the new Top-40 was announced, when those singles that had dropped out of the chart were marked down in price.  The point being that between limited knowledge and limited purchasing power and the hard critical analysis of the playground, you were virtually obliged to play the same records over and over again, to be word perfect in the lyrics, and to damn-well like them, whether you secretly liked them or not. 

Once again under the daunting influence of a friend’s older brother, the first album that I went out and bought for myself with my very own money, as opposed to those Christmas gifts of the K-Tel compilation Music Explosion and the collected works of Ken Dodd and the Diddymen, was the first Stranglers album, Rattus Norvegicus.

Whether they were entirely suitable role models for a young boy or not, what with strippers, heroin, Jet Black always looking like an old fat broken-down biker, and singing about beating up women, is beside the point.  The Stranglers were my band for a number of years, through thick and critical thin, until the weight of all the evidence convinced that they had become irredeemably rubbish.  I bought each single as it came out and played it over and over again, and religiously sat down to watch each Top of the Pops performance – if video-recorders had been available then I would have watched them over and over again, and I bought each album as it was released, a great favourite being No More Heroes.

I came upon Barbara Kingsolver somewhat by chance.  I was vaguely aware of her as an author but wasn’t at all disposed towards picking up one of her books until a trip away found me bereft of any reading material for the return journey and the friend I was staying with suggested The Poisonwood Bible.

I tolerated, I’ll say no more than that, this novel about a Baptist missionary and his family living through the throes of independence of the Belgian Congo, striving vainly to save the souls of the natives.  The narrative structure, with each chapter rendered in the voice of one or other of the female members of the family, is interesting enough but I felt that the book would have benefited by being slashed by 20 or 25%.  “I get it!” I wanted to shout:  Big Daddy America in its hubris sets out to save the world, to shape it in its own image, only to let down itself and those that it is ostensibly trying to help.

A little while later I mentioned Kingsolver to another friend who urged me to read The Lacuna. 

Now this this turned out to be something else altogether.  Warm-hearted.  A joy to read.  Beautifully written.  Forget the cliché, I really did not want to put it down. 

As with TPB, there are layers of narrative, the majority from the diaries of the Mexican-American central character - Harrison William Shepherd’s - as ostensibly transcribed and commented upon by Violet Brown, the North Carolinian spinster who acts as his secretary. 

A nobody who witnesses the crushing of the Bonus Army and becomes a somebody through his best-selling novels of the Aztec Empire, along the way Shepherd establishes himself within the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo while they shelter the exiled Trotsky from Stalin’s hatchet-men.  These associations bring him up before the post-war House un-American Activities Committee.

No sensible person can really accept the red-rose-tinted character of benevolent Trotsky, as presented here and, yes, Big Bad duplicitous Daddy Yank lurks again but, really, this doesn’t detract very much at all from such a rich, well-crafted, novel. 

Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn