Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
At The Back => Time Out => Topic started by: Johnny Mac on June 03, 2012, 05:06:22 PM
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They had a a Stiff records evening of music on BBC4 Friday night. All on BBC iPlayer this week :-)
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Thank you so much for this.
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Yeah, I watched it on Friday. Caught the end of Ian Dury's set, very enjoyable, was about to turn off and go to bed when the Dr Feelgood set started. That was excellent. At the end of that I couldn't get off the sofa, so I watched the Stiff programs as well.
The Stiff programs were a bit of an eye-opener for me, I hadn't realised quite how much superb music they were responsible for. Partly because of what I thought of a certain type of music at the time...
I watched the repeat of Punk Britannia last night (missed it on Friday), but I have to admit I found it a bit depressing - same as it depressed me at the time. I lived through the whole punk thing. I was just waking up to music then - I was just discovering Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, etc, in 79/80. If you're younger watching this stuff, and hearing people talk about what it was like back then, you'd think that all of us in our mid-late teens at this time were boiling over about the decadent bloated old gits who had nothing for us and that we were all thoroughly into this punk thing...
NOPE!! I loathed it, and so did a lot of my contemporaries. We could appreciate some of the raw rocknroll, but most of it seemed to be tunelessness for the sake of it, anger for no reason with nothing constructive to back it up.
It wasn't the music they were making, some of it was mighty fine. It was the attitude to music and fellow musicians that got me. I still can't understand the prejudice against all other forms of music, and how they used the media (and the media used them) in a fashion that had the effect of brainwashing a load of people into closing their minds against any music regarded as "establishment". I can still remember the "why do you want to play sh1t music?" attitude from the majority of people my age or younger towards everything I was interested in and wanted to do. And then, after a couple of years, the complete disinterest in local live music that this eventually caused.
I can see the how/why of this thing called "punk". And I can see the raw energy and various other positives that it brought. But I really can't get over the destructive (towards music itself) side of it...
And now it seems that it's time to get all nostalgic about this period, and to try and stir up the same sh1t again. Sheesh.... music is music, it's ALL good, take what you want and let others take what they want without telling them they're w@nkers for liking stuff you don't like.
I'm glad I saw this program, but felt very sad watching it :(
Sorry for the sudden outpouring of sadness... :lol:
I found the programs that Johnny has actually posted about very uplifting! :D
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I saw a bit of the Dury gig, but was never much of a fan so I turned over - wish I'd known Dr Feelgood was on after!
(Should check the TV listings, Phil!)
Very interesting comments about punk, Andy. I was in exactly the same position as you at the time, just getting into Purple and its offshoot bands, and the NWOBHM (so thinking about it, punk had really already been and gone really, but its influence continued).
Of course, we were kids, and therefore very partisan about music (aside: is it still like that? I don't know). There were the Punk kids, the New Wave kids, the Metal kids, the 2 Tone kids..... probably Reggae and Disco kids too, but not so much in Swansea at the time...... And of course, the big sellers of the time were the Saturday Night Fever and Grease soundtracks, Abba were still big, Dire Straits and The Police had just appeared....
But anyway, with hindsight, I can appreciate different types of music more (probably did at the time, too, but wouldn't admit it even to myself). Some punk music was good, some was great.... a lot was shite even if they did have the appropriate attitude.
Here's what annoys me. Seeing the recent documentaries about punk, ignoring the political bit about depressed '70s Britain for a minute, they always start from the premise that music in the '70s was bloated and terrible and had to change. Was it, did it? OK, it was silly that Rick Wakeman wore a cape. OK, they took a lot of drugs and swanned around the world in private jets. But musically, why is a triple album with one track any less valid than a two minute pop song with distorted guitars? Being able to just pick up a guitar and form a band is great, it's brilliant in fact, but does that mean skilled musicianship is something to be sneered it? If music is good, it's good (of course that's a matter of opinion, but one opinion is no more or less worthwhile than another).
As you say, it seemed to be a real prejudice against other forms of music, and that aspect of the punk phenomenon never seems to be challenged, even 35 years later.
Listening to old punks being dragged out of the woodwork for interviews the last couple of weeks, I find them depressing. None of them seem to have changed - they still tw@t on about Thatcher and, although they might now admit punk was at least as much about the attitude as the music, they still slag off everything that went before. It would be nice to hear just one of them admit they actually really like Barclay James Harvest.
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The other guitarist in the band mentioned this to me- we both missed it due to gigs but I will try one of the catch up thingies. I am keen to see Dr Feelgood to bring back memories of the many times I went to see them when I was a lad.
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I saw the original Feelgoods line up and they were phenomenal. I saw Kilburn and the High Roads supporting - wait for it - Golden Earring which was about the silliest combination imaginable. The Kilburns were great and Golden Earring were awful. Thirty minute bass solo anyone ? I still like Radar Love though. Punk ? The Pistols had one or two good songs, The Damned's first album was a lot of fun but I detested The Clash and pretty much every other punk band. I think I still hate Hong Kong Garden more than any other song.
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If you're younger watching this stuff, and hearing people talk about what it was like back then, you'd think that all of us in our mid-late teens at this time were boiling over about the decadent bloated old gits who had nothing for us and that we were all thoroughly into this punk thing...
Yes.....and no.
Myself and all my friends and my older brothers friends were all into punk, but we were also into reggae/early dub, mowtown, blues (chicago style blues as well as early delta stuff) '60's and 50's RocknRoll and the occasional scottish folk band.
The ire that Andy speaks of was definitely directed at the "Big Boys". Zepplin, Purple, Eagles BJH etc and of course D.I.S.C.O. but it was a time of more inclusion of other music rather than less.
There were lots of punk bands doing 50's rock and roll covers (Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent etc) and every band that I was in or around had at least one early Stones cover in the set
Corporate stuff was hated but that was pretty much it.
I loved (and still do) the first 2 Zep albums, but after that it was awful bloated shitee.
The freshness of The Buzzc--ks or The Undertones and the raw energy of the Pistols, who never were a favourite of mine, really showed how bad the previously excellent bands had become.
None of us were interested in how clever or technical the bands were. We were out to have a good time.
You couldn't even dream of affording a Gibson if you were a young band never mind ones with multiple necks (what was that shitee all about anyway?), but you could make a decent enough racket on a Shaftsbury or a Guild or a Yamaha for all your mates to go mad over.
We weren't rolling around in some middle earth/sci fi fantasy land with long moon and star bedecked suits, blonde models and cocaine flying around in private jets.
We were hanging about grim council estates with clothes you stitched together yourself, sniffing glue and trying to get into the local bike's knickers.
And so were the Clash, The Skids, The Exploited The Boomtown Rats.
To talk to Jimmy Page you would have to have made an appointment and went through a dozen minders but Mick Jones would probably turn up at your local boozer at some point. Bob Geldof did, in fact, as did others.
As for the music aspect of that time, playing Magazine covers was as tricky as Deep Purple covers and everyone knew that Tom Verlaine was a great guitarist. Brian Eno was revered as a musician
Bill Nelson, Stuart Adamson, John McGeoch. All of them were respected as artists. No one ever sneered at them, possibly because they didn't come on stage to fireworks, amp mountains and the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic.
I'm sorry Richard, I cannot forgive the hating of Hong Kong Garden.
Come to my house, we'll get drunk, I'll get some crisp pokes and some evo-stick and then at the appropriate moment I'll bang Souxsie on and hopefully you will experience the same musical epiphany as me at the Clydebank High School school disco, 1978
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^
Great post, I must say.
I'm sorry Richard, I cannot forgive the hating of Hong Kong Garden.
Come to my house, we'll get drunk, I'll get some crisp pokes and some evo-stick and then at the appropriate moment I'll bang Souxsie on and hopefully you will experience the same musical epiphany as me at the Clydebank High School school disco, 1978
:lol:
I have to ask, what are "crisp pokes"?
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The bag wherein the crisps are contained.
This would be emptied during the "getting drunk" process and used to contain the evo-stick.
I miss my school days. and a lot of brain cells
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Aha! Thanks for that. :D
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I loved (and still do) the first 2 Zep albums, but after that it was awful bloated shiteeee.
The freshness of The Buzzc--ks or The Undertones and the raw energy of the Pistols, who never were a favourite of mine, really showed how bad the previously excellent bands had become.
I'm sorry, Clyde, but it's words like this that depressed me about punk and continue to do so now.
If you'd written the following:
" I loved (and still do) the first 2 Zep albums, but after that it seemed awful bloated shiteeee to me.
The freshness of The Buzzc--ks or The Undertones and the raw energy of the Pistols, who never were a favourite of mine, really showed how irrelevant the older bands had become to me and my friends."
Then I wouldn't feel so depressed about it all. But instead, it's invariably written in the words that you used.
To a large number of folks, Led Zeppelin III onwards were not awful bloated sh!te. None of the previously excellent bands had become bad, they just became unfashionable, mainly in the media - there were probably at least as many people listening to them as there were listening to punk music, and a lot of the folks into the dinosaur music also liked the punk - but they couldn't understand why they had to hide the fact they liked BJH or whatever. (Btw, I actually loathed stuff like BJH and Genesis - mainly because I couldn't hear any decent guitar playing in them :lol:).
Those of us who were checking out the "dinosaurs" were also checking out all the 50s and 60s stuff (it was Led Zeppelin and Ritchie Blackmore that turned me on to blues). We also appreciated a lot of the good pop songs that came out of punk (I have to admit that I'm with Richard on Hong Kong Garden though :lol:, there was some git in our 6th form who insisted on playing it every bluddy break for an entire term, repeatedly - 3 or 4 times in a 15 minute break was a bit trying. We found it an effective tune to start with, but boring as hell after a few listens! Incidentally, he got a band together and played, they were pretty good, nothing wrong with them - except they sounded like a rock band!! If we'd got our hands on a decent recording of them, and tried to play that in the 6th Form Centre - he'd have chucked the tape out the machine as "dinosaur music"!! Complete prat...).
I was a bit weird, even in my group, because I also liked all the music that was in the charts at the time - there was some seriously good music getting made then, I liked all new music that was appearing through various channels, pop, rock, disco, country (including the punk tunes that got popular) - even Rene and Renata had something going for them (as long as you only had to hear it once or twice!! :lol:). There's probably some seriously good music getting made now, except I'm not listening to it - I don't have time to listen to the stuff I like and to learn to like other stuff...
But the other thing about punk, for me, is that it had a big hand in killing live music - especially the pub rock scene that so many of us musicians at the time needed. I suspect that it would have died anyway, but punk seems to have accelerated it. I was in Bristol when it was happening, and then Exeter for 4 or 5 years. By the time I got to London, the pub rock scene that I'd been promised was dwindling very fast. You had to be playing music from one of the fashionable strands of pop/rock, mostly with a punk background/attitude to it, to get a gig. To keep the gig you had to bring a load of erks. The problem is with this "inclusive music" that punk brought in, no f*cker wants to listen to an evening of it except the band's mates!!!
- The regular "British RnB" audience, stopped turning up when the British RnB dried up...
It really got brought home to us when we went back to Exeter on tour. We were setting up in one of the Student Union bars at about 5pm. That was when folks were popping in for a quick one after lectures before going home and then coming out again. There was a bunch of them who came in and looked horrified at the drum kit etc. Some left immediately in disgust, but half stayed. That half stayed all night and talked to us at the end. They'd expected us to be some "awful punky thing", but they wanted the cheap beer to start the night. When they found we were playing "proper music" (their words) they decided to stay. If the mobile phone had existed then, they probably would have brought the others back.
Punk had a lot of good things going for it, but with just as many charlatans as the previous regime. But the big problem was that, for it to work, everyone had to be brainwashed that everything else was "bloated sh1t" to be sneered at.
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To a large number of folks, Led Zeppelin III onwards were not awful bloated sh!te. None of the previously excellent bands had become bad, they just became unfashionable, mainly in the media - there were probably at least as many people listening to them as there were listening to punk music, and a lot of the folks into the dinosaur music also liked the punk - but they couldn't understand why they had to hide the fact they liked BJH or whatever. (Btw, I actually loathed stuff like BJH and Genesis - mainly because I couldn't hear any decent guitar playing in them :lol:).
I'm amused that you and Clyde both picked up on me mentioning Barclay James Harvest. :lol:
I never really liked them myself - and I'm not that familiar with very much of their music, to be honest - I just seized on them as the very antithesis of punk!
At the time I found all those prog bands like Genesis, Yes, Caravan, Camel, BJH, Gentle Giant etc a bit fey and flowery for my taste - I was into harder, blues-based rock - so I guess I was guilty of some of the dismissive attitude the punk fans showed. I'm actually finding prog a lot more interesting nowadays.
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Interesting readings about how you guys lived this british punk era.
I was 10 in '77, just getting interested in (rock) music, and discovered both the "dinosaurs" and the punk scene (and pub rock and ryhtm'n'blue etc) at the same time. I never stopped listening to (some of) the "dinoasaurs" because of them becoming unfashionable, but as a youngster fihjting to learn it's first chords on a beaten cr@ppy "guitar", I was a bit put off by the "you have to have learned classical and be able to do 15 minutes highly chorus and have a truckload of expensive gear to be a musician" stance from the "big boys" around (well, the 15 / 18 years guys I mean :lol:) so the "3 chords, 2 fingers, 1 asshole" punk approach was really refreshing to me. This, and, yes, the no-star-system / no-private-jet / just-regular-street-kids attitude. Note that I never clicked with the extrem-nihilist side of the whole thang, had no fascination at all for the Sex Pistols, and ran away when all was left from "punk" was the most stupid, dumbass, ideologically stubborn and musically inept "punks's not dead" (arf... sorry sir, yes it is) "bands", which were indeed quite depressing.
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^ I don't know why, but that's really cheered me up BigB (not that I was that depressed about it anyway :lol:)
:D
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^ I don't know why, but that's really cheered me up BigB (not that I was that depressed about it anyway :lol:)
:D
Don't know why neither :lol:
Well I'm guess to me it's really as simple as nothing can beat sincerity, generosity, and a good song. If you're a guitar wizard (like Rory was), fine (but no need to overdo it neither), if not it doesn't really matter, it's only, well, you know : rock'n'roll - IOW : 3 chords, 2 fingers, 1 asshole ! :mrgreen:
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Great post Clyde! I did some of those things too
I had heard of led zepp, deep purple before the punk scene. I got into them a bit later. I only remember the punk scene lashing out at disco, from the eyes of a 11 year old just starting at the local comprehensive. Punk was big in my school. I don't ever remember letting it tell me what I could and couldn't like though. I liked some of the disco it lashed out at. But I did like the way it broke down some of the class barrier cr@p in this country. It had a huge effect in my opinion and the ripples of it still resonate today. Punk isn't dead!
I love the pistols, the clash, the stranglers, the ruts. Sh*t I love everything! Music is f*cking brilliant :-)
The blockheads were great back then wasn't they. Top band!
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So we went from the prog rock of Genesis, ELP, Yes etc where you needed a degree in music in order to get an audition to the 'simplicity' of punk where it was preferable that you couldn't play at all. The sad thing with punk is that the 'ethos' simply wasn't true. The Pistols could play more than well enough to do justice to the stuff they played which is all that was necessary for their music. Same could be said for R'n'R in the 50s.
The result was that (in Brighton at least) the pubs were invaded by bands that REALLY couldn't play. Even worse were the slightly older bandwagon jumpers that saw punk as the way forward and PRETENDED they couldn't play. I remember seeing more than one spiky haired ham-fisted guitarist who I recalled having seen a few months before with waist length hair knocking out extended improvisations that would have had Jerry Garcia looking at his watch.
Having said this I do wonder what would have happened to UK 'rock' if punk had never happened.
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I'm of the opinion the Punk made little or no positive contribution to music, and was mainly a London media based fashion "movement", and did cause many venues to stop having live music, which was hardly positive...
The "punk" manifesto that modern rock music had become stale and boring and was inhabited by musicians with more technical know how that was good for them, and that music would benefit from a "back to basics" approach, is very much the revisionist view. This "back to basics" already happening with the pub rock movement and bands like Dr Feelgood.
Bands that Punk aimed to "overthrow" such as Genesis, Pink Floyd and Queen became even bigger through the 70s. Led Zep were still going strong until Bonzo died.
Many of the bands that broke through after punk, often labelled as New Wave (and is one of favourite era's of UK music), were already in existence in some form, eg Dr Feelgood,The Stranglers, The Clash, Ian Dury and the pub rock movement (which actually did change music), so it would hard to claim that they were "inspired" by punk.
Additionally, many of the "New Wave" bands were amazing musicians, eg the Blockheads, the Attractions, the Police, Joe Jackson (Royal Academy of Music!), so punk hardly drove the musos out of music either (thank heavens).
Incidentally Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock were huge Faces fans!
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ooohpf! Frank! haha.
Punk was the first genre of music I really felt a connection to. Prior to that, when I was younger I'd listen to my parents records, which were John Cooper Clark, Black Sabbath, Free, Paul Jones Blues Band, Canned Heat, Paul Lamb & The King Snakes, Dr Feelgood... lots of British Blues stuff as well as the Blues classics.
For me, listening to Punk was kind of the same as listening to Robert Johnson etc but with louder guitars.
I've never really been into the Pistols mainly DUE to the fashion side of things. I know a lot American punks/bands didn't really appreciate that either and took more influence from British bands like Sham 69 which came across to them as not being part of that so much. The Pistols where however a big influence on the Bad Brains who are probably one of the best bands ever. They are even excellent musicians. The whole US punk thing is a different beast though.
Not that I was around at the time, but I feel like a lot of the aims (like driving out musos and overthrowing rockstars) and such have been hyped up back then and over time. I feel like those people who were part of it I see on TV tend to talk it up a bit and believe their own hype to some extent. Maybe a combination of self importance and nostalgia a bit beyond what they may deserve, though credit where credit is due. What I've taken from it is that you don't need to be on a major label to record, tour the world, put out a record etc. I don't feel musically constrained by wanting to write music I'd consider punk either.
If you think about trends through mainstream rock music from then til now, while I've been conscious of it at least, I feel like there was a point where musicianship wasn't job number one, and that over time that has changed and 'shredding' has made its way to the forefront again. Maybe I'm wrong.
The worst thing about punks is that they worry too much about being punk
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The worst thing about punks is that they worry too much about being punk
:lol: PDT_003
You can say that about many groups of people, though.
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I suppose, for me, one of the things that colours my perspective is that I regard music as entertainment and not much else. I think it's artistic as well, you're creating things, but basically it's all about entertainment for me. When ever musicians (or the engine selling it, or the media) start adding political or social baggage, or trying to make out it's a force for change (any more than other art forms are), then I get turned off big time.
I want entertainment and escapism from music, I'm happy if lyrics deal with interesting topics that make me think, but I don't want a load of other bollox crammed down my throat. When/if the message gets "preachy", I'm off..
I missed, at the time, a lot of very good music because it came out under the "punk/new wave" banner. Elvis Costello is a particularly good example - I was turned off what he was doing because of how he fitted into things at the time and how fans of his told me about him. I didn't realise it at the time, but I loved the tunes and inventiveness he was applying. But I couldn't get past the image and attitude stuff. It took meeting Rory Gallagher at a festival (during Elvis Costello's set), and hearing what he thought about them to open up my ears (he was there a day early, as a punter, to check him and Ian Dury out because he thought they were brilliant - and he was "anti" pop music and the apparatus around it). Admittedly Elvis C was trying to distance himself from the new wave thing at the time - it was his country music period - so I might have got into him after that anyway.
I suppose I didn't like the social message that went with punk. I am of the generation that punk was apparently about and for. I faced the same bullsh1t they had to put up with and were apparently trying to knock down. But I don't agree with the knock it down, destroy the past, approach. I do think we should be able to mock the past or the establishment, but I think we can do it more gently (with better results) and hang on to respect (both self-respect and respect for others).
Punk and other things that were going on (eg Not The Nine O'clock News - I hated that) taught us that you don't have to respect anyone or anything. All of us now, if we don't like or understand a thing - whether it's right or wrong - instinctively feel that it doesn't deserve our respect.
So, yeah, from that perspective, punk is not dead - it's the cr@p that we don't like today, society apparently falling to bits, people with money just using it to make more for themselves and "screw you, by the way", and people without it taking it from people who ain't got much more and going "screw you, by the way". Long live punk... :lol:
The music itself, the good bits, were very good. The rest, as far as I can see, was a big mistake...
This is blaming a lot on "punk", I know :lol: - I do suspect that punk didn't actually cause it, though. I suspect that punk helped get it out in the open, but really it was just an expression of how uncaring and unsupportive of each other society was ready to be.
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Good discussion. I'm finding lots of stuff to agree with, and disagree with, on all sides of the argument! :)