I posted a link to this article by Nigel Williamson months ago, when I first started blogging, but at the time I didn’t make any further comments. Recent postings about “Bohemian Rhapsody” remind me of it.
You can read the whole article here
A cold and cheerless Saturday night in December 1975. Spend the rest of Saturday evening getting pointlessly drunk in Henekey’s Wine Bar in Bromley High Street, London, or go the short distance to Ravensbourne College of Art to see an unknown band called the Sex Pistols? We opt for the latter and hand over our 50p at the door. Within minutes we wish we’d stayed in the pub, for there is more future in getting mindlessly obliterated on Newcastle Brown than in listening to this racket.
The Sex Pistols can barely play their instruments. Each tuneless thrash that passes for a song sounds the same as the one before. And while the spotty, under-nourished front man knows how to sneer, he certainly doesn’t know how to sing. After retrieving our Afghan coats from the cloakroom, we shuffle off into the night, back to our squat to skin up a spliff and listen to the new Little Feat album.
Some months later, we set off to see an R&B band called Roogalator at the 100 Club. They have cancelled and the replacement is the Jam, playing one of their first London gigs. They are almost worse than the Sex Pistols and we ask for our money back.
Yes, I admit I never got punk. I was 22 years old in 1976, and by rights I should have loved it. But I hated its lack of imagination, its absence of musicality and its empty nihilism. Yet today, as we face a nostalgic jubilee around the 25th anniversary of the Pistols’ God Save the Queen, it has become heretical to point out that punk actually wasn’t very good.
He’s probably exaggerating things just a bit, but the article does nail three big myths about the 70s punk explosion in Britain. Those three myths being:
Punk was invented in England Which completely ignores earlier American bands such as the New York Dolls etc.
Punk was the pivotal moment in the whole of music history. A generation of music journalists that grew up at that time have perpertuated this one – it’s the eternal hubris of generationism; that the important thing in their lives is the most important thing ever.
The music scene immediately before punk was uniquely awful. To me, an unrepentant prog-rock fan, this is the most damaging of all the myths. Were the mid-70s really worse than the late-80s? Or the last couple of boy-band dominated years? If punk really was a revolution against bland corporate stadium rock, then corporate blandness was back with a vengeance ten years later, only far blander and far more corporate. Surely 70s Led Zeppelin were better than 80s Bon Jovi? 70s Genesis better than er, 80s Phil Collins?