Comments on: Old ClichÃ©s Never Die, They Just Smell Like It.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 07:25:47 +0000

I’ve talk of The Stanglers recently, but more along the lines that they weren’t really punk at all; they were just around at the time, and jumped on the punk bandwagon.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 01:10:27 +0000

Heck, the Music Machine were doing stuff that were “punk” in 1960-whatever. And they were a great band — their sound was arguably an influence on folks like The Stranglers — but who talks about them today?

I suspect all these labels only make sense in retrospect anyway.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:52:53 +0000

That’s the other big myth about Punk – That Malcolm McLaren invented it in London in 1977. As you say, Iggy and the Stooges had been playing what retrospectively got classified as punk a decade earlier.

Anyway, punk grew out of the mid-70s pub-rock scene, which also spawned Dire Straits, who went on to become the epitome of 80s corporate stadium rock…

By: Serdar

Serdar — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:38:08 +0000

Punk didn’t so much kill this stuff outright as give people fed up with it something else to chew on, which it did. I’m good with either kind of material (I wouldn’t have my Virgin-era Tangerine Dream albums *and* Godflesh’s “Pure” if I didn’t), as long as it’s done with intelligence and at least some semblance of good songwriting or composition.

The other thing is that punk had been lingering just out of sight in one form or another for some eight years previously. To wit: the Stooges. I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard “Fun House” it made most everything I’d heard dated ten years after or more that called itself “heavy” seem downright lightweight.

(That said, I’m taking the Ramones over ELP any day of the week.)

By: PaulE

PaulE — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:16:36 +0000

A case could be made for the journalists’ hatred of anything that reminded them of prog having a greater influence than the actual music of punk. Instrument players seem to have disappeared completely from the pop music scene – the constant sniping about “boring” solos may be partly to blame. Every other genre going back in history had famous instrumentalists – jazz, blues, swing, rock’n'roll etc. – so it certainly wasn’t just a prog thing. (Of course, technology is the other reason).

By: Archangel

Archangel — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 11:56:14 +0000

I couldn’t agree more. Have you been watching the re-runs of TOTP from 1977 on BBC4? With a few honourable exceptions (Abba, Peter Gabriel), almost everything in the charts 35 years ago was utter insipid rubbish. That’s what punk swept away, not prog (which wasn’t really concerned with the singles charts/Radio 1/TOTP anyway).

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 11:18:48 +0000

Yep, there has been too much great music that got ignored because it was out of step with prevailing fashions.

If punk really killed stadium rock how do we account for the existence of U2?

By: Lee

Lee — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 11:10:58 +0000

The ‘punk was necessary to kill the prog-rock dinosaurs’ theory is exactly the same as the cack the AOR/hair metal crowd wheel out regarding grunge. They still feel that Kurt Cobain killed the music they love.

He didn’t, of course, just as prog never really went away completely. It’s all about fashion, and always will be. Let’s face it: if grunge hadn’t have changed the musical landscape for a while, something else would have done…