WORLD BEAT

Punk and disorderly

The punk rock revolution is three decades old

JOHN CLEWLEY

Thirty years ago, the punk revolution exploded on an unsuspecting UK public. As I crazily crammed before my final university exams, housemate George, a biology major, was bouncing of the walls off his room to the sounds of the Buzzcocks, The Clash, The Sex Pistols and Sham 69.

It was a magical time in many ways, the closest those of us who came of age in the 1970s would ever get to the counter-culture hippies of the 60s. Punk revitalised rock'n'roll and pushed aside the aged dinosaur stadium rockers of the era (although they came back later with a vengence) with an irreverent DIY attitude to making music (or noise, depending on your taste). And it certainly didn't do George any harm; he's a professor and cancer research specialist these days.

The 30th anniversary has spurred commentators to produce books and TV documentaries on this most elusive of musical genres. Having greedily digested Burning Britain - The History of UK Punk 1980-84 (Cherry Red Books, UK) by Ian Glasper, Jon Savage's excellent England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (Faber & Faber, UK) and the seminal Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Penguin, UK) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McClain, I was intrigued by the latest tome to emerge, Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge (Viking, UK) by Clinton Heylin, a 700-page whopper that covers almost everything.

But first the origins. Punk rock was prefigured by protopunk bands, mainly from the US, like Detroit's MC5, counter-culture rockers the Fugs, the inspiration for all "underground", Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop's The Stooges (founded in 1967). In the UK, stripped down r'n'b outfit Dr Feelgood were also influential. The term punk - as a musical definition - was first used by journalists Nick Tosches and Lester Bangs in the US but it was the UK's Dave Marsh who coined the term when he reviewed ? and the Mysterians (surely one of the great band names) and called their music, "punk rock". (He also coined the term for "heavy metal" in the same article.)

The pre-punk scene in the US centred around New York venues like CBGBs and a coterie of new bands - The Ramones, Television and the massively influential New York Dolls. Malcolm McClaren, the svengali who would create and launch The Sex Pistols, was manager of the Dolls for a time, and he took what he could from the New York scene and set about creating a band through his King's Road clothes store, Sex, which he ran with designer Vivien Westwood, who would later introduce "punk" fashion to the mainstream.

It was the New York Dolls' bassist Richard Hell who is credited with popularising the punk look of spiky hair, ripped t-shirts and jeans and leather jacket. The dog collars, spikes and chains would come later thanks to McClaren and his pals. In Thailand, this influence is clearly seen in the wildly coloured spiky hairstyle of high profile coroner Dr Porntip Rojanasanun, although I believe that saxophonist Tewan Sapsanyakorn's Mohican hairstyle from his 1980s busking days beat her to the punch by at least a decade.

And the music? Well Sideburns fanzine (the fanzine, a truly punk phenomenon, was surely a precursor of today's blog) printed an illustration of three chords along with this sage advice: "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band." And the first punk single in the UK? Easy. New Rose by The Damned.

The seminal early punk gigs were at the 100 Club in London that featured The Sex Pistols and The Ramones debut at the Roundhouse in 1976 inspired more bands to switch to punk. The Ramones were a three-chord band par excellence. By the time of the infamous December 1976 TV interview of The Sex Pistols, followed the next day by the Daily Mail's colourful headline: "The Filth and the Fury", punk was Public Enemy No. 1, and punk was the greatest threat to the establishment since hippy rockers and teddy boys. If you were young it was exhilarating.

Babylon Burning is likely to become the reference book for punk history, despite passages of dull writing. Please Kill Me offers more of a feel for the period as there is no editorial and those who were active punk musicians, the ones left alive that is, tell the story in their own words. I'd recommend the latter. The book does, however, outline some of the important musical developments that punk inspired, from psychobilly to grunge to alternative.

In Asia, it was Japan that cottoned on to the style first, mixing it up with glam to create the heavy glam rock of bands like Kabuki Rocks and X. I've written about The Clash's late-80s Bangkok gig that influenced no one; this would come later with the emergence of Modern Dog (and The Erasureheads in the Philippines), "heavy" rockers like Ebola and Anthrax, and electro-clash outfit Futon.

One highly popular Thai rock band has even 'borrowed' the name, Clash from punk's most influential band, the incomparable The Clash, although I have yet to hear anything from them that is remotely as stirring as I Fought the Law or London's Burning. The spirit of punk doesn't run through Thailand's Clash. For that you have to turn to Futon, a band that definitely has the irreverent social and musical edge that is the hallmark of punk rock.

This column can be contacted at:

jclewley@loxinfo.co.th

Bangkok Post
Friday February 02, 2007