The Sound of the Suburbs

by Mark Brentano

John Peel got it right. Any culture wars won by punk rock in the UK, said the amiable Scouser, were won in the suburbs. When punk exploded, the epicentre might have been the middle of London, but the shock waves had most effect out where the tube lines don’t run. Three years after The Sex Pistols played the 100 Club, most of the handful of people present would be dressing in tea-towels and mascara and standing like shop-window mannequins at Spandau Ballet gigs.

The biggest bomb-crater left by the punk wars was financial. Before punk, you could start a band any time you wanted, provided you had about twenty thousand quid. After punk, you went to Woolworth’s and bought a guitar and amp for about twenty notes and your drummer played on Tupperware boxes full of rice. Then your mates borrowed your ‘gear’ and it was all round to their bedrooms to play the songs of The Adverts.

My home town had only one real punk legend. Dee Generate played drums with Eater, who had an EP called Get Yer Yo-Yos Out. He was 15 and, when the anti-punk backlash started – and Johnny Rotten was razored in a car park – Mr and Mrs Generate had a brick heaved through their window a few streets from me. We saw Dee Generate and the VD Scabs at a village hall in 1977. Our local record shop put out singles by Slimy Toad and Johnny Moped, and the summer of 1977 is best summed up by an online ‘Diary of a Suburban Punk Rocker’:

‘May 13th. Sent off for Sex Pistols T Shirt. – The naked 13 year old boy with a stiffy and fag. Not exactly rock n roll but it will annoy [sic].’

Annoyance was part of the package. On Jubilee Day 1977, me and my kilted mates avoided the street parties and sat in my room playing The Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ out the window through my crappy little speakers. We’d had our punk epiphany. Mine had come at my own suburban music Mecca: Croydon’s Greyhound. Here it was – with my long hair and Jethro Tull jeans patch – that I saw The Stranglers, the only band I’ve ever seen that I could also smell. They were dark and incredible, even if I did believe for some time that their bassist was called Jean-Jacket Borneo.

Bands I saw at the Greyhound include Buzzcocks, The Jam, The Slits, Ultravox [the good Ultravox, with John Foxx] and The Vibrators. At a Magazine gig, I stood at the bar with Siouxsie Sioux on one side of me and Billy Idol on the other, treading on Idol’s blue suede shoes for good measure. Other bands that, to my shame and regret, I didn’t see at the Greyhound include The Ramones (The Ramones played Croydon!), Blondie and Talking Heads. After an Adverts gig at the ‘Hound, my mate found two halves of a leather jacket in the road outside. He took it home and joined the two halves with safety pins (what were shares worth in that industry in 1977?). Functional and decorative.

The idea of punk fashion would be unrecognisable to today’s youth, who gauge style by expenditure. Oxfam shops have never had it so good as they did in 1977. I would regularly venture out in great baggy granddad shirts with ‘We’re the flowers in your dustbin’ stencilled across the front, and huge second-hand suits with ten or fifteen badges down the lapels. Cheap mail-order PVC trousers were big, DMs, home-sewn bondage trousers and kilts. I went to see Ultravox wearing a nylon protective coat I used for a weekend job cleaning planes at Gatwick Airport. Everyone I passed got a static shock.

Suburban music took longer to grow, but it outlasted its London origins. Watching a band called Easycure in a back garden in Crawley in 1977, I rated them. Watching them a year later in Merstham Village Hall – premiering a song called ‘Killing An Arab’ and now called The Cure – you could still see big things ahead. But it took time. Crawley – one of the original 1960s New Towns – also had its sports centre. By 1978, The Stranglers were now moving up the league and, when they played the sports centre, my soon-to-be girlfriend leapt on stage and snogged the bassist, whose name I now knew to be Jean-Jacques Burnel. I played at Crawley Sports Centre myself in ’79, with my band The Escalators. We won a competition to support The Clash, and my abiding memory is playing table tennis with Paul Simonon while my mum talked to Joe Strummer.

There was some doubt by then, though, as to whether The Clash and The Stranglers were punk enough; there were never any such doubts concerning The Damned. The Damned have a well-documented Croydon connection, with Captain Sensible being a local lad. When Sensible moved to guitar, their new bassist divided his time between thwacking the strings for The Damned and looking for me to beat me up for an ill-advised dalliance with his girlfriend. The Damned borrowed a couple of amps from my band once and, with gobbing still being de rigeur, they came back looking like glazed doughnuts.

Music fads come and go, but it’s the differences rather than the similarities that mark out punk and post-punk. It was comparatively difficult to get the music, for a start, which is why I had to ride a dangerous and uninsured Yamaha RD200 seven miles to Croydon in torrential rain in order to buy Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’ on the day of its release.

Punk’s legacy is debatable. Every talentless Brit artist out of St Martin’s School of Art claims to have been influenced by punk, but that’s just because none of them can paint. The real legacy, after all the coloured vinyl and Patti Smith T-shirts have been lost, is that, for a couple of years, we had some music which was ours.

Handbags and Gladrags: growing up with Kenickie

by Rhian

Inspiration can spring from the strangest of places. Kenickie were three girls with guitars and an unassuming boy drummer, a band preoccupied with glitter, Grease and Gary Numan. They began in the north-east lo-fi scene of the early 90s before kicking over the traces and high-tailing it to London in a blur of lipstick and leopardprint, attaining industry fame around the time I was sitting my GCSEs. Two albums and a trail of metropolitan mayhem later, Kenickie split up live onstage with the parting shot ‘We were Kenickie… a bunch of fuckwits’. In this piece, I’ll be speaking against the motion.

Kenickie were, like me, provincial and proletarian, and their descent into London’s major-label maelstrom, followed by their bruised rejection of it all, was the stuff of rock’n'roll cliché. Critics have often used this to justify their lazy categorisation of the band’s two albums: the debut At the Club as the skyward-soaring up-all-night party and the second, Get In, as the downbeat, dazed and drug-addled morning-after. But what made Kenickie great was their ability to draw on the rapid cycling of these two stages and the tension between them, a dynamic which captures the ups and downs of being young. Their songs are full of the competing impulses of self-belief and self-doubt that blight adolescence, each presented in its respective natural habitat: streetlight-bright, PVC-shiny nights out with no coats on versus shadowy dawns full of shivering sleepless regret.

Kenickie’s lyrics encompassed casual pick-ups, skateboarding, kerb-crawling, Catholic guilt, body dysmorphia, getting drunk in the park and getting off in bus shelters, self-hatred, bad parties, good parties, relationship quandaries and the wipe-clean properties of rubber dresses. The music, like the subject matter, ranged from brash and upfront to achingly romantic to grittily bleak, mixing spiky guitars and shiny blasts of brass with silvery swirls of keyboard and girl-group harmonies and handclaps. The first album balanced the sly and self-assured swagger of ‘Classy’ with ‘Acetone’s despairing sting; the second swung between the Saturday-night snapshots of ‘Magnatron’ (‘the night comes and your skin’s all itchy / so you eat toast in your best friend’s kitchen‘) and the stunningly desolate ’5am’:

So much harder to go home
Came in someone else’s car
Shiver in your nighttime clothes
You don’t know where you are
And if you ask, they’ll know…

Elsewhere, ‘PVC’ rocked like a grunge remake of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and ‘Weeknights’ howled into the teenage abyss like Jeremy Kyle scripted by Radiohead.

Kenickie made the everyday dramatic, comic and poetic by drawing on the escapist power of music. Their songs expressed the idea of becoming your own superhero, harnessing the power of the Big Night Out to transcend the grime and gloom in which you found yourself immured. ‘People We Want’ yearns to defy the rules of admission and the laws of closing time (‘If we go home, what happens now? / If we stay on – could we be the people we want?’). ‘Come Out 2nite’ – the final scene of Grease transplanted to the first episode of Our Friends in the North – is a life-affirming manifesto of both social solidarity and individual empowerment, acknowledging the world’s horrors but beckoning you on regardless:

Come out tonight -
You’ve got to grab it if you want to have it
You’ve got to become what you can
It’s dark and savage but it’s only in neon…

Kenickie had the London music press all but tripping over their own tongues, hymning the band to the skies as though the capacity of regional-accented girls for wit and articulacy came as some surprise. Interviews with them read as if your mates, the ones who reduced you to breathless giggling or desperate agreement around the pub table, had suddenly formed a band. Like the Clash and the Manic Street Preachers before them, and the Libertines after them, Kenickie oozed last-gang-in-town glamour, but theirs was a distinctly girl gang: sticky cocktails and stick-on spangles rather than spilled pints and regrettable tattoos. And let’s face it, Kenickie were gorgeous. The girls had a rough-edged, earthy, cartoon-glam aesthetic: half 1940s starlets, half explosion in Claire’s Accessories. They weren’t unnaturally skinny. They weren’t naturally blonde. Their high heels and lashings of makeup were worn on their own terms, a Pink Ladies inspired protective covering rather than a puppeteered provocation. And they were as unapologetically sharp, witty and smart as they were sexy. In a teenage world stuck for role models between the Spice Girls’ sham sisterhood and Sleeper’s smug potshots at suburban cliché, I found this no end of inspiring.

Courtney Love, back in the day, gave Kenickie her seal of approval, which makes sense if you consider how they extended the lessons of Riot Grrl beyond that scene’s demographic. Kenickie excelled at anatomising female self-loathing in its biological and social forms (‘How I Was Made’, ‘And That’s Why’, ‘Robot Song’), and at fashioning sleek, fierce paeans to a poised and self-possessed female independence (‘Nightlife’, ‘Classy’, ‘Something’s Got to Give’). Their protagonists are never passive, always self-aware, fragile but resilient and wise beyond their years. ‘In Your Car’ shimmers with the jubilant sexual agency of its arch and knowing narrator who pinpoints herself as ‘too young to feel this old’. Growing up, Kenickie’s attitude and aesthetic, as well as their music, did as much to outline my potential agency and autonomy as any feminist tome or broadsheet editorial I read. They remain one of a handful of bands who inspired me to analyse and articulate my own experience, and listening to them these days still feels like being disco-lit with righteous glittery magic.

*

As for links… the price of cult success is that your albums are out of print and your videos are very hard to find! However, both Kenickie albums are on Spotify (http://open.spotify.com/search/kenickie) and Youtube has a live set from 1997 here.

Houses of the Holy

by Obnoxio the Clown

Bella’s post about “Achilles’ Last Stand” was curiously evocative for me.

I think I must have been about eight years old, visiting my grandparents, when the youngest of my mother’s brothers introduced me to real music.

And I have such strong memories, even now, of lying on the carpet (a hideous ’70s concoction of browns and oranges, occupied by heavy, dark wood furniture with green and beige fabric) looking at the cover of Houses of the Holy and trying to figure out what the hell was going on with those naked children climbing up the rocks. It was a beautiful sunny day and there were loads of kids running around outside, but somehow I was completely mesmerised by this strange music. Up until then, I’d only ever been exposed to ’60s and ’70s pop (and pap!) but this was alien and strange and very, very different.

It started off conventionally enough, apart from Robert Plant’s curious voice and the fact that the music was somehow better, more interesting than anything I’d ever heard.

And then there was this melancholy, wistful song. I’d heard any number of corny “slow songs” but this was just … different. It wasn’t cheesy. Everything was just so clear, so foreign to my young ears. But so bewitching.

And whereas I’d normally have moved off to do something different, I stayed and listened to the whole album. Track after track of something that grabbed me. I didn’t get tired of it.

But while there are some great tracks on the album, one stood out for me above all the rest:

It was scary. A song had never scared me before. I was freaked out. Sitting in a room with the doors open to let a breeze run through the house, sunlight streaming in through the windows and my mind was filled with snow and cold and terrible dangers and fear and dark Norse deeds.

Eventually the album finished and I did go run around outside.

But something changed forever that day. Houses of the Holy made me take music seriously, it made me realise that music could be something other than a background noise.

There are other Zep albums I like more, there are albums by other artists I like more, but I can’t remember where I heard them the first time.

Houses of the Holy will always be special to me, because it was the first time I really listened to real music.

Anti-Mood Music

by BenSix

“Mood music” attempts to induce or enhance a particular feeling. By this definition, most fits the bill: lush harmonics for the tired and lazing; euphoria for the dancefloor; black, fucking hatred for Norwegian metalheads. It’s all very enriching, but – comfortably premeditated – it can be terribly bad at creating a mood: once you’ve hit such emotional aridity that the full depths of your consciousness can’t move you to feeling, worn routines aren’t going to shatter the burden.

Anti-mood music jars you from whatever funk you’ve been lumped with. It’s nervy, discordant, and varied and striking enough that it presents a vivid contrast to whatever you’re feeling. It hurls you into a maelstrom of tones from which you may emerge with any emotion. Think My Bloody Valentine at their most conflicted; electro at its most unhinged; Syd-era Floyd, with his paranoia bumping up against blissful, woozy melodies…

One of my favourite such bands is Xiu Xiu, an ever-evolving trio from California. Fretful rhythms burst into rich harmonics as easy as distortion (or both); Jamie Stewart gives an overwrought delivery, and lines which cut through the songs like blades…

Plastic Beach

by Mr Civil Libertarian

Gorillaz, cartoon band that critics insisted on calling “just a gimmick” despite 15 million sales and a decade of cult following, are, after another of their trademark several-year absences, back on the scene with their third album (if you exclude B side collections, which are worth picking up on their own merits), Plastic Beach.

If, like me, you prefer the fantasy put forward by the band’s videos etc, to the reality of Ex-Blur man Damon Alburn with a load of session musicians, then having abandoned their previous hideout, Kong Studios, in favour Plastic Beach (“The most isolated place on the planet,” says Murdoc) built on tons of trash thrown to sea (ah, environmental themes are becoming clear already and we’re hardly past the album cover), the band (or at least, bassist Murdoc and vocalist 2D – obese drummer Russell and guitarist Noodle currently MIA) are free to pursue musical experimentation to their hearts’ desires. Once again packed with guests, ranging from Mos Def to Lou Reed, the band churn out another success of an album that manages to hold your attention from the opening track, an orchestral piece that balances suspense and tranquillity in an oddly disquieting way, to the last, “Pirate Jet”. In the 58 minutes between those two points, a dedicated listener will be treated to a huge variety of sounds.

In the first ten minuites, you’ll have heard hip hop (“Welcome to the World of Plastic Beach”) and – Gorillaz have never shied away from World Music influences – an Oriental inspired pan pips fused with the above (“White Flag”). But both these tracks are mere warm up for what follows.

Lead single “Stylo” (why yes, that is Bruce Willis in the video) with Mos Def and Bobby Womack comes a few tracks in. Possibly consisting of not a single “real” instrument, this synthesizer-heavy tune features an addictive bass line and good vocals from guests Def and Womack as well as 2D. Although “Stylo” was probably the best choice for a single, since most of the other tracks need to be heard in the context of the full album to be fully appreciated, “Stylo” is in fact one of the album’s low points. Not at all fitting in with the tranquil beach theme or the reflecting-upon-affluent-society ethos, “Stylo” almost seems to be an added extra to the album than part of the album itself. Not that’s its a bad song; it just doesn’t seem to fit in with its neighbours.

“Superfast Jellyfish“, one of said neighbours, is a bouncy and uplifting tune, which as far as I can make out is about fast food. Sure to become a fan favourite, “Jellyfish” contains good vocals provided by long time Gorillaz colaborator De La Soul (Clint Eastwood and Rock the House from the debut album) mixed with the trademark Gorillaz oh-so-slightly avant garde style. It’s a more upbeat and energetic tune than most on the album, but after every MSG-driven energy rush comes a crash, in this case in the form of “Empire Ants”.

Much more slow paced and relaxing, “Empire Ants” may remind some listeners of the repetitive muzak often deployed in hotel lobbies and elevators. At least, until the 2 minute mark, when the drums and synths really kick in, alongside Yukimi Nagano’s vocals. Then the tune takes a totally different direction.

“On Melancholy Hill” will give fans of MGMT a buzz; 2D has obviously been listening to Oracular Spectacular. The album continues, never letting go of its “peaceful beach” theme – “To Binge”, again with Nagano, being a prime example. It’s impossible to be angry whilst listening to this song, it’s simply too peaceful on the ears.

These are just a few standout tracks on the 16 track, hour long album; many of the songs are great on their own, such as “Stylo” and “Superfast Jellyfish”, but like its predecessor (and unlike its predecessor’s predecessor), Plastic Beach comes out as an album, much like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or Rush’s Power Windows, that to be properly enjoyed needs to be listened to as a whole rather than as the sum of its parts. As usual for the band, it’s ambitious, and covers more genres than you could throw a stick at, but once again it all comes together beautifully.

No review could skip the underlying theme of the album; not quite explicitly environmentalist, the record exudes concern for humanity’s apparent disdain for dear old Mother Earth. Albarn himself says of the record’s lyrical content:

I suppose what I’ve done with this Gorillaz record is I’ve tried to connect pop sensibility with … trying to make people understand the essential melancholy of buying a ready made meal in loads of plastic packaging…

We didn’t create plastic, nature created plastic. And just seeing the snakes like living in the warmth of decomposing plastic bags. They like it. It was a strange kind of optimism that I felt… but trying to get that into pop music is a challenge, anyway. But important.

Achilles’ Last Stand

by bella gerens

The night I moved into my first flat also happened to be the night I decided to open a CD I had bought several weeks earlier: Led Zeppelin’s Presence. What with writing term papers and studying for final exams, I hadn’t found the time to listen to it; but my exams were finished at last, and I had loaded all of my possessions into my hatchback to carry them from the dormitory room to the new flat.

The first thing I unpacked was the stereo. I rigged it up on the floor of the empty sitting room, put the album on, and proceeded to open my bin bags stuffed with clothes and vodka boxes stuffed with books.

It was a queer night. I was alone, for perhaps the first time in months: no roommate, no flatmates yet, no internet connection. Everything was very quiet, as the flat was off the beaten path and I had grown used to all of the background noise associated with living in close proximity to hundreds of people.

The first track on Presence, ‘Achilles’ Last Stand,’ begins with a lone, repetitive arpeggio that fades in and grows to a crescendo before breaking into the pounding drums and screaming guitar that are Zeppelin’s trademark. But it sounds nothing like their other work; this song is dark and frightening. Alone in the empty flat at night, I was already disposed to be jumpy, but my first reaction to ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ was such paranoid dread that I could hardly bear to carry on listening.

Presence is one of Zeppelin’s later albums, released in 1976. Some critics say that, although very atmospheric hard-rock, it has none of the energy and excitement that infused their earlier work. Possibly it is their most drug-fuelled album; I’ve even heard it said that, by the time it was recorded, Robert Plant’s voice was done for. Certainly it’s not as enjoyable an album as, say, Led Zeppelin II.

But ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ saves it. Plant can no longer carry off the crazy wailing of days of yore, but as a result his voice on this track has the kind of purity of pitch one associates with standing chimes. John Bonham keeps up the gruelling, relentless pace of the drums for ten minutes straight, displaying his famous endurance. John Paul Jones lays down a scalar bass line in unexpectedly perfect counterpoint to the melody.

But the real master is Jimmy Page, whose fingerprints are all over the track, from its ominous darkness and dramatic dynamics to its guitar solo of almost unparalleled genius. One account of the recording process states that when Page played the solo unaccompanied in the studio, Jones, who was listening to it for the first time, didn’t believe it could possibly work over the rhythm parts Page had proposed for that section of the tune. And it’s true that the solo is vaguely disconnected to its musical surroundings, although that hardly diminishes its power. The frantic build to the end is vaguely reminiscent of his famous solo in ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ but ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ takes that solo and raises it to the power of fifty, like a Caravaggio compared to a child’s drawing in crayon.

(Solo 3:41-5:14.)

An article I read many years ago claimed that ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ was one of the greatest pieces of blues ever written; I wish I could remember where I read that, because at the time I scoffed at this analysis. Whatever the qualities of the track, it doesn’t sound like any blues you’ve ever heard – until you realise that, like the blues, it’s built around the pentatonic scale; and then you can hear what the author of that article meant. For what is technically a blues tune, the track is heavily layered and complex; even after years of listening to it, I still don’t know it inside and out. It’s one of the few songs I never grow weary of, and it’s definitely the only one that’s ever inspired any visceral anxiety in me. I could love it for that reason alone.

I am not a lyrics person; I tend not to hear the words to songs, or to ascribe to them much meaning if I do. Music comes to me in colours (‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ is black and bronze) and most of the time the words just get in the way. But eventually, if you listen to a song often enough, some of the lyrics sink in, and that’s the last impression of ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’ I’ll leave with you. Sometimes the lyrics Robert Plant writes are a little too pastoral for my taste, and there’s an element of that in this tune, but here he manages to find words that accord perfectly with the unceasing drive and terrible weight that are the dominant musical characteristics of the track:

Wandering and wondering what place to rest the search
For the mighty arms of Atlas hold the heavens from the earth

Music and Memory

by Left Outside

I’ve heard that the one sense which brings back memories more quickly and vividly than any other is smell. The immediacy with which an odour can hit you and remind you of an old friend’s washing powder can sometimes take you aback.

But I’ve always found that music can affect me in a way that nothing else can. Sometimes it only takes an opening swell or a few lines of lyrics to take me back years and make me think of people and places I haven’t thought of in as long.

I suppose this is because I have always soundtracked my life – since you’re here I would guess many of you do too. Most things I do, whether it is my boring commute or playing poker with friends, will always be accompanied by music.

A few years ago I would have been embarrassed to use this as an example but, as I enter my early to mid 20s, no longer. Linkin Park were, like most people my age, a fairly big part of my musical upbringing. They were catchy but edgy in a way I thought was quite startling at 12.

The simplicity of this song always stood out to me. But it took a while for me to realise that the song was almost all one riff varied quite/loud. When I realised my first thought was “that sucks” shortly followed by “that rocks”"

The songs from Linkin Park’s first album remind me of playing Perfect Dark on my Nintendo64, it accompanies killing stuff made out of pixels quite well, give it a go.

But I also remember being on my friends bedroom floor underneath his bunk bed being amazed that there wasn’t any swearing on the album, after listening to a lot of Papa Roach I thought it was mandatory.

Of course there is a flip side that makes me feel more ambivalent about the unexpected memories that music can bring back. Some things I would rather forget at the moment.

All I Need from Radiohead’s In Rainbows is a beautiful song, but one I rarely listen to these days.

It reminds me of many evenings spent doing the washing with my old housemate. Not noteworthy except for the fact I was besotted with her and she knew it and wasn’t interested. Boy, was it wasawkward in that house.

But like with all songs, memories layer up on top of one another because in the end we did get together and one got to see Radiohead at Reading in August. But now we’re not together, so this song reminds me of about the best and worst 24 months of my life and all in a few minutes.

For a lot of reasons she’s the sort of person it would be best to forget about now but this song, and dozens other, ensure I never will. For a whole host of reasons I am grateful for that even if it is painful from time to time when my iTunes is set to shuffle.

This is what I love about music: I am utterly and totally incapable of not reacting to it and that’s why I’m so excited about writing here.