Three years ago, but it seems more like three centuries ago, I started writing a blog
http://greengalloway.blogspot.com
Here are a couple of samples from my first posts. They connect with many recent (and not so recent) comments on KYPP.
Love and chaos
AL Puppy
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
In the beginning there was punk
It was the summer of 76, the summer the earth stood still and burnt.. I was living in a caravan on the edge of the Forest of Dean. By day I toiled in the sun helping to re-build a derelict cottage. At night I sweltered in the heat, door and windows open. Looking out east over the Severn, by day I could see pillars of smoke rising up over the Cotswolds. At night the the flames of scrub fires lit up the darkness.
For a few days I visited London, travelling via Stonehenge. The route was marked by the skeletons of dying elm trees, so many it looked like winter in the summer. Stonehenge looked like a painting by Dali, the stones fusing into glass in a desert. There was no green, only the dead dry stalks of grass dancing in the furnace heat.
The London I searched for beneath the Westway was not the London of punk, the only punk I knew then (and that but little of) was that of New York and Patti Smith. Rather I was searching for the spirit of a previous age, of Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies. I found a few traces. In a headshop somewhere near the Portobello Road I found a stash of old magazines, OZ and Frendz and a newly (briefly) revived IT/ International Times. The counter-culture gone so far underground it had become invisible.
I don’t recall the return west. All that I can recall is waking up one night in the caravan and seeing flashes on the horizon over towards Bristol. For a few brief/ eternal minutes I thought “This is it. They have dropped the Bomb on Bristol. It is the end of the world…” . And then came a breath of cold air and the first fat drops of rain began to fall. Was there thunder?
There must have been. “Waiting for the summer rain…” Even then, felt more like a Jim Morrison moment than the birth of punk The punk moment didn’t come until much later, until I heard White Riot played at a student disco as winter took hold. Only then did the geological shift happen. Only then did punk happen for me. Only then did the Westway become part of the present of the Clash not the past of Hawkwind. Except it is not so simple as that.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Subway surfing anarcho-goths.
Legend has it that when Tony D. First saw Jeremy Gluck of The Barracudas, he was carrying a surfboard down an escalator at Holborn tube station in 1978. The Barracudas were a surf-punk band, celebrating early sixties California in late seventies London. They even had a hit in (?) with ‘I want my woody back’. Jeremy joined the Puppy Collective and wrote an article in praise of ‘stupid songs’ for KYPP 1 featuring Abba, Boney M, the Village People and Blondie.
Fast forward to early 1981 and the Puppy Collective are surfing the subway to see The Barracudas play rock n roll heaven, the legendary Hope and Anchor pub halfway down Upper Street, Islington. It was a venue I had never visited before. The pub was upstairs, the bands played downstairs in a tiny basement on a stage which must have been all of six inches high. It was hot and sticky. Sweat evaporated instantly and then condensed on the ceiling to fall back down like rain on the audience.
At some point in the evening’s proceedings, most of the Puppy Collective vanished, leaving only myself and Tony to re-create obscure dance moves from the Sixties as our tribute to The Barracudas.
Gay Punx and a Parallel Universe
The lost puppies returned a few days later, full of strange tales. They had apparently entered a parallel universe and found a lost tribe of gay punx living in a squatted corner shop in Islington. They even had the evidence to prove it. On closer inspection, the evidence was revealed to consist of an article about gay punks in Gay Noise magazine (swiftly cut up and retourned for KYPP 4) and flyers for gigs at a squatted church on the Pentonville Road called “the parallel universe”. From here on in, any coherent linear narrative breaks down. All that remains are a jumble of dubious ‘recovered memories’.
The Mob on Parliament Hill
The gay punx/ Gay Noise was written by Pip. Pip lived at 51 Huntingdon Street in Islington, a former corner shop with its windows breeze blocked in. H. Street as it was called for reasons which will become apparent later, was part of a punk squatting scene which had diverged from that of the Puppy Collective a few years earlier. It is all somewhat confusing, but from 1977 onwards, as more and more teenagers were drawn to London by punk, punk squats began to emerge as the squatting scene of a previous generation (i.e. Frestonia/ Freston Road W 11) decayed.
For a while, members of the Puppy Collective lived in a squat at Covent Garden. later they lived in a derelict fire station at Old Street, right on the edge of the City of London. After this squat was evicted, some occupied an abandoned hospital, St. Monica’s, in north London. Other punks moved to Campbell Buildings near Waterloo. Campbell Buildings gained a reputation as ‘hell on earth’. As Bob Short of Blood and Roses put in an interview with Tony D. , published in Zig Zag magazine, “It was like boredom for weeks, then there would be a murder”.
What happened in 1981 was a re-connection between these divergent strands of punk. Pip invited the Puppy Collective over for a meal (vegetarian lasagne) and the next morning we trekked back across north London to search for magic mushrooms on Hampstead Heath. None were found. What we did find was The Mob playing a free gig in an adventure playground on Parliament Hill Fields.
The Mob. Though we did not know it at the time, The Mob were to become inextricably entwined with the Kill Your Pet Puppy Collective and the Centro Iberico, with ‘anarcho-punk’ and the Black Sheep Housing Co-op and with our magickal mystery tour to Stone(d)henge and beyond. Through Min, who I met that afternoon, another series of connections emerged, leading from Throbbing Gristle to Psychic TV….
Stewart
May 30, 2008 at 5:14 pmHi Alistair! Hate to be a pedant, but just reading some of your blog (dammit, I’ve got to go and do a night shift otherwise I would tarry a while longer) you mention “In those long ago days, when the GLC had become a radical organisation (the same GLC whose anti-punk stance had created a classic punk single by UK Subs “GLC, GLC, GLC, GLC your full of shit, shit, shit shit shit.”), the peace walkers were given a house in Hackney. It had no hot water and a barely functional toilet and, as Pinki said, she had lived in better squats, but it was a house.” Just wanted to point out – for the historical record – that it was a band called Menace who recorded GLC with that chorus, not the UK Subs – I may even still have it if it wasn’t one of the many that Scottish Leah fucking nicked off me and sold to a second-hand record shop in Kings X (along with some of Scottish Stuart’s records) to buy heroin with… Never forgiven her for that, it was like stealing a piece of my soul… :O
alistairliv • Post Author •
May 30, 2008 at 8:05 pmWell spotted Stewart… one of the many records I don’t have so relying on vague memories. But I did find GLC by Menance to the UK Subs on a different punk site and downloaded it. And one of their other singles is on KYPP.
Ian S
May 30, 2008 at 8:22 pmThe GLC was weren’t radical then, they were run by bow tie wearing Sir Horace Cutler. He once came out with a ‘sawdust Caesar’ type rant against punks which would be good to find the exact words of.
alistairliv • Post Author •
May 30, 2008 at 8:55 pmCouldn’t find Cutler’s anti-punk rant Ian, but did find this from recentish interview with Menace:
The reason “G.L.C.” was written was Horace Cutler and the G.L.C. Because at the time they cancelled a big punk festival that was gonna happen. It was basically the first major punk festival and it was gonna happen at Charlton Athletic football ground. And it was cancelled for the usual ‘oh punks are gonna wreck the place and blah-blah-blah’, so we did “G.L.C. – You’re full of shit!” On the live album, John Lacey the new singer says “and this one goes out to Horace Cutler,” or words of that effect. A lot of people don’t realise that and they wonder ‘Why are they writing about the G.L.C.?’ Cos as soon as Ken got in it was got rid of.
From http://www.menace77.co.uk/Noel%20Martin%20Interview.htm
alistairliv • Post Author •
May 30, 2008 at 9:35 pm“In London, as elsewhere, we live in a divided society—a society where the Government are effectively at war with the people.”
No war but the class war?
From a speech made 24 February 1984 by Tony Banks MP in support of the GLC –
I beg to move, That this House is of the opinion that the Government’s proposals to cancel the 1985 elections to the Greater London Council and the Inner London Education Authority are an affront to democracy and a fundamental attack upon the liberties of the people; notes that unemployment has risen in Greater London by 241,507, since May 1979 and that the number of persons claiming supplementary allowance in Greater London has increased by 240,800 since May 1979; …
….and calls upon the Government to bring forward policies designed to end the scandals of mass unemployment, poverty and reductions in the quality of public services in the capital city.
The primary purpose of my motion is to bring to the attention of the House what amounts to a deliberate and systematic attack by the Government on the democratic rights and living standards of Londoners. Everyone is affected by the former, and a growing number are affected by the latter. Although London is often regarded as the cornucopia of the country, it is a region in which great extremes of wealth and poverty exist side by side.
In London, as elsewhere, we live in a divided society—a society where the Government are effectively at war with the people.
From : http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1984/feb/24/london-government-policy
Ian S
June 15, 2008 at 7:33 pmThanks Alistair for putting that info up. Wish I could remember more about the rant. It might be I’ve got it mixed up with a rant by some licensing committee type about the Sex Pistols being ‘nauseating, obnoxious’ etc etc. – might have been in ‘The Great Rock & Roll Swindle’?
Another brooding figure from back then in London was David Macnee, then head of the Metropolitan Police. He was the one who said: “If you don’t want trouble with the Special Patrol Group, stay off the streets.”