{"id":595,"date":"2008-02-18T21:00:24","date_gmt":"2008-02-18T20:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/?p=595"},"modified":"2008-02-19T08:18:21","modified_gmt":"2008-02-19T07:18:21","slug":"clash-not-crass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/clash-not-crass\/","title":{"rendered":"Clash not Crass"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Police<\/a><\/p>\n

It was the long hot hot summer of 1976. I was in London for a few days. I\u2019d spent the past 17 years of my life living in the countryside – see it here<\/a><\/p>\n

Now I was in West 11 looking for my hippy heaven underneath the Westway – the place where Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies had played back in 1971. I never found the place, but I wandered around getting more and more hot and bothered until I found the Portobello Road made famous by the Pink Fairies song \u2018Portobello Shuffle\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"Clash<\/a><\/p>\n

So I went back to where I was staying – a caravan in Gloucestershire- until the summer ended with a thunder storm so strong I thought the flashes were nuclear bombs taking out Bristol.<\/p>\n

Nine months later I was an effing student in Scotland. Jefferson Airplane\u2019s \u2018White Rabbit\u2019 was still played in the uni bar with no irony at all. At a disco a song came on which confused me into dancing . It was White Riot by the Clash. Up until this point – March 1977 – I knew nothing of punk. I was listening to second hand sixties records being flogged off by older students. The Incredible String Band. Country Joe and the Fish. Quintessence. I was living in 1967 not 1977.<\/p>\n

But White Riot \u2026 it was a \u2018what the fuck\u2019 moment. Not sure how long it took, but eventually I worked out it was about a real riot that had happened at Notting Hill Carnival in August 1976 – in place I had been just a few weeks before. And these punks were my age – born in the fifties not the forties. And they were singing songs about what was happening now, not then.<\/p>\n

But\u2026it still took awhile. I found \u2018Anarchy in the UK\u2018 , EMI version, remaindered for 37p in Woollies but that didn\u2019t do it. Saw the Rezillos play in Castle Douglas Town Hall in summer 77 – which was impressive. And tried to find a copy of \u2018God Save the Queen\u2019\u2026but no luck.<\/p>\n

Then I heard Complete Control (released 23 September 1977) by the Clash played on Radio One. SHEE-IT. (Shee- ite in Scotch) Total aural orgasm. Utterly and totally blown away by the sheer intensity of the music. Though I still had long hair and a beard (well I was an anarchist, wasn\u2019t I, and the anarchists I met at uni had long hair and beards. Apart from the one female anarchist, who did not have a beard) .<\/p>\n

To cut this short – didn\u2019t go back to university, went to Gloucestershire to help look after some goats and ducks and chickens and guinea fowl on a small holding in the Forest of Dean and got a job working for the Lydney branch of London Rubber. Only music I had for first few months was a tape of Clash first album. Which I played over and over again. Couldn\u2019t make out the words so got the Clash Song book in 1978.<\/p>\n

This had the words in Dynotape lettering plus pictures. I did get more punk records – mail order from Small Wonder – but it was the combination Clash music, words and pictures which was \u2018punk\u2019 for me. I even shaved off my beard and cut my hair short. [This caused much startlement at work]<\/p>\n

On 1st January 1979 moved to London to work at London Rubber HQ. Lived in a bedsit in Ilford. No record player, but had tape recorder so first album Clash tape played over and over again.<\/p>\n

\"What\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n

And my point is?<\/p>\n

When I talk of \u2018punk\u2019, deeply embedded in my idea of what \u2018punk\u2019 means is the combination of words, images and music of the Clash \/ Clash song book. The images – of the 1976 riot, of the Westway, of concentration camp victims, of tower blocks \u2026of the City of the Dead of yankee soldiers shooting skag, of having the will to survive (to cheat if I can\u2019t win) \u2026 that even if you close your eyes, it will not go away, – you have to deal with it – hate and war is the currency.<\/p>\n

Hate and war not anarchy and peace.<\/p>\n

Which is why I never could get Crass. \u201cAre you going backward or are you moving forwards?\u201d [White Riot]<\/p>\n

It seemed straightforward to me. Punk was moving forward . Punk realised that the hippy dream of love and peace was dead, that the world of windmills and psychedelic dreams [General Bacardi\/Crass and Undercurrents magazine] was over.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the power is in the hands of people rich enough to buy it\u201d.<\/p>\n

But was it over?Or had something new only just begun?<\/p>\n

As I passed beyond the wall of sleep last night it came to me. “Green is the missing word” – like I had already said, the long-haired eco-friendly veggie anti-nuke anarchist group I joined in 1876 (oops, time slip, there) 1976 would nowadays be a group of green activists, not anarchists.<\/p>\n

So maybe what Crass invented in 1978 was not ‘anarcho-punk’ but ‘green-punk’.<\/p>\n

If you stop trying to wrestle greenish punks into\u00a0 an anarchist straight-jacket (as in “if it hadn’t a been for all\u00a0 those damn punk kids back in the eighties, we would have won the class war … <\/em>“) then it kinda makes more sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was the long hot hot summer of 1976. I was in London for a few days. I\u2019d spent the past 17 years of my life living in the countryside – see it here Now I was in West 11 looking for my hippy heaven underneath the Westway – the place where Hawkwind and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-al"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}