In the beginning there was punk<\/strong><\/p>\nIt 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Thursday, March 31, 2005<\/strong><\/p>\nSubway surfing anarcho-goths. <\/strong>
\nLegend 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.<\/p>\nFast 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Gay Punx and a Parallel Universe<\/strong>
\nThe 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’.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i208.photobucket.com\/albums\/bb227\/killyourpetpuppy\/Parliament%20Hill%20Fields\/PHMobGig.jpg\")
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The Mob on Parliament Hill<\/strong>
\nThe 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.<\/p>\nFor 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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 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\u00a0 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 […]<\/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-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-al"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","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=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3559,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions\/3559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i192.photobucket.com\/albums\/z149\/pengy1966\/pengy1966%20stuff\/mobsp60.jpg\")
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