REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nComposed of essays, interviews, memoirs and manifestos by veterans of London\u2019s punk scene, Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix\u2019s Punk is Dead is a nostalgic, intelligent homage to the brief, hazy era of \u201cpure\u201d London punk, before it was named, over-described and turned into another sub\u00adcultural phenomenon. This golden age lasted somewhere between four and eighteen months, depending on who\u2019s recollecting, although most agree that by 1978, it was over. A yearning for its own prelapsarian state was built into punk\u2019s ethos. As the punk musician-turned-philosopher Simon Critchley tells Gallix, \u201cBecause of the acute awareness of the fact that punk . . . would become a creature of the very music industry whose codes it subverted, we knew that it was going to be short-lived. And that was fine\u201d The book is also a homage to youth and lost possibilities. In her foreword, Judy Nylon (formerly Niland) describes arriving in London in 1970 with an overnight bag and $250, wearing jean shorts and a black Borganza coat. \u201cBands are necessarily approximations of the dreams that conjured them up\u201d, Gallix writes in his essay \u201cUnheard Melodies\u201d. Punk is Dead shows the transmission of culture as a kind of lucid group dreaming. The accounts of its contributors capture the role that coincidence plays in history. Ideas can rarely be traced back to one person; they accrete and recur. Gallix is eloquent in his defence of nostalgia against the cult of an amnesiac future. Punk might be not only the last great subculture in the rock and roll mode, but the most analysed and documented. Nevertheless, art and cultural histories are always reductive, and, as he writes, \u201cthe past is subtly rewritten, every nuance gradually airbrushed out of the picture\u201d. Some of the contributors to Punk is Dead are professional writers and critics, although most of them are not. Cumulatively, their contributions evoke the texture, meaning and sensation of being young four decades ago in a now-unimaginably derelict London. They recall the smell of new vinyl records, beer, cigarettes and hair dye; the pointless squabbles with band mates; the composition of outfits; the eruption of street fights; the sweet taste of cherries picked outside a squat; and the ubiquitous brown packets of speed. Some of the pieces are historical documents, while others appear for the first time in this anthology. Together, they capture the collective soul of an era. — Chris Kraus, Times Literary Supplement.<\/p>\n
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Perhaps that\u2019s why this anthology, Punk Is Dead, published on the eve of Never Mind the Bollocks\u2019 40th, feels so relevant. Punk may be, as co-editor Andrew Gallix admits, \u201cprobably the most analysed youth cult ever,\u201d but its resonances with the contemporary zeitgeist make it ripe for such analysis\u2014even if, he is also quick to add, it continues to resist tidy theses. Gallix, the founder of literary webzine 3:AM, and his fellow editor, music journalist turned playwright Richard Cabut, are wise enough not to attempt any grand summations. Instead, they curate and contribute to an eclectic, dialectic collection of 28 short essays, juxtaposing historical testimonies from the eye of punk\u2019s hurricane with more critically distanced analyses of its aftermath. The result admirably captures punk\u2019s fractured, anarchic early spirit\u2014if also, inevitably, some of its clannishness and opacity to newcomers. As its title implies, the ultimate failure of this revolution in the head is the closest thing the book has to a running theme. Virtually every contributor avers that punk, in its most exciting form, was over before it ostensibly began. As Gallix writes in his essay \u201cThe Boy Looked at Euridyce,\u201d the movement died \u201cas soon as it ceased being a cult with no name\u2026 Punk\u2014in its initial, pre-linguistic incarnation\u2026 was the potentiality of punk.\u201d By enshrining these six months or so of ferment, before the cult became a commodity, Punk Is Dead embraces what is, on its surface, a decidedly un-punk emotion: nostalgia. But this is not the ineffectual, ideologically empty nostalgia of events like 2016\u2019s \u201cPunk London\u201d celebration, presided over by the city\u2019s then-mayor, Conservative politician and chief Brexit cheerleader Boris Johnson. Cabut, Gallix and the other contributors use their critically productive nostalgia to correct decades\u2019 worth of the former variety: to prevent punk from being, as Judy Nylon puts it in her foreword, \u201creduced to a coffee-table book of white English boys spitting.\u201d If reading these essays in early 2018 brings any solace, it\u2019s the knowledge that punk has retained its vitality as an ideal, even if it has long since failed as a movement. \u201cOnce we were part of punk,\u201d Gallix writes. \u201cNow punk is part of us.\u201d — Zachary Hoskins, Spectrum Culture<\/p>\n
The specific purpose of the book is to celebrate that original evanescent wellspring of creativity when punk emerged as a “stylish boho response to the modern world of inertia and consumption” and retained the “innocence characteristic of childhood” of a movement yet to be frozen by being named or sullied by exposure to popular vitriol and acclaim alike. — Colin Coulter, The Irish Times<\/p>\n
In his introduction Gallix admits that punk is not only \u201cprobably the most analysed youth culture ever\u201d, but that it\u2019s also one of the most resistant to analysis, a problem that his book \u201chas not quite solved\u201d. Indeed, any attempt at a definitive examination of a movement risks a killing, like an animal categorised through vivisection. Accordingly, he and Richard Cabut have instead chosen the theme of punk as a transformative force, a becoming, not just in terms of the music and the culture around it, but in terms of the humans involved, fans included. Cabut and Gallix are just about old enough to be first-hand witnesses to punk: among these pieces are their own memoirs of the time. Accordingly, the book is as much testimony as it is criticism. …Many of the essays are welcome acts of preservation. Some are taken from rare 1970s fanzines like Kill Your Pet Puppy, long extinct magazines like ZigZag and Sounds, and early 2000s blogposts, such as a typically theoretical take from the late Mark Fisher’s blog K-punk. Often, these historical documents are newly annotated by their authors. This layered reading gives the book a feeling of vital historical scope, rather than indulgent nostalgia. — Dickon Edwards, The Wire<\/p>\n
The punk movement has, as this book readily acknowledges, been more closely analysed and chewed over more thoroughly than any other moment in pop history. While it\u2019s true that it meant and continues to mean very different things to different people, it\u2019s also true that in recent years the potted history version, shorn of its more interesting edges and lesser characters, is the one that\u2019s prevailed in the age of post-pub BBC4 viewing. While this book is more of a collection of everything from academic essays and lists to personal recollections than anything claiming to be a definitive history, its chorus of different voices and agendas ultimately creates a more accurate narrative. The opening piece sees Snatch\u2019s Judy Nylon \u2013 that\u2019s her referred to in Brian Eno\u2019s 1974 song \u2018Back In Judy\u2019s Jungle\u2019- reminiscing on her time in London, hooking up with Chrissie Hynde and partying with Nureyev and Keith Moon. It sets the tone well, emphasising that punk had a past as well as a future, the role of women and the American contingent in the capital\u2019s scene, and the fact that it didn\u2019t all revolve around McClaren and the Pistols. Elsewhere there are several big-name contributions, including an essay that Simon Reynolds wrote in 1986 arguing that, on its tenth anniversary, modern music needed to escape its punk-ness to show any hope of progress. \u2018England\u2019s Dreaming\u2019 author Jon Savage provides a fascinating history, in list form, tracking the use of the word \u2018punk\u2019 from 1946 onwards in 123 different entries. Crass figurehead Penny Rimbaud, meanwhile, shares the experience of the band\u2019s third ever gig in \u2018Banned From The Roxy\u2019, originally penned in 1977 but now viewed with the benefit of hindsight and some honest self-criticism. The most interesting bits here are the descriptions of the cast of thousands that populated and\/or surrounded the scene at the time. People who weren\u2019t in the bands that made it, those that were just there, feeding off the energy and the anarchy and reacting to it in a million different ways. The inhabitants of North London described in \u2018Camden\u2019s Dreaming\u2019 by Richard Cabut, for instance, or the more impressionistic \u2018Camera Squat Art Smiler\u2019 by Neal Brown. They both stand up as vivid snapshots of the time as seen through their own eyes rather than any all-seeing overview. This is a book for those who\u2019ve read and digested all the starter level punk literature and are seeking something a little more. They\u2019ll find it here for sure – a generous hit of the hard stuff. — Ben Willmott, The Extricate blog<\/p>\n
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This is a well-selected collection of essays about punk and its cultural impact, which mixes contemporary accounts with more academic reflective approaches (sometimes in the same chapter). This means it’s quite uneven but that seems appropriate given its subject. You do come away with feeling how exciting it must have been to be involved in what was happening in 1976 and 1977 and how quickly the excitement seems to have dissipated. A good companion to books like Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming. — Michael J, NetGalley<\/p>\n
The book’s title (Modernity Killed Every Night) quotes Jacques Vach\u00e9, friend to the surrealist Andr\u00e9 Breton. But Punk Is Dead is not end-to-end cultural theory; there’s a lot on clothes. Three strands unfurl – papers, essays and first-person accounts. Cabut and Gallix have included historical documents – such as Penny Rimbaud’s 1977 essay, Banned from the Roxy, newly annotated by the Crass drummer – while Gallix argues that punk started ending when it acquired a name. Jon Savage is here, and Ted Polhemus and Vermorel. (…) As an interview with the punk turned philosopher Simon Critchley attests, punk unleashed ideas. It palpably changed suburban teenage futures, rather than ending them. — Kitty Empire, The Observer.<\/p>\n
I thoroughly enjoyed Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night. Edited by Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix, this anthology of essays, interviews and personal recollections reflects on the ways in which punk was lived and experienced at the time. Gallix flips his finger at those who see nostalgia as an affliction and rightly attempts to promote the fragmented and contested legend of punk to “a summation of all the avant-garde movements of the 20th century . . . a revolution for everyday life. — Deborah Levy, New Statesman.*<\/p>\n
*Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Deborah Levy has chosen Punk is Dead as one of her books of the year in the New Statesman).<\/p>\n
The book is available direct from Zero Books HERE.<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/i192.photobucket.com\/albums\/z149\/pengy1966\/shot_1486070412293_zpsckxazw4d.jpg\")
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Tony D and Richard Cabut under the Kings Cross lights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This interview with Richard Cabut was recorded at the Resonance studio in Borough, London, mid-November 2017, but has remained unaired due to administrative difficulties. It was chaired and produced by Mr A.U \u2013 an outstanding job, thank you. The raw audio of Richard Cabut talking about the book is available here and now on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-downloads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9175","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9175"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9198,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9175\/revisions\/9198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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