How I took on the New York Dolls
Mark Hudson 02 June 2007 • 00:01 am
The art of punk: Jamie Reid's cover art for the Sex Pistols 'God Save The Queen'
As a new exhibition marks the 30th anniversary of punk, Mark Hudson, lead singer in a college band, recalls the once-in-a-lifetime feeling of the summer of 1977 when anything seemed possible
In pictures: Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years
'This one's for Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers," I yelled at the gaping youth. "And we're a lot better than they are!"
It was May, 1977. Someone had booked the drugged and desperate remnants of the New York Dolls to play at a teacher-training college in, of all places, Winchester. "The most immaculate combo on the planet", as Julie Burchill, high priestess of punk journalism, described them, were in the sleepy cathedral town where I was a student.
The frontline of Western popular culture had moved to where I was, and it was incumbent upon me, as the singer in the band opening the show, to upstage these cool incomers. It says something for the atmosphere of the time that this seemed not an adolescent publicity stunt, but politically, artistically, morally and musically necessary.
Punk had been in the open for six months: all over the newspapers, the subject of TV documentaries. Yet the gaping youth kept on gaping - hard-looking kids in ripped-up school blazers and spikes, art students, gobsmacked townies - awestruck not so much at our art-school rock or at the prospect of seeing a band who would one day kill themselves with smack, but because we were all still in that moment when the world was holding its breath.
Punk was about a lot more than safety pins and bondage trousers. It was the triumph of the hard over the gentle, the nobody over the somebody. And in this instance, New York Dolls frontman Johnny Thunders was a somebody.
As I spat out our lyrics, I could see Johnny and his boys, standing in a line at the back, watching us, their unassailable cool disrupted by a look of curiosity that asked, "What is all this about?"
They might well have asked, for while British punk drew on East Coast reprobate bands of the Dolls school, it was a local phenomenon - rooted in the feeling among a generation of British youth that they'd missed out on something.
A new show at the Barbican, Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years, looks at a whole range of developments informed by the dour social landscape that also gave rise to punk - from Gordon Matta-Clark's New York demolition art to the visionary films of Derek Jarman, from Nan Goldin's drugged-out photo diaries to Victor Burgin's Marxist poster-art. Yet, speaking as someone who was in art college during the entire episode, I find the exhibition's rationale only partly convincing.
While a large number of those involved had art-school connections, there was little direct overlap between art and punk. There were a lot of messily exciting, home-made graphics. But punk operated on a level of fidgety immediacy incompatible with long-term reflection. You couldn't organise an exhibition six months ahead, because the speed of change might make your statement irrelevant. Punk administered a shock so violent that, rather than reflect on it for your art, you were more likely simply to stop and do something else - like join a band.
Most importantly, the likes of Jarman could only be peripheral to punk because - to be brutal - they were the wrong age. Punk, like all youth movements, was about a generation defining itself in reaction to those that had gone before. And if you weren't part of that generation, you could only look on.
The punk generation saw the first Top of the Pops with the Beatles, the Stones and Dusty Springfield. We saw the whole 1960s cataclysm through children's eyes. But when the time came for us to do it ourselves, something was missing.
As an adolescent, I had no experience of the dole queues and housing estates that were such a part of punk. My bit of characterless Surrey suburbia had, in fact, produced many of the pop heroes of the previous generation: the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page. But these 1960s suburban rebels had long since departed to a life of mansions and private jets. The previous wave of youth had seen the best of it. All that was left to us was to buy the records.
It wasn't all star-spangled loons and concept albums - there were Bowie, Roxy Music, T-Rex and the Bay City Rollers, but the prevailing mood was one of bombed-out hangover from the beautiful 1960s. There was black music, of course, but rock and roll was the medium. And rock and roll had got stuck.
At 17, I couldn't focus on anything. I was too busy thinking about rock and roll. I was doing an English literature A-level, but the only thing I read was the NME. I was shy but arrogant, bored, sexually frustrated, with bad skin and no more than average musical ability. In other words, I had all the attributes for a career in rock and roll. The problem was finding the right context.
A reference in the NME Book of Rock to the Jeff Beck Group's "rowdy, outrageous gigs" had stuck in my mind. Never mind that the group's singer, Rod Stewart, had sold out with Sailing. The music was a detail: it was the rowdiness and outrageousness that were interesting.
In early 1975, Ringo Starr told the NME, "Something's got to happen. I don't care what it is, but it's got to happen." If even Ringo thought things were bad, they must have been bad. I can't remember when I realised something was going to happen - but it wasn't the morning in late November, 1975, when I walked into the Chelsea School of Art, where I'd started a foundation course, to see the placed decked out in posters for an event there featuring "Sex Pistols plus Cherrybubble Disco".
I wondered what a band with a name like that could be like, but since none of my new friends were going, I didn't either. It was the band's fifth gig, and the following Monday the whole college was not talking about it. The one person I tracked down who knew someone who'd been there had heard it was "absolute rubbish".
I waited so long for "something to happen", and when it finally did, I almost missed it altogether.
Having done very little work at Chelsea, I found myself doing a painting degree in Winchester, a cathedral town with a seedy underbelly. When the Pistols made their world-changing TV appearance with Bill Grundy, I was too busy falling in love over cheap curries and trying to paint still lives to pay attention.
I'd been corralled into the college band, which was led by a guitarist called Nick Jacobs, who dyed his hair aubergine, made his own clothes out of furnishing fabrics and was trying to create an alchemical fusion of Syd Barrett and Dr Feelgood. Our gigs were shambolic affairs, mostly in the dank shed of the students' union, or in down-at-heel local pubs - our audiences always in a drunken frenzy.
"You're good," a girl told me. "You're like, 'I'm the king!' " But I was too preoccupied with getting drunk myself to think this might be something. I'd even stopped reading the NME.
Then one afternoon, a couple of months into 1977, I picked a torn page of that paper off the college floor. It was a live review of the Clash and there was enough there, in an incongruous reference to Left-wing politics, to give a sense that something was happening - that the spiky-haired, safety-pin thing wasn't just more showbiz. This finally was about something.
"I'm so bored with the USA!" sang the Clash, and after all those years of hearing bands singing about being on the way to somewhere in Oklahoma, when they were in Hemel Hempstead, it was fantastically liberating. People had been fretting for a decade about how to get a good reggae sound, but the Clash booted into Police and Thieves the same way they did everything else. Why hadn't anyone thought of doing that before?
When the first albums by the Damned, the Stranglers and the Clash came out, half the college went over into the students' union and just stood there listening - hearing the news about what their generation was doing. Suddenly, all the people in the world doing anything interesting were our age. That was the only time I ever suspended my disbelief and went with what was happening.
I binned the still lives. If painting wasn't dead with the invention of photography, it was now. I never picked up a paintbrush again. And, like just about everybody, I didn't listen to any music that wasn't new. Why would you have wanted to, with such a surge of new music coming through - Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Bowie's Low and Heroes, Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life. Things had been building in the shadows for years, and now it was all happening at once.
Within a few weeks, there I was, on stage in front of hundreds of people, insulting Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. Without trying to be punks, we were suddenly the only punk band in a chunk of southern England. From being a peripheral activity, that band became my entire existence. Our gigs were packed out, not only with students, but with all kinds of nutters, all determined to be in the moment. And there's no adrenaline charge like getting up in front of a roomful of people who are determined to be rocked by you, backed by a roar of electric guitars - and with the added feeling that something was happening.
A lot of it was inane. But for all the drugs and excess, it was all fantastically puritanical - obsessed with lambasting the falseness of practically everything other than itself - while generating, of course, its own range of fatuous postures.
While a lot of the violence was pretend, it did generate real aggression. Whenever you put young men, loud music and alcohol together, violence naturally occurs. When we played at a "punk festival" in the idyllic abbey town of Romsey, we were pelted with bottles and chairs by the locals. When the police turned up to calm things down, they got the same treatment.
Soon, the so-called Summer of Hate, with its Silver Jubilee high jinks, was over. Whatever was going to happen had happened. And what was that? Looking back on it, not very much. Revolt became style, as it always does.
"When I said I wanted to see 2,000 bands," groaned Johnny Rotten, "I didn't mean 2,000 bands exactly like us!" Unable to play in Britain, the Pistols were at once largely absent from the events of 1977 and the focus of the greatest sense of expectation. But when it finally came out that autumn, Never Mind the Bollocks was just another rock record. What else could it have been?
Our band went on playing and, for a time, it looked as though we were going to get somewhere. But by the following spring, Nick, the guitarist, had opted out, and my career in rock and roll was over. I could never have made a "profession" out of it. I was into the sex and primitive religion side of rock and roll rather than the words and the chord changes. It's difficult to make a career out of that alone. And towards the end, I'd felt that oblivious self-belief ebbing away. Maybe I was just growing up.
People say that punk changed the face of rock, but what with U2 and Coldplay, there are more ponderous stadium rock bands around now than in the early 1970s. Radiohead are a prog-rock band. The Sex Pistols themselves reformed for the money in 1996, and tried to reform again to play alongside Pink Floyd at Live8. History has managed to destroy itself.
I don't feel nostalgic for punk. I never listen to the records. I find it impossible to invest them with the feeling they had at the time. But I did watch a TV documentary on the Clash a couple of years back, and I cringed throughout. Was I posturing prat? Probably. Were we better than Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers? Of course.
'Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years' opens on Tues at the Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2, and runs alongside screenings of films from the era. Tickets and details: www.barbican.org.uk or 020 7638 8891.
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