Rock:An exhaustive - and exhausting - history of aexplosive musical movement
Punk may not be dead quite yet, but that hasn't stopped a horde of would-be anarcho-anthropologists from picking over its remains in search of clues as to how the whole thing got kick- started, and signs as to when exactly it all supposedly came to a bitter end. It doesn't take a genius to trace a line from the explosion of punk in the late 1970s to the ascendancy of grunge in the early 1990s - Kurt Cobain, the guitar-wielding general who led the charge of the lumber shirt brigade, saw himself as a punk rocker from the boondocks, channelling the spirit of the Stooges, Ramones and Black Flag to spark a new sonic revolution. It takes a singular talent, however, not to mention patience and tenacity, to pull together the disparate punk scenes from all points of the compass and all strands of pop's timeline and make it seem as if the teenage protagonists were all reading from the same blank generation blueprint.
Clinton Heylin - author of Joy Division, Sex Pistols and Van Morrison biographies, as well as numerous books on Bob Dylan - tracks the evolution of punk from the early 1970s to the present with almost painstaking attention to detail. Advocates of the punk aesthetic would probably sneer at the sprawling scope of Babylon's Burning (its doorstop width seems more suited to a pedantic prog-rock tome), but they'd have to concede that at least Heylin is not chronicling the scene from some safe, intellectual vantage point - he gets right in there amid the blood, spit and boot polish. He takes us deep into the dingy clubs of New York, the dilapidated rehearsal rooms of London and the desolate streets of Manchester, Belfast, Edinburgh and Sheffield, to witness a thousand nascent punks plotting a snotty world destruction, armed with barely three chords and the unvarnished truth about real life in the doldrums of the 1970s.
THE BOOK SHARES its title with a song by UK über-punks The Ruts, whose troubled singer, Malcolm Owen, died of a heroin overdose in 1980. Everyone is on fire in Babylon's Burning, from young British lads such as The Clash's Joe Strummer, Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley, Sex Pistols' John Lydon and The Damned's Brian James, who crashed their way out of the pub-rock scene into an altogether more dangerous milieu, to New York punk poets such as Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith, jacked up on the self-destructive rebellion of The Stooges and the preening, posing defiance of New York Dolls.
For Heylin, punk began with a blank page in the typewriter of a Californian rock journalist named Leslie Conway, who became better known to readers of Creem, Rolling Stone and NME as Lester Bangs. Bangs combined a fevered, gonzoid writing style with an evangelical passion for pure-hearted rock'n'roll and an Olympian capacity to party harder than any of the rock stars he interviewed. Bangs wrote about the rock scene with visceral, subjective fervour, favouring bands with attitude over musically accomplished acts, and championing such rock'n'roll outsiders as The Stooges; it was in a review of a gig by The Stooges - led by a young, snotty, self-mutilating Iggy Pop - that Bangs laid out his manifesto for a new punk order. His call-to-arms was taken up by hip young British writers such as Nick Kent and the gunslinger duo of Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, who fearlessly rode shotgun on the punk train as it careered out of control.
In New York, the punk aesthetic was acted out by such self-mythologising acts as Suicide, The Velvet Underground and New York Dolls, prompting arty, self-starting bands to play wherever they could get a gig: in gallery spaces, loft parties and the even-less-likely location of a country, blues and bluegrass club named CBGBs, run by a beardy bloke named Hilly Kristal. Meanwhile, in the UK, the pub-rock scene of the early 1970s was prompting dozens of young guys to grab guitars and have a go at performing their own take on classic 1960s rock'n'roll by The Kinks, The Zombies and The Yardbirds. Yes, Genesis, Floyd and Zep may have ruled the giant stadiums, but in Rose & Crowns everywhere, local heroes such as Bees Make Honey, Kursaal Flyers and Kilburn and the High Roads reigned supreme. Top of the pub pile were Canvey Island quartet Dr Feelgood, whose wiry rhythm'n'blues inspired young John Mellor to form his own band, The 101ers, before changing his name to Joe Strummer and forming The Clash.
Punk's "get pissed, destroy" manifesto, as snarled out in the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK, might seem like mouthy self-promotion in the cold light of the present day, but back in the mid-1970s there was a palpable feeling that big upheavals were underway in the moribund music scene. In the UK, rock'n'roll lay crushed under the gargantuan weight of prog, while in the US, slick FM country-rock was the dominant music form. As The Stranglers, an old pub-rock band who reinvented themselves as punks, succinctly put it: something better change.
When punk sprouted, its tentacles spread from the now-legendary New York scene that spawned Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, The Ramones and Suicide, to the London scene, where Svengalis such as Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes steered their angry young charges - The Sex Pistols and The Clash, respectively - to national notoriety. Which came first, NY punk or UK punk, hardly matters - what's important is that it was happening. Soon enough, it spread beyond the Big Apple and the Big Smoke, to the industrial towns of Ohio, whence emerged the artful, innovative Pere Ubu and the deviously marketed Devo; the depressed northern English town of Manchester, where Buzzcocks, The Fall and Joy Division originated; the decimated Northern Irish towns of Belfast, Bangor and Derry, where Rudi, The Outcasts, The Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers ducked and dived; even as far away as Brisbane, Australia, where Ed Keupper's band, The Saints, challenged the status quo at a remote remove. Anywhere there was a blighted area - either through unemployment, economic devastation or plain complacency - a punk band was sure to spring up.
PUNK WAS, SAYS Heylin, a pandemic, a firework display that lit up music scenes around the world, and the blue touchpaper was lit by the Sex Pistols and their sitting-room-shaking, middle-England-shocking antics. When they quickly burned out, a million other bands were ready to launch themselves into the vacuum, and Babylon's Burning follows punk's contrail as it goes off in myriad directions. In the UK, punk eventually descended into a dark place, but in the US, it erupted in such cities as LA, Washington DC, and Portland, Oregon, and found voice in such bands as The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag and Sonic Youth. Eventually, punk's road to nowhere led to Seattle, Washington, where a trio led by Kurt Cobain triggered a new mutation of the form: grunge.
And there punk's odyssey ends - for now. But where does it go from there? Are Arctic Monkeys punk? It seems that, having kicked back at all attempts by the record industry to package it and homogenise it, punk finally succumbed after the success of Nirvana, and when Kurt Cobain put a gun to his head in 1994, he was symbolically putting punk out of its major label misery.
Heylin takes eyewitness accounts from all the major names in punk - and what great names, too: Ari Up, Poly Styrene, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies, Sid Vicious, Howard Devoto, Siouxsie Sioux, Lora Logic, Jah Wobble and TV Smith. This is an exhaustive - and pretty bloody exhausting - trawl through the underbelly of punk rock, but it's also a rich oral history of an era when rock was firmly in the hands of the kids - even if many of those kids were far from all right.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Times journalist
Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge By Clinton Heylin Viking, 694pp. £20
