proto-Titanic and post-Titanic

I've posted here before about Mick Farren's famous "The Titanic Sails At Dawn" polemic. Appearing in the NME's June 19 1976 issue, the piece is legendarily claimed to have played a precipitative role in the punk uprising. It identified a malaise in rock: the loss of its connection to "the streets" and "the kids" that traverse them;  the recline and fall of a rebel sound into mere showbiz.  And in the process it birthed a mini-genre of explicitly or implicitly Titanic-themed jeremiads, which cropped up in the pages of the NME over the next decade (as well as the pages of zines populated by NME-wannabes).

I've also noted here that six months earlier Mick Farren had written a very similar - and to my mind, sharper - argument in the first NME issue of 1976.  A piece that no one seems to remember, and for whatever reason, it didn't seem to have any precipitative effect.  Timing is everything. 

Talking about timing... Well, here's a funny thing: turns out Mick Farren wrote yet another similar piece almost a year before the first of those 1976 pieces. The complaint is the same: the Seventies so far is a wash-out and rock's new superstar aristocracy - aka the Uncle Toms of Teendom -  have "taken Rock off the streets and into the penthouse". 

And here's another funny thing - four years after "The Titanic Sails At Dawn", Farren rocks up yet again in the page of NME with a polemic about the music's aesthetic bankruptcy and directionlessness.

I suppose four handwringing thinkpieces across five or six years isn't that excessive.

At Monitor, I must have written two or three with that vibe in just two years / six issues.

David Stubbs wrote a piece on that theme in virtually every issue of Monitor -  hilariously vivid evocations of impending entropy.

And then at the end of '86 we co-wrote a rather gloomy overview for Melody Maker (the editor complained it was a bummer way to wrap up the year).  Not one of our most coherent efforts, but maybe I should dredge it up as a period curio.

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Not forgetting Mick Farren's entire book on this approximate subject.... from a few years prior to the 1975 piece "The Kids Are Not Necessarily Alright".   With the word "Kids" in the title. 

At that point - most likely writing the book in 1971 -  Farren still retained some optimism about the radical potential of rock and youth culture. The tone of Watch Out Kids is defiant - the gathering decadence can be turned around. 

The story of "how Elvis gave birth to the Angry Brigade" promises the jacket copy.

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This is a genre of rock essay - the dispirited measuring of Rock's vital signs. 

A classic example is this piece by Greil Marcus.

Some of Lester Bangs's most famous pieces are in that mode, albeit always pointing to green shoots of vitalizing vulgarity that defy the overall atrophy. 

No surprises here, but I personally love the "The Death of ________" essay. 

Every art form has its examples.  E.g. "The Literature of Exhaustion". 

Lester Bangs - On the Road with the Clash, 3-part epic (NME, 1977)

 

Lester Bangs - The Punk Rock Machine - National Screw - November 1976

How did this magazine come into my possession?

When we lived in New York, in our East Village apartment block... there was this informal tradition of people leaving stuff out by the mailboxes - old books, old records, old magazines. The aging bohemian / arty residents of the coop often had cool things they were offering to the commonweal -  Cahiers Du Cinema collections... a complete run of 1970s Artforum, left out in stages, to a fitful rhythm, over months and years... (I snatched and hoarded them all, have them still in a box in storage... never once looked at them). 

Occasionally, an actually intriguing and worth-keeping record in decent nick amongst the old Bread albums and Nana Mouskouri...  e.g something on Chatham Square, Philip Glass's indie label, I seem to recall. 

A hell of a lot of drek too... things no one would want... shabby used clothing... tea towels... unappealing crockery... defunct bits of outmoded audio technology .... half-finished tubes of ointment!

However the copy of National Screw was not left out by the mailbox area. The person who offloaded it clearly felt it was not for general view... there were after all children living in the building... 

What this resident did was to leave his old culture crap by the garbage chute on our floor

Now I had heard that someone in the building worked in the porn industry, or had once worked in it.. 

At any rate, boxes would appear, by the chute, containing old - and by today's standards, tame -  porn mags... some publications catering to specialist sexual tastes but fairly mild...  and, interestingly, some counter culture magazines too... including an issue of a late 1960s publication called Orpheus (a kind of digest of pieces in other Underground Press periodicals)  where every single copy had a bullet hole through it... They must have stacked the print-run in bunches and fired shots at them. A sales gimmick, or maybe a statement about the underground press and the persecution it faced? 

Anyway, among these dusty yellowed publications was a still bright, glossy copy of National Screw - the (shortlived - 1976-77) nationwide magazine version of Al Goldstein's NYC tabloid sex paper Screw... 

"First and best in the field it created" goes the legend for this "sex review".

The word "screw" in itself profoundly dates the publication, but amazingly it stills exists online, long after Goldstein's passing. 

                                               

Naturally the words "punk rock" on the cover caught my eye - and lo and behold, it turned out to be by Lester Bangs!

The history of rock writers earning a crust from skin mags is worthy of investigation... Mick Farren did some work in that field...  I believe Xgau contributed to Playboy...  I knew a Melody Maker writer who had a second channel of income from working for the woman behind The Sex Maniacs Diary and related publications. 

Well, Spin magazine was founded and chief-edited by the son of Penthouse man Bob Guccione.

Rock press straying into porn zone - from the NME Xmas edition 1977

The interface between the rock world and the porn world in the 1970s is a recurrent theme at Pete Stansfield's blog. Usually porn mags covering certain bands or scenes. 

Unexpected convergence of the world of Goldstein + Screw with the world of alternative rock - a  compilation, on Amphetamine Reptile of all places, as reviewed in Melody Maker in April 1996

This same mysterious neighbour on our floor also put out a whole bunch of VHS cassettes onto which he'd recorded both series of Rock Follies, from when PBS had first shown it in America, some years after the original airing in the UK. 

I watched them all avidly -  only to discover that the final episode of the second series was missing.  

Julie versus punk(s)

Julie Burchill had loudly left the NME for greener pastures by around 1981 - but she could be coaxed back for the occasional assassination. 

Here, in a single issue, May 28 1993 - and in fact, as printed, on a single page - she sticks the shiv into two punky old fools she must have rubbed shoulders with down the Roxy many a time: Malcolm McLaren and Siouxsie Sioux. 

Although for a long while a grieving punk epigone herself, insisting that nothing could ever compare to Sex Pistols, by around '83 JB had moved firmly into the acceptance stage of mourning and espoused the view that a properly adult usage of pop would be as an aural after-dinner mint, things like Sade that served as background sounds for grown-up conversation, or sex.  

(via NME 1980s)

proto-proto-Titanic: Watch Out Kids

 

Moot point whether this 1972 tract is the swan song for the 1960s fever dream ("How Elvis gave birth to the Angry Brigade") or the earliest inkling of renewed faith in rock-as-revolution

Either way, the most seductively unbalanced over-estimation of the power of youth music until....

Well until the scribings of the 77-76 music papers.  Until The Boy Looked At Johnny. 

In retrospect, Mick Farren's science fiction novel The Texts of Festival  from the following year (1973) seems closer to an accurate prophecy of what would become of rock: 

"In the Great Hall of the capital city called Festival, the magic ritual of Soundcheck prepares the ancient loudspeakers for tonight's Celebration. It is the distant future, when all that remains of the ancient ways is a collection of sacred black discs which contain the words and music of the great prophets who lived before the disaster: Dhillon, Djeggar, and Morrizen, the fabled lizard-king.

But in the hills and valleys surrounding Festival, a threat builds. An outlaw army, wasted by spirits and speeding on 'crystal,' works its way toward the dying city, raping and pillaging, gathering strength and weapons as it goes. In Festival, the population continues its preparations for the Celebration, unknowing, unsuspecting..."

That's the jacket copy of one edition; here's another 

"In the wilderness of Britain little of civilization remains. Decadence and division have overtaken the huddled people of Festival. And faith in the texts of the old gods - Dhillon, Djeggar and Morrizen - is fading fast. Beyond the city walls the tribes are massing, united in evil intent. Hill savages fired by ritual superstition to pillage and slaughter. Satanic horse riders inspired by drugs to rape and defile. And crystal-crazed Iggy at the head of them all - a despot in search of territory. A territory like Festival."

In other words, rock as a dwindling, increasingly haggard tribe, cherishing its myths and rituals long after they have lost purchase on reality. 

Titanic #2 (Ray Lowry versus Ian Penman) (1981)

 

Ray Lowry

Titanic Refloated

New Musical Express, June 20 1981

Ian Penman

Titanic Resunk 

a.k.a. Political Conscience Every Now and Then. Pub Every Night. NME Every Week.

New Musical Express, June 17 1981

Unusually clearcut for the Punman then -  and a piece that did some rewiring of my ideas in those formative days, so deftly did it demolish the quaint 'n' clunky idea of  politics + pop that the Lowry tirade wished to restore, with such clumsy yearning (stick to the cartooning, boy, you're ruff at that).

I believe this is the last of the Titanic-themed pieces that NME did. 

Missing from the sequence: the proto-Titanic piece that Mick Farren wrote at the very start of 1976, a sort of warming up to the theme of "things have gone adrift". I feel that I have at some point read that proto-piece, but where it would be and how to get my hands on it, I'm not sure....  

Unabashed by being thrashed, in October 1981 Lowry continues to demand generational voices of angry sanity from within the ranks of rock. 

"I promise I'll be funny again soon - when the economy looks up"

A reader dresses down Lowry