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.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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". 

rock writers on the teevee

Not interested here in rock writers in their current haggard state, of which there are innumerable examples on YouTube.... but rather, rock writers in their original pristine prime. These are much rarer, as rock journalism was not taken seriously by the gatekeepers of the mass media. 

In roughly chronological order   

There are some TV clips of the young Coon here amongst the looking-back stuff.

She also appears here from 14.35 onwards in this next clip, a TV program about The Alternative Society

Richard Williams (Melody Maker) presenting The Old Grey Whistle Test, with a natty mustache

Clip of Legs McNeil and the other fellow from Punk magazine which you'll have to go to YouTube to watch

Danny Baker, pre-NME, and Mark Perry, both then repping for Sniffin' Glue

Apparently the Clash totally fan-boyed Tony P

Charles Shaar Murray

The earliest clip of me on the box is from The Late Show  -  a live-on-air discussion of Jimi Hendrix. This must be 1990. I was brought on to represent the younger breed alongside more venerable rock pundits like Richard Williams and Charles Shaar Murray (during the long wait, CSM took me in the stairwell for a smoke and tried to ascertain how cool I was about weed. I certainly was not going to get stoned immediately before going on national TV). 

I have to say, I looked quite dreamy. Extremely soft-spoken, almost whispering through a cloud of long curly hair, as I unfurled my Dionysian argument: better by far that Hendrix shot across the sky like a meteor than for him to have carried on, gradually dwindling to an ember of his former incandescent intensity.  Only the most bourgeois metric would measure a life in terms of mere duration. In his brief transit, shooting star Jimi burned through lifetimes more "experience" than we mere mortals eke out across our cautious, play-safe spans. 

Young man's talk, obviously... 

It used to be online but no more.... somewhere I have it still on a VHS tape. 

UPDATE: Actually you know what, being a hoarder, turns out I saved it from YouTube... 

there is also this.... from 1998, the electronica doc Modulations. 

I don't look quite as terrible as I remember... When it was premiered in a movie theater, my bad hair blown up on the big screen, I was aghast. 

Kodwo Eshun in the middle of the Reynolds sandwich there, looking very natty indeed. 

Another Kodwo bit

 I remember being peeved that they used him talking about gabber, and not me!  

The full film - I think we are the only journos in it

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I said I didn't want to show the legendary critics in their current haggard state, but chanced on this the other night and it's full of them in varying states of disrepair  (and this is quite an old look-back prog, must have been made in the 2000s I should think)

Mick Farren - The Stooges

 

Not sure which publication this was in - probably International Times - but this could be the start of a sporadic series: reviews in which critics don't perceive the significance of something at the time of its release. 

Interesting, though, that the one track Farren digs and praises is "We Will Fall" - the track that most Stooges fans find tedious and interminable.

Contradicting his own point, it also the one with the least "live" energy.

But he's right - "We Will Fall" is a great track, precisely for its droning narcotic lassitude - the absence of kinetic-ballistic energy.  Attributing it all to John Cale strikes me as unfair, but it does indeed resemble The Marble Index relocated to Michigan. 

Personally I never had any problem with its protractedness or inertia - always loved it.  Plus it functions similarly as side-one ender to "Dirt" on Fun House. 

It's an atmosphere to sink into.  An ambience somewhere between an opium den and a temple. Sinister ceremonies, rituals of annulment. It could go on for ever.

"Ann", on the flipside, starts with a similar kind of limpid limpness - before erupting (erecting) with rampaging desire.

What's this "Dance of Romance"? Presumably an ironic title -  courtship, wooing, seduction, cloaking the animal reality. 

I could go for a 70 minute version honestly.

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.  

refloating the Titanic

From 1984, I Punman's own reflotation move. An attempt to imagine a form of oppositionality to "the state of pop".... 

But where Mick Farren envisaged all of rock (once suitably reformed / reformulated) marshalled into unified opposition to Showbiz ... here Penman imagines a far more subtle, to the point of being somewhat elusive, idea of "against"

For starters, "showbiz" is not the enemy, not at all.... he loves that Vegas / Broadway / Hollywood pre-rock nexus.... pines for the days when crooners crooned tunes crafted by dedicated professionals who didn't feel the need to sing their own creations... loves the contemporary ersatz echoes of the bygone (August Darnell / ZE).... even such pale reflections as Blue Rondo A La Turk....  The riffs about the Song with a capital S are being wheeled out for the first (but not last) time. 

So it's quite an elusive, flickering, evanescent sort of disruption....   least likely, in fact, to be found amid the overtly disruptive...  likelier to nestle rather within the softest songs (another life-lasting riff auditioned thenabouts)

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. 

proto-Titanic

Mick Farren

Is Rock 'N' Roll Ready For 1976?

 New Musical Express, January 3rd, 1976

I don't know about you, but for some of us 1975 really turned out to be a bitch of a year, and that's a fact. Or maybe you didn't notice.

As far as music was concerned, it seemed to kick off with the release of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and terminate with the qualified disappointment of Bruce Springsteen. A year of upheavals, turn-rounds, disappointments, hopes and, when all is said and done, damn-all to show for it.

Not that this is a complaint about 1975 and its shortcomings, nor is it a piece about Bob Dylan. It isn't a piece about Springsteen either (praise, the Lord), or one about my own personal trials and exultations.

I guess you could say it's an examination of what current rock and roll is all about, and what exactly it is relevant to.

Like I said, 1975 was a bitch of a year.

It wasn't one of those grand exhilarating years when it was all going on so fast that there was no time to touch ground and find out what was happening. In that kind of year you couldn't write a piece like this because you were too busy bringing back the word from the front, or too busy doing it to bother to bring back the word.

It also wasn't one of those years when nothing happened at all. In those kind of years you couldn't write a piece like this. It either wouldn't get published or, if it did, you'd get shunned by polite society. In those kind of years, only an attitude of complete terminal ennui would stop you from becoming a social pariah.

Commitment in years like that was a dirty word, and any emotional response above a yawn would be judged positively obscene.

1975 has been neither of these things. At risk of being repetitive, it's been a bitch of a year.

For a start, there really haven't been any dirty words. Sure you could be lethargic, it's just a mild aberration. If you wanted to, you could be committed, another charming idiosyncrasy. 1975 has seemed to be the year when we've been prepared to tolerate just about anything.

The one thing there's been plenty of has been confusion. It's been moving round the planet by the truckload. Even in the private, often hothouse little world of the rock writer, confusion has abounded.

On the surface, one would think that it was a relatively simple act to tell the world at large about the merits or otherwise of a record, artist, live concert, movie or what-have-you.

It shouldn't be hard to tell the public whether Batter Z. and the Dogs' Homes are good, bad, indifferent, or The New Messiahs. Yet we look around and see critics starting to doubt their ability to recognise a Messiah even if he came up and whacked them with his stone tablets.

The relevancy of rock comment, criticism and a rock press, has been seriously questioned, not only in the hangouts of journalists, but in the pages of Gasbag, the luxury hotels of the stars, and the air-conditioned warrens of the business manipulators.

Even the hoary old shock question "Is rock dead?" has been dragged out and given an airing.

The key word to this whole problem seems to be relevancy.

Before we go any further, let me tell you a little story, and maybe you'll see what I mean.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Like a couple of thousand others, I'd gone along to Hammersmith Odeon to see Bruce Springsteen's first U.K. concert. I came out with somewhat mixed critical feelings and got into a taxi. Frankly I was disappointed, and was trying to work out whether this came from something that was lacking in Springsteen himself, or simply that the show had been oversold to me by the massive promo campaign that had surrounded it.

At the time, it seemed that sorting out what I felt about Bruce Springsteen was somehow important. He had, after all, been referred to as the "future of rock and roll" and appeared simultaneously on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

The whole thing was suddenly dragged into a much clearer perspective by the voice coming over the cab driver's radio. The despatcher was giving a blow by blow account of the injured being dragged out of a bombed restaurant. Each time a driver called with some fresh information the dispatcher would relay it to all the other cabs in the network.

The impact of this was immense. It wasn't the usual kind of tidied-up newscast. I was actually hearing what was happening, as it happened. I was seeing the bombing through the direct subjective view of a handful of cab drivers.

Suddenly the importance of Bruce Springsteen shrank to almost nothing. There seemed to be little relationship between the concert I had just seen and the horrific events that were going down on the street.

I couldn't recall ever experiencing a similar feeling after coming out of either a Dylan or an early Rolling Stones' concert. The question in my mind was no longer what had disappointed me about Bruce Springsteen, it had been replaced by a much more important one:

Why did Springsteen — and for that matter, a great deal of modern rock and roll — seem so damned irrelevant to most of everyday life?

This is not intended to be a piece, either good or bad, about Bruce Springsteen. His name is cropping up so often because he seems to be a perfect example of the problem afflicting the contemporary rock scene. He has been touted to us by big business promo men as the ultimate street punk. In the guise of "the new Bob Dylan" he seemed to be credited with a degree of commitment, sensitivity and perception that would surpass even the best work of the sixties.

This promotion was so overwhelming that nobody ever stopped to question exactly what Springsteen was either being committed to, or sensitive and perceptive about.

An analysis of his songs reveals not a precise observation of life on skid row, but a kind of punk fantasy world based not in real life, but on an amalgam of pulp fiction and B movies firmly rooted in the fifties' teenage gang tradition.

This concept may have been developed originally in the context of the street, but, as the CBS promotion campaign began to grow, Springsteen must, by necessity, have been isolated from his roots. Unless he possesses an amazing clarity and tenacity of mind, it would seem impossible for Springsteen (or any other artist in his position) to prevent himself becoming cocooned in record company money, and cut off from the first sources of his creativity.

The earning potential of even a middle-grade rock star has so increased in the last six or seven years that a management/record company is far more inclined to treat their "investments" like so many prize race horses.

This almost total isolation of the artist from his audience must result in his or her music becoming, no matter how good, somewhat irrelevant to what's going on in the outside world.

We're back to that word again.

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In the sixties it was a lot easier for an artist to stay in touch. It was a time when the music was still controlled by mavericks. On the crucial levels of promotion, production — as well as the musicians themselves — control was in the hands of people from the same background and with very similar ideas.

Bill Graham, Andrew Oldham, Derek Taylor, Spector, and even Epstein set patterns in rock administration that made it possible for people like Lennon, Dylan, Jagger or Jim Morrison to still have solid links with the street.

Today, however, things seem to have changed. A corporation mentality has taken over. Admittedly it's a hip corporation philosophy, but it's a corporation philosophy all the same.

Its attitude to music is one of polish, and giving the customers what they want.

It's an attitude that strips away the rough edges. They are concerned with the smooth distribution of product. Words like 'commitment', 'involvement' and 'art' are, to this kind of corporate mind, bad for business. They cause hassles, they could lower profits.

This has given rise to the technique of totally insulating the artist from the real world. The more the musicians are encouraged to remain in their sheltered worlds, the less trouble they cause and the easier they are to handle.

In many ways it's like a rerun of Hollywood in the 'twenties and 'thirties. Like movie stars and top sports heroes before them, musicians are being encouraged to stay inside a private hothouse environment. It's a superheated world where gossip, scandal, drug habits and breakdowns flourish to exotic proportions. It's a luxurious pen in which are kept the prize, money-earning specimens.

It has little to do with any serious reality.

There seems to be a kind of rule emerging that when rock and roll gets wrapped up in too much money, it begins to lose its guts. The kind of insulation that the corporate salesmen wrap around the musician tends to shut him off from the kind of essential street energy that is so vital to the best of rock and roll.

Occasionally we can see an individual break out of the cocoon and recharge himself from this essential energy source. We have just witnessed Dylan doing this. Lennon does it at regular intervals.

Unfortunately, they are part of a very small minority. It is far easier to call room service at the Hyatt House than to get down on the street and check out the action.

However, it does seem that too long in the Hyatt House can, in creative terms, turn you figuratively blind. The balls go out of the music, and the original fire is replaced by massive displays of sheer money.

The Rolling Stones tour of the Americas, earlier in the year, was an obvious example of what Charlie Murray called "a dinosaur" in his excellent Little Feat piece a few weeks back.

It may have been a magnificent, exciting circus, but on a logistic level it was a vast, blundering, super extravagant, over-consuming thing. It didn't take the 73 people to get Woody Guthrie on the stage.

In a process of gradual evolution, the Stones had felt forced to augment their own unique energy with spectacles like the vast, illuminated folding stages. In the orgy of presentation the Stones' relevancy (that word again) slowly slipped away.

The band that once talked uncompromisingly about the world they saw around them had turned into a Busby Berkeley spectacular.

So is there no hope at all? Is rock and roll on an unalterable course to a neo-Las Vegas?

It damn sure looks like it.

We are currently going through the worst depression since the 'thirties. In global terms, the fear of civil war is probably greater than it was even at the height of '60's paranoia, and in quiet moments I tend to wonder just how long the food, water, air, etc., are going to last.

Do we ever hear any of this reflected in rock and roll? Not often. Most of the time it seems as though all either musician or audience want to deal with is pure escapism.

If that is what everyone wants, then fair enough. I'm not about to argue with the will of the people. You have to admit, though, that the only social significance that can be gleaned out of this is that maybe we've unconsciously started on the last great party before the human race becomes extinct.

I'd be quite happy to lie back and enjoy myself if it wasn't for a small group of musicians who seem to have turned their backs on escapism and are totally related to the environment in which they live. They are also producing some of the most exciting music that's around at the moment.

^^^^^^^^^^

If being plugged into the street is the only way to produce good rock and roll, then reggae is possibly the only kind of music that is still sitting up and taking nourishment.

I have a strange feeling that when we look back and get a perspective on the 1970s it will be Bob Marley who emerges as the "Bob Dylan" of the period.

This is no more a piece about reggae than it's a piece about Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones. One of the problems in getting anywhere below the surface either in reggae or, for that matter, Rastafarianism is that a white boy never really gets a straight answer.

Marley appears to be talking to his own generation in the same way that Dylan talks to his. With Dylan in the mid-sixties it was the proto-freaks that grasped his convoluted symbols. It was a language that they, and they alone, understood.

Marley is talking to young West Indian blacks in the same kind of secret language. Unfortunately for the white would-be aficionado, a great deal of this language is unintelligible. We are, after all, the bunch who shipped their ancestors off to Babylon.

One thing does seem to have been established, however. Both Marley and the Rastas have moved the consciousness of their followers to a point beyond the consumer-orientated, leopard-skin-suit-and-diamond-pinky-ring ideology of the Superfly/pimp cult that grabbed American blacks so solidly.

They also seem to be able to hold off the corporation structure. The world of reggae is one of small studios, technical improvisations and for the most part, small struggling labels.

According to the corporation philosophy, this should create frustration and inferior product. In fact, it turns out far more energetic music than anything that comes gift-wrapped out of the high-rise entertainment complexes.

If we take the whole thing a stage further, even the most cursory examination of rock history proves beyond doubt that the most inventive and rigorous periods are those when musicians and producers worked in very similar circumstances as are now prevalent in Jamaica.

The Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Howling Wolf classics that came out of Chess Records; the early Stones' material; Specter's first masterpieces and, to a certain extent, even Blonde on Blonde were produced in unsophisticated studios and on comparatively small budgets.

In this context, a considerable emphasis had to be placed on the musicians becoming absolutely proficient on a live stage before they could be trusted in a studio.

This kind of recording environment makes impossible both manufactured groups of good-looking incompetents and the marathon fifty-eight hour "if-we-go-on-long-enough-we-might-come-up-with-something" philosophy of album-making.

The question that we face at the moment is whether rock and roll can move back to this simpler, more dynamic method of working and hold back from becoming simply an extravagant show-biz spectacle.

A few isolated purists like Dr. Feelgood have consciously made this move, but they are, unfortunately, very much alone in their dedication. While bands like Queen go on spending the equivalent of the annual wages of a whole factory-lull of workers on making an album, far too many musicians are going to be tempted to follow the same course.

There is a slight possibility that the success of Bob Marley may encourage other creative musicians to re-evaluate their situations.

This could be the salvation of rock and roll. It really depends on whether the white boys in rock and roll can once again stop and learn from their black counterparts.

We shouldn't forget that in these terms, Bob Dylan is a lot blacker than Isaac Hayes.

[going good until that last line - ouch!]

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