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
