CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH: GENRE THEORY & PUNK ROCK by Stewart Home

CHAPTER II: BLOOD SPLATTERED WITH GUITARS
A demonstration of the fact that there are no direct links between PUNK ROCK, the Sex Pistols and the Situationist International

PUNK, to paraphrase Howard Devoto, came out of nowhere and
was heading straight back there. What was PUNK if not a media hype? It was empty, shallow and trivial – and that was its greatness! When I was fourteen and first got into 'PUNK' in 1976 I didn't know anything about the Situationists, I was too young and ignorant, they wouldn't have interested me. I hadn't even heard of Dada until one of the Sunday papers ran a feature comparing the 'PUNK' phenomenon to events at the Cabaret Voltaire. PUNK was much sound and fury, signifying nothing. After all, what I considered to be PUNK in 1977 turns out to have been a complete misunderstanding, I simply didn't know about genre theory back then. When I was fifteen, loads of people I knew thought Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols was the archetypal PUNK album. Regardless of this fact, its destiny was to become just a dull piece of rock history.

Malcolm McLaren decided to manage the Sex Pistols because he thought they'd be a good advert for his shop. He wanted to sell a lot of trousers! However, things got out of control, because a whole bunch of people decided the rock scene was tired and needed a novelty 'movement' to spruce it up. Of course, there was no master plan, just a lot of confusion and chaos with various individuals working at cross purposes – but that's show biz! Create a scene, but how? Do the Sex Pistols have anything in common with the average PUNK ROCK band? No. Their records were over-produced rock platters and their modus operandi was completely different to that of snotty two-chord garage no-hopers. However, they at least managed to feign ignorance when they started. For example, take a look at Sounds of 24 April 1976: 'Who's Sterling Morrison?' asks Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols in an early interview. Well, that blows the Velvet Underground connection! Malcolm McLaren goes on to slag off the New York scene: 'Pretty soon Richard Hell is going to leave the Heartbreakers and Sire Records will dangle a contract in front of him and he knows it won't help and won't do any good, but he'll sign it because it's what's expected of him.'

Hell did leave the Heartbreakers, and did sign a contract with Sire Records. Likewise, as the idea of PUNK took off, it became necessary to create a genealogy for the movement, and the New York scene was the first thing journalists turned up in their search for precedents to the Sex Pistols. Now PUNK is said to begin with the Velvet Underground and as textural proof of this, pretentious morons can cite From The Velvets To The Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History For A Post-Punk World by Clinton Heylin (Penguin, London 1993). Heylin recites the laying on of hands through the years as previously rehearsed by lesser lights writing in the weekly rock press, and it goes something like this: Velvet Underground, MC5, Stooges, Modern Lovers, Suicide, New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Television, Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash. At this point things get a bit sticky if you're a 'serious' rock critic, because it would be embarrassing to endorse anything that wasn't art, right? If you're Greil Marcus you simply whinge on about Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen. After this everything is simple because there's U2 and Nirvana. UK Subs? What's that? Something to do with your English tax system?

Rock 'critics', don't you just love 'em? Why is it that publication by Penguin so irreversibly transforms a cynical stringer for a music weekly from an avant-hip satirist into a pretentious bore? As Adam Ant put it in the song Press Darlings: 'if passion ends in fashion, then Nick Kent is the best dressed man in town.' Fortunately, most music journalists are incapable of sinking to the depths of imbecility plumbed by Greil Marcus. Heylin's book on American 'PUNK' is anything but a fun read. Nevertheless, he still manages the odd wry quote that puts a smile on your lips and a song in your heart. For example, try this one from Lester Bangs:

Rolling Stone had flown me to [San Francisco to] check me out, since I had been writing for them for about six months. I guess they wanted to see if I was executive limber. I guess I wasn't because not only did I get moved from Greil Marcus's to Langdon Winner's house after about two days, but I thought it was as curious that they sat around not even smoking pot, listening to Mother Earth and Creedence with absolute seriousness...

This is Heylin at his best, putting the boot in without even bothering to elaborate that Marcus went on to 'edit' a collection of Bangs' writing after the hipster died. This, of course, should not surprise anyone since Marcus is a cultural necrophile with a penchant for sucking the blood out of popular culture, as well as indulging in 1984-style rewritings of history.

It's absurd to suggest that PUNK started with the Velvet Underground because, as I keep saying, as a musical genre it's subject to constant social renegotiation. This text is part of the process and later on I'm gonna unveil a theory of Punk Rock that is so utterly sublime that you won't know whether I'm seriously putting it forward as a means of understanding the subject or just satirising the writing of dickheads like Marcus. However, I can assure you it will demonstrate that I have a much firmer grasp of the movement of modern culture and western philosophical traditions than lumpen-intellectuals such as Marcus. Most of the pretentious twits who are a sandwich short of a hamper and wanna let everybody know it by shouting their absurd 'art' 'rock' 'theories' from the rooftops are content to erroneously trace the origins of PUNK back to some sixties combo. But not Groovy Greil! No sir! Marcus has to compensate for his lack of intelligence by attempting to impress all and sundry with the so called 'ideas' that fester in his brain. Marcus doesn't actually have any thoughts of his own, he simply finds 'his' ideas in other people's books then mangles what he's 'discovered' because this self-styled 'contemporary cultural critic' is incapable of understanding how musical discourse actually functions.

Let me give you an example of this man's idiocy: Aporia Press sent a copy of my book The Assault On Culture: Utopian Currents From Lettrisme To Class War to Groovy Greil in 1988, asking him if he'd review it. Marcus responded with a note saying he couldn't possibly review my text because he was writing a book on the same subject! Usually, having done 'research' in the area is understood to be a qualification for passing judgement on a 'similar' work of non-fiction, although grasping this notion proved too great a challenge to the hack in question. I had the misfortune to meet Marcus in 1989, and he was less than pleased with the review of Lipstick Traces I'd written for City Limits. What a twat! I'd been under instructions from my editor to write something 'fair'. Later, after New Art Examiner rang from the States to say that Lipstick Traces sucked, deserved a highly critical response and that I was the person to pen it, Groovy Greil was heard blubbering about me to his friends. Marcus didn't understand the graffiti which decorated Paris in May '68 (for example, the slogan 'Be Cruel') although he's written a right load of tosh about it.

Now, let's return to the genealogy Marcus has contrived as his 'history' of PUNK. Groovy Greil has to trace the origins of PUNK back several hundred years earlier than everyone else, thinking this proves how smart he is, when in actual fact, all it does is show him up as a dick. As I keep pointing out, as a musical genre, PUNK has shifting parameters, and lacks a fixed point of origin. However, such a dynamic notion of culture is too much for Marcus to get into his head, besides the name John of Leyden sounds very similar to Johnny Lydon, and so, like one of the maniacs described in Max Nordau's Degeneration, our 'contemporary cultural critic' concludes from this that there must be a link between Free Spirit heresies and PUNK ROCK.

At this point, I'd like to parody Groovy Greil's 'critical' method of free association. And so, from Nordau I'm able to move on to Richard Hell, whose notes to the CD reissue of his second album Destiny Street are a pale echo of the symbolist 'madness' one of the founding fathers of Zionism attacked in Degeneration:

"I am the master of the flaw. Nothing I do is very good, is very talented, but the way I recover from it is exquisite (extraordinary, astonishing, endearing, profoundly endearing, fairly beautiful)... Where did those years go?... Proust, Nabakov... I was insane and desperate and riddled with drugs and lonely and despairing and didn't know how to make a record sound good... Most of my records sound to me like artefacts from a corrupt culture... earnest but inept. They have their charm but you really have to be exceptionally willing – predisposed to sympathy – a scholar of the genre, or to some degree a result yourself of the same forces that produced the 'artist' to really like them, to find beauty in them. At least I think they are brave, they have that poignancy... Sadness rock and roll as a way of turning sadness and loneliness... into something transcendentally beautiful... I'm aware of the utter unredeemable idiocy of apologizing for – denigrating – one's own work. But... I must acknowledge that it is deformed, disturbed, deprived..."

Clearly, Hell has spent his entire life on a hiding to nothing. Okay, so he came up with one brilliant plagiarism in Blank Generation and one great song with Love Comes In Spurts, even the first album was pretty good. However, the bloke was a loser. Unable to take up the past, internalise it and in the process transform it, he simply tried to reproduce the ennui of the 'yellow' 1890s, and like the efforts of his chum Tom Verlaine (the adoption of a French poet's surname by the Television frontman exposes the geezer as an art bore), the results were, on the whole, absurd. Patti Smith was part of the same syndrome, there is a great anecdote about a gig where she was ranting endlessly on the theme of 'great' rock 'n' roll as 'high art', eventually, from the back of the hall someone shouted for Pictures Of Matchstick Men, the title of an early recording by the decidedly 'low brow' Status Quo.

Fortunately, back in the mid-seventies, there were bands in New York who had the suss to avoid the bullshit that typified much of the city's club scene, thereby creating a new culture that combined elements of the past with the high energy of contemporary city life. The Electric Chairs, Dictators, Ramones and Dead Boys were all excellent groups, but only in Britain was the conjunction of elements possible that would enable a new generation of rockers to cut through to media overkill! This is where we really have to let go of the music and instead embrace the hype and rhetoric that surrounded it. The protean spawn of the New York club scene was undoubtedly ejaculated into the embryonic London Punk uprising of '76/'77 but there was something else that wouldn't have worked in the 'New World' and that was imagery drawn directly from Britain's repressive and class obsessed society. Suddenly, a monster was stalking the land!

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that PUNK had a political programme, or even a 'profound' social analysis, it didn't. What PUNK did do was tap into a reservoir of social discontent and create an explosion of anger and energy. PUNK wasn't offering a solution, it was simply a genre of novelty music being hyped on the back of the manic and frequently pointless exploitation of social tensions. PUNK was pure sensation, it had nothing to offer beyond a sense of escape from the taboo of speaking about the slimy reality of life as the social fabric came apart. After all, if Punk Rockers had preferred 'analysis' to 'rhetoric', they'd have been attempting to organise a revolution instead of pogoing to three minute pop songs.

Undoubtedly, it was Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols who uttered the words that inaugurated the 'new wave' explosion. However, Jones was not responsible for Punk Rock, he merely lit the fuse that ignited a fresh outbreak of teenage rebellion. It is impossible to stress too strongly the fact that there was no way a single individual could create the social conditions in which this musical genre flourished. When Jones swore on a tea-time television chat show in December 1976, I was a fourteen year old who thought it was unprecedented for an ordinary geezer to show the toffs what life was really like. Now I'm older and wiser, on my desk, to one side of a Mac Plus, lies a copy of Watch Out Kids by Mick Farren. Inside, there's a reproduction of the front page of the Daily Mirror of 9 November 1970. 'THE FROST FREAKOUT' screams the headline, Yippie King puts David on the spot:

Television chiefs will begin an inquiry today into the yippie invasion of the David Frost Show. The probe was ordered by Mr. Brian Young, director-general of the Independent Television Authority. It follows the invasion of the Saturday-night programme by about twenty yippies – members of an American revolutionary cult. They swarmed on to the stage while Frost was quizzing yippie leader Jerry Rubin and forced Frost to change to another studio. Some shouted four-letter words and threatened to take over the programme...

Jump forward six years and the headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror for 2 December 1976 screams: 'THE FILTH AND THE FURY! Uproar as viewers jam phones.' Yes, history repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second as tragedy, only to be absurdly rewritten with a 'Situationist' slant by idiots like Greil Marcus. However, the yippie connection makes a great deal of sense, it brings home what I was saying above about a great many of the wilder aspects of the sixties, and indeed things that were quite openly detested by Debord and his friends, being subsumed under the rubric of Situationism as historians set to work on their task of simplifying the past. Now, the 'truth' of this observation is reinforced by the fact that I came across the yippie press cutting in Mick Farren's book – a not entirely successful attempt at producing an English version of the 'revolutionary theory' of the American hipsters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Farren was, of course, lead singer with free festival favourites the Deviants, and the chief organiser of the British branch of the White Panthers.

Now the British underground, and in particular the Notting Hill freak scene of the sixties, provide a very strong precedent for late seventies Punk Rock. This should be contrasted with the fallacious notion that there was a vast Situationist input into PUNK. For a start, the Situationist International consisted of a very small number of intellectuals who were consciously organised as a group, whereas both the sixties underground and the PUNK 'movement' were amorphous and disorganised. Secondly, there are innumerable direct connections between the sixties underground and what was understood to constitute British Punk Rock in the '76/'77 period, whereas any connections between Punk Rock and the SI turn out, on examination, to be extremely nebulous.

By tradition, the Situationist-PUNK connection is made through the London based 'revolutionary' group King Mob. However, in order to understand the genesis of King Mob, one needs to know about the Black Mask and Motherfucker groups from the Lower East Side of New York. Black Mask emerged from the New York Surrealist Group and the American Anarchist Group in the mid-sixties. Black Mask's brand of political neo-Dada was of sufficient interest to the specto-Situationists in Paris for the Debordists to consider franchising them as the American section of their organisation. But after a considerable amount of manipulation on the part of Tony Verlaan (a Black Mask fellow traveller, who went on to become a member of the American section of the Situationist International), the Debordists broke with Benn Morea, who was a central figure in both Black Mask and the Motherfuckers. This, in turn, led to the expulsion of the English section of the Situationist International for remaining in contact with Morea. From their early days as the British end of Rebel Worker, and then as Heatwave, the English section was far closer to the activism of the Black Mask group than the acerbic intellectualism of their French controllers. After their expulsion, the Brits transformed themselves into King Mob with the help of Dave and Stuart Wise who'd moved to London after growing up in Leeds and attending art school in Newcastle. The Wise brothers had already established fraternal links with Benn Morea and were destined to spread huge amounts of bullshit about PUNK ROCK during the eighties in a desperate bid to justify their own past.

Now, since King Mob were clearly an underground phenomena, cast in the same mould as the Motherfuckers, any influence King Mob exerted on Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid can hardly be considered 'Situationist'. The Debordists made this state of affairs quite clear in Internationale Situationiste 12 (translation from Situationist International Anthology edited by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley 1981), where they stated: 'a rag called KING MOB... passes, quite wrongly, for being slightly pro-situationist'. The SI was self-consciously avant-garde, whereas the wilder aspects of the sixties counter-culture that fed into PUNK bubbled up from a less sectarian, and simultaneously less intellectually rigorous, underground. While the Black Mask journal ran odd fragments of Situationist prose translated into English, as King Mob would do later, these were reprinted alongside material put out by civil rights organisations and even the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation! Benn Morea and his group were deeply involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement and developed an analysis of the 'new proletariat' using the slogan 'nigger as class' (a variant on this notion surfaced again in 'connection' to the Sex Pistols when sixties rocker P. J. Proby covered Anarchy In The UK, and changed the opening lines from 'I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist' to 'I am an anti-Christ, I am a nigger'). While Black Mask and the Motherfuckers succumbed to some, but by no means all, of the illusions prevalent among sixties activists in the US, the flip side of this was that they presented their ideas in an easily accessible, rather than an academic, form. This accessibility led to the flavour of their gestural politics being effortlessly transmitted to the 'blank generation', whereas the acerbic intellectualism of the Situationists was completely alien to the average British teenager in the late seventies.

Besides plagiarising virtually all their graphics from Motherfucker sources, King Mob expended considerable energy in eulogising their chief source of inspiration. For example, from issue 3 of King Mob:

"Black Mask seized every possible opportunity of fucking up culture. They moved in at a moments notice and improvised as they went along. They heckled, disrupted and generally sabotaged dozens of art congresses, lectures, exhibitions, happenings. Probably their most notorious escapade was the wrecking of the marathon seminar on Modern Art sponsored by the Loeb Student Centre.. Howls of ART IS DEAD, BURN THE MUSEUMS, BABY and POETRY IS REVOLUTION. Tables kicked over, windows smashed, scuffles breaking out. Larry Rivers roughed up a bit in the best futurist manner. The theoretical dimension – 'fuck off, you cunt' – equally worthy of the occasion."

Greil Marcus prides himself on making connections, but he doesn't mention Black Mask or the Motherfuckers in Lipstick Traces, instead he makes the wrong connections. It's a shame Groovy Greil isn't a junkie, because if he'd gone in for that kind of rebel pose, he'd be long dead. However, Marcus does mention King Mob, after all, they are the mythical PUNK-Situationist 'connection', and this is part of what he's got to say about them:

"The group threw a potlatch in Selfridges, with a man dressed up as Santa Claus giving away the department store's toys to throngs of happy children; it accomplished Strasbourg-style detournement when the children were forced to witness the shocking sight of one of Santa's helpers placed under arrest."

Marcus can't, or won't, acknowledge that this prank was first pulled by the Motherfuckers in New York; King Mob simply copied it. Before departing from the subject of King Mob, it's worth noting that Charles Radcliffe, a one time member of the English section of the Situationist International, also pops up in less 'esoteric' histories of the sixties 'rebellion' in Britain. He was an associate of notorious pot smuggler and part-time MI6 man Howard Marks. Charlie ended up with a five year jail sentence for his activities in the dope trade. The English issue of Rebel Worker, the precursor to Heatwave which in turn begat the English section of the SI and King Mob, is of even greater interest. Under the title Crime Against The Bourgeoisie, there is an article on The Who:

"There is a violence in the Who's music; a savagery still unique in the still overtly cool British pop scene. The Who don't want to be liked; they don't want to be accepted; they are not trying to please but to generate in the audience an echo of their own anger... The Who are at full volume; despite predictions of their imminent demise they have two records in the English charts and they will not die until they are replaced by a group offering more far-reaching explosions of sounds and ideas. The Who are symptomatic of discontent. Their appearance and performance alike denounce respectability and conformity... on a good night The Who could turn on a whole regiment of the dispossessed."

And so, rather than providing a link with the Situationists, the King Mob 'connection' takes us back to The Who, an acknowledged influence on the Sex Pistols from their earliest days. And it doesn't matter how long 'contemporary cultural critics' wank in the wind, the Sex Pistols never did cover Velvet Underground songs, while a version of the Who's Substitute WAS included in their set.

Likewise the Motherfuckers, via King Mob, were hardly the most immediately accessible aspect of the sixties counter-culture waiting to inspire the average late seventies teenage 'PUNK', while the Situationist 'influence' is completely negligible. What would inevitably be encountered by anyone trailing around the London rock circuit at this date were the musicians and sound crews clustered around the Deviants, the Pink Fairies, the Edgar Broughton Band, Hawkwind etc, all of whom had been stalwarts of the underground free festival scene.

One of the things that tends to be associated with PUNK is independent record labels, not that this was anything new, the idea that it was merely demonstrates the average wo/man's innate capacity for complete amnesia. Nevertheless, independent releases are a quintessential element of the PUNK ROCK phenomenon. In his New Wave On Record England & Europe 1975-8: A Discographical History (Bomp Books, Los Angeles 1978), Greg Shaw has the following to say about Stiff Records: 'When punk rock came in, Stiff was quick to get involved with the Damned and others... Stiff was not only the first, but the most successful of the new British labels...' In fact, New Rose by the Damned, released on Stiff, is widely considered to be the first single of the British 'new wave' explosion, preceding as it did the release of Anarchy In The UK by the Sex Pistols on the major label EMI. Stiff's second release had been Between The Lines by the Pink Fairies, and in 1977 they issued a solo single by ex-Fairy Larry Wallis. Likewise, Mick Farren did a comeback EP with Stiff, although for reasons unknown, the label never got around to releasing a planned single by Motorhead, featuring former Hawkwind bassist Lemmy.

Another of the bigger independent labels associated with the British 'new wave' explosion is Chiswick Records, who had the honour of unleashing Motorhead's first single on an unsuspecting world. Chiswick PUNK acts included Johnny Moped, the Radiators From Space, Johnny And The Self-Abusers, and the notorious Skrewdriver in a pre-Nazi incarnation. One of the best punk records of 1977 came out on Chiswick: I Wanna Be Free by the Rings. The title was a completely abstract demand, typical of the gestural politics favoured by PUNK and underground bands, the ex-Pink Fairy Twink, now with the Rings, simply demanded freedom in a vacuum. Brilliant – loud, fast and stupid! His next release on Chiswick was Do It 77, credited to Twink And The Fairies, presumably because by the time the company got around to issuing the platter in 1978, the appeal of PUNK was waning and they thought they'd do better by cashing in on his underground credibility with a 'punky' revival of an old song. In the eighties, when the company finally released The Pink Fairies Live At The Roundhouse 1975, they were operating under a variety of label names including Big Beat. It would have been a revelation if Chiswick had released this platter in 1976 or 1977; the tough cockney vocals on City Kids are remarkably 'punky' and this is followed by a cover of Waiting For The Man, a favourite with '77 PUNK bands such as the Wasps and Slaughter And The Dogs. Clearly, the Velvet Underground had been due a revival and just got lumped in with 'PUNK' because the two things coincided.

Further connections between the British underground and figures associated with the 'new wave' explosion are revealed in the sleeve notes accompanying the track Psychedelic Music by the Lightning Raiders on Back To Front Volume 4:

"Formed in 1976 by Little John Hodge, Andy Allen and Duncan Sanderson (ex-DEVIANTS and PINK FAIRIES in the sixties) they didn't start to play punk rock before 1979. This is their vinyl debut with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of THE SEX PISTOLS... Andy Allen was also with THE SEX PISTOLS playing bass on their Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle LP. Later he left the Lightning Raiders to join the PROFESSIONALS with Cook and Jones..."

Likewise, a 1969 poster promoting the Edgar Broughton Band featured a photo of the group and underneath the legend: 'Wanted – for plotting subversive acts involving treason, arson and corruption of youth...' Ironically, one of the greatest New York PUNK songs of the seventies was recorded by a former yippie and veteran pot smoking street 'musician', this being the title track on David Peel's own label release King Of Punk (Orange 1978). The song spits venom: 'I'm the king of punk from the streets of the Lower East suicide... / Fuck you Talking Heads / Fuck you Sex Pistols / Fuck you New York Dolls...' On and on Peel rants, for a glorious seven minutes and seventeen seconds, cursing every New York 'new wave' band of the period: Ramones, Tuff Darts, Television, Blondie etc. With its screaming PUNK ROCK guitars, the track makes a pleasant change from Peel's usual obsessive harping on the themes of dope, uptight pigs and John Lennon.

I hope from what's been said above that it's now clear that rather than being unprecedented, Anarchy In The UK was a novelty record in the tradition of Donovan's Atlantis. They are two sides of the same coin; hippie mysticism and PUNK nihilism have nothing in common with the 'genuine' revolutionary agitation. This is pop music 'liberating' 'social struggle' from the need to transform anything other than the hit parade. Today, I still find Atlantis entertaining, whereas Anarchy is so familiar to me that it's dull, there's nothing worse than an over exposed novelty record. The opening line, which struck me as brilliant when I was fourteen, I now view as completely fluffed. Having long ago mastered works such as Max Stirner's The Ego And Its Own, I just wish Rotten could have sung 'I am THE Anti-Christ' instead of the half-cocked and absurdly modest 'I am an Anti-Christ'.

The Sex Pistols should have been disposable, instead they've ended up providing the central subject matter for uninspired books by pseudo-intellectuals. It's easy to see why these imbeciles go for the Situationist option when they're confronted with the genealogical question. The Situationist International produced a good number of 'difficult' texts and so they are easy to write about. What one does is explain concepts such as 'the spectacle' or 'detournement'; this fills up a lot of space with less time being put in for the money earned than that required from someone engaging in genuine analysis. The same clichéd incidents are repeated again and again: Notre Dame Cathedral, Strasbourg, May '68, the Pistols at Winterland etc. The assertions of other writers are accepted at face value and no one bothers to examine the circumstances concerning the expulsion of the English section of the Situationist International, thereby unearthing the crucial Black Mask/Motherfucker link.

However, it is at least consoling that the public is smarter than those critics who pretend to be its representatives. The Pistols' greatest problem as a novelty act was always Johnny Rotten, whose expressive voice made him sound like a proper rock singer. After Rotten left the band, the sales of the group's singles soared. Clearly the song No One Is Innocent, featuring Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs on vocals, is vastly superior as a novelty item to Anarchy In The UK. While Greil Critic is unable to recognise this, Joe Public proved Hegel to be absolutely correct in the distinction he drew between these two beasts. And in conclusion, let's not forget that it was the part-time Hawkwind member Michael Moorcock who handled the novelisation of the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle.

Previous: Chapter I: Journalist Jive

Next: Chapter III: No More Rock 'N' Roll

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