3. 1979, Part 1

Buzzcocks

Buzzcocks’ Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) has made a strong comeback into my playlist after a nearly decade-and-a-half absence (for obvious reasons). It’s fortuitous timing for this series, because after my introduction to the world of punk with nineties pop-punk, the Buzzcocks’ early singles I Don’t Mind and Ever Fallen In Love served as my transition to the world of early-days punk. It’s a world I’d go on to spend much of my teens enjoying. After the decade-and-a-half that have passed since those days, none of the holy trinity of the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and the Damned have survived my ever-changing playlist, but many others from the seventies have.

Ramones

Before I start off on those, let me just say the Ramones were my favourite of the big three. Blitzkrieg Bop in particular – like tracks from Green Day’s Dookie and American Idiot – got its own acoustic-based folk punk treatment in my bedroom in 2006’s summer break. Revisiting the 2016 remaster of their 1976 self-titled album now, I’m struck by a couple of things. One, by just how strange their music must’ve sounded then in the absence of a punk vocabulary. Two, by just how much I prefer the old masters to the new remasters. Usually, I like the idea of remastering old albums to fit the dynamic range of modern recordings – but in the case of these particular remasters, I’m not a fan. That said, even in the new remasters, the infectiousness of songs like Blitzkrieg Bop, Sheena Is A Punk Rocker, et al is undeniable. I never really got into the Ramones’ English counterparts – Sex Pistols and the Damned – even to the limited extent to which I got into the Ramones. It wasn’t until my discovery of the Stranglers, Buzzcocks, and the Clash that my punk preference shifted Britainwards. 

The Clash, and 1979’s London Calling

Of particular note was the Clash’s London Calling, my first repeat-front-to-back listen from the world of classic punk. Released in November 1979, London Calling was already more representative of the start of a new movement after punk (conveniently called post-punk) than of the tail-end of the original punk movement that the Clash had helped usher in. The release of Television’s 1977 album Marquee Moon (another one of my early repeat-front-to-back favourites) had already signalled the start of punk’s upcoming transition to post-punk, and the genre had already had its first few British classics, in the form of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Wire’s Chairs Missing in the years preceding London Calling. But London Calling signalled the starting point of my discovery of these classics and of the Clash’s pre-post-punk (therefore just punk) years.

X – Los Angeles

Even as post-punk was starting to take the concepts of punk and package them in a more creative and accomplished way, the original punk sound was being milked for the infinite potential it had. One of my early favourites was X’s 1980 release, Los Angeles. Its side-eyed view of Los Angeles’s high-society snobbery coincided perfectly with the side-eyed view I’d started to take of everything Bombay from the corners of an engineering college hostel room situated a kilometer away from my childhood home: a place that had before my very eyes gone from being a middle-class neighbourhood populated by the middle management of engineering companies and government offices to an upper-middle-class-and-up home of bankers, consultants, and general business-type globetrotters. 

In stark contrast to the high-rises that now populated my childhood neighbourhood, my hostel room was a dank eighty-square-foot box shared by two people, with infrastructure that was falling apart, once again, before my very eyes. Many of us countered the reality of our living space with a different form of elitism. We’d all taken the world’s most competitive post-high-school examination to get in here. Just the three letters of our university were enough – in the view of many of my peers – for us to be treated like superstars. We were IITians. The faces of my batchmates were on hoardings, the sides of buses, newspaper front pages. A common refrain I heard throughout my eighteenth year – the first of four I’d spend at IIT – was that ‘our lives were set’. Over the more than a decade since, it’s a dream that has, for all of us, proven to be a lot more complicated than that initial assessment. (And fairly so – why should passing one multiple-choice test in physics, chemistry, and mathematics guarantee anyone’s continued success through a life that contains virtually no reference to the concepts of thermodynamics, inorganic chemistry, and high school calculus?) Over the four years of college, many of us (myself included) discovered that the most reliable indicator of continued success was not raw analytical skill, but a sense of decency, hard work, and patience; Panchatantra was right – in the end, the good win. And all elitism is bad. I came to strongly relate with X’s Sex and Dying in High Society, and more than a decade later, still do. 

You start it out that way
You'd do anything to stay
And keep your money, boys
Made of silver and gold
And keep your Pekingese
Turkish cigarettes
And your lighter that looks just like a gun
So you married your daddy
With a different name
Sex and dying in high society

Class and post-punk

By the time X’s Los Angeles came out, art-school and middle-class-and-higher rejects had discovered this now nearly-mainstream and not-quite-subaltern form of music, and injected it with their private-school education. Most punk was now no longer punk, it was post-punk. The genre’s first iteration (with the exception, perhaps, of Buzzcocks) was the music of the urban white working class in largely urban largely white class-divided western countries. It was the music they used to make a racket against a mainstream they saw as being classist, oppressive and hypocritical. The fact is, in this class divide, it was clear where I stood. It would be insane for me to pretend to be working class; these hands have spent more time typing today than they have gripping hammers and drills over all their thirty years. Of course, the post-punk world grew out of the punk ethos – of inclusivity, of doing it oneself, and of making a racket – and had its source in punk’s consciousness. But it’s no wonder that soon after entering the world of punk music, I found more of a natural home with bands like Wire and the Slits than the Ramones and Sex Pistols. 

Wire, the Slits, and what’s next

1979 signified the cementing of this shift in punk. In 1979, Wire released their third album, 154: an album that had a lot less to do with the punk of their classic debut, Pink Flag (one of my favourite albums of early punk), than it did with the alternative rock movement it would go on to inspire. And the Slits released their dub-infused post-punk debut, Cut. These were college-educated kids (the members of Wire went to Watford School of Art, and those of the Slits went to Chelsea School of Art) making music that extended punk’s ethos of questioning the norm to the sound of punk itself. Why can’t punk music have keyboards? Why can’t it be about things other than ‘the system’? Why can’t it have more than three chords? And the occasional solo without it sounding like the overproduced tripe of prog-rock? Why can’t a punk band be composed entirely of women? The answers to these questions would result in more than just the birth of post-punk: it would result in the new wave of Blondie and Talking Heads, R.E.M.’s alternative rock, and Sonic Youth’s noise rock. Next week, more 1979, and a full introduction to the post-punk of my youth: the first time in my life I listened to music and thought not, I want to cover this on my guitar, but, I want to some day make music that sounds like this.