Keith’s University of Rock, part 2: How Punk is Suede’s Stay Together?

Recently, I’ve been re-reading John Harris’ Britpop book ‘The Last Party’ and enjoying it, though I disagree with many of its conclusions. One of these points of disagreement is the assessment that Suede’s ‘Stay Together’ is ‘pompous and overblown’. He also claims that nowadays, Bert of The Suede thinks it is too.

Am I missing something? I think it’s probably the best thing they ever did, though I don’t really know, since I pretty much lost interest after Bernard Butler left. That said, I did hear the singles and they were plums. Part of the problem here seems to me that the ambition to do something different had gone with Butler. With the arrival of Britpop that year, having the desire to produce anything other than standard issue pop/punk songs soon became spectacularly unfashionable, but that’s OK, because with mega-memorable tunes from the likes of Northern Uproar, who needs that.

In general, this sort of thing is OK for a while, but things haven’t really recovered from that period. The ‘indie’ scene, having grown out of punk, on the whole tends to maintain the status quo (not the band: it’s arcane machinery and the blood of young virgins that maintains them).

The Tweenet internet site claims that the C86 movement carries the true spirit of punk. Trouble is, Skrewdriver think the same thing and I know who I’m backing in a fight. Some of the principles are the same: keep a lid on it lads, anything longer than three minutes is rubbish; oh yeah and hurry up Harry, we’re going down the pub.

Anyway, the phrase ‘pompous and overblown’ has been overused in the extreme since punk broke in 1991. Oh no! Hold on, it was 1976, or 1977 if you’re not a member of the Sexpistols. Cowabunga! That was thirty years ago! Thirty years is, for example, the amount of time between 1957 and 1987.

It's fucking annoying that since then, musicians have had to wear straitjacket for fear of slagged off for not being ‘punk’, by the taste makers (typically, the music press and its followers). Strange thing is, fundamentally it seems to me that anything that promotes anarchy would have a stated aim not to have a well-defined view of what’s good and bad.

Wikipedia claims that anarchy means:

that all forms of rulership are undesirable and should be abolished

Though personally, I think it’s more about sticking two fingers up to grannies, but taken either way, it doesn’t mean make three minute sort-of-pop-songs. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that punk has provided the guiding principles for popular musicians for the last thirty years, but that for the most part, those adhering to these principles have been anything but anarchic; in fact, they’ve been quite ordered really, following a pretty strictly defined aesthetic. What a bunch of bobbies’ helmets!

It’s clear to me that in a land where the rules are that you must stick to three minute songs and have no guitar solos that releasing an eight-minute single with guitar solos and trumpets and stuff is pretty anarchic.

Strangely, if the punk aesthetic had been strictly held to in the years following the initial punk explosion, then many of the great bands from that era (Wire; Associates; Talking Heads; Television; the Dooleys; Devo etc.) would not have been allowed to exist, and yet most of these bands exhibit sounds that draw inspiration from the early ‘70s and the late ‘60s.

There was another period in the years immediately following the acid house explosion of 1988, or 1987 if you are lying, that demonstrated a significant amount of invention, largely in and around the ‘indie’ and ‘dance’ fields and quite often deviating from the rules that were laid down by punk; however, around about 1994, the world (well, the UK anyway) was ready for a change. I was ready for a change, in fact. At this time I remember dancing to Primal Scream’s ‘Rocks’ and liking the third Ride album. I think I was sick of endless ambient records by guys called Pete Namlook at the time. Steve ‘Global Chillage’ Hillage seemed to be enjoying a revival too. Funny thing is, looking back at it, the need to rock was a short-term need. I kind of wanted it to fuck off by the end of 1994 and to go back to not rocking.

Unfortunately, music has on the whole, followed this dull pattern since back then. I thoroughly enjoyed a quote by semi-celebrity dafty Louise Weiner a few years ago. I can’t remember it exactly, but the question was along the lines of ‘what had Britpop accomplished’ and as I remember, her answer was something along the lines of ‘at least it got rid of all those twenty minute guitar solos’. Hmm. Yeah, that’s a result! See you down the front in your TRUSTY DMs. It got rid of... Err.. Exactly who? Hmm. The Porcupine Tree perhaps. Maybe Ozric Tentacles, though I bet they’re still popular in Swampy’s wigwam. It’s a sad reflection of the movement, in that it seems to indicate a degree of wishful thinking; that something had actually been achieved by it all.

‘Dance music’ lives in its own world entirely. There, it’s OK to have twenty minute long track, though clearly not twenty minute guitar solos, because guitars are for neanderthals, but this is another story.

In conclusion, inspired by the great animated version of ‘Lord of the Rings’, I’m just going to finish here. In any case, conclusions are for hippies.