Hardcore for Nerds

Husker Du - ‘Dead Set On Destruction’ from Candy Apple Grey (1986)

Poptimism/punktimism [delete as appropriate] means to me: preferring Husker Du’s Warner Brothers albums Candy Apple Grey and Warehouse: Songs and Stories to New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig (Metal Circus and Zen Arcade are still gold, though). Their last two records are the best examples of Husker Du’s ‘pop’ sound, and the earlier two of the punk/post-hardcore sound. The middle two seem, well, transitional, and I’ve never really gotten into them. I don’t begrudge anyone else who has, of course.

This is interesting (if not surprising), though:

“Hüsker Dü was not expected to sell a large amount of records. Rather, Warner Bros. valued the group for its grassroots fanbase and its “hip” status, and by keeping the overhead low the label anticipated the band would turn a profit.”

I should probably read Michael Azerrad’s book (from which the above is sourced) sometime, but as a non-musician and frankly someone who isn’t active in any kind of physical scene, it’s never particularly interested me; and more broadly, I don’t have much interest in the micro ‘process’ side of cultural production. I think it’s good if people recognise that art isn’t produced in a vacuum, and question the way in which artistic creation interacts with broader social and economic contexts; but at the same time I do tend to subscribe to the view of not particularly caring about artists’ personal or even professional lives as a lens through which to view their work. It is a creation, after all, which implies something distinct. On the other hand, it’s hard not be aware of such things if you’re historically sensitive: I wrote a thesis which substantially involved researching the unsavoury life of a man who wrote some intellectually valuable books in response to his time, but containing flaws both internal and external to himself. We love stories, to know the deeper meaning to things, which is a good instinct; but often it changes, and perhaps distorts, our appreciation of whatever meaning excited us about that book or album in the first place.

Then again, nothing lasts forever, which is kind of the point.

(Source: Spotify)

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“ Ed Ward’s recollection that the Sex Pistols were a response to “Margaret Thatcher’s Britain” is really a function of nostalgia, a dream of punk as giving the middle finger to the conservative ideology of shrinking government, tradition, and dwindling social services. And yet, as Momus (Nick Currie) has suggested, punk can be looked at from another angle: as the flowering of expression of a deeper cultural conservatism. “In retrospect,” Momus argues, “we can see punk’s no future nihilism as one of the factors contributing to the triumph of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. If we refuse to believe in - and therefore start building - a positive future, you prepare the way for a politics of fear, which usually means authoritarian leaders. Punk was simply the sexy face of Britain’s innate conservatism, its fear of the future.

—

Nicholas Rombes, ‘Callaghan, James, Prime Minister of Great Britain (1)’ in A Cultural Dictionary of Punk 1974-1982

I was drafting a post of Leatherface’s ‘Winning’ (“roundabouts and swings aren’t some of my favourite things”) in response to the death of the primary proponent of the Thatcherite ideology, but I was trying to find where I’d discussed this piece in Nicholas Rombes’ superb book on the cultural history of punk - in which he riffs on a journalistic howler:

“In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, Ed Ward wrote that when “the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, draped on his microphone, intoned, ‘No Future,’ it was the cry of youth coming out of school to discover that there were no jobs in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and refusing to accept that as reality.” At the end of the article there was this correction: “An article last Sunday about the legacy of the Clash and other punk rock bands in the 1970’s referred incorrectly to the social climate from which the Sex Pistols emerged. It was not the Britain of Margaret Thatcher: she became Prime Minister in 1979, and the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978.”

The association of two Labour and Democrat leaders (Callaghan and Carter) with the birth of punk’s rebellion against society isn’t often discussed, and the more self-consciously political punk and hardcore of the Thatcher and Reagan years tends to supersede it. But if you want to be true to the historical context, it has to be addressed - and in doing so, potentially finding a deeper meaning. This was the post I wrote before about Leatherface, Thatcher, Rombes and the left-wing history of punk (the uselessness of Tumblr’s search function meant I only just found it again now).

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Wounds - ‘Dead Dead Fucking Dead’ from Die Young (2013)

(previously)

(Source: Spotify)

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timocraticyouth:

So my problem with Retromania as far as I can tell is that I am pretty invested in the following two beliefs:

i. that ‘pop music’ (using the term to cover a whole swathe of musics dating from lets fairly arbitrarily say the 45 revolutions per minute gramophone record coming on to the market in 1949) is in some pretty fundamental senses the creature of capitalism; that its craving for novelty and its frequent-to-constant recapitulation and reanimation of its own earlier forms are both aspects of this;

ii. that pop music (and various allied musics that it becomes harder to call for certain pop or not pop) frequently throws up interesting spaces in which we glimpse some kind of temporary escape from the popular-culture-under-capitalism churn-of-new-product logic of (i.) seems to be negated, in which art happens, in which social possibilities and utopian hopes are glimpsed, let’s say.

Now I think Reynolds would probably agree with these. But as of two-thirds of the way through the book, every piece of evidence he introduces to flesh out his thesis — that recapitulation/reanimation has reached some (critical mass/saturation point/singularity) where the new ceases to have the power to matter — just seems further evidence against it; e.g. in the history-of-punk-as-revivalism chapter he notes that Kaye’s sleevenotes for Nuggets refer to that effort as archaeological as early as 1972.

Anyway: the feeling I can’t shirk is that the book’s argument boils down to something like: the glimpses of social possibility and utopian hope you get these days just aren’t as good as the ones we had when Simon Reynolds were a lad: i.e., that the book is at best a symptom of itself.

I can’t help feeling that this whole thing is the anxiety of influence on a grand scale, and on critics. Given that a large part of the argument is about the political value (or lack thereof) of art in modern society, I’m having a hard time caring about the vitality of pop in a diseased world. A plague on all your genres, etc. Perhaps this discussion about the lack of novelty in popular music is just an echo of concerns about diminishing productivity gains in Western capitalism - i.e., a symptom of an irretrievably broken system. Excuse me while I drown in hardcore punk.

The mention of Nuggets and punk-as-revivalism reminds me of what I wrote - perhaps in happier times - about that Radiators’ retro album:

“But the real fun is in the miniature Nuggets-like quality of the rest of the album, from excellent band names (Eire Apparent) and predictable song titles (“Yes, I Need Someone”), and sounds expanding to folk and psychedelia, to some thrilling pop hooks. Throughout it’s possible to recognise large elements of the Radiators’ own sound, but depending on the vocals and the style of the cover, it can be sometimes hard to remember that it is all just the one band playing the songs. Or sometimes, bizarrely, to remember that this is music that existed in its own time and place and isn’t totally the reimaginings of contemporary punks - not to deny the adherence in spirit to and difference of the styles used, but hearing this music mostly as a blank slate, the Radiators definitely place their own modern (or at least post-‘77, which is not very new after all) stamp on it.

For example, the atypical “stone solid Mod groove” of showband The Blue Aces (a central theme of the album’s historical revisionism is the distinction between the popular history of 60s, “in which the conventional wisdom habitually depicts the secular pulpit of Gay Byrne’s television show set against a soundtrack of Showband Scene mania”, and the underground of Beat Clubs - although one of my parents describes it as more of a straightforward rural-urban divide between the showbands and the tennis pavilions) is given a take that “acknowledges its kinship with the spirit of the punk bands of a decade later”; but which sounds to me very much like Rancid’s early 90s album Let’s Go. Of course, some bands are always arch-revivalists, but it’s fascinating to hear everything connected on a long line and collapsed together into one asynchronous celebration of a past.”

Kill Yr Innovators, just like you do if you see the Buddha walking on the road…

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» Against Retromania

The above link is to a very interesting essay dealing with Simon Reynold’s Retromania. I haven’t read the book, so I’m only going on the ideas as presented here and what I’ve read elsewhere, but I’m coming to the realisation that I agree with the thesis less than I thought I did. I mean, the idea that we’re all saturated in backwards-looking indie pop with little of real novelty going on has a certain cynical appeal, especially when you’re seeing music through the prism of modern criticism (more on which later). But to compare it to the nearest empirical data I have at hand, which is what I listen to, I really don’t think it stacks up.

Of course, Reynolds et al are deliberately discussing ‘pop’ in a broad sense, which is something I exclude myself from to a greater or lesser extent; but at the same time I don’t think I make any especial effort to seek out the ‘new’ or the avant-garde, beyond what is part of the inherent dynamic of punk and indie and alternative music in general. Which if I’m reading it right, the thesis of the Retromania argument is that that dynamic is disappearing or has disappeared. So here’s my top ten list of albums from last year, in ~~no particular~~ alphabetical order, with links to what I wrote about each:

Christian Scott - Christian aTunde Adjuah

Dan Deacon - America

Grimes - Visions

Julie Feeney - Clocks

Loma Prieta - I.V.

Radiators - Sound City Beat

So Cow/Squarehead - Out of Season

Some Bells - s/t

Woods - Bend Beyond

Xiu Xiu - Always

There are two (Christian Scott and Julie Feeney) in genres that I don’t know nearly enough about to say whether they qualify as ‘retro’ or not in any way. There are several I’m comfortable saying are not retro or backward-looking, in any particular or general sense, but rather do contribute something novel and/or disruptive to the ‘hyperstasis’ of contemporary popular music: Dan Deacon, Loma Prieta, Xiu Xiu and (my favourite, which others have written and understood more about) Grimes.

I mentioned recently that I can see Dan Deacon’s blend of energetic, danceable and cerebral pop as the contemporary equivalent of what critics above a certain age would have liked to have seen in mbv if it had been released around 1993 rather than 2013:

“Wonder 2 is that hallucinatory drum and bass tune Shields once suggested he’d gone and recorded. If that had come out in the mid-90s, the Britpop boys would have all taken their Beatles songbooks and gone home crying”

In other words, while critics are bemoaning the late arrival of what they looked for in the past, perhaps a different form already exists in the present. Maybe Dan Deacon just isn’t that good, although my subjective experience says otherwise. But I don’t really see how, even after three albums, it could be said that what he’s doing isn’t somewhat new and original. It’s forward-looking enough to show a new way of constructing pop and performing it: isn’t that enough?

As for punk, well there’s a whole nest of arguments about originality in it, but something that struck me about the above essay was this quote from Jaron Lanier:

“I have frequently gone through a conversational sequence along the following lines: Someone in his early twenties will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and then I’ll challenge that person to play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s. I’ll ask him to play the tracks for his friends. So far, my theory has held: even true fans don’t seem to be able to tell if an indie rock track or a dance mix is from 1998 or 2008, for instance.”

On the one hand that seems like a ridiculously short time period to have clear stylistic differences, but is that because I’ve grown up in a relatively static period? Between 1978 and 1988 does sound more plausible, although I wonder how much of any difference would be due to advancement in recording techniques, in quality and availability? I think there are clear stylistic shifts between earlier decades, at least, in hardcore but which have been accentuated as later bands get easier access to decent recording spaces. Of course the opposite effect also exists as influences pile up and are blended together: Loma Prieta I would class as a ‘part-retro’ band, taking some influence from early 90s abrasive post-hardcore and merging it with more contemporary screamo styles. But overall I think the diversity of such subgenres means that a lot of post-hardcore and punk can be dated quite distinctly.

Xiu Xiu I suppose carry a lot of influence from post-punk, but musically and lyrically it still seems new, in that it expresses things in a way that hasn’t occurred yet. Maybe all this is just a sign of my ignorance of musical history, but I don’t see the retro. And Grimes - well, she may earn comparisons to other outré female artists in the past like Kate Bush, but it seems broadly recognised that what she is doing is pulling things together in her own style, a kind of eclectic digital modernism.

If ‘retro’ is consciously taking elements of the past for (minimal) refashioning in the present, and the opposite is the mythical outpouring of original, transformational creativity, then I think there is also a middle path of artists that explore existing and established forms to see what more can be got out of them before they become exhausted: the ‘miners’. Miners do not have to go back into the past; they merely continue an existing seam. They only cover already-explored ground to get to where they’re going; what they find is not necessarily wholly new, but it is an addition to the existing stock. Most of all, however, there is a sense of an unbroken tradition that sidesteps the issue of ‘retro’: how can you be going backwards when you’re going forward on the same path, and deeper into the mountain of artistic possibilities?

Some may find it claustrophobic, and break out into new tunnels or find a new entrance, but others are happy to keep going on in anticipation of a new lode (ok, I think the metaphor is done now). For these ‘miners’ I think of Some Bells and their mix of rock and folk, with elements of many things from Earth to Bob Dylan, but again not so much ‘retro’ as a continuation of an evolving and increasingly familiar style (it’s there too in much of EMA’s very original work). Or the Irish groups Squarehead and So Cow; the former something of a Nirvana-with-punk-pop alchemy, the latter perhaps more indebted to indie-pop of the preceding decade: not necessarily retro as much as following a clear path for pop music, and what they make of it will be the ‘new’.

That leaves only Woods, who do probably most conform to the ‘retro’ designation as a band reliving the folk-rock of the 60s with a smear of psychedelic freak; and the Radiators (from Space), who produced the most definitively, self-consciously retro record with a collection of 1960s and 1970s covers of Irish ‘beat’ groups - influenced obviously by US and UK sounds of the time. Indeed the band themselves are something of a ‘retro’ entity, being a reformed punk group of 1970s Dublin who in their time made the modernist (as their attitude to Irish cultural and societal conservatism illustrates) post-punk statement that would appeal to Reynolds, in the excellent 1979 Ghostown, but which was itself quite concerned with Ireland’s past. Now they’ve come back from the dead, as it were, to teach us about their (and ours too, of course) musical history - and I like it. But artists like So Cow and Squarehead are clearly Ireland’s musical present, and I like that even more.

I think the obsession about retrospection has as much, if not more, to do with writing about music than music itself. It’s easier to draw parallels with past artists because not only are there more of them, but it’s easier for people to recognise and have heard them now. What if it’s not people’s listening that is trapped in the past, but criticism? Even, or especially, in part as a reaction to breathless hype and shallow publicity material; it becomes tempting to rely on history for perspective and critical context. Personally, as a former student of history I can see both its importance and the danger of its overuse: I think the punk ethos is as much about ‘no past’ as it is about ‘no future’ - we must escape the easy linkages to fully engage with the present, and be critical about every viewpoint. In that sense, I agree with this part of the essay:

“The future Reynolds believes in seems to be just another abstraction—“post-now,” inconceivable in its specifics.

But then maybe the point is just to hold on to the ideal, even in the abstract. Perhaps this is all Retromania can plausibly offer: a defense against a certain type of fatalism, which doubles as an exercise in remembering. Pop really did do these things: possessed, inspired, ignited and transformed on a mass scale. To maintain a belief in the (artistic) future—even just as an empty category—is a means of preserving the memory of desire, of reminding oneself what pop could be, because it once was. The principle then is not to reverse time but to make it reappear, as a past that had substance and a tomorrow with possibility. To resist, in other words, retro’s anaesthetic.”

NO PAST punk pop history

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invisiblemusic:

This was recorded before you were born, in a country that you’ve never visited. And yet when listening to it I’m amazed how much it sounds like something that was recorded in the last couple of years, in New York or London. It has touches that we associate with “exotic” music from somewhere else but something about the recording and the mix and the approach to percussion feels very “now”. I can imagine this being made by someone sitting in the room with me though there’s an outside chance that some of the people playing here are dead, even from old age.

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The Radiators - ‘They’re Looting in the Town’ from Ghostown (1978)

This is one of my favourite songs on this album, both musically and lyrically. It’s got that big, thumping, spacious Clash-like sound that isn’t really classically ‘punk’, but transforms the essence of the genre into a grander form (I was almost going to say ‘statement’, but it’s more subtle than that). There’s a humility and wry cynicism to this kind of post-punk that easily undercuts any feelings of grandiosity - it’s rather reminiscent of the Boomtown Rats’ more iconic Dublin pop-punk; but I prefer the Radiators as, I don’t know, less obviously snotty - more like the Clash than the Rats’ Pistols.

The opening lyrics set the scene in Catholic Ireland:

“The Angelus bell rings out

Just a shadow of doubt

Calls in vain to a city on its knees”

Although written in the 1970s, the song is set in the 1913 Dublin Lockout, which saw riots and street-fighting between strikers and the police. At that time the Angelus would have just been a physical institution, the Christian Catholic equivalent of the Islamic call to prayer, but from the 1950s till the present day the Angelus has become an “Irish audial and televisual institution”, that

“consists of the ringing of a bell for Angelus for one minute and a short film about one minute long. It is broadcast 7 days a week on RTÉ One immediately prior to the Six One News. On radio they are broadcast at 12:00 and 18:00 every day.”

Although there are periodic calls for its removal by secularists and atheists, it is quite a popular and (generally) inoffensive institution, supported both by the Anglican Church of Ireland and by those who simply believe an opportunity for a short period of spiritual reflection during the day is valuable. The overtly religious dimension of it has declined, but as the song suggests, the national piety - and the sense of strict morality that went with it - was never entirely what it seemed, especially when it came to advancing self-interest:

“well they know the Ten Commandments by heart

but they never get caught

cos they’re too smart

words are only sacred if they’re true”

The refrain of “they always land on their feet”, however, puts me in mind of a rather more revolutionary - if perhaps equally cynical - analogy:

“I’m reminded of the scene in Jorge Semprún’s memoirs, Quel beau dimanche. After his family was expelled from Spain, he, at the age of twenty, was swept into the French Resistance and subsequently arrested as a communist. Sent to Buchenwald, he was taken under the wing of an old German communist - which doubtless explains his survival. At one point Semprún asks the older man to explain “dialectics” to him. And the answer comes back: ‘C’est l’art et la manière de toujours retomber sur ses pattes, mon vieux” - the art and the technique of always landing on your feet.”

Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century, p. 88

“They’ve got no future, and the past is just for show” seems more appropriate for 1978 than 1913 - when the stale nationalism of the Irish republic met limited economic aspirations. It also chimes with the campaigning phrase of President Higgins of instituting a “real republic”, in that the proclamations of that era have not been fully realised. But in particular there is the influence on the album of the social history of Strumpet City, a popular novel in the 1970s, as Phil Chevron described recently:

“I loved Strumpet City because it was the first novel that manifested, in an interesting way, the people who were involved in the 1913 lockout and how people responded to the Rising.

The Jim Larkin statue was probably a catalyst. It was unveiled in ’77 I think. It was the first ‘real’ person we had in that street. O’Connell and Parnell were all in the ‘pre-history’. The Jim Larkin statue chimed with Strumpet history.”

Although Larkin is now nearly as distant from the present day as Parnell was from the 1970s, and cynically one could say statues tend to remain firmly on their feet (unless they’re blown up, like Admiral Nelson). The line about a city on its knees may be a reference to the inscription on the statue, taken from one of Larkin’s speeches as a trade unionist - “the great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!”

“they never lose any sleep

they never walk too fast or run too slow”

—sax solo!—

“the patriot’s farewell kiss can turn adversity to bliss

while the poet sings the catch-cries of the ?clown?”

The best line of the song, from a lyrical standpoint, I think is the following expression, summing up the political cynicism in a simple rhyming wordplay:

“the revolution in the air is somewhat the worse for wear”

then delving deeper into the seam of disappointment and unfinished modernity:

“the secret’s out but no-one really cares

take a look at this picture and tell me what you see

the monochrome set up could never be a kodachrome dream

but the tricolour TV set is on the blink”

as Chevron explains about the influence of the latter:

“You have to understand that we were the first generation in the country to have TV introduced to us in our lifetime. We were not born with TV. Unlike say American kids. So, we had this strange phenomenon of being introduced to TV. Inevitably it had a hold on the imagination.

At the time, The Late Late Show acted as a sort of ‘secular pulpit’. It genuinely opened up the doors for people to talk about things at the breakfast table that weren’t being talked abut. Suddenly, the words ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’ and even ‘atheist’ were becoming topical because of TV.

But TV also reduced people. While it was freeing people, it was reducing people to commodities and units of commerce.”

Incidentally the big event of the Irish television season happened last night - The Late Late Toy Show, in which the jocular host dons a naff Christmas jumper and entices children to perform demonstrations of the latest potential purchases. It’s obviously aimed at a younger audience, and forms part of everybody’s childhood memories, but it’s also a focus for escapism and cheap humour for a disillusioned adult population.

In its final verse the song turns from television to film, quoting Marlon Brando’s famous line from On The Waterfront - and I reckon also referencing, perhaps in a half-remembered fashion, another of the main characters; the Father, based on the real-life Jesuit, who at a dramatic point (and having refused before) shouts at the bartender “get me a beer!”:

“the priest in the corner has turned to drink

he says I might have been someone,

heaven knows, I could have been a contender”

In the end, though, it’s all summed up by the one line describing both Ireland’s economic depression and the hollowness of its historical legacies:

“they’ve got no future and the past is just for show”

Punk rock, Irish 1970s style.

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“…I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. It is only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build out best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.”

- from a rather good novel I just finished reading, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (more on which anon, probably)

“…I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. It is only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build out best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.”

- from a rather good novel I just finished reading, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (more on which anon, probably)

(Source: printedinternet)

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The Radiators from Space - ‘Head for the Sun’ from Sound City Beat (2012) - originally by The Movement (1968)

[buy here]

This is the opening track of the Radiators’ new album of covers from Irish ‘beat’ groups, between 1964 and 1971. It’s a really good record, that combines the band’s own versatility and musical strengths with a wide variety of styles from their formative era (being a late-70s punk and post-punk band). Indeed, as singer and guitarist Phil Chevron remarks in the liner notes which give a track-by-track guide to the history, of those bands “who got to cut whole albums and not just a smattering of singles…. [t]heir eclectic impulses are often striking, as they used the album format to commit as much of their musical DNA as possible to vinyl.” Yet in turn the Radiators add their own interpretations of what the music should sound like, often drawing on their, later, punk influences in order to bring out the protean character of the music, or simply to have fun - as in the case of this song: “For no better reason than it seemed to work and that we were big fans of da bruddas back in our garage days, our version channels The Ramones in surfin’ mode…” (which is slightly bizarre in the damp Irish context, as I’ve mentioned before in relation to the Undertones’ similar ‘Here Comes The Summer’, but that’s the genius of cultural influences… they’re not limited to the one situation).

So Sound City Beat isn’t an exactly faithful transcription of past music, and all the better for it (it also means you can dig out the originals on YouTube - full list here - and expect them to be somewhat different). Neither is it a rendering of certain ‘classics’ into a single recognisable style - I can imagine the band had a lot of fun working with the various styles on show here, and at its best it echoes the diversity of their own great eclectic masterpiece, Ghostown. The only song I did know before (admittedly my pre-1970s, or non-punk, musical knowledge is pretty terrible) is one of the best, the inestimable ‘Gloria’. Which I first encountered through the Patti Smith version on Horses, but was originally written by Van Morrison in the band Them, in 1965. I like to think of this as rediscovering an Irish treasure - after having it exported back to you in Americanised form - but the truth is it was a UK hit and a global song, so it’s kinda churlish to be too possessive of something just because the author was from Belfast. There’s something simple and effective but inherently transformative, or adaptable, about the song, that seems to suit its role in both proto-punk and Irish rock:

“it was, as it happens, the first song ever played by the Radiators. Taking our cue from Morrison’s own performances - at the Maritime Hotel, he is said to have stretched the song to fifteen minutes or more on occasion - we found it useful for extended arrangements, especially in venues outside Dublin where the standard thirty minute sets favoured by punk bands would have been profoundly frowned upon.”

It’s not all obscurities otherwise, though, at least in terms of authorship - there’s an early Rory Gallagher track from his Taste days, an early Thin Lizzy, and a (literally) lost Horslips debut single. But the real fun is in the miniature Nuggets-like quality of the rest of the album, from excellent band names (Eire Apparent) and predictable song titles (“Yes, I Need Someone”), and sounds expanding to folk and psychedelia, to some thrilling pop hooks. Throughout it’s possible to recognise large elements of the Radiators’ own sound, but depending on the vocals and the style of the cover, it can be sometimes hard to remember that it is all just the one band playing the songs. Or sometimes, bizarrely, to remember that this is music that existed in its own time and place and isn’t totally the reimaginings of contemporary punks - not to deny the adherence in spirit to and difference of the styles used, but hearing this music mostly as a blank slate, the Radiators definitely place their own modern (or at least post-‘77, which is not very new after all) stamp on it.

For example, the atypical “stone solid Mod groove” of showband The Blue Aces (a central theme of the album’s historical revisionism is the distinction between the popular history of 60s, “in which the conventional wisdom habitually depicts the secular pulpit of Gay Byrne’s television show set against a soundtrack of Showband Scene mania”, and the underground of Beat Clubs - although one of my parents describes it as more of a straightforward rural-urban divide between the showbands and the tennis pavilions) is given a take that “acknowledges its kinship with the spirit of the punk bands of a decade later”; but which sounds to me very much like Rancid’s early 90s album Let’s Go. Of course, some bands are always arch-revivalists, but it’s fascinating to hear everything connected on a long line and collapsed together into one asynchronous celebration of a past. To quote an American band (if only because I can’t think of similar lyrics from an Irish one), Drink deep, it’s just a taste, and it might not come this way again…

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2012 60s 70s NO PAST irish punk radiators HFN

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“ This means that common sense is quite wrong in thinking that the past is fixed, immutable, invariable, as against the everchanging flux of the present. On the contrary, at least within our own consciousness, the past is malleable and flexible, constantly changing as our recollection reinterprets and re-explains what has happened. Thus we have as many lives as we have points of views. We keep reinterpreting our biography very much as the Stalinists kept rewriting the Soviet Encyclopedia, calling forth some events into decisive importance as others were banished to ignominious obliivion.

—

Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective - ‘Digression: Alternation and Biography’

At first, when I read this, I thought ‘well there goes my chosen discipline’, but historians already incorporate revision and reinterpretation into their work, and largely distrust ‘remembrance’ and the use of the past for direct ends in the present. It fits more with my distrust of the history of the self, the interrogation of one’s own past: for one cannot be one’s own historian. Biography is fine, if a little narrow; auto-biography is merely a specialised, if interesting, form of fiction.

NO PAST history fiction berger sociology

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