Revisionism: Pop Will Eat Itself

I'm reading this book, 'Good Night and Good Riddance', about the influence John Peel and his radio shows had on music and cultural life for over 35 years.  It's a great book that I'd thoroughly recommend and, despite the book's subtitle, it's no hagiography, and casts a critical eye at times, even though, on balance (and I'm up to 1979), it pretty much confirms what fans, including myself, thought of him and his maverick musical taste.

This post, however, is not a book review - that'll appear on goodreads after I finish it - it's about a question that gets raised in the book when the story reaches the mid-1970s.  

[Oh, and in case the title of this post misled anyone, this is not going to be about the Midlands grebo band, affectionately referred to as PWEI aka Pop Will Eat Itself: this is not the article you are looking for.]

My question - and it's not posed as a question in the book - concerns the state of rock music around 1975 and the impact of what was just emerging during 1976, namely punk, and is simply: is there good music, that can be appreciated still today, from before 1976?

[Historical Scene Setting: I was at university in Leeds from 1976 to 1979 and was an avid John Peel listener.  Leeds University student's union had a long history of booking good bands - witness 'Live at Leeds' by John Martyn and also a similarly titled album by The Who, both recorded in the Leeds University refectory, and several entertainment staff at Leeds have gone on to bigger things as a result. The bands that played there between 1976 and 1979 were a snapshot of the transitional state of music at the time.]

Looking back on the period when punk emerged it's easy to see that rock music was in danger of disappearing up its own, self-indulgent, pompous, over-inflated, orifice. Some people, and John Peel was among them, were becoming dissatisfied with the behaviour and direction of bands at the time. Where once the term progressive, when preceding the word rock, was a positive term and meant bands were constantly evolving, trying to push boundaries and try new things, it had become synonymous with increasingly laborious concept albums and attempts to, if not become classical musicians, then to fuse classical music styles into rock, sometimes with the result that there was no rock. In the process bands became ever more aloof, distant from their fans and started to play venues so large, that, short of taking a telescope, you'd barely be able to see the band on stage.

So that's where we find ourselves - at a time when rock was the musical equivalent of Mr. Creosote ("Just one more waffer thin mint") - and the question is not whether punk was a force for good or not (I think it was, though sadly, sometimes the baby was a casualty along with the bath water) but how to view music before and after punk, 40 years hence? [Editors note: Isn't that a second question?]

People who were teenagers when punk broke are often totally dismissive of all the music that came before, perhaps in the same way that people often get stuck liking only the music they grew up with, their musical tastes frozen at the point they settled down, got married, got a mortgage and had kids.

But is it reasonable to dismiss all the music that came before? Having been a teenager through the first flowering of prog rock and also during the emergence of punk, I have a different perspective.  Similarly, it emerged when punk mutated into new wave and post-punk that many of the prime movers in the punk revolution were fans of selected sixties and seventies psychedelic and progressive rock bands. Amongst band members of the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Slits, The Fall, Joy Division and more besides, you'll find admirers of Hawkwind, Peter Hamill / Van Der Graaf Generator, Can, Neu!, Syd Barrett (and indeed Syd-era Pink Floyd), Captain Beefheart, Gong, The Doors and Love, to name but a few.  Most recently I watched a video of Steve Jones, of Sex Pistols fame, on his LA radio show (Steve Jones in LA, WTF???), in conversation with Todd Rundgren, expressing how much he liked Sparks!

As you'll see if you listen to the early albums of punk and new wave stalwarts and follow their careers through, not only did they admire these bands, they started to develop styles which increasingly showed the influences of those bands. 

So, when I look back on the music I liked back in the early 1970s, I view it through a distorted lens.  There is stuff I liked back then that I find un-listenable today:  take Camel as an example - I have tried to listen to their albums from back then - 'Mirage', 'Music Inspired by The Snow Goose' and 'Moonmadness' etc - and I find nearly all of the music dull and turgid and without any emotional connection, other, perhaps, than nostalgia. It's a shame, as I will always have a soft spot for Camel because they were the first band I saw live (at Reading Town Hall), but at the time of writing only 'Supertwister' from 'Mirage' still hits the spot.  

In contrast there are pre-punk albums I have only latterly heard and love, like White Noise's 'An Electric Storm' and '666' by Aphrodite's Child, for example, which passed me by at the time.  (I was aware of both those albums, they were just way off my radar and out of my limited pocket money budget, but that's a wholly different blog for another day.)

So back to the music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and when I say back to that music, I'm really talking about albums, because a lot of the music I liked then (and now) didn't grace the top 50. In fact, back then, there was a distinct divide between bands who had chart hits and those that did not. Rock music fans looked down their noses at chart singles, with the odd exception when bands like Hawkwind or Jethro Tull had unexpected chart hits.

Every now and then a new band or tune I hear reminds me of something from the early 1970s and I dig out the album from my collection and listen again, in many cases finding something new I'd not noticed before.  The songs I tend to go back to most often are those whose lyrics resonate or illuminate the times I'm living through.
  

So, what albums do I most often go back to from that era? Too numerous to list here and, much as I love lists, not always great fun to read, so, a flavour then.. Well, for starters, there's obviously the four essential Todd Rundgren albums from 'Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren' through to the peyote-drenched 'Todd' and, if you know me, you'd be hard-pressed not to know that, but what else?

Stevie Wonder's sublime trilogy from 'Talking Book' through to 'Fullfillingness First Finale'; 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath', Black Sabbath; most John Martyn; Caravan; most Can; the first three Neu albums (though many say that 'Hero' from '75' was one of the first punk songs); a shed load of krautrock from Amon Duul II to Faust via Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, The Cosmic Jokers and too many others to mention; Captain Beefheart; Kraftwerk; David Bowie; Frank Zappa; Hawkwind; Pink Floyd (up to 'The Wall' on a good day, tho most days I find much of 'The Wall' a step too far); 'Still Life', Van Der Graaf Generator; Neil Young; Soft Machine up to 'Third'; Gong; and, perhaps rather too obsessively to be healthy, Syd Barrett. And there are many more I've forgotten to mention...

Today and, hopefully, until the clock comes down the stairs, I still seek out new bands and new music.  One thing I learned from John Peel is to always be open to new sounds:  the idea that the best is still to come. As much as possible I don't do nostalgia, at least not for the sake of it, preferring the present and future. As new wave supplanted punk, John Peel did come to terms with the past, interspersing the new with selected Beefheart, krautrock and favourite singer-songwriters like Kevin Ayers (forgot to mention him above).

My answer to the question, then, is that, yes, it is possible to reconcile and enjoy music from before punk, from punk's brief reign, and also what has followed. I don't consider 'prog rock' to be anathema to punk, though equally I don't like everything labelled 'prog rock': in fact much of what goes under the banner of prog today, especially prog metal, leaves me colder than the grave. But that's me I guess, cantankerous to the last breath.