One Chord Wonders

Dave Laing

Description

Originally published in 1985, One Chord Wonders was the first full-length study of the glory years of British punk rock. The book argues that one of punk’s most significant political achievements was to expose the operations of power in the British entertainment industries as they were thrown into confusion by the sound and the fury of musicians and fans.

Through a detailed examination of the conditions under which punk emerged and then declined, Dave Laing develops a view of the music as both complex and contradictory. Special attention is paid to the relationship between punk and the music industry of the late 1970s, in particular the political economy of the independent record companies through which much of punk was distributed. The rise of punk is also linked to the febrile political atmosphere of Britain in the mid-1970s.

Using examples from a wide range of bands, individual chapters use the techniques of semiology to consider the radical approach to naming in punk (from Johnny Rotten to Poly Styrene), the instrumental and vocal sound of the music, and its visual images. Another section analyses the influence of British punk in Europe prior to the music’s division into “real punk” and “post-punk” genres.

The concluding chapter critically examines various theoretical explanations of the punk phenomenon, including the class origins of its protagonists and the influential view that punk represented the latest in a line of British youth “subcultures.” There is also a chronology of the punk era, plus discographies and a bibliography.

Sujets

• Music industry
• Academia
• Political economy
• Semiotics
• Analysis
• Roland Barthes

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629630571
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock
© Dave Laing
This edition © 2015 by PM Press
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright owners of illustrations used in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, they should contact the author and publisher
ISBN: 978-1-62963-033-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908071
Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com
Layout: Jonathan Rowland
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan www.thomsonshore.com
Contents Foreword by TV Smith Preface Acknowledgements Introduction One Formation Two Naming Three Listening Four Looking Picture Section Five Framing Six After Seven Conclusions Eight Chronology Appendix 1 Song Titles Appendix 2 Punk Singles in Top 30 Charts Appendix 3 Select Discography Bibliography Notes Index
Foreword
W hat just happened? That’s what I was thinking when my band the Adverts broke up at the end of 1979 after two years of being in the forefront of the UK punk scene. What was punk anyway? I had been writing songs since I was at school, I’d had various bands that went nowhere, and then suddenly it all changed. I wasn’t just in a band anymore I was in a punk band, part of a movement that I was helping create even as I was simultaneously swept up in it. People were suddenly interested in what my band was doing, even though we were just beginners and as musicians strictly amateur. Now and this had been inconceivable just a year earlier the question of how well or badly we could play didn’t matter anymore, apart from to a few old-school critics who were clinging desperately to the sinking ship of pre-1977 rock. For the rest of us, the so-called professional musicians had nothing we wanted, nothing we could relate to. The doors had opened for people with ideas; the renegades and mavericks who took an alternative view of the way bands should look and sound, and what their songs could be about. Lack of conventional musical talent was a spur to try harder, not a handicap. In January 1977, within months of forming the Adverts, I found myself on stage at the Roxy club in London in the company of kids on stage and off who were desperate for music made by people like themselves, ‘normal’ people talking about ‘normal’ lives not an untouchable and self-indulgent rock ’n’ roll elite living a life of absurd extravagance paid for out of their audience’s pockets. Many of those watching us that night went on to form bands themselves, no longer intimidated. After just a few gigs we were signed by Stiff Records and were able to put out a single, ‘One Chord Wonders’. By the summer of 1977 we were in the UK top twenty with ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ and appeared on mainstream television’s Top Of The Pops, previously the heavily defended territory of the old guard music business, the very people who a short time earlier had scorned punk rock and actively tried to stop its progress.
So, what happened? Why now? What led up to this? What had changed? And for a movement that still has powerful resonance nearly forty years later, why did it all fall apart so quickly? These are some of the questions Dave Laing addresses with impressive rigour and objectivity in this fascinating book, and in developing his argument tells us something about not just punk rock but also the social and political landscape that brought it about, as well as giving us a razor-sharp insight into music, and the music business, in general. There are many books that describe what happened during the punk rock era. A few even dare to ask questions about it. Here at last is one that provides some answers.
TV Smith
Preface to the PM Press Edition
O ne Chord Wonders was originally published in 1985 and after about a decade it was out of print and very difficult to find. Over recent years, I have had many requests from scholars and fans for copies and, if only for their sake, I’m pleased that PM Press have decided to bring out this new edition. I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a few misprints and expand the index. Otherwise, the book is unchanged.
Thinking about republication, I considered whether to add new material but soon realised that punk has taken so many new forms and new directions since the 1970s that it would be impossible to do justice to them in a few pages. In addition, there have been numerous chronicles and analyses of that later history of punk and its derivatives. I shan’t mention any here, but I will recommend a few studies that bear directly on the music and the era that One Chord Wonders attempts to illuminate.
First, Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols And Punk Rock (1991), which was published several years after my own book and also places the Sex Pistols at the centre of the scene. Unlike me, Jon was an active participant and so brought a more direct perspective to the evocation of British punk. Another participant was the singer, songwriter, guitarist and scholar Helen Reddington. Her The Lost Women Of Rock Music: Female Musicians Of The Punk Era (second edition, 2012) opens up a highly important topic that is only briefly touched on in One Chord Wonders. A third book, that goes into greater depth on another aspect, covered in chapter 6 , is Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (2005) by Simon Reynolds. I’ll be thrilled if my book finds its place alongside these, and other, excellent chronicles of punk.
Acknowledgements
Although nobody else should be held accountable for the ideas put forward in this book, I have benefited greatly from the ideas and arguments of a number of people in the process of writing it. They include Phil Hardy and Mike Flood Page, with whom I collaborated in the late 1970s; Martin Jacques who allowed me to develop my ideas in the pages of Marxism Today; Dave Harker and Richard Middleton who are critical and constructive editors; in discussions on general and specific points, Simon Frith, Gary Herman, Deborah Philips, Jenny Taylor, Penny Valentine and Richard Woodcock; and Sally Quinn for her encouragement and friendship.
Introduction
I n the mid-1980s, punk rock is in danger of being taken for granted. Like Elvis or the Beatles, the term is used in a way which assumes we know exactly what it was and what it meant. The music which in 1976–8 caused uproar and alarm among critics, politicians, media pundits and record company executives has now become one more convenient landmark in the conventional periodization of recent British musical and cultural history. We are in a ‘post-punk’ world, it seems.
One aim of this book is to question the assumptions upon which punk’s landmark status is based, to make it problematic and even unrecognizable. To do that means questioning the various identities that have been provided for punk rock both by close observers and participants and by critics and theorists. Punk was particularly well-served by contemporary observers, notably in the books by Caroline Coon, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, and Fred and Judy Vermorel, which are listed in the Bibliography. The more considered explanations are often less rewarding, though those of Dick Hebdige, Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau and Simon Frith are all of value.
In the present account, ‘punk rock’ is used in no special sense. Its meaning is that established through the consensus of users in the 1976–8 period, a consensus made up of the authors listed above together with musicians, journalists and other participants in published discourse. Chapter 5 deals directly with the range of nuances within this consensus, while elsewhere ‘punk rock’ refers to a complex of artefacts, events and institutions which flourished in the years 1976–8. The artefacts include the many hundreds of recordings and many dozens of ‘fanzines’ and other published writings, plus the items of visual style that make up the material archive of punk rock. The events of punk were both the live performances of the era and certain other key incidents, such as the notorious television interview involving Bill Grundy and the Sex Pistols and the series of concert cancellations and acts of censorship that occurred in the early months of 1977. The institutional framework of punk rock involved both the new organizations thrown up by the music (record labels, clubs and shops) and the manner in which established parts of the music industry (record companies, broadcasting stations, music press) tried to incorporate or exclude punk.
The context in which these elements emerged through an interaction of various forces (economic, aesthetic and ideological) is described in Chapter 1 . That chapter’s title, ‘Formation’, has a double sense. It means both a process the manner in which a new music emerged by the mingling of elements old and new and a shape: the structure of the punk rock field at its most dynamic moment, in 1977. Chapter 6 follows on by chronicling both the wider influence of British punk and also what happened to its fragments after its collapse in 1977–8, a collapse the causes of which are considered at the end of Chapter 1 .
Together, these two chapters offer a sketch of punk rock’s history, its rise and fall, while Chapter 8 provides a chronological outline. The sketch does not pretend to be a full historical account, something which is acutely needed. Such an account might deal in depth with the considerable range of local punk rock activity which grew up throughout Britain, providing an amount of musical productivity in many towns which h