Human Punk

John King

Description

For fifteen-year-old Joe Martin, growing up on the outskirts of West London, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, busy pubs, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cutthroat Teddy Boys and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet—until he is attacked by a gang of youths and thrown into the Grand Union Canal with his best friend Smiles.

Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian Express after three years away, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with tragedy. Fast forward to 2000, and life is sweet once more. Joe is earning a living selling records and fight tickets, playing his favourite 45s as a punk DJ, but when a face from the past steps out of the mist he is forced to relive that night in 1977 and deal with the fallout.

Human Punk is the story of punk, a story of friendship, a story of common bonds and a shared culture—sticking the boot in, sticking together.

Sujets

• Friendship
• Politics
• Blue Collar
• Festival Cinémabrut
• Violence
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629631905
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Human Punk
‘In its ambition and exuberance, Human Punk is a league ahead of much contemporary English fiction.’
New Statesman
‘Evokes the punk era superbly.’
Independent On Sunday
‘The long sentences and paragraphs build up cumulatively, with the sequences describing an end-of-term punch-up and the final canal visit just two virtuoso examples. These passages come close to matching the coiled energy of Hubert Selby’s prose, one of King’s keynote influences…. In the resolution of the novel’s central, devastating act, there is an almost Shakespearean sense of a brief restoration of balance after the necessary bloodletting.’
Gareth Evans, The Independent
‘King’s eye for detail is as sharp as his characters’ tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and fucked up the next. Like real people, then.’
The Face
‘Unique and brutal fiction. King is a master of idiom and street slang. He appears with a voice that appears to be the true expression of disaffected white British youth.’
The Times
‘A novel dedicated to good literature lovers. Rough, violent, scary, visionary, true, political, raw, aggressive, totally moving, this novel has got the anger of the Sex Pistols, the energy of the Clash and the pumping lines of the best dub courtesy of King Tubby.’
Pop Culture Detox
‘King’s most accomplished and compelling story to date.’
Esquire
‘An ode to satellite towns that Paul Weller will love.’
Q Magazine
‘John King’s achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely literature.’
Charles Shaar Murray

Human Punk
John King
© John King 2000
First published by Jonathan Cape, a division of The Random House Group Ltd
"Two Sevens Clash" © John King 2015
This edition© 2015 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
John King has asserted his right to be identified as the Author of the Work.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–115–8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900711
Cover design by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Two Sevens Clash
SATELLITE
Slough, England Summer 1977
Boots and Braces
Dodgems
Sound of the Westway
Kicking for Kicks
ASYLUM
Beijing, China Autumn 1988
DAYGLO
Slough, England Spring 2000
Sitting Pretty
Loud and Proud
Version
Against the Grain
For Amanda and Sam
The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming pools.
‘ England Your England’, George Orwell
I clambered over mounds and mounds of polystyrene snow, Then fell into a swimming pool, filled with Fairy Snow, And watched the world turn dayglo, you know, You know the world turned dayglo, you know.
‘ The Day The World Turned Dayglo’, X-Ray Spex
TWO SEVENS CLASH
The memory is razor sharp. I was standing by the bar at a Friday-night dance in the West London satellite town of Slough, aged sixteen, sipping at a can of bitter-tasting lager. This was no Travolta-like disco, nor was it an up-market club full of coke-snorting celebrities, just a scruffy British affair flavoured with beer, perfume and some Jam-style Doctor Martens leather ‘blended in by the weather’. The records played by the DJ saw chart hits backed up by some rock and plastic soul, and then out of nowhere came ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ by the Ramones. It singed the air, changed the atmosphere in seconds, my skin tingling same as it did when I heard ‘Liquidator’ by Harry J & The All Starts at my first football match. Life had changed.
In those popular chart songs, with their music-hall delivery and vaudeville humour and singalong football-terrace choruses, lay the roots of our version of punk. Slade, Sweet and Cockney Rebel … T. Rex, Mott The Hoople, Roxy Music … Alvin Stardust, Gary Glitter, Wizard … Punk was the next step on from what is now labelled ‘glam’ via Dr Feelgood, those speeding rhythm-n-blues merchants from Canvey Island to the east of London. Older kids knew about Detroit’s Stooges and the New York Dolls, but not us. Our music was the sound of the English suburbs.
Other records had already made their mark, the biggest influence being David Bowie and a series of LPs that include Aladdin Sane , Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs . Bowie sang in an English accent, didn’t try to mimic the American greats, which was unusual at the time. Punk would do the same. The Rolling Stones and the Who were going strong, as were Elton John and Rod Stewart. There was plenty of rock ’n’ roll about and Elvis Presley still ruled the working man’s clubs. The girls wore pencil skirts and stockings and danced to Motown and Hot Chocolate. The lads brooded at the bar in cap-sleeve T-shirts and DMs, doing their best to look tough. We were boot boys. Hated hippies and soulboys. Disco was the enemy. The year was 1977.
The media had a different take on punk. For them it meant the fashionable and expensive King’s Road in Chelsea, a wealthy area of Central London, the pose of entrepreneurs Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, a collection of art-school students and older hippy chancers. The clothes these self-promoters pushed belonged on a catwalk in Milan. For us, it was a load of bollocks. We hated that side of things with a vengeance. Punk was supposed to be anti -fashion, that was part of the attraction, and so a split was there from the start.
What really mattered was the music and without four proper herberts in Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook punk might never have existed. The Pistols were the guvnors, seemed to come out of Slade and Sweet, though in reality it was more like the Stooges. Everything changed when the Sex Pistols exploded onto vinyl. Four massive singles ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Holidays In The Sun’ set a standard that has never been bettered. Steve Jones’s guitar is definitive. The B-sides were also excellent. Their one and only album Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols was perfect. Then suddenly they were gone, ruined by the publicity-seeking of McLaren.
The Clash were the other big band. They were all about their albums and live shows, brilliant 45s such as ‘White Riot’, ‘Complete Control’ and ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’ never seriously damaging the charts. They lasted into the 1980s and produced five LPs with their normal line-up one of those a double, another a magnificent triple. Sixteen slabs of 12-inch vinyl. The Clash stuck together, overflowed with ideas, changed and mutated, could be seen on tour again and again. Each show was a spectacle. I saw them three times in a week at the Lyceum, two nights running at the Electric Ballroom. Life didn’t get much better. Joe Strummer delivered the lyrics and vocals while another Jones guitarist Mick pushed the sound in different directions. Reggae and dub were two Clash loves, the popularity of the music generally clear in the bass of so many punk bands. And then there was X-Ray Spex. Like the Pistols, they released a single LP, but Germfree Adolescents was also perfect.
The vocals of their lead singer Poly Styrene freeze the skin, cut across a room the same as those Ramones guitars. Poly was a punk rocker, Sheena in the flesh. When she talked about diamond dogs in ‘The Day The World Turned Dayglo’ the Bowie connection was fixed. Swimming pools and dirty canals the emotions that filled our homes, schools, churches, workplaces was tapped. Bowie’s Major Tom roamed the streets of Slough under another name. And it is here that Human Punk is based. Some see Slough as grim and grey, a flatland of petrol-soaked aggravation, but Joe Martin knows it is exciting and alive and thick with an inner colour. It is the people who are important.
Slough could be a rough old place in the 1970s. It still can be. The town has been insulted and dismissed by snobs of all persuasions. It has never been fashionable and will never be trendy, and while it is far from alone, its name has become synonymous with the notion of a new sort of concrete jungle. But there is an honesty about the place. It is direct and diverse, part of the surrounding area. There are fields and woods on the margins, big homes and housing estates. A series of arteries run through it, goods moved by rail and road, but there is also an arm of the Grand Union Canal overgrown and dirty and full of rubbish in 1977, symbolic of the decay of post-war Britain, raging industrial strife and an escalating clash between labour and the bosses, a conflict that would see the emergence of Margaret Thatcher. Punk is a child of the seventies.
Four miles away is Uxbridge, where the spraw