The Golden Age of PuNk and nEw wAvE - reimagined by me

Here’s some - what used to be called in the good old days of vinyl - 'Sleeve Notes'.

Ahhhh. Remember? No, you might not have even been born. But some of us do.

AI's idea of a Mohican....but the red and black colouring is authentic

At sixteen years old in 1977 I’d been, like most kids of that time, taken by the sheer brazenness of the Sex Pistols. In that now famous Bill Grundy BBC TV interview in late 1976, the live on-air swearing (albeit in response to Bill Grundy openly antagonising the band members and prejudicially looking down upon them as complete degenerates (in much the same way as many of my parents’ generation did) they suddenly captured the hidden mood of the young generation. Social change and unrest was being triggered by the youth of the day. The pistols were but the catalyst for the fed-up, fucked-off youth.

For those of us outside of London, the ‘Pistols’ TV appearance was the spark which ignited the change

.

Maybe - and this is just a personal thought - that the unrest of youth around this time was a long time in coming. Most of them, between the ages of 16 and 25, had parents who’d been through a war; if not WW2, then Korea, experiencing horror, tragedy and loss. Those feelings, however suppressed, surely couldn’t have escaped their children’s attention even if things were very strict before Rock’n’Roll hit the streets of Britain, particularly in London which experienced so much destruction. A new fast and angry form of music was the vehicle of their expression. It was a social backlash.

AI does quite well with this... but AI 'Strummer' should have had a Tele, not a Strat!

The British youth were fed up with older people - and that included those in the recording

‘establishment’ of the mid 70’s - telling them what they couldn’t do, couldn’t say, couldn’t think, where they couldn’t go etc. I knew this because I felt the same and so did my mates. Since the advent of Rock’n’Roll, music had been the social-definer of the youth and there was a certain energetic and angry section of the youth that was fed up with boring and safe sounds coming over the airwaves in the late 70’s. The ‘Hippies’ were ‘wankers’. Peace and Love - fuck that! They were angry and wanted to be heard. Punks eschewed the major labels and started recording on their own, without much experience, just enough to be able to catch the energy of performance.

Gone were the six-minute prog singles of the 70’s, replaced by singles which were barely two

minutes in length. Indie labels began to spring up from everywhere, but it was short-lived. When finally fully awake to the new music, the major labels being what they were, cashed-in on it while the going was good. There were some raw gems, some of which more than 40 years later, I have recorded in the album "Taking A Step Back, Vol 1"(link below). But there was also a lot of substandard material performed by ‘fifteen minutes of fame-ers’ which, thankfully didn’t stand the test of time.

I think Dog's Trith is a great name for a band.....

Regardless, the change brought about by that fateful TV interview did allow a new breed of skillful writers and musicians to come to the fore with energetic, short, punchy, loud songs which were to deliver messages as important back then as they are now - social awareness, racial equality, the broken system, or just anger at being put down by old farts. It was the generation, as The Jam would proclaim in their first single, "In The City", under the age of twenty-five who would be listened to.

Apart from that initial shock from the Sex Pistols, it took me some time to get into the then new British wave of Punk and New Wave as I was then heavily into an eclectic mix of American music between ’77 and ’81; Tom Petty, The Eagles, Steely Dan, Boston, Bob Scaggs, The Doobie Brothers…..I could go on. Queen, for me, was a British exception, them and the Beatles of course. But then, everyone loved the Beatles even if they said they hated them. Oh, and the only other British band that stopped me in my tracks in ’78; Dire Straits with ‘Sultans of Swing’ - original and brilliant but decidedly non-Punk. In fact, the Punk phenomenon was all but over before I started to fully embrace the energy it was putting out.

Now that I’m an old fart myself, I’m happy that I can still, with fondness, appreciate the musical energy of those pre-Thatcherite days of the job-for-life, the dole, full student grants, the Winter of Discontent and the Old Imperial Establishment under fire from the kids who were making their own hope. I’m happy that I can also still enjoy playing this music.

Is this Lydon?

Later, perhaps in the mid-90’s, when I was already a married man with a son, I couldn’t believe how different the 90’s white collar, mortgage-seeking youth appeared to be compared with my age group. Was this effect really down to the 'swing to the right' following the Winter of Discontent and a Tory victory under Maggie Thatcher? Was this how the discontent of the late 70’s backfired on the nation, turning the young kids who ten years later would become subdued, share-buying estate agents, bank tellers, service industry functionaries and people who listened to bland pop bands? Fight, pizzazz, anger at the system, social justice - they all seemed to have disappeared and been replaced with acceptance of the ‘Gordon Gecko’ ethic.

Cash (not Johnny) was king and Punk had died. Anger is an energy, as John Lydon once sang. And the raw energy expounded by Punk, well, it seemed it had dispersed in the winds of time. Until the Yanks revised it in the 90’s with bands like Green Day and Black Flag - a kind of ‘British Invasion’ in reverse. It lives on where Live Music can be found in sweaty, underground havens, temples to those days of hope when us kids were convinced we had the answer.

Album cover front

So it’s with fondness - and while I still had some of that energy left in my old bones - that I decided to record some short, punchy Punk and New Wave classics some of which on first hearing stopped me in my tracks and others which I didn’t appreciate until much later, after YouTube came on the scene. Most are faithful to the original key and tempo, although some are a bit ‘left-field’; just how it worked out in the studio. The Golden Age of Punk and New Wave - reimagined by me. They were recorded from March to July 2023.

You can check out one-minute segments of these tracks on my site link https://www.jimmythedog.com/taking-a-step-back-vol-1