Guilty Pleasures (Part 6)

GUILTY PLEASURES (Part 6)

I was once upon a time a great admirer of the Sex Pistols and in particular John Rotten. I say 'once' but I should declare that still to this day I fully appreciate them and all that they did. To think that John was only 19 at the time of the Pistols but how brightly he shone then. How fierce his intelligence was and how righteous his anger. Viewing old clips of him now on YouTube it's quite astounding how incandescent he was, articulating what I and many, many others were thinking and feeling.

"We ain't got no heroes." he would say "They're all useless." And oh, how I identified with that. A slight problem being, however, that in the process John became a sort of anti-hero hero of mine and very slavishly would I soak up his pearls of wisdom. Over a Pink Floyd t-shirt he had scrawled 'I hate' and I thought that if Johnny hated Pink Floyd then they must be bad so I chose to agree with him and chose to hate them too - without ever actually listening to them.

It was only a couple of years later at a friend's house whilst trying our utmost to exit planet dust via his sensimilla that my friend put on the Wish You Were Here album and I realised how brilliant Pink Floyd actually were.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.

And wouldn't you know, it turned out that Johnny never really hated them himself and that he even liked Hawkwind and Alvin Stardust...

Which brings me to Think Floyd, regarded by many as being the UK's finest tribute to Pink Floyd. They're playing at the Exmouth Pavilion and I may just go and see them. As a teenage Anarcho Punk Rocker such a thing would have been unthinkable, particularly as tickets are £17.50 but you know, this is 2015. In answer to Marc Bolan's old question, I think I know what happened to the teenage dream. I've heard the chimes at midnight. I know for whom the bell tolls. But the world keeps on turning. And the sun also rises.

I still see light at the end of the tunnel.

Life is good.