Cranked Up Really High - Stewart Home

CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH –
STEWART HOME

The advantage in re-reading Stewart Home's Cranked Up Really High almost 25 years after it first being published is that all the songs that he writes about are now available on YouTube. Whereas before, when Home wrote for example about a song entitled King Of Punk by former yippie David Peel and declared it to be one of the greatest New York punk songs of the seventies, you just had to take his word for it – or take his words with a pinch of salt. Now, however, at a click you can give it a listen and decide for yourself whether Home is correct, and on this occasion I'm happy to report that he's right and it is indeed a very good song.

He does, however, sometimes get it wrong especially when he's talking about things other than specific songs. In his postscript, for example, he declares that Cranked Up Really High is the best theoretical account of the punk rock phenomenon to date and the only work on punk rock that is worth reading. Well, it's not a bad book at all but then so too is Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus which makes for a bit of a problem because Home seems to have written his book essentially as a riposte to Marcus, particularly regarding Marcus's linking of punk and the Sex Pistols with Situationism.

Rather than linking the Pistols to the Situationists or even to the Velvet Underground, Home makes instead a very good case of linking them more to the 1970s London hippy Underground/Notting Hill scene clustered around such bands as the Deviants, the Pink Fairies, the Edgar Broughton Band, and Hawkwind. Viv Albertine of The Slits made the same connection in her memoir Clothes Music Boys when she described the Sex Pistols on her first encounter with them as being 'loud and raucous but not bad musicians. I'd seen bands that had this anarchic quality before: the Pink Fairies, the Pretty Things, the Edgar Broughton Band...'

Before he joined the Pistols wasn't Johnny Rotten once an old Hawkwind fan himself? Didn't Lemmy even once try and teach Sid Vicious how to play bass? And then there were the record labels. Stiff Records famously released New Rose by The Damned but at the same time they also released Between The Lines by the Pink Faries. Chiswick Records released singles by punk bands such as Radio Stars and Radiators From Space but they also released the débuts from Motorhead and the 101'ers. So yes, Home’s argument is a convincing one.

Cranked Up Really High is essentially a discourse on genres within the punk rock realm with Home plotting a path between various forms of the medium. From the Fugs and the MC5 in America to the Notting Hill scene in London, to the Pistols and '77 punk to American punk to British Oi! To white power rock of the Skrewdriver kind to Riot Grrrl to Vegan Reich. A lot of it is waffle, of course, and comes across at times as being merely a way for Home to wax lyrical about some of his favourite records. Not that this is a bad thing, however, because the strength of the book lies in the way that bands not normally discussed or even ever mentioned are written about: John The Postman, the Depressions, early Adam And The Antz, Crisis, Condemned 84, Close Shave, and even somewhat controversially, Skrewdriver, to name but a few.

Along the way many valid points are made such as when Home says that punk began as music and punks themselves began as music fans and performers, which is kind of obvious but something that's often overlooked. There's a few clangers in there as well though the amusing thing is that it's unclear if they're intentional or not. For example, at one point he writes 'some readers may feel that I come across as suspiciously anti-Bergsonian, holding to the position that time is not real, that all events are merely the unfolding of a reality already existent in the world'. He's making a joke here, right?

At other times straight out of the blue he lurches into Richard Allen territory which comes at odds with the general tenor of the book, for example when he mentions a fight at a Crisis gig and writes 'the chick booted the bastard in the bollocks, severely crippling the cunt'. Is this Home in his 'demolish serious culture' mode with him intentionally trying to sabotage the 'seriousness' of his discourse, or is it just the auto mode that he falls into as soon as he begins writing about violence? Who knows?

For all this, Cranked Up Really High is a good book though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's the only work on punk rock that is worth reading. That honour, in my opinion, still belongs to England's Dreaming by Jon Savage though of course the crown is still open for the stealing...

John Serpico