British Low Culture - From Safari Suits to Sexploitation - Leon Hunt

 BRITISH LOW CULTURE -

 FROM SAFARI SUITS TO SEXPLOITATION -

 LEON HUNT

If culture is not your friend, as ethnobotanist Terence McKenna once advised, does this mean that low culture is your mortal enemy? And what of British low culture specifically? Is it your nemesis? The metaphorical bullet with your name on? Enter into Leon Hunt's book British Low Culture and it needs to be done with trepidation because let's face it, the title is pretty loaded particularly with its added subtitle 'From Safari Suits to Sexploitation'. 

What exactly is 'low culture' and if such a thing can be defined is it cast as a good or a bad thing? Who's to judge? Who's the arbiter? In the blurb on the back of the book it mentions flares, lava lamps, safari suits, sexploitation films, skinhead novels, glam rock, and the mythology of wife-swapping suburbia. But hang on a minute. Is this implying that all these things are of no worth? As in low culture as opposed to high culture? Flares I'd agree with as they were always a waste of good cloth in the Seventies as well as the Madchester Nineties but everything else listed are some of my favourite things!

Leon Hunt's book was published in 1998 and there hasn't been a reprint since. The publisher is Routledge, who specialise in books of an academic nature which means Hunt is obviously an academic himself as well as a lecturer. Not that this is a bad thing, of course, but to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

'If you can remember the Seventies, you were there,' as comedian Jack Dee once said. The 1970s being always held up as an example of when culture turned naff. But isn't this by now a very boring yardstick? What exactly was better culturally about the Peter York/Robert Elms embellished 1980s than the BBC/ITV embellished 1970s? Between 'crumpet' and 'knockers' in the Seventies and 'birds' and 'tits' in the Eighties, there's not a lot of difference. There is, however, a difference between 'popular' and 'low' culture and that difference is often defined by 'authenticity', even if the term 'authenticity' itself is increasingly hard to define as the years pass.

Punk, of course, was the great leveller when it came to separating the authentic from the inauthentic but again as the years go by and our bullshit detectors in our garages become dulled, it's almost reached a point of where nobody really cares anymore because everything is simply product to consume without there being any real reasoning behind so-called choices. Essentially, for a lot of people 'I shop therefore I am' is all that really matters.

Leon Hunt's book is a dense affair, well-researched and packed with detail. Who would have thought that British TV comedy series from the Seventies were such cultural, political and sociological case studies? On The Buses, Are You Being Served?, Rising Damp, Man About The House - prime subjects for serious cultural studies all. As for Love Thy Neighbour, the fact that it was the most successful British sitcom from 1973 to 1975 tells us it was part of popular culture which alone begs a lot of questions, though the one to ask here is was it actually 'low culture'? Was it authentic?

This is where it starts to become problematic. The Sun newspaper was once part of popular culture too, but was The Sun 'low culture'? Was The Sun authentic? If so, then where did that leave The Guardian newspaper? It's at this point that a class analysis comes in handy, something that in a lot of academia is often missing. Thankfully there are times in Leon Hunt's book where he does indeed reveal a class consciousness and it's at these times that his book goes beyond navel-gazing and becomes genuinely illuminating, even if the reader needs to work on it due to these illuminations not being handed-over on a plate.

Hunt delves into the subjects of the Skinhead and Hell's Angels books from the New English Library stable, the wave of Confessions films starring the legendary Robin Askwith, the porn empire of David Sullivan and his Mary Millington films, and then finally the British horror film genre of the 1970s focusing specifically on the Hammer, Tyburn and Amicus films of that decade.

It's all good, interesting stuff written by somebody who clearly knows what he's talking about. And that's the beauty of it. British Low Culture is a serious book written by somebody who has thought seriously about the kind of subcultures that don't naturally invite examination. Importantly, Hunt doesn't set out to criticise but to understand. The icing on the cake of all this being the select filmography he supplies at the end that is an education in itself. Add to that all the films listed in the index then what you've got, essentially, is nothing less than a design for life.

John Serpico 

The Punk Reader - Dines, Gordon, Guerra

THE PUNK READER -

RESEARCH TRANSMISIONS FROM THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL -

MIKE DINES, ALASTAIR GORDON, PAULA GUERRA

Published in 2017, another more than welcome collection of scholarly debates from the Punk Scholars Network going under the title The Punk Reader - Research Transmissions From The Local And The Global. As declared on the back cover, the aim is to 'explore and critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary, radicalised globalisation'. Well, whatever floats your boat is what I say. Some might argue, of course, that an academic study of the so-called 'punk phenomenon' isn't warranted and is in fact, anathema to the very idea of punk. But it's horses for courses at the end of the day. 

Punk was never a closed shop or an exclusive gentlemen's drinking club even if some people tried their hardest to make it so. No, punk was a free-for-all, meaning if you wanted it as a space to sniff glue and bang your head against a wall then that's fine. If you wanted it as a cultural equivalent of the Baader-Meinhof Group then that's fine also. And if you wanted to come along with your clipboard and your pen, take notes and compose a revolutionary thesis on what you observe, then all power to you. Punk isn't mine to claim as my own and neither is it yours. Punk is all of ours. Apart, obviously, from Richard Branson's. He can fuck right off.

Where punk was born as in New York or London is a timeless question but The Punk Reader isn't concerned with that. Instead, it's more interested in where it's gone to and where it's at. You see, punk nowadays is global and is all the more better for it. On its inception, like an incurable ever-mutating virus, punk spread out from the major cities and into the towns; its different strains erupting gloriously throughout the UK, North America, the whole of Europe, and the Far and Middle East. Admittedly, there's still yet to be an Eskimo punk band but give it time.

One of the multitude of questions this all led to was that of 'authenticity', and straight off the block this is what co-founder of the Punk Scholars Network, Alastair Gordon, races into with a keenness of mind and a passion of lovers. And where do questions of authenticity tend to lead to? Why, to Chumbawamba of course, with them from their very start being representative of 'anarcho-authenticity' up until their signing to EMI.

'Bare faced hypocrisy sells records' as one particularly grieved punk wag put it on a record of the same name in regard to the Chumbawamba/EMI debacle but one of the things that Gordon makes clear in his chapter is that the world is not black-and-white even though 'bare faced hypocrisy sells records' is a very true statement to make - and not only in regard to Chumbawamba.

You might not think it but punk is a very convoluted, distorted and twisted affair that always has been and always will be ripe for taking seriously. Tony D of Ripped And Torn/Kill Your Pet Puppy fanzines knew this, which is why when he first encountered Crass through being passed a copy of their demo tape was at first confused by it before realising how important it was because 'At last' as Tony put it 'punk was being taken seriously'.

Ah, Crass. Our let's pretend passport to perversity. Crass: like Morrissey's Manchester - so much to answer for. Their ghost haunts the pages of The Punk Reader like smoke lingers round your fingers and it's a legacy earned, a legacy deserved, and a legacy of resonance that reflects well upon those whom they've influenced. Those such as the punks of Groningen, in Holland, for example, of whom Kirsty Lohman writes of in her chapter in the book.

But then it was always going to be a match made in heaven when it came to the Netherlands and punk, particularly when it came to Dutch squatting history and the Crass vision. And indeed, Groningen was one of the handful of places Crass back in 1980 ever played outside of the UK. 

A country they never played, however, is Malaysia although according to Marco Ferrarese in his chapter, you might think Crass were in residence there as the anarcho punk aesthetic is the signifier of Malaysian punk authenticity to this day, right down to the black clothes and the use everywhere of the same font Crass used on their record sleeves.

An important point in regard to global influence is raised in the chapter by Augusto Santos Silva and Paula Guerra to extinguish any ideas of punk being a form of cultural imperialism or as some sort of 'British invasion'. Instead, the term 'cultural syncretism' is used, meaning multi-cultural cross-pollination, resulting in punk mutations with 'substantially different attributes to the original version'.

If you think of punk as being a form of Chaos Theory where the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world causes a tornado on the other side, then it starts to make sense. Unlike the expanding symmetry of fractals, however, where a fractal reproduces its same self into infinity, punk bears localised hybrids. Like strange flowers born from seeds blown on a breeze. Is it any wonder why those of an academic bent might find punk such a thing of interest?

For all that, it's easy to criticise The Punk Reader for its general aesthetic as in being a very dry read, but then dryness is almost the very nature of most academic writing and it's hard to break out of that without diluting the whole purpose of it. Without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's also always very obvious whenever a thesis attempts to break out of its academic mode into a more flowing and easier-on-the-brain format as it often comes across as a sort of insult, as if the writer or editor is dumbing everything down to make it easier for non-academics to understand. Well, as Dean Friedman almost said, academics can thank their lucky stars we're not as smart as we'd like to think we are, or else they'd all be out of a job.

At the end of the day, academic writing in regard to punk is a niche space and there's room for it, and it's a more than welcome inclusion onto the sprawling tapestry that punk has become. In fact, anything that instigates or invites critical thinking of any sort should be welcomed for as Johnny Rotten once said of the Sex Pistols: 'We make people think, and that's dangerous - for those who'd like to make us morons.'

John Serpico

1974 - Nick Rennison

 1974 - NICK RENNISON

'No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones in 1977' as The Clash sang in their song of the same year name, and doesn't it just go to show how much things can change in such short spaces of time and how history is always in the making? When it comes to recording history there's different ways and means of course, and in school it would always be via the rise and fall of kings and queens and the waging of wars. We should all know by now however, that history is made from the bottom up and then interpreted from on high by those in positions of power because as we also should all know by now, those who control the past controls the future.

President Richard Nixon knew this, which is why on the night of his resignation in August 1974 on being assured by Henry Kissinger that history would remember Nixon as a great president, he replied 'That will depend on who writes the history'.

It's for this reason why it's important that we record our own history because if we do not, then others will do it for us and slant it to the advantage of their own prejudices and investments. 'Never mind the Stars and Stripes, let's print the Watergate tapes,' as The Clash put it 'I'll support the new wave, and I hope nobody escapes.'

1974 by Nick Rennison is a romp through 12 months of a year that has never been portrayed as being a pivotal one. Indeed, there are many people who dismiss the whole of the 1970s as a decade of drivel, as if it was but a mere half-way house between the Swinging Sixties and the money-driven Eighties. It's a gross misrepresentation, of course. 

Numerically, decades are neatly divided by precise cut-off points but in reality, each decade bleeds into the next as does every generation. Which means the Swinging Sixties bled into the Pop/Glam Seventies that bled into the computerized Eighties, etc, etc ad infinitum.  The same goes for each and every year. Numerically, one year ends and another begins every last day of December but the life, the culture and the reverberations of events that happened within one year will more often than not bleed and echo into the next. History is a messy affair.

In his book, Rennison catalogues a whole series of events that took place over 1974, with the tagline on the front cover calling it 'Scenes from a year of crisis' but in truth, it's actually a slightly problematic tagline because let's face it: every year is a year of crisis. Every day, even, is a day of crisis in one way or another.

Not that his book is a wallow in misery at all but then how could it be when it includes Abba winning the Eurovision Song Contest, the release of The Godfather Part II, the first lesbian kiss on British TV, and the anecdote about England football manager Sir Alf Ramsey telling England forward Rodney Marsh that he needs to improve his work rate. 'If you don't,' Ramsey says 'I'm going to pull you off at half-time'. 

'Christ,' Marsh replies 'At Manchester City all we get at half-time is a cup of tea and an orange.'

The more serious stuff includes the various bombing campaigns by the IRA and the subsequent false arrests and convictions of The Guildford Four, The Birmingham Six, and the slightly lesser-known Judith Ward. Then there's the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and their catchy motto 'Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys Upon the Life of the People'. The British and Irish Lions rugby teams touring South Africa under apartheid, 'Operation Smiling Buddha' and India's first successful test of a nuclear bomb, and the Windsor Free Festival that in the eyes of Chief Constable David Holdsworth was 'nothing more than a gigantic drug-inspired breach of the peace' that he decides to shut down by sending in hundreds of his officers to truncheon everyone.

In a way, Rennison's book is money for old rope, really, and acts mainly as a reminder of some of the things that took place in 1974. It's a research-based project that someone saw fit to publish in book-form. There's no analysis of any of the events, just straight down-the-line reporting of them, which is fine as at least it shows that Rennison doesn't have an agenda. There are hints and inferences between the lines but it's totally down to the reader if they wish to pursue them further. 

1974 though - it must be said - was a good year.

John Serpico

Yes We Have No - Nik Cohn

 YES WE HAVE NO - NIK COHN

Maybe it's just me but I often get Nick Cohen and Nik Cohn mixed-up. It's obvious why, of course. Nick Cohen, whilst full of insights and cutting political cynicism is ultimately pretty depressing. I wonder if anyone has ever told him that? You shouldn't shoot the messenger but the thing with Cohen is that not only is he the messenger but he's also the message. Nik Cohn, on the other hand, has a knack for enthusing because Cohn himself is enthused. He's keen, and it comes across in his writing. I'm baffled, however, how his first book he wrote was such a success that from the proceeds he bought a seventeenth-century cottage in Hertfordshire. I'm jealous, really, because I think: why can't I do that?

Yes We Have No, by Nik Cohn is one of those 'in search of England' books where the author travels around from city to city meeting all kinds of disparate people and recording the conversations in a bid to discover Albion - or at least something similar. Books such as these can often be entertaining at the very least as skirts are lifted, stones upturned, and windows into peoples' lives opened. The conclusions, however - if any are ever reached - are usually debatable and whether they're positive or negative ones, often seem to rest on a flick of a coin.

Is Englishness a moveable feast? It's a moot point. Is England built on shifting sands or sinking sands? This is the more pertinent question. These men of old England on a raft with sharks circling, as someone once sang. But who are these old men nowadays, and who or what are the sharks? We all have our own opinions about all of this but as it's Nik Cohn's book it's for him to discover and for him to divulge.

With his dissecting eye and his way with words, Cohn cuts a picaresque swathe through the wreckage of England circa 1999 and discovers a nation within a nation populated by the jobless, the homeless, and the fucked. A nation full of trouble. Violent and dispossessed. Many millions strong, holed-up in tower blocks, housing estates and inner cities. In places such as Bristol, which just happens to be my hometown. And where in Bristol does Cohn first venture? Why, Stokes Croft of course, taking in Montpelier and St Paul's. If Cohn is after stories then these are areas he's going to find them and amusingly (in fact, highly amusingly) one of the stories he picks up on is that of Bristol's very own black transvestite legend, Sapphire. 

Everyone in Bristol knew Sapphire - or at least knew of him - so to have him mentioned in a book is worth the price of admission alone. 'Sapphire got away with murder,' Cohn is told 'but he had style'. And then comes tales of how Sapphire would pull straight white kids off the dancefloor and give them blow jobs in the toilets. 'Buttocks wouldn't melt in his mouth,' another says, and the thing is - it's all true. Nowadays his antics would probably get him on a register but back in the day, Sapphire was a clubland legend. In fact he should probably have a blue plaque with his name on it somewhere - such as outside the Lakota, saying something like 'Sapphire played here. If you know you know.' 

From Bristol, Cohn heads down to Cornwall and a travellers camp called Fraggle Rock, populated by remnants of the Peace Convoy and others who seem to have no choice but to live this lifestyle. The camp is a last refuge - until the occupants are moved-on and another muddy field at the end of another side road takes its place. It's like an Indian reservation for New Age Travellers in a done-by alternative reality where the Battle of the Beanfield was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the travellers were the massacred U.S Army's 7th Cavalry.

From Cornwall he's off to Blackpool and when describing the nightlife there, it's like Hunter S Thompson's Las Vegas on acid as described in Fear And Loathing:

'Crowds descend on the pubs like packs of Visigoths, knocking back two or three drinks for every round, then rushing on again. We are accosted by a dwarf on stilts selling peppermint-flavoured condoms. Then we're in a transvestite cabaret called Funny Girls. A heart-stopping boygirl in black leather thigh boots and a black leather tunic cut just below the crotch is singing 'Send In The Clowns'. A papier-mâché  dragon with two heads asks me for a light. Past the arcades and strip joints, the barkers and tattooed love boys, the musclemen flexing, the jailbait pouting, the draw and E and bad cocaine, till we reach Pleasure Beach, the amusement park, where all things are biggest and best.'

Cohn's Blackpool makes today's annual Rebellion punk festival held there at the Blackpool Winter Gardens look restrained, conservative and positively quaint.

And then to Liverpool where Cohn is educated on the Toxteth Riots. The London press, he is told, called them race riots but in reality it was actually people versus police. The same with the St Paul's riot in Bristol. 'It was never black against white; it was a political statement. Toxteth just said "We're not having this. We're tired of being treated like crap." All of us were on that. But blacks, of course, they were treated worst of us all, so their protest was the most extreme.'

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as L P Hartley once said. And so too is the North of England but in the plural: the North is foreign countries, they do things differently to the South. The North also has things done to it by the South. Industrial genocide, for a start. We're talking; of course, about the Thatcher government's decimation and wholesale destruction of the coal industry along with the closure of the shipyards and steelworks. 

Everywhere Cohn goes in the North; every town, every city, every village, it's all the same picture. No jobs, no money, no future. Yet bewilderingly there is still hard cash being spent at night in the pubs and clubs but no-one seems to know where it comes from. The closest answer Cohn gets is from a builder who says somewhat mysteriously 'Other people's pockets', and by this he can only mean from the black market. From cash in hand - and no questions asked.

Down South, to the detriment of future generations people may have been able to buy their council house but up North, Cohn is hard pressed to find anything of benefit from all the years of Conservative rule, with Tony Blair's New Labour government being no better. Aye, it's grim up North.

So come the end, does Cohn discover the spirit of England? Does he find Albion? The answer is both yes and no. What he finds is an England turned-in on itself. An England that may like to think of itself as being a republic but has in actual fact been thrown to the wolves. An England under the yoke of the free market where everything has a price and anything that doesn't is surplus to requirement. Cohn finds an England Disneyfied, under a free market Disneyfied tyranny.

It's complicated, for sure, but only in the sense of when 'It's complicated' is used to describe a person's relationship status on Facebook. What you see is what you get and what you see - is what you are.

John Serpico

Riotous Victorians - Donald C Richter

 RIOTOUS VICTORIANS - DONALD C RICHTER

It was Thatcher who advocated for Victorian values, seeing in them the path to a better Britain. Hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and sexual propriety were the cornerstones of her vision but you have to wonder: how did Thatcher ever come to such a mindset? It was chemistry she studied at Oxford, not history, so where did she come by this perception that Victorian times were some sort of golden age of higher morality? 

And whilst we're on the subject, what is it with those on the Right and their harking back to 'better days', as if better days ever were? Conservative Prime Minister John Major was the same with his 'back to basics' campaign, calling for a return to so-called 'traditional values', before his government being drowned in an infinity pool of sexual and financial scandals. 

The 'We want our country back' advocates are the modern-day equivalents, but back to what exactly? When were these supposed harmonious times when everyone was happy and the streets so free of crime you could leave your front door open for the Kray Twins to pop in and borrow a cup of sugar?

Riotous Victorians, by Donald C Richter, makes the case that Thatcher's ideal Victorian society was in actual fact rife with lawlessness, violence and riot. And a pretty convincing case it makes too. Published in 1981 by Ohio University Press, which means it's an academic book full of footnotes citing sources, but then when it comes to history and debunking revisionism this is no bad thing. Unusually for an academic book, the language is accessible and the style of writing is free-flowing which makes for a far easier read.

The sheer amount of episodes of rioting during the Victorian age that the book chronicles is actually quite bewildering, proving that Britain during this period was an extremely disorderly society and that any other version of it is a misconception.

Policing at that time was in its embryonic stage and the powers of those recruited for the work were vague and undefined, one of their major tasks being to prove they could uphold the law without military aid. In particular, that they could control crowds and combat rioting through the use of truncheons instead of guns and cutlasses. The military was always in waiting of course but even more so were the threats of prison, hanging, and being transported to Australia.

Unintentionally, some of the outbreaks of rioting of which Donald Richter writes are actually quite amusing, especially when quoting the politicians and newspapers of the day. For example, describing mobs as 'a great lot of roughs', 'frivolous elements', and 'riot-for-the-fun-of-it types'.

One riot where a labourer was urging a crowd of one thousand to kill the constables trying to restore order is described as 'Never was there such a hurly burly'. And what better phrase to describe a riot than 'a hurly burly'?

Another great turn of phrase is in regard to the proscribing of public meetings at Hyde Park, where placards on the gates of the park declared 'Meetings for the purpose of delivering or hearing speeches, or for the public discussion of popular and exciting topics' were banned. Exciting topics?

Not to be outdone, certain rabble rousers had a way with words also. For example, Protestant lecturer William Murphy, who would taunt Catholics by telling them their wives and daughters were being 'exposed to debauchery in the confessional, and are betrayed and kidnapped into convent prisons, and there kept the dupes or slaves of priestly lust'. Moreover, he would advise that 'all the convents in England ought to be burnt' and that 'if ever there was a rag and bone gatherer in the universe it was the Pope himself'.  

These were obviously not the Victorian values that Thatcher had in mind, but in the scheme of things were probably a lot more appreciated at that time than sexual propriety and thrift. And rightly so. Thatcher was dreaming a lie. As was Major and as is Farage and co today. The past is a foreign country, as they say, where you visit for a cheap holiday in other people's misery only to find it's not as it's depicted in the brochure at all but you send home a postcard saying 'wish you were here' anyway.

'History is written by the victors' as Hermann Goring said at the Nuremberg trials. And as George Orwell said: 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' The urge to rewrite the past is the urge to rewrite reality and is the foundation stone of totalitarian-type control. And in this light, how Thatcher, Major, Farage, Trump and all the others try to rewrite history starts to make sense for why should they even bother if there was nothing from it for them to gain?

John Serpico

The Squeeze - David Craig

 THE SQUEEZE - DAVID CRAIG

Yes, that's right. That's Freddie Starr on the cover, as featured in the film of the book. And yes, as well as being an unpredictable comedian he could also act and surprisingly well too. And yes, that's Stacy Keach on the cover as well, playing the part of the main protagonist in the film alongside such notables as David Hemmings, Edward Fox, Carol White, and blink-and-you'll- miss-him, a young Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols.

The film is a cult classic, notable for its depiction of a pre-gentrified, rundown London in the 1970s when parts of it was still bombed-out wastelands from the Blitz and World War Two. There's also its cast of dislikeable characters and general downbeat feel that's very 1970s/The Sweeney/get-your-trousers-on-you're-nicked/Men-in-stocking-masks-armed-with-sawn-off-shotguns-and-baseball-bats robbing Securicor vans. All good stuff, of course. London hard stuff, basically.

Before being turned into a film, the book on which it is based was originally published under the title 'Whose Little Girl Are You?' before being published again with its new title, The Squeeze. The book is a breathless affair with no let-up or deviation from the plot involving hardcore London gangsters, a kidnapping, a heist, and an alcoholic ex-detective.

'All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun', as Jean Luc-Godard once said. And that's true. When the main character is also an alcoholic, however, it adds a whole other twist to the story. It's the alcoholism in fact, that is a major theme along with how the main character attempts to redeem himself. The other major theme is 'humiliation', either self-inflicted via the ravages of alcoholism or inflicted upon others by the gangsters, demonstrated on two occasions by them forcing people to strip naked.

Is there any point in reading The Squeeze, you might ask? Well, it's not great literature by any means, and it's not quite pulp fiction of the classic kind either. It's a companion-piece to the film, essentially. An example of a cheap novel inspiring a half-decent cult movie, but that's more than a lot of other books and is more than enough to merit it being read. As for the eternal question over which is better - the book or the film? - on this occasion, it must be said, the film wins out.

John Serpico

Sex Pistols - The Inside Story - Fred & Judy Vermorel

SEX PISTOLS - THE INSIDE STORY -

FRED & JUDY VERMOREL

It's still my contention that the best book ever written on the subject of 'punk' is Jon Savage's England's Dreaming. It's in the way that Savage is so thorough, leaving (practically) no stone left unturned. His writing style is like that of a shark hunting down prey, with the scent of blood in the nostrils driving it forward. Sniffing after every entrail, every speck of blood but when sensing the prey might be too large to easily digest (like the subject of Crass), backing off to allow for further consideration.

For all that, I still wouldn't say Savage's book is definitive, and that to get an even wider and more complete understanding of punk, you really need to read other books on the subject by other writers - Sex Pistols - The Inside Story by Fred and Judy Vermorel being but one of them.

'But what exactly is there to understand about punk?' some might say, and 'Why even bother?' If you have to ask, of course, you'll never know, for as Neil Young once advised in his ode to Johnny Rotten: There's more to the picture - than meets the eye. And if there has ever been a band that this applied to then it's the Sex Pistols.

The backbone of the Vermorel's book is the diary kept by Sophie Richmond, who as well as living with Pistols' art designer Jamie Reid, was the secretary and office manager to Malcolm McLaren and the Pistols up until the end of 1977. Sophie had previously worked with Jamie Reid on the radical anti-commerce newspaper Suburban Press so her politics were already in place. Indeed, in one of her diary entries she alludes to being a non-affiliated Marxist.

Sophie is very conscious of the political nature of the Sex Pistols though also acknowledging that it's a double-edged sword. 'What worries me is fascism,' she writes 'That rebellious stance (of the Pistols) at this point of political time could equally lead rightwards as leftwards'.

Possibly of more interest is her awareness of situationism, shown in one of her diary entries when she attributes to the situationists the quote about all men and women living lives of quiet desperation. Even though she's mistaken in citing the quote to them (it was actually said by Henry Thoreau) at least it's an indication that she's aware of the situationists - which is probably more than could be said about Johnny Rotten.

On the other hand, Jamie Reid and Malcolm McLaren were well versed in them as was Fred Vermorel, so this obviously explains why it's a theme that runs through the whole book. It's funny nowadays, actually, how a significant number of people are of the view that the Pistols were just a 'boy band' and mere puppets of McLaren. It's patently not true. It is, however, true to say that McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, and Reid dressed them up in symbols and slogans. Moreover, it was situationist slogans - or versions of them, at least - and a chapter in the book on the subject of the situationists lists a number of them that in 1968 were sprayed all over the buildings and metros of Paris:

'Live Without Restrictions Or Dead Time. Never Work. Scream, Steal, Ejaculate Your Desires. The More You Consume the Less You Live.' Etc, etc. There is also mention given to the situationist idea of making retreat impossible and 'global proletarian revolution in the name of 'perpetual orgasm''.

No matter how much John Lydon might wish to deny it, the links between the Sex Pistols and situationism are obvious. Right down, even, to the situationists' concept of recuperation whereby radical ideas are defused, neutralized and commodified into mainstream consumer culture.

It's interesting also that the agent of mainstream consumer culture in the case of the Sex Pistols wasn't so much the big, established record companies EMI or A&M but the supposedly more hip (at the time) Virgin Records and in particular Richard Branson. As Julien Temple in the book puts it: Branson was a businessman pretending not to be a businessman. In fact, whilst McLaren was doing his utmost to present himself as the great rock'n'roll swindler, it was Branson who actually out-swindled everyone, going into overdrive in the end come the death of Sid Vicious and the over-the-top exploitation of the whole sad and sorry affair.

And talking of Sid Vicious, Julien Temple in the book makes another good observation in regard to when viewing the film footage of the Pistols in America, it's Sid who's keeping the craziness going and making the Pistols more than just a rock and roll group. According to Temple, Sid knew by that stage that he'd inherited Rotten's place and importance so based on that alone, the subsequent splitting up of the band was inevitable.

The Vermorel's book is full of observations such as this and full of insights from those behind the scenes, making it an important and somewhat special book when it comes to the story of the Sex Pistols. Unexpectedly and very amusingly, one of the highlights is actually Paul Cook's mum and the interview with her. For example, on Paul Cook as a baby she says: 'I couldn't believe it when he was born. I said to the doctor - he said it was a boy, and I said: 'No, it ain't,' and he said: 'Yes, it is.' And there he was, his little white nob!' And then on being asked about Johnny Rotten, she says: 'He sat on my back step in the garden and he looked so depressed. So I said: 'Well, we are all depressed, Johnny,' and he started to laugh.'

Paul Cook's mum is brilliant, and if as Malcolm McLaren once said that 'Anyone can be a Sex Pistol' then she was an undisclosed star member.

John Serpico

The Shit Of God - Diamanda Galas

 THE SHIT OF GOD - DIAMANDA GALAS

'Is it safe?' as Lawrence Olivier's Josef Mengele character keeps asking Dustin Hoffman's character in the film Marathon Man, as he drills a hole into his tooth without the use of anesthetic.

Is it safe? In this instance to read a book by Diamanda Galas with the somewhat alarming title of The Shit Of God. Is it safe?

Well, I always say you should never be intimidated by a book be it by its size, its girth, its complexity or anything, really - particularly its title. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky? It's only a book. Ulysses by James Joyce? It's only a book. The Shit Of God by Diamanda Galas? It's only a book. And unfortunately in the case of Galas's book, not a very good one.

Writer and filmmaker Clive Barker gets it right in his introduction when he says of Galas: 'Her voice carries her audience on a journey into primal regions, where intellectual analysis and even aesthetic judgements become redundant. All you can do is listen and feel.'

And that's the thing. The work of Diamanda Galas is something to be heard and experienced, preferably in a live setting. Her words aren't meant to be laid down on paper and presented as poetry. It just doesn't work. In doing so they lose all their power and are rendered redundant. Rendered useless.

Galas is a musician, a vocalist/singer extraordinaire, composer, performance artist and a visual artist/painter. She's a legend. The printed word, however, just isn't her medium.

Obviously, The Shit Of God isn't completely without worth as I imagine if you're a fan then you're going to view it as a little birthday present but as Joe Strummer once sang: 'Nembutal numbs it all but I prefer alcohol', whilst I say: Diamanda Gala is possessed of genius but give me Peaches any day.

John Serpico

A Fistful Of Dollars - Frank Chandler

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS - FRANK CHANDLER

'Get three coffins ready.' And with that we are formally introduced to the Man With No Name. Everyone makes mistakes, however, even a gunslinger who has death as a constant companion because it ends up as actually being four coffins that are required after him shooting down a gang of gunmen in a blur of movement before twirling his two pistols around his index fingers and then sliding them back into their holsters with a slow, gentle movement that's almost like a caress... 

It's impossible to read Frank Chandler's A Fistful Of Dollars without picturing Clint Eastwood as the stranger who rides into town leaving a trail of bodies behind when he departs. And so it should be because Clint Eastwood owns the Man With No Name character even though there have been many subsequent imitations. It's the character that made Clint Eastwood into the iconic actor that he is today, and the character that has become the template for the silent killer/studied cool/avenging angel trope in movies ever since.

Based on the screenplay of the film, Chandler's book stays close to the script and doesn't deviate from the crux of the original at all, but again - that's how it should be. You don't read a book like this for it to go off at tangents. Flesh it out a bit, for sure, but don't go changing it for the sake of being clever. Don't go trying to fix something that's working fine already, or trying to improve something that doesn't need improving. Just present in a different medium what is there already and everyone will be happy.

It's this policy that Chandler abides by and his book is all the better for it. The film of A Fistful Of Dollars is still better than the book but then the book isn't trying to be better. It's an accompaniment. It's a movie tie-in. It's a joy to read. It's a pleasure. A small pleasure maybe, in the scheme of things, but a pleasure all the same.

John Serpico

The Spear - James Herbert

 THE SPEAR - JAMES HERBERT

From the cover, you wouldn't really know what The Spear by James Herbert is about. 'Instrument of terror, symbol of evil...' says the tagline, but again that doesn't really give much away. Even the main protagonist when asked 'Have you ever heard of the Heilige Lance?' has to say 'no' before the person asking the question waves the subject away with a dismissive 'it's an ancient spearhead that a certain arms dealer seemed to have an interest in'.

In fact, for the first half of the book, arms trading and the subterfuge around the whole industry is what it seems to be about, taking in Israel, Mossad, global terrorism, and a private detective agency. It's not until the protagonist - private detective Steadman - and the arms dealer finally get to properly meet that the story takes a sudden turn to the esoteric with the arms dealer asking 'Have you heard of the Thule Gesellschaft, Mr Steadman?'

The Thule Gesellschaft - in English the 'Thule Society' - the German occult group founded shortly after World War I that sponsored the German Workers' Party, that was later reorganized by Hitler into the National Socialist Workers' Party - probably more commonly known as the Nazi Party.

So, rather than arms dealing, the core of the story is about the establishment of the Fourth Reich. This time round, however, taking control of the Western World through stealth. Spreading fear, confusion and mistrust on a universal scale through worldwide terrorist attacks and the gradual breaking-down of the world's economic structure. Boiling everything down to one simple but major conflict: Right against Left.

'It would be the only choice for the people of Britain.' Steadman is informed 'No in-betweens, no fence-sitting. The public would be forced to choose. Civil war would be balanced in favour of the Right, for the majority would be the wealthy, those whose sympathy lay towards nationalistic pride; and the middle classes who had suffered so much between the elite of the country and the working classes, would choose to join them rather than be ruled by the economy-wrecking socialists. The choice would be made very easy for them. New leaders would emerge and their ideals would be uncompromising, just as Hitler's had been in the 1930s.'

And those ideals if not broken why try fixing them as in the eyes of the Far Right there's nothing so perfect and normal than racial purity and racial segregation, along with the dissolution if not extermination of marxists, communists, trade unionists, anarchists, gypsies, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, and anyone else deemed to be 'untermensch' - or in other words, 'subhuman'.

This being a James Herbert book, the supernatural is not too far away and is represented by the Heilige Lance, otherwise known as the Spear of Longinus the Centurion. The Spear of Destiny. The spear that was believed to be the weapon that pierced the side of Christ as he died on the cross. And just for good measure there's also the resurrection of Heinrich Himmler - the Reichsfuhrer himself - the head of Hitler's notorious SS and the architect of the Holocaust.

Whilst The Spear isn't Herbert's best book (and it certainly isn't as good as The Rats) it's still a well-written story told by a master storyteller, with Herbert obviously having done a lot of research into the subject of Himmler and his interest in the occult. And like it or not, the occult side of Nazi Germany is an interesting subject if only for the fact that its place in World War II is always downplayed to the point of hardly ever being mentioned at all.

The unsettling thing about The Spear, however, is that there are elements of it that still echo to this day, particularly around the subject of Fascism and how those who knowingly or even unwitingly advocate for its rule along with the methods utilised to bring it about. 

As the saying goes: Fascism doesn't start with concentration camps - that's where it ends.

John Serpico

Words Are My Matter - Ursula K Le Guin

 WORDS ARE MY MATTER - URSULA K LE GUIN

So impressed was I with Ursula K Le Guin after reading her The Word For World Is Forest that I thought I should investigate further. So, following the advice given by friend and top man Lawrence Burton from his hacienda in Texas, rather than reading another of Le Guin's novels, I picked up a collection of her essays entitled Words Are My Matter - Writings On Life And Books from of all places the Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol, where on entering the building a copy was there on prominent display as if waiting for me to arrive. It was serendipity, obviously, particularly as I've always had issues with the Arnolfini staff for being ignorant about aspects of art and culture that they disguise through snobbery. But that's a whole other story.

Words Are My Matter is a collection of essays, talks, book introductions and book reviews all from the pen of Ursula K Le Guin, all on the subject of literature and its meaning and purpose in our lives. From the start she writes 'The imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses, it beats the opposable thumb', and then goes on to explain exactly why. It's a no-brainer, really, but Le Guin takes it further by saying 'Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making.' Before then adding 'In the market place, the word 'creativity' has come to mean the generation of ideas to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word 'creative' can hardly be degraded further. I don't use it any more, yielding it to the capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can't have 'imagination'.'

These words were written in 2002 and they tell us that Le Guin was very much ahead of the curve, particularly in regard to creativity. Nowadays, there's no end of people who call themselves 'creatives', 'content providers', and 'digital creators' - and frankly, it's embarrassing. The terms are meaningless because essentially it's just people on social media grifting. Let them go ahead. Let them 'create', let them entertain, let them grift but don't let them tell you it's 'imagination' because it's not, for as Le Guin explains: 'The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human'. 

The imagination is not for grifting.

In regard to Le Guin's book introductions, one of them is for Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, a book that just happens to be a favourite of mine and the film of it by Andrei Tarkovsky one that is easily in my Top Five. Her insights into Lem's book are both interesting and enlightening, particularly on the period it first appeared in an English translation in 1970. I didn't know, for example, that when Lem was made an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1973, many members of the association disapproved due to him being a citizen of a Communist nation. Never mind that Lem was actually a Pole, not a Russian. His honorary membership was withdrawn and in objection to this, Le Guin refused the Nebula Award voted for her by the members of the SFWA. It going instead to Isaac Asimov who, Le Guin tells us, was a vociferous Cold War Warrior.

Other introductions take in among others works by Philip K Dick, Huxley, Paternak, the Strugatsky brothers and HG Wells, all of which offers insights galore that could only come from a fellow writer.

And then there's the slew of book reviews, many of them being of works by authors I've not heard of before but by this time because you know where Le Guin is coming from, you trust her judgements. For example, when she says of one book that it's 'a classic, and should be cherished as such', you know she's not just saying it as a favour to the author and to promote sales. She's saying it because she means it.

'I like book reviewing,' Le Guin tells us. 'It's an interesting and demanding form. And one can say a good deal in a review that has to do with wider matters, literary and otherwise.'

I agree with this totally. It's the reason I'm writing these very lines. These very words. It's ended up as the very reason for this Art Of Exmouth blog. And in the same way that Le Guin sees imagination, a good book review is not for profit-making. It's not for providing content, and it's not a way of being 'a creative'. And it's certainly not for grifting.

John Serpico

The Hellfire Club - Daniel P Mannix

THE HELLFIRE CLUB - DANIEL P MANNIX

'The rise and fall of a shocking secret society whose sole interests were perversion and politics.' So says the blurb on the front cover and it's almost as if this book had been written especially for me. The Hell-Fire Club? Where do I join? But then I remember the Oscar Wilde quote with him saying 'I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member,' and I'm stuck.

The Hellfire Club by Daniel P Mannix, first published in 1961, is the story of an elite club of men founded in the 18th Century by Sir Francis Dashwood whose main emphasis was on sex, drugs and the ridiculing of religion. A club that attracted the supposed brightest and the best minds of England that would secretly direct the fate of the nation, operating behind the scenes of government.

Members of the club included the Earl of Sandwich (who did indeed invent the sandwich), the Earl of Bute (who later became Prime Minister), Thomas Potter (the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury), William Hogarth (the English artist), Laurence Sterne (the novelist), John Wilkes (the British libertine), and Frederick, Prince of Wales.

The book is composed of large swathes of conjecture though based on a lot of facts that can easily be cross-checked. Amusingly, there doesn't actually seem to be any proof that any of these people were members though that doesn't stop Mannix from having a lot of fun with what is known.

When George III became king, his first act was to make Bute his prime minister, Sandwich the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Dashwood the Chancellor of the Exchequer. "I'll be the worst chancellor England ever had," Bute is reported to have told his friends, to which one of them disagreed: "But you have considerable experience with figures, My Lord. You have often helped chalk up how often each of us have had a go at the nuns."

Ah, the nuns. These were 'special' nuns, of course, who attended the parties and black masses held by the Hell-Fire Club where they would 'service' the attendees. Demonstrating, for example, new positions not found even in the Kama Sutra. Parties where sex and drink of only the most involved and esoteric kind would be served. Parties held under the maxim 'Do what thou wilt' and guided by the words 'Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven'.

I know what you're thinking. It sounds like just a typical night down your local pub except there you've got Guinness on tap and a pool table to mess about on and then back to whoever's house is available that night until the sun comes up. And you wouldn't be far wrong, actually. Debauchery isn't the sole reserve of the ruling class. They might well have more money and be more lavish but when it comes to imagination, inventiveness and indulgence of extremes, they do not hold a monopoly. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the upper class and even the middle class so dislike the poor and the working class. Because the working class naturally know how to enjoy themselves, whilst the middle and upper class can only buy enjoyment. They cannot invent and make it themselves.

The thing of note about this book is that it shows the workings of such elite clubs as the Hell-Fire Club, Eton's Bullingdon Club and the goings-on at Epstein's island is nothing new. Secret societies, elite clubs, nepotism and the old school tie have been with us for centuries. So too has the machinations and the corruption of power and the way it's clung to and wielded for the benefit of the few and the exploitation of the many. And that is where the difference in debauchery lies. Not in the quality of it or in its highs and lows but in the level of the power games that go with it.

John Serpico

Hombre - Elmore Leonard

 HOMBRE - ELMORE LEONARD

The book on which the film starring Paul Newman is based of course, and I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff where a film is based on a book and vice versa. It's the interplay between the two mediums and the 'compare and contrast' that comes into play. It's only natural to match one medium against another and to let the best man win and though both have their own very unique strengths, nine times out of ten 'Het boek is beter' as the Dutch say. Which brings us to Elmore Leonard and I didn't realise just how many films have been made from his books - 23 in total - including 3:10 To Yuma, Valdez Is Coming, Jackie Brown, and this one, obviously - Hombre.

First published in 1961, Hombre by Elmore Leonard is concise, succinct and to the point. It's an example of storytelling in a very precise way. Lean, mean and clean in its structure though set in a hot, dirty and unforgiving landscape. One of the major themes running through it is the subject of racism, specifically in regard to the treatment of Native Americans, accentuated by the main character having spent half his life living with the Apache.

Without going into too much detail, the story involves a stagecoach holding a mixed-bag of passengers being held up by outlaws and them being left to die with no water in a barren, Monument Valley-type environment. A turn of events then leads to the passengers being chased-down by the outlaws across this same hostile landscape. The only one of them who has any survival skills and of any use with a gun is, of course, the one raised by indians so it's him they come to depend on for their survival even when only a day earlier they didn't want him in the stagecoach with them.

The vast amount of the story is centred on the play-offs and stand-offs between the characters, with the indian-raised character - the 'Hombre' of the book's title - being the pivot around whom everything circles. It's a familiar trope, admittedly, but what grips the attention is the masterly way the story is told and the suspense maintained.

But is the book better than the movie? Well, one of the major flaws in the film when watching it nowadays is seeing Paul Newman dressed as an Apache, which unavoidably doesn't really sit right. There's also the feeling when watching the film that it's an ensemble piece but usurped by Newman. So yes, the book - as ever - is better. Or again, as the Dutch say: 'Het boek is beter'.

John Serpico

Dead Kennedys - The Unauthorized Version - Marian Kester

 DEAD KENNEDYS - THE UNAUTHORIZED VERSION - MARIAN KESTER

Another one of those scrapbook-type books but this time on the Dead Kennedys. Vocalist Jello Biafra has recently suffered from a stroke though by all reports he's slowly but thankfully recovering, so now is probably as good a time as any to revisit this: Dead Kennedys - The Unauthorized Version, written by Marian Kester.

Jello is 68 years-old now and the last time I saw him was around the year 2000 when he appeared at the London Anarchist Bookfair, down at the Conway Hall. The night before, he'd stayed at a friend's house in Bristol who told me he'd found Jello to be a bit strange, though that was okay by me because after all - it's Jello Biafra!

I was manning a stall at the bookfair and the place was heaving. I knew that Jello was there but I thought he'd maybe just come along to pick up a few books or at best to do a talk in one of the meeting rooms? What I didn't expect was for him to get up on the stage and deliver a long speech-type rant to the assembled hordes. And neither did anyone else. Unannounced and (as far as I knew) uninvited, there he was: some guy with a funny American accent up on the stage telling the largest, genuinely anarchist crowd he'd probably ever encountered in his life just what was wrong with the world and what we all needed to be doing about it. I looked around and it was obvious that most people there didn't have a clue who he was and were thinking 'Who the fuck is this?' It was pretty embarrassing.

Maybe it was a cultural misunderstanding thing? Maybe Jello felt he was at just another concert? Maybe he genuinely felt that he knew best and needed to enlighten us? But did he not think it strange that of all the people there, that he was the only one important enough to mount the stage and explain everything to us as if we were one of his audiences? To put it gently, there was a slight lack of self-awareness on Jello's part that day, it seemed to me.

Relaying this anecdote is not to diminish the brilliance and even the importance of the Dead Kennedys as a band, but it's just to show we all have our flaws - though most us us don't usually choose to flaunt them in a self-important fashion from a stage in front of our peers in a weird-sounding Walt Disney-character-type voice.

Musically, the Dead Kennedys were really good. Politically they were... interesting. You think of the Dead Kennedys and you think of East Bay Ray's distinctive guitar-playing. You think of the Dead Kennedys and you think of Jello Biafra's politics as amplified by his vibrato vocals. The music carried the politics, the politics supported the music, and combined a force of exuberant energy was created.

Printed in 1983, Dead Kennedys - The Unauthorized Version is, unfortunately, a bit of a cash-in. A vanity project, even. It's a muddle and a bit of a mess due to appearing not to know quite what its purpose is. A lot of the photos are lacklustre and the reproductions of Winston Smith's artwork are uninspiring. The interesting thing about it, however, is that it's almost a meditation on the Dead Kennedys. An attempt to try and understand what the Dead Kennedys are about and what they might represent. The writer, however, is on a hiding to nothing.  

Tucked away in the text of the book there's a line that acts as a clue as to why trying to pin down the Dead Kennedys is a fruitless task and to my mind it says a lot about them as a band: 'Perhaps being political in the US means choosing which conspiracy to believe in?'

For a band whose name rests on one of the biggest conspiracy theories in the world, led by a singer whose whole trip was to raise conspiracy theories as semi-alternatives to the New World Order and then shoot them all down; well, to try and come up with a viable explanation of what the band meant is like trying to nail-down jelly. Or jello. 

For all that, I'll say again, the Dead Kennedys were a brilliant band whose impact has been significant. Moreover, their song Police Truck is sublime: 'The Left newspapers might whine a bit, but the guys at the station they don't give a shit. Dispatch calls, "Are you doing something wicked?" No siree, Jack, we're just giving tickets. Let's ride, how we ride. let's ride, low ride.'

And not to mention, the lyrics to Holiday In Cambodia still stand as almost perfect punk lyrics, up there with the best of them: 'Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz on your five grand stereo... You're a star-belly sneech, you suck like a leech, you want everyone to act like you. Kiss ass while you bitch so you can get rich, but your boss gets richer off you...................      Pol Pot!!! 

John Serpico