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

Suspect Device - Edited by Stewart Home

SUSPECT DEVICE -

EDITED BY STEWART HOME

He's joking, right? He's got to be fucking joking. Someone please tell me that he's joking. I'm talking about Stewart Home, the person responsible for editing this collection of short stories published under the title of Suspect Device.

The cover's eye-catching and the title's good also, bringing to mind Stiff Little Fingers and their song of the same name, of course, and that's no bad thing. The contents, however, are a whole other kettle of fish that leaves something to be desired to put it politely. I mean, for fuck's sake. Did Home actually get paid for compiling and editing these stories? Did the publisher Serpent's Tail actually give credence to Home's judgement regarding what qualifies as 'hard-edged fiction'? Is it just me? Is it just that I don't recognise great, cutting-edge writing when I read it?

So what have we got? Well, it starts with a story entitled Blind Date about being bound up in rubber and fucked up the arse, and then progresses from there really. Bound up in rubber and fucked up the arse? Hmmmm, nice idea, you might think? Except when it reads as though it's been written with all the wit, flair and insight of a thirteen year-old boy.

Then there's some horse shit of a story entitled Vegan Reich, about a Khymer Rouge-style group of eco-terrorists who kidnap a bunch of bands at a music festival and ceremoniously burn them alive like in the end scene of The Wicker Man. Hmmmm, yummy, you might think? Same as before, however, except this time it reads as though it was written by a sixteen year-old? Maybe it was?

Then there's The Suicide Note, about some bloke who climbs down into a sewer to kill himself with an overdose of whisky and codeine, and it's at this point I just about give up on the will to live myself. Like the trooper I am, however, I persevere thinking it can't get any worse, can it?

'At last he'd found something that could approximate the alienation he felt from late capitalist society' it declares in the story Zyklon B Zombie, regarding the story's main protagonist. And that was? Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report LP. Really. And then the story Tradesman's Entrance which as might be guessed involves more anal sex but with added vomiting.

Fuck it. Out of twenty stories in total they can't all be rubbish can they? And indeed they're not. Law of averages, I guess. Three of them (to my mind, at least) are actually quite good and I'm happy to name them: St Andrew's Arena by Berholt Bluel (which I suspect might actually be Iain Sinclair writing under a pseudonym), Pig! by the late, great Steven Wells, and Last Train Home by John King. I must admit also that bits of Stewart Home's own piece are quite amusing as well.

The thing about Stewart Home is that the Richard Allen books of the 1970s that he emulates and parodies are actually far better than his own books. When they were first published, Allen's pulp chronicles of skinheads, boot boys, knuckle girls and suedeheads found their way out onto Council estates throughout the country where they were eagerly devoured by working class kids. So popular were they and so controversial at the same time that schools banned their pupils from reading them, or at least bringing them into school and reading them. Home's books have never found their way out onto Council estates in the same way and we all know they never will.

Richard Allen's books didn't pretend to be anything other than what they were. Stewart Home's books, on the other hand, are Richard Allen parodies with a wink, as if to say "Yes, we know this is sub-pulp fiction and because we know, it means it's art".

Richard Allen's books, though written in a supply and demand manner, were honest. Stewart Home's books (or if not all then a fair number of them) are dishonest because they're pretending to be something that they're patently not. They're trying to be brutal, they're trying to be extreme, and they're trying to be clever all at the same time but they fail and miserably so. As do seventeen of the twenty stories Home has selected for publication in Suspect Device but then I guess that's no surprise because if Home's own work is a reductive imitation of Richard Allen's, then any story emulating Home is going to be nothing but a pale shadow of that reductive imitation. Which means they're going to be even worse than Home's own stories. And that's the case (as I shake my head despairingly) with this book.

John Serpico