Punk Footnotes 10# - Hagar the Womb

In this era of iTunes, Amazon and Spotify it is kind of easy to feel that everything ever is available to download. To be honest having recently downloaded an album of Triffids outtakes and early demos it is a fairly reasonable assertion. However browsing Youtube I stumbled across the joyous yelpings of Hagar the Womb, dishing out what is probably their best know work 'Idolization.'

This set a gutterful of nostalgia flowing. Hagar the Womb were part of the Anarcho Punk scene in the early 80's playing alongside the likes of Conflict and Omega Tribe. What made them  different was that despite the notional feminist and anti- sexist stance of many of the Anarcho bands, most were pretty male and pretty macho. Hagar the Womb was led and fronted by women, and like Rubella Ballet did a decent job of subverting the culture, adding humour, colour and a certain playfulness to the brew.

I came across them (of course) listening to John Peel who championed their 'Word of Womb' EP and getting them to record a (if I recall slightly disappointing) session. In my box of cassettes I am sure I still have these moments captured. Watching the video of them from the Leeds Bierkellar I felt a little pang, as I recalled the look of time, the big hair and printed dresses with DM's, girls who were just that bit older and so much cooler, the girls I yearned for, but stayed painfully out of reach. But what also struck me was that for anarchists, they don't look like the advance guard of an anarchist Armageddon. They and their audience look a rather nice colourful and jolly bunch.

Swept away by this warm nostalgic glow I decided to purchase Word of  Womb. However unlike the works of innumerable non entities iTunes could only manage one song on a compilation, and Amazon couldn't manage a download or a CD. But curiously in the Amazon store somebody was offering a copy of the EP for £30. I had a look on ebay, and there was again a copy of the EP for about £25. Further investigation showed that the band reformed a couple of yours ago for a tour, given that their recorded works amounted to two EP's and a JP session, for a band that no material currently available this seemed pretty impressive.

So the Hagar's were very much a footnote, but one that seems to have left a mark deep enough for a small following still to give  a damn 30 years after their brief shrieking life.

Punk Footnotes #9 - Live in Yugoslavia - Anti Nowhere League

ANL are probably worthy of two footnotes. They appeared as the real fag end of Punk in about 1981/2. They were probably best described as a prototype for the likes of Blink 182 and the Macc Ladds. Straight forward Punk tunes with a bucket full of predictable offensiveness to chuck around.

Their first claim to fame was their cover of Ralph McTell's 'Streets of a London' which actually pretty good and its b side 'So What.'

So What got sort if banned. Not banned in the Frankie Goes to Hollywood BBC way,  but properly seized by the police. The song was meant to be based on a pub argument where two men try to out brag each other. In pursuit of this the lyric moved from drug taking, STD's and fellating elderly gentlemen into far more dubious waters. And hence the attentions of the police. It gave the band a few moments of notoriety before the storm in a tea cup passed.
However the song gained an unlikely second life through American Heavy Metalers Mettalica. The song became one of their live favourites. Watching on YouTube, seeing  them boast 'I've been to Brighton, I've been to Hastings, I've been to Eastbourne too' is one of the more surreal moments in Rock. Though times had moved on and they did replace the reference to 'school girl' with 'teacher' with good reason.
Onto the second footnote. The band played in Zagreb in 1983, and a well recorded live album emerged of it. Though Yugoslavia was probably the most nonconformist of the Eastern Bloc states the iron curtain was very much still down, Reagan and Thatcher glowering and a pre Gorbachev series of immobile Soviet leaders still waving at tanks. Details are sparse on how the gig came about, and what if any impact it had.  There are claims the inter song banter was edited to remove references to Tito, and ANL's suspicion that the audience were expecting the Human League. But it does beg the question, why ANL? And also what if any legacy resulted from this exchange? An internet search does not reveal much more but it is fun to think about.

There is a sad irony given what was soon to happen in that country about ANL cheerily banging through songs with titles like ' I hate people' and 'let's break the law.'

Punk Footnotes #7 I, Shithead

It is probably unfair to describe Vancouver's DOA as a punk footnote. They are seen as amongst the founding fathers of Hardcore Punk in North America, along with the likes of Black Flag and Minor Threat. I first heard them in 1984 when the Bloodied but Unbowed compilation came out in the UK. Musically they bore the hallmarks of their classic punk influences more visibly then their Hardcore contemporaries. With the band members carrying names like Dimwit, Stubby Pecker and Randy Rampage they also had a sense of humour that few of their competitors could have been accused of.

But the person I am interested in here is their leader, and the only member who has seen them from 1979 to today. The wonderfully named Joey ‘Shithead’ Kiethley. He is a man who in many ways has overcome some fairly obvious limitations to keep his band alive. As a physical presence he had none of Henry Rollins’ menace or Jello Biafra’s theatrical charisma. Instead we have a man going at it like an excited Jack Russell in a sleeveless tee shirt. And boy this man has a serious long term commitment to the sleeveless tee.

Hugely committed to various causes for the start, ideologically he fits in with Biafra and the likes of Billy Bragg. But as a lyricist he is some way short of those two. Even when making a serious point he will normally reach for the obvious and literal, lacing in with ‘Smash the State’ and ‘Fucked up Ronnie.’ He also a man that gets a buzz out of belching into the microphone. Songs with titles like ‘I don’t give a shit’ and ‘Fuck You’ don’t place him obviously amongst the deep thinkers of the genre. But what always comes across has been a massive drive and energy. DOA’s slogan Talk – Action = 0 does some him up.

Maybe surprisingly he is a pretty good talker, and writer.  He is articulate and charming as a speaker, and a vivid, humorous writer.  The contradictions in the man are nice brought together in a story about a gig in San Francisco. He tells of ‘the night I pissed on the crowd’ explaining how the audience parted like the red sea before Moses. The story is delivered with such good natured self-deprecation that is defuses the extreme unpleasantness of the act itself. His autobiography ‘I, Shithead’ tells this and many other tales of his 30 odd years doing what he does. If one is going to read a punk biography this isn't a bad one to choose.

Punk Footnotes #6 Osaka Ramones

While I am on the theme, here are another band that imitate both sincerely and wildly inaccurately the work of one of the Punk originators. However that is where any connection between this lot and the Bollock Brothers ends.

Osaka Ramones are the alter egos of the Japanese pop punk Shonen Knife. It is this connection that actually reassures one that they are not in fact a racist joke cooked up by some cynic in London. Even clad in leather jackets as a tribute act the Osaka Ramones do not do a vary convincing imitation of the originals. There are three of them not four, they are very obviously not men, and they are well very Japanese. And unlike the Ramones they go about their work with a cheery sense of fun, rather than the feeling  that every 1-2-3-4 is an act of vengeance against a malign world.

But while I am sure it is lots of fun live I cannot imagine why anyone would want to possess this band on record. It does not take long before the helium voiced 'bwitskweeg bop' starts to grate, and the cultural significance of 'KKK took my baby away' to a Japanese audience is boggling. It just does seem a little bit too much effort barking up a slightly inappropriate tree. That said they seem to be having lots of fun and importantly seem very much alive, which in the grand scheme of things gives them the edge.

 

Punk(ish) Footnotes #4- Hazel O'Connor, burgers and Stephen

Stephen always seemed to be in trouble. I could never quite work out why the teachers found so much to object to about him. He was a bit of berk but never seemed like a bad kid. There must have been things not quite right at home. Sutton was well off enough for Stephen to standout on the first day at Senior School. He was still wearing the grey shirt and jumper we wore to Junior School. He was minus a blazer and the only piece of the new uniform he had was the blue and gold tie.

Stephen came to mind yesterday when I was browsing YouTube. I was struck by how many old bands seem be enjoying some strange afterlife. Angelic Upstarts made their one Top of the Pops appearance in I guess 1979. I had presumed they had thrown in the towel by 1984. But no, YouTube reveals a band that has put on a lot of weight but is still playing to appreciative audiences. These gigs are not just in some mate’s pub in Wallsend but locations as exotic as Sao Paulo, Bologna and Lodz. How these guys music found an audience in these places, and how they wound up playing there is profoundly odd.

But Stephen came to mind because of a more commercial New Wavish artist. The last time I gave Hazel O’Connor a thought was in Burgermeister, opposite Sutton Station, late one Tuesday night in 1985. There bouncing around behind the counter in an apron holding a big burger flipper was Stephen.

‘I don’t work here, I am hiding from somebody.’ Was his explanation. Unless he was fleeing a group of enraged vegans I could not think of a less effective hiding place. Burgermeister was a grim spot strategically located near The Whistle Stop Pub and the cab shop. A good place to be if you wanted to be involved in a fight.

We started chatting about music. ‘I still like a lot of punk stuff.’ My ears pricked up. He pointed toward s a battered cassette player. ‘I was listening to Hazel O’Connor earlier.’ I stifled the urge to make a sour remark. O’Connor appeared in that space when New Wave gave way to synth pop. I was a bit snooty about her; she broke through starring in the film ‘Breaking Glass’ which was not very 4 Real in my book.  But when I got home I dug out the cassette, and a couple of nights later enjoyed listening to ‘Will You’ with my girlfriend.

Browsing YouTube that evening came to mind and l did a search. But what appeared was not the face of a spikey haired young singer but a rather formidable looking woman in her 50’s belting out the tune. And there was more from 2010, 11, 12. Loads of footage of O’Connor performing at all manner of events. In fact it proved a struggle to find the stuff from what I imagine even she would describe as her heyday. There was stuff from a Punk festival a couple of years ago, and footage from a 30^th anniversary gig. I did not realise that the film ‘Breaking Glass’ was remembered with that kind of fondness.

It is kind of appealing that below the surface of public consciousness there are a whole batch of bands long presumed dead still playing to those that love them. And what they play is sealed in amber, the songs from when the love affair began. The fans are loyal and in return the artists don’t shatter the mirror of nostalgia.

Punk Footnotes #3 Stiff Little Fingers -Johnny Was

'This is a song written by Bob Marley
About a guy getting shot
For being in the wrong place
At the wrong time
This is
Johnny Was'

So Jake Burn's introduced  the song on Hanx over the sound of a snare drum thrumming like in a marching band. Turning this 3 minute Marley album track into this sprawling 10 min howl of pain against the cheapness of life in Belfast was their finest achievement.

Though most famous for the more straight forward hardcore of Suspect Device, Alternative Ulster and Wasted Life, it is in Johnny Was that one can see the scale of the potential they had at the start. On there later albums there was always a workman like Reggae cover, Roots Radcials and Love of the Common People. But these were at best worthy. Johnny Was is much more, it takes the original but completely reinterprets it, placing it in a setting so vivid that when Burns sings 'a shot rings out, in a Belfast night' he could be singing about nowhere else.

Though they enjoyed a few hits and good commercial success, they always seemed trapped by the brilliant first album Inflammable Material. That explosion of rage was always going to be hard to follow. They lacked the musical and stylistic agility of The Clash. Deciding to stop writing about Ulster once in London got them accused of being dishonest, and the quality of the material drifted gradually away. They still exist in some incarnation with the bespectacled square head of Burns leading the line.

There are numerous versions of Johnny Was out there. For me the version recorded at The Rainbow for Hanx! is probably the finest.

Newtown Neurotics - Footnote to a Punk Footnote

Browsing iTunes I stumbled across a half forgotten band from my teens. The Newtown Neurotics were never that big a name, even in their heyday. They dished out a kind of punk that sat somewhere between the Ramones and Billy Bragg and they hung around with the ranting poet Attila the Stockbroker. I saw them at a tiny festival in Bermondsey in the early 80's. They seemed a likable bunch and got the modest crowd bouncing around. Their most lasting legacy was the tub thumping anthem 'Lets Kick out the Tories'  a  song that  is as enthusiastic and naïve as the title suggests.

But listening to their stuff again, away from the rather obvious sloganeering there is something more interesting at work. The lyrics of  'Agony' and' Mind of Valerie' explore domestic violence, depression and compromised masculinity in a way that was pretty unusual for the early 80's. Lines like 'I know I am wrong, but the fury drives me on, cry is all I want to do, cry instead of bruising you' and 'whenever I get a bee in my bonnet its always you who gets stung' move the band into considerably more emotionally complex territory than most of their piers. Which kind of begs the question why would a band capable of this be satisfied with releasing a straight cover of Blitzkrieg Bop? Can't answer that one, but I am glad that this odd little footnote exists and hope that wherever they are today good things have come to them.