Tag Archives: punk rock

654. suicide?

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“I discovered Barclay James Harvest during my mostly lame teenage years when I was doing everything I could to avoid punk rock (for mostly lame, late teenage reasons). This tendency led me down a lot of dubious roads, but as is always the case with music – there was gold to be found. In the case of Suicide? (found on 1976’s Octoberon), that would be not just the song itself (epic and sorrowful), but also the extended coda wherein binaural recording techniques are employed to give a visceral feel for what it’s like to hurl yourself off the edge of a building, achieve terminal velocity then SMACK … unto whatever happens (or doesn’t) next.” (Philip Random)

741. holidays in the sun

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Side One Track One of the first (and only really) Sex Pistols album is a solid and enduring f*** you to everyone that’s ever taken a cheap holiday in some broken down so-called Third World locale. Because it was true in 1977, it’s even more true now – the world ain’t equal, your luxurious fun and good times inevitably involves some other guy’s blood, sweat, pain, misery. But don’t let that worry you. Just stick to the big hotels and always drink bottled water, and if you see a new Belsen in the distance, look the other way.

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764. pigs [three different ones]

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Speaking of Pink Floyd, come 1977, they’d become the defacto poster children for all that pompous, bloated, overblown and wrong with the so-called Prog Rock that Punk was supposed to be annihilating. Which made the album Animals a source of much confusion, because it was so full of uncompromising bile and rage, it would’ve been punk rock if the songs weren’t so long. Pigs gets singled out here for the sheer violence of the instrumental parts, like the worst of dreams. You wake up to air raid sirens. You look skyward into the night, catch a glimpse of a pig the size of a football field, with red laser eyes, and they’re fixed on you. Welcome to 1977. The future looked grim.

(photo: Erich Biruk)

890. the thrasher

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In which Neil Young waxes sad and beautiful about leaving home and finding himself on an asphalt highway bending through libraries and museums, galaxies and stars. Found on the acoustic side of 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, the album where Mr. Young faced the punk whirlwind, found it relevant, and thus ensured that (unlike most of his contemporaries) he would neither burn out nor fade away, but keep on keeping on.

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992. you have it all

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John Miles‘ timing sucked. Because he really did seem to have it all on his debut album Rebel. Solid songs, kickass band, world class production c/o Alan Parsons (who had his own big deal project going by then). Except it was 1976, which meant Punk was breaking out across town. Even cutting your hair redneck short and posing with a shotgun wasn’t going to slow that storm down.

1012. problems

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“You don’t truly own the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks unless you’ve stolen it.  Such was the logic of a guy who called himself Limey Len, an English ex-pat who I remember for chiefly two things. 1. the marijuana he sold was always underweight. 2: he’d never shut up about how he’d been there, actually seen the Pistols in a small club in London, which was probably a lie, he lied about everything else. So anyway, one night, at the dog end of some shitty New Years party when he was passed out on his kitchen floor, I stole his copy of Never Mind The Bollocks. I’m not even sorry.” (Philip Random)

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