Seventies Music

RETROSPECTIVE: Sex Pistols’ Punk Detonation

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Nearly fifty years after its release, the Sex Pistols’ incendiary debut remains punk’s perfect storm, a molotov cocktail of working-class rage, musical brilliance, and media manipulation that changed British culture forever….


The album that didn’t just break rules – it obliterated the rulebook

Never Mind the Bollocks didn’t just land in 1977, it crashed through the plate-glass window of British society and sprayed the drawing room with cultural shrapnel. Nearly fifty years on, it still snarls like a kicked dog. In a landscape now wallpapered with playlist-core, TikTok hooks and sanitised rebellion-by-subscription, Bollocks feels like a holy relic from a time when music had the power to make the establishment sweat.

The Pistols weren’t a band in the traditional sense. They were a detonation. The result of a chemical reaction in the King’s Road boutique Sex, where Malcolm McLaren, part art school agitator, part snake-oil messiah set out to manufacture a British answer to the Ramones. What he ended up with was something far more combustible: four working-class lads with nothing to lose, contempt for the sacred, and just enough talent to weaponise it.

It was John Lydon, not McLaren, who gave the Pistols their real teeth. That infamous audition, Lydon miming Alice Cooper in a torn “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt wasn’t an audition at all. It was a warning. And from the moment he snarled into a mic, Rotten was born. Not a singer in the usual sense, but a frontman who could turn a howl into a manifesto. His was a voice shaped by failed systems and boarded-up futures. You believed him not because he told the truth, but because he believed his own bile. And in a cultural moment drowning in fakes, that was radical.

His lyrics didn’t sermonise like The Clash or cartoon like the Ramones—they targeted. They named names. “The fascist regime.” “The tourists.” “The Queen.” This wasn’t abstract anger. This was brutalist literary wit, honed on council estates and spat back at a country that had turned its back on him.

Behind Rotten, the band were better than they ever get credit for. Steve Jones’ guitar work was pure sledgehammer pinched from Ronnie Wood’s toolkit and stripped of all bluesy indulgence. Paul Cook held it all together with dead-eyed discipline. And then there was Glen Matlock, the band’s melodic spine, the one who actually wrote songs. Before McLaren booted him out for liking the Beatles (the horror) in fairness his mum and dad weren’t too keen on his band membership either – Matlock laid the foundation for nearly every track that matters. Sid might’ve looked the part, but Glen sounded it.

And that brings us to Sid Vicious: the icon who couldn’t play. The most famous non-musician in music history. He brought nothing to the table musically, less than nothing, in fact but gave the tabloids something they couldn’t resist: a photogenic train wreck in safety pins and blood. He turned the band from agitators into tabloid currency, and McLaren milked every drop of it. Sid was myth in motion. His tragic end, overdosing after allegedly stabbing Nancy Spungen, would become punk’s dark parable. The image devoured the music.

But Never Mind the Bollocks is no chaotic mess. It’s a tight, brutal record, shaped by Chris Thomas, a producer fresh from Floyd’s palaces of sound, now neck-deep in spit and swearing. It shouldn’t have worked. But it did. It worked because the songs were solid, the delivery vicious, and the band at least for one special moment, utterly focused.

“Anarchy in the UK” starts with a leer and explodes into a full-throttle riot. “Pretty Vacant” is practically power pop under the sneer. And “Bodies”? Still disturbing, still necessary a razor blade of a song about abortion, trauma, and madness that no one today would dare touch.

And then there’s Art School McLaren’s marketing sorcery. Every cancelled gig, every court case, every playground rumour was stoked by him. The infamous Bill Grundy interview, the Jubilee boat stunt, contracts signed outside Buckingham Palace it was all punk as performance art. The Pistols were slashed, banned, burned, boycotted. Which, of course, meant they sold more records than God.

But you can’t sustain that level of heat. The 1978 U.S. tour, an mis-booked shambles by design saw Sid out of his mind, the band disintegrating, and Rotten fed up with being a performing monkey for the media circus. At Winterland in San Francisco, he looked out at the crowd and delivered the perfect punk epitaph: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

That line still echoes because it summed it all up; the manipulation, the disillusionment, the raw, ugly brilliance of it all. The Pistols didn’t burn out so much as combust in real time. And what followed, Sid’s death, McLaren’s myth-making, Lydon’s post-punk messiah rebirth in Public Image Ltd wasn’t an epilogue but a necessary failing forward.

Lydon, to his credit, didn’t retreat into parody. PiL pushed boundaries most punk bands wouldn’t touch; dub, experimentalism, post-punk minimalism. It didn’t make headlines, but it made art. Meanwhile, the world turned the Pistols into a brand. Punk became a T-shirt slogan, rebellion a marketing brief. Rotten became John Lydon again, appearing on butter ads and talk shows, but Bollocks remained.

And that’s the point. You can license the image, sell the nostalgia, but you can’t fake what this album captured. Never Mind the Bollocks is a time capsule filled with rage, wit, and electricity. It’s the sound of a band and a country on the brink. Could something like this happen today? Not a chance. The algorithms wouldn’t allow it. The PR team would step in. The snarl would be filtered and auto-tuned.

But that’s why this record matters more than ever. It reminds us that music can scare people. That songs can shake the foundations of the establishment. That sometimes, four angry kids with guitars can tell the world exactly where to stick it and be heard.

Never Mind the Bollocks isn’t just a punk album. It’s a battering ram through the front door of British culture. Nearly fifty years on, drop the needle and hear it again: that beautiful unrepeatable roar of latent energy stored in the opening chords of Holidays In The Sun.

RETROSPECTIVE: The Art Punk Blueprint Of Chairs Missing

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Nearly half a century after its release to a mixed response from fans and music writers , Wire’s ‘Chairs Missing’ continues to sound like a transmission from the future. While punk’s original fury has long since fossilised into museum pieces, this extraordinary second album remains as sharp, relevant and bewildering as the day it emerged from London’s art-school underground in 1978. No more punk of Pink Flag, synthesisers, atmospheric production and intricate arrangements had the hardcore punks scratching their heads.

What makes an album endure when so many of its contemporaries have faded into historical curiosity? How did four unassuming blokes in sensible jumpers manage to create a blueprint that’s still being copied today? And why does ‘Chairs Missing’ sound more modern than records released last week?

In this retrospective, I explore how Wire’s clinical precision, ruthless economy and gift for subversive melody created something that transcended its punk origins to become one of the most influential albums in rock history. From the metronomic menace of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ to the gorgeous brevity of ‘Outdoor Miner’, ‘Chairs Missing’ didn’t just predict the future of guitar music – it wrote the instruction manual.


Looking back from our vantage point nearly half a century on, it’s almost impossible to overstate just how thoroughly Wire’s ‘Chairs Missing’ rewrote the rulebook. Released in that feverish summer of ’78 when punk was busy eating itself and disco was conquering the globe, this magnificent second album stands as the moment when four art-school oddities from London quietly laid the foundations for post-punk, alternative rock and about a dozen other genres that didn’t even have names yet.

What’s most striking today is how startlingly modern it still sounds. While the Sex Pistols’ once-revolutionary racket now feels like historical tourism (if you’re interested there is an actual Punk Tour of London), ‘Chairs Missing’ could have been recorded last Thursday. The clinical precision of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’, with its metronomic pulse and Colin Newman’s clipped vocals, created a template that bands are still copying today, whether they know it or not.

Wire’s great trick was ruthless economy. Nothing wasted, everything measured, not an ounce of fat or self-indulgence. When they emerged from the punk scene, they ditched the bondage trousers and safety pins while keeping the urgency and directness. To this unruly mix they added something genuinely new, a cool, analytical intelligence that treated the studio as a sterile surface lab and pop music as an experiment worth conducting properly.

‘I Am The Fly’ still buzzes with menace, Newman’s proclamation that he’s “the fly in the ointment” serving as the perfect manifesto for a band who were always happiest disrupting expectations. They were provocateurs, but never pranksters because there was too much serious intent behind those deadpan expressions.

The album’s great revelation was how Wire embraced melody without sacrificing their edge. ‘Outdoor Miner’ remains one of the most perfectly constructed pop songs of the era, its fabulous hooks and harmonies smuggled in inside a deceptively simple arrangement. At under two minutes, it demonstrated Wire’s other great talent, knowing exactly when to end a song. No three-minute pop formula for this lot, no siree.

‘Heartbeat’, once merely impressive, now sounds positively prophetic, its pulsing electronic textures and detached vocal style laying groundwork for everything from Joy Division to LCD Soundsystem. When Newman asks “How many heartbeats will there be?”, he’s not just confronting mortality but questioning the very mechanics of existentialism heady stuff for a time when most guitar bands were still bellowing about getting pissed or laid, or even being let out at all.

What’s become clearer with each passing decade is how ‘Chairs Missing’ represented a road map for what intelligent guitar music could be, cerebral without being pretentious, experimental without disappearing up its own backside and genuinely challenging without being unlistenable. In their forensic deconstruction of rock conventions, Wire created something far more durable than the three chord thash and bash of contemporaries.

The influence is simply everywhere: from R.E.M. to Radiohead, Elastica and Interpol, even Blur – they all owe some debt to Wire’s clinical brilliance. Even younger bands today, with their angular guitars and oblique lyrics, are still dipping into the well that Wire dug with ‘Chairs Missing’.

Nearly fifty years on, this remains the sound of a band operating with absolute clarity of purpose, creating music that existed entirely on its own terms whether that was jagged or etherial. While countless landmark albums from the period have aged like milk left out of the fridge, ‘Chairs Missing’ stands pristine and untarnished, still bewildering, still thrilling, still essential and still played.

Not bad for a bunch of art-school refugees who looked like mildly rogue bank clerks – which of course was also relatable to anyone making do outside of the Seditionaries clique.

RETROSPECTIVE: In Every Dream Home a Heartache. Parasocial Pop Art.

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In the summer of 1973, as glam rock reached its sequinned peak and Britain grappled with economic uncertainty, Roxy Music released what may be their most uncomfortable masterpiece. Buried in the grooves of their second album For Your Pleasure, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” presented listeners with six minutes of deeply unsettling art rock that most dismissed as typical avant-garde provocation from Bryan Ferry’s art school collective.

Half a century later, the song reads less like artistic statement and more like prophetic warning. What once seemed like an abstract meditation on consumer culture and artificial desire now feels like a documentary of our current moment, an age where human connection is increasingly mediated by technology, where intimacy can be purchased through subscription services, and where the line between authentic and artificial relationship has all but dissolved.


Five decades on, this remains Roxy Music’s most unsettling masterpiece – a six-minute fever dream that anticipated our current relationship with technology, materialism and artificial intimacy with frightening prescience. Arch art school glam rock posturing in 1973 now reads like a prophecy.

Ferry’s tale of romantic obsession with an inflatable doll has only grown more relevant in our age of OnlyFans, dating apps and parasocial relationships. The song’s exploration of commodity fetishism – literally making love to a consumer product – feels less like provocative art school trope and more like documentary realism in 2025. We’re all having relationships with objects now, aren’t we? The machines know the real us better than our friends.

The track’s structural audacity remains breathtaking. A cycling four chord progression led by a ‘cinema organ’ style Farfisa part, the song creates an unsettling foundation that mirrors its psychological terrain. Manzanera’s treated guitar lines snake through Eno’s synthesiser washes like electricity through circuitry, while Chris Thomas’s production – not Eno’s, as often misattributed – captures every whispered confession and orchestral climax with surgical precision.

Thomas, fresh from work with later The Beatles (White Album) and Pink Floyd (DSOTM), understood how to balance Roxy’s avant-garde impulses with their pop sensibilities. His production allows the song to build from intimate murmur to full orchestral delirium, mirroring the psychological trajectory of its narrator’s delusion. After the lyrical conclusion “I blew up your body/but you blew my mind!”, the song climaxes with an extended instrumental section, with the lead taken by guitarist Phil Manzanera – a moment where musical chaos perfectly embodies a psychological breakdown.

The song emerged from a specific cultural crucible: post-swinging sixties Britain, where the optimism of the previous decade had curdled into something more complex and cynical. By 1973, the utopian promises of the consumer society were revealing their hollow core, and Roxy Music – art school graduates steeped in Pop Art theory – were uniquely positioned to dissect this disillusionment.

Ferry’s lyrics don’t just describe commodity fetishism; they inhabit it completely. His delivery oscillates between tender vulnerability and creepy obsession, creating a character study that’s simultaneously sympathetic and deeply disturbing. Lines like “I bought you mail order/My plain wrapper baby” transform consumer language into intimate confession, while “Immortal and life-size/My breath is inside you” elevates plastic fantasy into genuine pathos.

This track sits at the absolute heart of the Roxy canon – more adventurous than the later smooth soul period, more emotionally complex than the debut’s art rock exercises. It bridges the gap between “Virginia Plain”’s pop art collage and “More Than This”’s new romantic melancholy, establishing a template that would prove enormously influential.

The band pioneered more musically sophisticated elements of glam rock, significantly influencing early English punk music, and provided a model for many new wave acts while innovating elements of electronic composition. The DNA of “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” can be traced through decades of subsequent music. The band’s influence ran particularly deep among bands associated with the New Wave movement of the late 70s and early 80s, especially “New Romantic” acts such as Spandau Ballet and Ultravox. The song’s fusion of art school conceptualism with emotional immediacy provided a roadmap for bands seeking to marry intellectual ambition with visceral impact.

The Pop Artist and Ferry tutor / mentor Richard Hamilton connection runs deeper than surface Pop Art references. Like Hamilton’s domestic interiors in his work ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ Ferry presents consumer paradise as psychological prison. The dream home becomes nightmare, the perfect woman becomes plastic fantasy. But where Hamilton maintained ironic distance, Ferry commits fully to his character’s delusion, making the critique more devastating through total emotional investment.

The song functions as both artwork and psychological case study, examining how capitalism doesn’t just sell us products but entire emotional frameworks. In 1973, this felt like avant-garde provocation. Today, it reads like anthropological field notes from our current reality.

“In Every Dream Home a Heartache” anticipated not just our technological predicament but our emotional one. In an era of AI companions, virtual relationships, and increasing social isolation, Ferry’s exploration of artificial intimacy feels less like satire and more like documentary. The song’s central question – what happens when human connection becomes another consumer product? – has never been more relevant.

Essential. Prophetic. Still deeply creepy.

RETROSPECTIVE: Joe Strummer’s Culture Clash Single

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The Clash’s Reggae Revolution Examined. Just two years into the Seventies British punk era, this is no three-chord thrash. A brave, culturally and politically insightful brilliant record that asked questions the scene wasn’t ready to answer.

Four Colour The Clash White Man In Hammersmith Palais


Many years on from its release, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones’ most pointed cultural critique still cuts like a razor through the pretensions of punk’s supposed solidarity. ‘Seventy Eight’s “White Man In Hammersmith Palais” wasn’t just The Clash dipping their toes into reggae waters, it was a full-blooded dive into the contradictions of being white, privately educated (or art school) punks singing about revolution whilst signed to a major label.

The genesis of this track lies in Strummer and Don Letts’ pilgrimage to see Jamaican acts like Dillinger, Leroy Smart, and Delroy Wilson (the ‘Smooth Operator’) at the famous West London venue in early 1978. What they witnessed wasn’t the cultural communion Strummer expected, but a stark reminder of his own position as an outsider looking in. The resulting song became punk’s most honest examination of cultural tourism and political posturing.

Musically, it’s The Clash at their most adventurous pre-London Calling. The always under appreciated Topper Headon’s ska beat is perfect, not a ham-fisted attempt but a genuine understanding of reggae’s rhythmic subtleties. Mick Jones’ guitar work walks the tightrope between punk urgency and reggae’s more spacious approach, whilst Simonon’s bass provides the crucial foundation that makes the whole thing swing rather than simply thrash.

But it’s Strummer’s lyrical dissection of the disappointment of that night in the lightweight way the bands presented – plus the culture clash South London zeitgeist that elevates this from mere genre experiment to the essential punk document it has become. His observations about fashion victims “too busy fighting for a good place under the lighting’ and weekend revolutionaries were aimed squarely at punk’s emerging orthodoxies and not for the first time. That fabulous line about ‘turning rebellion into money’ and the hollowness of sloganeering hit closer to home than many wanted to admit. This wasn’t The Clash having a go at the establishment this was them turning the mirror on themselves and their scene, one now infiltrated by the Far Right.

The single’s commercial failure at the time, it barely scraped in, seems almost inevitable in hindsight. A huge fork in the road that was too reggae for the punk purists, too punk for the Rastas, and too uncomfortable for those who preferred their politics less complicated including anti-violence, wealth distribution, unity. Lyrically Strummer is really kicking off. Radio programmers didn’t know what to do with it, and neither did much of the press initially. This ain’t no White Riot redux.

Urban mythology has built up around the track over the years. Some claim Strummer wrote it in a fit of disgust after seeing Far Right punks and skinheads doing Nazi salutes at the Palais gig, though those who were there aren’t convinced of that. Others insist it was a direct response to criticism from Jamaican musicians about white bands appropriating reggae. The truth, as usual, is probably more mundane: four young men trying to make sense of their place in a musical and political landscape that was shifting beneath their feet.

What’s undeniable is the track’s influence on what followed. Without “White Man,” there’s no London Calling album, no “Rudie Can’t Fail,” no bridging of punk and reggae under the influence of Letts’, and that became one of The Clash’s defining characteristics. It opened doors not just for The Clash but forother bands who realised that punk’s year zero mentality was creative suicide and a punky reggae party might be route one for them too.

The production, handled by the band and Sandy Pearlman is sparse without being minimal, allowing each element space to breathe whilst maintaining punk’s essential urgency. The decision to keep Strummer’s vocals relatively low in the mix was inspired it forces you to lean in and listen rather than simply absorb. I’ve got four copies and I dread to think how many times my white ears have heard it. It’s impossible to get bored with.

Looking back, “White Man In Hammersmith Palais” stands as perhaps The Clash’s most prescient moment. Its questions about authenticity, appropriation, and the commodification of rebellion feel more relevant now than they did in 1978. ‘If Adolph Hitler flew in today, they’d send a limousine anyway’ they’d also get his opinion of this week’s Nazi atrocity. In an era when punk has been thoroughly sanitised and packaged for consumption, Strummer’s uncomfortable truths about the music industry are prophetic.

The Clash would go on to greater commercial success, but they never again achieved quite this level of self-awareness. “White Man” remains their most honest song, a moment when they looked in the mirror and didn’t like everything they saw, but had the courage to share that reflection with the world.

RETROSPECTIVE: The B-52’s – S/T (1979) It’s Joy As Rebellion

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Picture this, it’s ’79 – punk’s getting philosophical and Seventies disco is wheezing waiting for it’s Eighties inhaler. Then five exuberant nutters from Athens, Georgia rock up to dance this mess around a bit.

The B-52's Self Titled Debut Album From 1979 Retro Reviewed


I realised while thinking about the ‘next one’ that being a punk, new wave, indie and nowadays classic rock fan there’s not exactly much joy in my album racks. A few disco era, the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is mostly upbeat even if the film is grittier than you’d expect.

So running my finger along the spines and out slides this bright yellow pop art cut and paste thing by Sue Ab Surd (get it?) that sounds exactly like it looks. Joyful but odd in equal measure and totally new wave – because what other genre would have them? Art Brut now included music.

Nearly half a century on, and the B-52’s debut still sounds like it was made by visitors from Planet Claire where everything’s inclusive and brilliant all the time. What we’ve learned in the intervening decades is that this wasn’t just a great teenage party record – it was the moment American rock music remembered it was allowed to smile.

Back in ‘79, punk was getting all serious and art-school, chart disco was dying on its arse, and new wave was formed sixth formers in skinny ties looking miserable. Then along came five lunatics from Athens (Georgia) – with beehive hairdos, ‘a ‘thrift store’ look before Molly Ringwald and the audacity to suggest that rock music could be simultaneously completely mental and absolutely brilliant.

The genius of it is clearer now than ever. While their contemporaries were desperately trying to be cool, the B-52’s had stumbled onto something much more powerful – they were trying to be joyful. And joy, as it turns out, is infectious.

Fred Schneider’s vocal approach was nothing short of revolutionary, though nobody realised it at the time. That Schrechgesang ‘speak-sing’ delivery that seemed bonkers in ‘79 basically invented alternative rock vocals. Indie frontman like Michael Stipe channelled a bit of Fred’s fearless weirdness. The man gave permission for rock singers to stop being frontmen and be themselves.

“Rock Lobster” once destined for the bizarre list alongside Telephone Man and Oh Superman! has revealed itself to be pure genius – a seven-minute masterclass in how to build tension, create atmosphere, “Rock lobster, down, down” and anyone that way inclined lose their mind on a dance floor. please listen to it now. It’s f***ing crazed. As the closer for side one it’s perfect, you cannot wait to hear side two. Chapeau Chris Blackwell and B-52’s.

Fun fact; Cindy Wilson’s screaming vocals, reminiscent of Yoko Ono (with the mic left on) and the album’s playful nature directly inspired John Lennon to come out of retirement to write and record Double Fantasy. That tells you everything about its power. If it was good enough to get a Beatle excited about music again, it’s worth attention. It’s hot lava!

But here’s what’s become most apparent with time, this wasn’t just novelty nonsense. The B-52’s were proper musicians creating genuinely innovative sounds. Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s vocal interplay was decades ahead of its time, creating templates that alt-rock new wave bands like the Go-Go’s would follow. Ricky Wilson’s guitar, jangly alien-surf-rock, created a sound that would dominate US college rock for the next two decades.

The Athens connection looks even more significant now. That vibrant and bustling college town also produced R.E.M. and literally dozens of lesser known US indie bands. But the B-52’s got there first, proving that stateside you didn’t need to be in New York or LA to create something world-changing. All you needed was great imagination, a sense of humour, and no shame.

What’s remarkable is how modern this record still sounds. You could play “Planet Claire” today and it sounds fresh, unaffected by fashion and super upbeat. It exists outside of time, belonging to no particular era because this album created its own entire universe.

The album’s influence on fashion, art, and general cultural weirdness is immeasurable. The B-52’s made it acceptable to be fun and outrageous. Note fun. They proved that style and substance weren’t exclusive, that you could be completely over the top and still create lasting art. This is Drag Race T-40 years, no B-52’s no Scissor Sisters, maybe for a few coming out became easier and every person who’s ever teased their hair into an impossible shape owes them a drink.

Looking back, the production by Chris Blackwell is inspired. A clean, spacious mix that lets every mad element breathe – it was the perfect sonic setting for controlled chaos. While punk records were deliberately aggressive and new wave was often formulaic and sometimes saved by power pop, the B-52’s found the sweet spot where everything was clear, punchy, and completely alive. Over the next decade other US alternative bands like R.E.M applied the jangly guitar courtesy of Peter Buck and clean uncluttered mixes, Sonic Youth particularly on Daydream Nation that clarity and chaos evident here and The Go-Gos who applied similar vocal interplay, there are also similarities with Talking Heads although these are simultaneous with Brian Eno at the controls until 1981.

A then revolutionary feminist angle has only become more apparent with age. In an era when women in rock were still fighting for basic recognition, Kate and Cindy weren’t just singers – they were equal creative partners, their voices driving the songs as much as any instrument. They presented a model where gender was irrelevant; all that mattered was bringing their energy.

What’s most impressive about revisiting this album now is how it’s aged like fine wine whilst somehow getting more relevant. In our current era of manufactured authenticity and focus-grouped strategy, there’s something deeply inspiring about the B-52’s’ complete commitment to their own beautiful madness. They had a vision, admittedly involving lobsters, aliens, and enough Harmony [insert any US hair spray for local readers] to punch a hole in the ozone and they pursued it with utter conviction.

The ripple effects are still being felt. Is too much to say that without the band and this album, there’s no US college rock explosion or indie revolution, no acceptance that American rock could be colourful and strange. Kurt Cobain in those big white sunglasses. The B-52’s didn’t just make a great debut – they rewrote the rules.

Forty-six years on, “The B-52’s” debut album remains the sound of pure possibility, proof again from these retrospective reviews and research (also for my book Art Pop / Pop Art) that the best art comes from the margins, from people who care more about creating something wonderful than following the rules. It’s a record that gets better with age, revealing new layers of genius with each listen. I’ve loved playing it again.

In a world that often feels like it’s forgotten how to have fun, the B-52’s debut stands as a reminder that sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is refuse to take yourself too seriously. They created music that was so purely themselves that it transcended trends, genres, and decades.

Still essential. Still mental. Still absolutely bloody brilliant. 6060-842!

RETROSPECTIVE: Bowie’sStationTo StationWithNoDartsInLovers’Eyes

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Time takes a Bowie album… and spawns the definitive retrospective.


It’s time for a Bowie Retrospective. After Young Americans, this is his trans-Atlantic mid-Seventies masterpiece signposting the genius redux on the horizon.

Nearly fifty years hence, Station To Station remains David Bowie’s most perplexing achievement, neither his most revolutionary nor his most accessible, but certainly his most necessary. Released in January 1976, it occupies that peculiar position in an artist’s canon where personal crisis, manic depression and artistic clarity converge with inspired precision. That Bowie himself claims to remember virtually nothing of its creation only deepens the mystery: how does one’s most cohesive statement emerge from complete psychological fragmentation? Or does it? It’s common knowledge people often have little or no recollection of bipolar episodes, and Seventies’ Bowie (Class A aside) is textbook manic episode creativity. But I digress.

The album functions as a fulcrum upon which Bowie’s entire career pivots, the moment when the glitter-encrusted showman shed his sequined skin and at this time alien contacts, to reveal something altogether more unsettling beneath. Six tracks, just six, yet each one a movement in what amounts to a symphony of identity crisis. This is Bowie as musical Dr. Jekyll, conducting experiments upon his own psyche with the detached fascination of a laboratory technician.

Musically, Station To Station represents Bowie’s most successful synthesis of seemingly incompatible elements. The Philadelphia soul he’d absorbed during his Young Americans period, that white British art-school graduate slumming it in the City of Brotherly Love (Brother Lee Love I only just got it during research) collides head-on with the mechanical metronomic precision of European electronic music. It shouldn’t work, this marriage of American warmth and Teutonic coldness, yet somehow it births something entirely new.

Earl Slick’s guitar work deserves particular attention. Gone are the bluesy histrionics and Sixties influences that had characterised Bowie’s previous guitar heroes; instead, Slick delivers lines that cut like scalpels, each note placed with obsessive precision. Listen to his work on “Stay”, those slashing chords that punctuate the verses aren’t mere rock posturing but architectural elements, supporting the song’s claustrophobic emotional weight. It’s guitar playing as urban planning, all sharp angles and deliberate omissions. The track itself embodies the album’s central tension: a seemingly straightforward rocker that reveals layers of unease beneath its propulsive surface. Bowie’s vocal alternates between desperate pleading and detached observation, while the band locks into a groove that feels simultaneously urgent and mechanical, the sound of someone running in place, trapped by their own momentum.

The rhythm section of Dennis Davis and George Murray provides the album’s mechanical heartbeat, a pulse that feels simultaneously human and robotic. Their work on the title track’s opening section transforms a simple 4/4 into something approaching industrial music, three years before Throbbing Gristle made such sounds esoterically fashionable. This is the rhythm of assembly lines and commuter trains, the metronomic beat of modern alienation. But “Station To Station” functions as more than mere sonic experimentation it’s a ten-minute manifesto of identity dissolution. The track’s structure mirrors its lyrical journey from European mysticism to American soul, with Bowie literally traveling from one musical station to another. The opening’s stark, almost ritualistic atmosphere gives way to the gospel-influenced finale, yet something essential remains lost in translation. The Duke emerges not as synthesis but as absence, the negative space between stations where no trains stop. Thankfully the Trilogy confirms he bought a return ticket.

Lyrically, Bowie constructs a peculiar theology that borrows from Nietzsche, Cambridge educated bisexual Aleister Crowley, the Kabbalah’s occultism, Judeo-Christianity and his infamous cocaine, milk and peppers fuelled paranoia. It’s a sort of spiritual algebra where traditional religious symbols are multiplied by pharmaceutical insight and divided by sexual desperation. If a Rock Star could be thus – gender confusion? The results don’t always make sense indeed, they’re not supposed to. This is the sound of a mind in free fall, grasping at mystical straws.

“TVC 15” transforms what might have been a simple paranoid episode into a peculiar love song addressed to a television set, the kind of domestic surrealism that would later mark Talking Heads’ best work. Yet where David Byrne would approach such material with Asperger’s detachment, Bowie invests it with genuine longing. The Duke may be emotionally vacant, but he’s not entirely dead inside.

It’s “Word On A Wing,” however, that provides the album’s most naked moment. Disguised as a love song but functioning as a prayer, it finds Bowie reaching towards something approaching grace. His vocal performance here, multi-tracked harmonies that create a choir of Bowies, each one seeking salvation in a slightly different key, represents perhaps his most vulnerable moment on record. The Duke’s marble facade cracks just enough to reveal the frightened human beneath.

The album’s visual identity proves equally calculated. That stark red-black-and-white cover avec an iconic still from Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth captures something essential about both album and era. Here is Bowie mid-stride, embodying alien detachment that defined the star mid-Seventies. The bold, minimalist typography strips away baroque excess, replacing it with corporate authority. This is alienation made manifest through graphic design, the Duke as extraterrestrial advertising executive smack bang in the peak Fifth Avenue heyday. And a lovely futuristic font style it is and stylistically redeployed here.

The synchronicity between album and film feels almost too neat, yet it works. Thomas Jerome Newton, Bowie’s gin-soaked alien entrepreneur, shares the Duke’s emotional remove and otherworldly perspective. Both exist as commentaries on American excess, observers rather than participants in the society they critique. That both emerged from the same period of pharmaceutical dissolution creates a multimedia meditation on identity and exile that feels genuinely prophetic.

Yet Station To Station is not without its limitations. The album’s brevity at barely 38 minutes is cruel to fans. Similarly, the album’s obsessive perfectionism occasionally works against it. Every element serves the whole, certainly, but sometimes one craves the messy humanity of Diamond Dogs’ unguarded moments. The Duke’s emotional detachment, while conceptually fascinating, can feel genuinely cold, a frigid barrier between artist and audience that even Bowie’s considerable charisma cannot entirely overcome. There’s a warmth in “Golden Years” that’s residual from the previous Young Americans album but different enough to spawn it’s own Bowie-generation, a stunning inclusion and single release that almost makes up for any deficiencies. We’re not going near the infamous salute and flirtation with the far right or any misunderstandings, but they exist so merit this mention.

The cover of “Wild Is The Wind” succeeds brilliantly as vocal performance but fails to entirely justify its inclusion. While Bowie’s voice stretches towards notes that seem almost beyond reach, a man grasping for salvation it remains unclear what this particular song adds to the album’s overarching narrative. It’s beautiful certainly, and would we be without it (a non-album single?) but beautiful in a way that feels slightly disconnected from the Duke’s particular path right then .

What makes Station To Station essential is not its perfection but its necessity. This is Bowie’s ‘Exile on Main St.’ an album born from extremity that transcends its circumstances. Where other artists might have been consumed by such personal turmoil, Bowie channelled it into his most disciplined statement. The cocaine psychosis that nearly destroyed him instead crystallised into diamond-hard brilliance.

The album’s influence can be traced through decades of post-punk anxiety, from Joy Division’s mechanical depression to The Prodigy’s electro-dance-punk hybrid. The Thin White Duke’s aesthetic all sharp suits and sharper cheekbone became a shorthand for alienated glamour, reimagined via the New Romantic Blitz Club Bowie Nights while the music’s marriage of warmth and coldness prefigured everything from New Order to Bloc Party.

Yet its true achievement lies in its function as an artistic Ground Zero. This is Bowie burning down his house to see what survives the flames, and discovering that what emerges from the ashes (to ashes) is something genuinely new. The Duke may be dead, but his ghost haunts everything Bowie would subsequently create, a reminder that sometimes the most profound art emerges not from comfort but from the desperate need to survive one’s own worst impulses or embedded periodic psychopathy.

Station To Station endures as proof that artistic necessity and personal crisis can produce results that transcend both. It’s neither Bowie’s most adventurous work nor his most commercially successful, but it may be his most honest and human, a document of a mind at war with itself, achieving temporary ceasefire through the discipline of writing and playing. In its now frozen perfection, it captures something essential about the terror of an artist in free fall, creating masterpieces from a wreckage of his own making.

#nowplaying Golden Years whap whap.

RETROSPECTIVE: The Discomforting Virtuosity Of The Stranglers Prescient Masterpiece

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The Stranglers’ genre-defying third album Black and White.

‘The album’s greatest achievement, visible only in retrospect, is how it managed to bridge multiple worlds simultaneously. It’s European art-rock disguised as British punk, progressive complexity wrapped in new wave accessibility, academic sophistication delivered with street-level aggression. This wasn’t difficult third album confusion, it was cultural synthesis of the highest order.‘

The Stranglers Black and White - Their post-punk defining third album.


The Stranglers in their original line-up have always been an awkward bunch to pin down. Too clever by half for the three-chord merchants, too hard for the art school crowd, and now, nearly five decades later, it’s clear that with Black and White, they were mapping out musical territory that the rest of us are still catching up to. This third LP finds Hugh Cornwell and his merry band of misanthropes wandering off into uncharted territory.

Make no mistake about it, this was never your standard punk fare, and time has only made that more obvious. The album’s position in their canon is rather like that of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper or Bowie’s Low – it’s when the band stopped being what people expected and took a hard fork and became something else entirely. Where Rattus Norvegicus and No More Heroes could still be filed under “angry young men with guitars,” Black and White reveals The Stranglers as something far more prescient: a band of genuine musical ability who understood that punk’s three-chord limitations were a creative dead end. Dave Greenfield’s keyboards, which seemed so alien to punk orthodoxy in 1978, now sound like a direct line to everything from Joy Division’s atmospheric menace to Depeche Mode’s electronic romanticism.

The album’s opener sets a tone that, viewed from today’s perspective, feels remarkably contemporary. There’s a European sensibility at work here that becomes more significant when you consider Cornwell’s academic background, his time pursuing doctoral studies in Sweden had clearly broadened his musical horizons beyond the parochial concerns of British punk. This is music that breathes Continental air, influenced as much by krautrock and European art movements as by the Ramones or The Sex Pistols. It’s telling that while their punk contemporaries were busy becoming parodies of themselves, The Stranglers were quietly absorbing influences from across the North Sea. “Let me tell you about Sweden!”

The musical sophistication that seemed so controversial at the time now appears as the album’s greatest strength. Jean-Jacques Burnel’s bass doesn’t just anchor these songs; it prowls through them with a melodic complexity that prefigures the art-rock basslines of bands like Radiohead. His French background, combined with Cornwell’s Scandinavian academic experience, created a cultural perspective that was uniquely European within the context of British punk, something that seemed like pretension in 1978 but reads as genuine cosmopolitanism today.

Which brings us to the question of genre, now settled by history’s verdict. This wasn’t punk, it was post-punk before the term existed, nascent yet to be defined new wave, and death and night and blood darkwave a full decade before any Goths claimed it. The progressive rock DNA in instrumental passages and influences that so scandalised the Peaches punk faithful in 1978 now seem like natural evolution rather than betrayal. There’s art-rock sensibilities that align them more to Bryan Ferry’s Roxy Music than Brian James’ era The Damned. When viewed alongside the career trajectories of contemporaries who stayed “pure,” The Stranglers’ willingness to embrace musical sophistication looks like wisdom rather than sell-out.

The pre-Stranglers ice-cream selling Jet Black’s drumming is phenomenal and displays the kind of precision that made contemporaries envious and now sounds like a masterclass in restraint and power. His technical ability, which punk doctrine suggested was somehow inauthentic, has aged far better than the amateur enthusiasm of many of his contemporaries. This was always about more than attitude, it was about creating something genuinely new from the wreckage of rock orthodoxy.

The production, courtesy of Martin Rushent, has aged remarkably well. That claustrophobic intensity, the sense of menace lurking in the spaces between notes, a kind of negative space threat, points directly towards the atmospheric post-punk that would dominate the early eighties. Rushent understood what The Stranglers were reaching for, a sound that was simultaneously ancient and futuristic, rooted in European classical traditions but pointing towards electronic possibilities.

The European influences run deeper than mere musical technique. Cornwell’s academic sojourn in Sweden exposed him to Nordic social democratic thinking, Scandinavian cultural pessimism, and a Continental intellectual tradition that was light-years removed from punk’s British working-class romanticism. You can hear it in the album’s lyrical sophistication, its philosophical undertones, its refusal to offer simple answers to complex questions. This wasn’t just rebellion, it was critique, informed by a broader cultural perspective than most British bands or songwriters could muster.

Lyrically, the album now reads as remarkably prescient social commentary rather than simple provocation. The themes of dystopian late stage capitalism, existential threat, social breakdown and cultural exhaustion that seemed left field shocking in 1978 now feel like accurate prophecy. The Stranglers weren’t just chronicling the decline of British society, they were anticipating the cultural fragmentation and the rise and fall of the Internet and social media that would define the following decades.

The album’s greatest achievement, visible only in retrospect, is how it managed to bridge multiple worlds simultaneously. It’s European art-rock disguised as British punk, progressive complexity wrapped in new wave accessibility, academic sophistication delivered with street-level aggression. This wasn’t difficult third album confusion, it was cultural synthesis of the highest order.

Looking back across the landscape of late-seventies music, Black and White now appears as one of the most innovative albums of its era. While The Clash were already retreating into reggae and rockabilly nostalgia and The Sex Pistols had combusted spectacularly, The Stranglers were quietly creating a template for alternative music that would influence generations of musicians. From the atmospheric post-punk of Joy Division to the electronic experimentation of Kraftwerk’s British disciples, the DNA of Black and White can be traced through decades of innovative music.

In the end, history has vindicated The Stranglers’ refusal to stay within punk’s narrow confines. What seemed like betrayal in 1978 now looks like vision, a recognition that musical progress required synthesis rather than purity, sophistication rather than simplicity, European cosmopolitanism rather than parochial nationalism. Hugh Cornwell’s Swedish academic experience, Jean-Jacques Burnel’s French cultural background, and the band’s collective refusal to be constrained by British musical traditions created something genuinely unique in the landscape of late-seventies music.

Black and White remains uncomfortable listening, but for different reasons now. In an era of algorithmic predictability and focus-grouped lo-fi rebellion, there’s something genuinely subversive about music that refuses easy categorisation. The Stranglers were always outsiders, even within punk’s supposedly inclusive chaos. With Black and White, they staked out territory so far from any mainstream that it took many decades to recognise its importance. Uncomfortable listening for uncomfortable times, which is exactly as it should be, and exactly why it matters more today than ever. What’s that in the shadows?

#NowPlaying – The Stranglers – Toiler On The Sea

RETROSPECTIVE: Lennon’s Lost Weekend

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John Lennon's Lost Weekend. At home in Beverly Hills.


Eighteen Months of Madness in the Heart of Hollywood. The ex-Beatle’s wildest period yet – sex, booze, and Rock’n’Roll excess that nearly destroyed a legend.

Right, so you think you know John Lennon? The peaceful Beatle, the ‘Bed-In’ revolutionary, the bloke who gave us “Imagine”? Well, think again, because between October 1973 and early 1975, our John went completely barmy in Los Angeles – and we do mean completely. They’re calling it his “Lost Weekend,” though at eighteen months, it’s more like a lost year and a half.

It all started when Yoko threw him out of their Dakota apartment. Yes, you heard right – she actually booted him out, told him to go find himself or some such psychological bollocks. “Go away and have your midlife crisis somewhere else,” was apparently the gist of it. So off trots Lennon to La-La Land with May Pang, Yoko’s 23-year-old assistant, who’d been hand-picked by Mrs Lennon herself to keep an eye on her wayward husband.

What followed was a period of such spectacular debauchery that even Keith Moon would’ve raised an eyebrow. Lennon, aged 33 and supposedly a reformed character, promptly went completely off the rails in the most American way possible.

First stop was a beach house in Santa Monica that quickly became legendary for all the wrong reasons. Lennon surrounded himself with a motley crew of musicians, hangers-on, and fellow piss heads who turned the place into something resembling a Rock’n’Roll commune crossed with a rehabilitation centre – except nobody was trying to get clean.

The core gang included Harry Nilsson (already well on his way to drinking himself to death), Ringo Starr (taking a break from his own marriage difficulties), Keith Moon (just because), and a rotating cast of session musicians, groupies, and general wastrels. They called themselves “The Hollywood Vampires” – which tells you everything you need to know about their priorities.

Days would start around noon with cocaine and brandy, move on to more serious drinking by mid-afternoon, and end with everyone unconscious in various compromising positions around dawn. Lennon, who’d supposedly given up the hard stuff years earlier, was necking everything he could get his hands on – whisky, vodka, tequila, you name it. The man who once sang about peace and love was now starting fights in nightclubs and getting thrown out of venues across Los Angeles.

The nadir came in March 1974 at the Troubadour club, where Lennon and Nilsson had gone to catch an Ann Peebles show. Both absolutely legless, they proceeded to heckle the poor woman throughout her set. When staff tried to quiet them down, Lennon apparently shouted something unrepeatable about the management’s parentage and stormed off to the toilets.

But here’s where it gets properly weird – instead of using the gents, our revolutionary hero decided to relieve himself in a cupboard, emerging with a sanitary towel stuck to his forehead like some demented tribal marking. The press had a field day, of course. “BEATLE JOHN’S TOILET SCANDAL” screamed the headlines, and suddenly the man who’d once been the most respected musician in the world was reduced to a laughing stock.

The incident became symbolic of everything wrong with Lennon’s LA period. Here was a bloke who’d written some of the most important songs of the decade, reduced to pissing in cupboards and wearing feminine hygiene products as headgear. It was pathetic, really.

Amazingly, amidst all this chaos, Lennon was still trying to make music. The problem was, he was too pissed most of the time to do it properly. Recording sessions for what would become “Walls and Bridges” were exercises in frustration, with Lennon turning up hours late, completely bladdered, and unable to remember lyrics he’d written the day before.

Producer Jack Douglas later described the sessions as “like trying to record with a very talented ghost who kept disappearing.” Lennon would start a take, wander off mid-song, and return hours later having forgotten what they were working on. It’s a miracle the album turned out as well as it did.

The saving grace was May Pang, who somehow managed to keep some semblance of order in the chaos. Twenty years younger than Lennon and completely out of her depth, she nevertheless became his anchor during this period. She’d drag him out of bars, clean him up for recording sessions, and generally prevent him from killing himself through sheer stupidity.

If you want to know how mental things got, consider this: Lennon thought it would be a brilliant idea to record an album of Rock’n’Roll covers with Phil Spector producing. Yes, that Phil Spector – the gun-toting maniac who was already showing signs of the complete breakdown that would later land him in prison for murder.

The sessions, held at various LA studios throughout 1974, were legendary for their dysfunction. Spector would turn up armed (literally), paranoid, and completely controlling. Lennon, meanwhile, was usually drunk and belligerent. The two would spend hours arguing about arrangements while session musicians sat around collecting overtime pay.

One session ended with Spector firing a gun in the studio and then disappearing with the master tapes, leaving Lennon with nothing to show for weeks of work. It was like something out of a Martin Scorsese film, except it was real life and nobody was laughing.

The thing is, beneath all the chaos and self-destruction, you could sense Lennon was actually quite miserable. This wasn’t the joyful excess of a rock star living it up – this was the desperate flailing of a man who’d lost his way completely.

Friends from the period describe him as paranoid, lonely, and increasingly aware that he was making a complete tit of himself. The press coverage was universally awful, his music was suffering, and worst of all, he was alienating himself from the son he claimed to love more than anything.

Julian was still back in England with Cynthia, and Lennon’s contact with the boy was sporadic at best. When he did ring, he was often too drunk to hold a proper conversation. It’s heartbreaking, really – here was a man who’d sung about love and peace, completely unable to maintain relationships with the people who mattered most to him.

The long and winding road back… By late 1974, even Lennon’s legendary constitution was showing signs of wear. He’d put on weight, looked terrible in photos, and was developing a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most unreliable talents. Studio executives were starting to avoid him, club owners were banning him, and his behaviour was becoming genuinely concerning to those around him.

The wake-up call came when he collapsed during a recording session, apparently from exhaustion and alcohol poisoning. Rushed to hospital, he spent several days recovering while doctors told him in no uncertain terms that his lifestyle was unsustainable.

It was then that May Pang apparently sat him down for a serious conversation about his future. According to those close to the situation, she basically told him he could continue on his current path and probably die, or he could sort himself out and try to salvage something from the wreckage of his life.

The irony is that throughout this entire period, Lennon was in regular contact with Yoko back in New York. She’d ring him every few days, ostensibly to check on his wellbeing but apparently also to monitor his behaviour. Some cynics suggest the whole “Lost Weekend” was orchestrated by Yoko from the beginning – a way of letting Lennon get all his middle-aged rebellion out of his system while keeping him on a very long leash.

Whether that’s true or not, by early 1975 it was clear that Lennon was ready to return to New York and his wife. The LA experiment had run its course, leaving behind a trail of damaged relationships, wasted opportunities, and some genuinely questionable musical decisions.

But here’s the thing – as much as the Lost Weekend period was a disaster in human terms, it also produced some of Lennon’s most honest and vulnerable music. “Walls and Bridges” contains some genuinely affecting songs about loneliness and regret, while the eventually completed “Rock’n’Roll” album, despite its troubled genesis, showed Lennon reconnecting with his musical roots in ways that would influence his later work.

So what do we make of John Lennon’s Lost Weekend? Was it a necessary period of self-exploration, or just eighteen months of expensive self-indulgence? The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between.

On one hand, it’s hard to have much sympathy for a millionaire rock star whose idea of finding himself involves drinking himself senseless in beach houses while his assistant-turned-girlfriend cleans up after him. The whole thing reeks of middle-class privilege and self-pity taken to absurd extremes.

On the other hand, there’s something genuinely tragic about watching one of the most important artists of his generation lose himself so completely. Lennon’s music had always been about honesty and emotional truth, and in some perverse way, his LA breakdown was probably the most honest thing he’d done in years.

The period also demonstrated something important about the nature of creativity and self-destruction in rock music. While the myth of the tortured artist is largely bollocks, there’s no denying that some of our greatest musicians have produced their most powerful work while falling apart personally. Lennon’s Lost Weekend wasn’t pleasant to witness, but it was undeniably real in a way that his more controlled periods sometimes weren’t.

Perhaps most importantly, it showed that even John Lennon – the man who’d helped change popular music forever – was still fundamentally human, still capable of making spectacular mistakes and learning from them. The fact that he eventually sorted himself out, returned to New York, and spent his final years as a devoted father and husband suggests that the Lost Weekend, for all its chaos, might have been a necessary part of his journey.

Whether it was worth eighteen months of madness is another question entirely. But then again, that’s Rock’n’Roll for you – never simple, never clean, and never quite what you expect from the outside.

Whatever gets you thru the night eh?

*The author wishes to acknowledge that this piece is based on publicly available information and interviews from the period, and that some details remain disputed by those involved.

#nowplaying John Lennon – Walls and Bridges (1974)

ART POP / POP ART: Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle

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The Birth of a Proto-Industrial Provocateur

Having grown up around the bleak industrial landscape of Hull in the late 1960s, a young Neil Andrew Megson, later to become Genesis P-Orridge, found himself at the Hull School of Art. Amid the pollution-stained buildings and dockyard silhouettes, this artistic institution became the crucible where Megson’s transformative journey began, a journey that would eventually lead to pioneering work in industrial music, performance art, and radical explorations of identity. Perhaps the most extreme example of the experience of art school manifesting in popular (sic) music.

The port city’s stark contrasts, its bleak post-war architecture juxtaposed against a vibrant underground arts scene provided the perfect backdrop for Megson’s early artistic development. Here, surrounded by the rhythmic machinery of Hull’s factories and the distant calls of ships, the foundations were laid for what would become a revolutionary artistic vision that challenged conventional boundaries of music, gender, and consciousness.

“I never wanted to be an artist in the conventional sense,” P-Orridge would later reflect. “I was more interested in using whatever medium seemed most effective to challenge control structures and question the assumptions underpinning society.”

At Hull, P-Orridge encountered the writings of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose cut-up technique would become a foundational methodology not only in P-Orridge’s literary experiments but eventually in the sonic assaults of Throbbing Gristle. The technique involving the physical cutting up and rearranging of text to create new meanings represented a form of artistic détournement that challenged linear narrative and conventional meaning.

Perhaps most significantly, Hull provided P-Orridge with a first taste of institutional resistance to provocative art. While studying there, P-Orridge began mail art projects and early performance pieces that deliberately pushed boundaries of taste and acceptability. These early forays into confrontational art would establish patterns that would define the rest of P-Orridge’s career.

It was during the Hull years that P-Orridge formed COUM Transmissions with Cosey Fanni Tutti in 1969. Initially conceived as a fluid musical and performance art collective, COUM represented a direct application of P-Orridge’s art school philosophy: art should disrupt, challenge and provoke rather than merely decorate or entertain.

The influence of Fluxus, the avant-garde art movement that emphasised the artistic process over finished products, was evident in COUM’s approach. Like many art school graduates who formed bands in this period, P-Orridge saw little distinction between visual art, performance, and music; all were simply different vehicles for expressing ideas and challenging established norms. The entire Art School system served as an incubator for artists and creators to produce work for a burgeoning post-war consumer society

COUM’s performances grew increasingly provocative, incorporating elements of self-mutilation, pornography, and occult symbolism. Their development paralleled similar explorations in Vienna Actionism and other radical performance art movements, but with a distinctly British working-class inflection that added both grit and humour to their provocations.

The culmination of COUM’s art school-inspired approach came with the infamous “Prostitution” exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1976. The exhibition, which included pornographic images of COUM member Cosey Fanni Tutti from adult magazines alongside used tampons and other provocative items, caused a national scandal. Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn famously denounced the group as “wreckers of civilisation,” a title P-Orridge and company wore with pride.

When COUM Transmissions evolved into Throbbing Gristle in 1976, it represented not an abandonment of art school principles but their logical extension into sound. The four members—Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson approached music not as trained musicians but as conceptual artists working in sound.

Throbbing Gristle’s sonic palette of distorted electronics, found sounds, atonal improvisations, and disturbing samples directly reflected art school methodologies. Their approach to music production paralleled the mixed-media assemblages and collages taught in art foundation courses. The band’s very name, Yorkshire slang for an erection, indicated their continued commitment to provocation and their working-class roots.

P-Orridge explained their approach: “We wanted to see if one could make music like an art movement, like Dada or Surrealism, rather than as entertainment… We were interested in information war, in using sound as a weapon, as a tool for change.”

The group’s establishment of Industrial Records and their coining of the term “industrial music” represented a conceptual art move as much as a musical one. The label’s logo, a photograph of the Auschwitz crematorium and slogan “Industrial Music for Industrial People” explicitly positioned their work as a commentary on post-industrial Britain and the mechanisation of society.

Beyond their own creative output, P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle became nexus points for a wider network of art school graduates working across disciplines. Their association with publications like RE/Search helped disseminate ideas from the European avant-garde and postmodern theory into underground music circles.

P-Orridge, in particular, became a conduit through which concepts from critical theory, occultism, and poststructuralism entered the post-punk musical landscape. The band’s Industrial Records label released work by fellow art school provocateurs like Monte Cazazza and SPK, creating what amounted to a distributed art movement operating under the guise of a record label. This intellectual approach distinguished Throbbing Gristle from many of their contemporaries. While punk often expressed its dissatisfaction through direct, emotional expressions of anger, TG’s approach was more analytical, using strategies of détournement, appropriation, and conceptual framing derived directly from their art school backgrounds.

After Throbbing Gristle disbanded in 1981, P-Orridge continued to apply art school methodologies in the formation of Psychic TV and the Temple of Psychick Youth (TOPY). These projects further developed the idea of erasing boundaries between art, music and life, now central to P-Orridge’s philosophy.

TOPY, in particular, functioned as a kind of alternative art school in itself, with P-Orridge as the provocateur-teacher at its centre. Through publications, rituals, and networking, TOPY disseminated techniques of collage, sigil magic (itself a form of symbolic visual art), and conscious mythmaking to a generation of followers.

In these later projects, the influence of P-Orridge’s art school background remained evident. The cut-up technique first encountered through Burroughs and Gysin became central to TOPY’s magical practices. The network’s visual aesthetic, a mixture of occult symbolism, industrial imagery, and pornography drew on the same transgressive visual language developed during the COUM/Throbbing Gristle years.

Perhaps the most profound expression of P-Orridge’s art school thinking came in the later Pandrogeny Project, undertaken with second wife Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. This project, which involved both partners modifying their bodies through plastic surgery to resemble one another, represented the ultimate extension of art school principles into life itself.

The project explicitly referenced conceptual art precedents like Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy and drew on theoretical frameworks around gender and identity that had become staples of advanced art school education by the 1990s. In becoming the artwork, P-Orridge fulfilled the ultimate art school ambition of erasing the boundary between art and life.

P-Orridge described the project as “breaking DNA control,” a phrase that encapsulated their lifelong artistic project of challenging biological, social, and cultural determinism, a project that began in the studios and classrooms of Hull School of Art.

Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle exemplify how art school education provided not just technical skills but conceptual frameworks that musicians could deploy to revolutionary effect. Unlike many rock musicians who attended art school but ultimately produced conventional music, TG maintained an uncompromising commitment to the avant-garde principles they encountered in their education.

Their influence extends far beyond the immediate industrial music scene they helped create. The analytical, theory-informed approach to making music pioneered by Throbbing Gristle became a template for generations of experimental musicians who approached their work as conceptual art rather than mere entertainment.

When P-Orridge died in March 2020 (from leukaemia), the obituaries rightly positioned h/er not just as a musician but as an artist whose primary medium happened to include sound. In this, the art school had done its job, not producing a conventional artist, but nurturing a creative revolutionary who used every available tool to challenge, provoke, and transform.

The story of Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle reminds us yet again that sometimes the most profound musical innovations come not from conservatories or traditional music education, but from the conceptually rich, boundary-pushing environment of the art school. In their noise, distortion, and transgression, we can hear the echoes of critiques first encountered in the classrooms and studios of provincial British art schools transformed into sounds that would change musical history forever.

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Art Pop / Pop Art: a study of the influences of art school, famous artists and movements on pop and rock music. Those institutions where failure is motivation, where the eccentric and pretentious emerge into the fascinating space where art and music meet.

ART POP / POP ART: The Clash Cut And Paste Revolution

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As the amber lights of The Rainbow dimmed on a hot night in May 1976, few in the perspiring audience realised they were witnessing more than just another gig. The Clash, in their first major London appearance promoting White Riot while supporting the The Jam, Buzzcocks and Subway Sect represented something beyond mere musical rebellion. In the jagged guitar work of Mick Jones and the snarling bass lines of Paul Simonon lay the foundations of a visual and conceptual revolution that owed as much to the corridors of Britain’s art schools as it did to the streets of Notting Hill.

The conventional narrative of punk rock often emphasises its working-class roots, positioning the movement as a visceral reaction against both the excesses of progressive rock and the stifling economic conditions of 1970s Britain. Yet beneath this compelling but simplified account lies a more nuanced story, one in which formal artistic training and calculated aesthetic choices played roles as crucial as raw anger and three-chord progressions.

Paul Simonon’s journey to becoming the iconic perfect cheek-boned bassist of The Clash began not with a guitar in his hands but with charcoal and canvas. His time at Byam Shaw School of Art in London, though brief, was highly influential and established a visual sensibility that would later define the band’s aesthetic as much as their sound.

“I was always drawing, even before music came along, that was my thing. I’d spend hours sketching the streets, the people, trying to capture something real about London that wasn’t in the tourist brochures.” Paul Simonon 1991.

At Byam Shaw, Simonon encountered formal artistic disciplines while maintaining his outsider’s perspective. Though he departed after just a year, frustrated by what he perceived as the institution’s disconnect from the urgent social realities of mid-1970s London, the techniques he absorbed proved transformative. His understanding of composition, negative space, and visual impact would later inform everything from The Clash’s stage presence to their iconic album artwork.

Malcolm McLaren, who through his partnership with Vivienne Westwood ran the Sex boutique in Soho, a place where punk band members congregated and the future Sex Pistols recruited noted: “Paul brought something different to punk, an actual artist’s eye. He understood intuitively how to construct an image that would provoke and endure. That’s not accidental; that’s training.”

This training manifested most visibly in Simonon’s approach to the bass guitar itself. Unlike many musicians who viewed their instruments purely as sonic tools, he approached his Fender Precision Bass (and occasional Rickenbacker 4001) as a visual element, a prop in a carefully constructed tableau. His famous bass-smashing moment, captured on the cover of “London Calling,” demonstrates this synthesis perfectly. The moment, often mistaken for spontaneous rage, was in fact a considered piece of performance art that Simonon later acknowledged drew from his understanding of compositional drama.

“I knew exactly what I was doing,” he admitted years later. “It wasn’t just anger, though there was plenty of that. It was about creating something visually powerful, something people would remember.”

While Simonon brought the raw visual power of street art and expressionism to The Clash, Mick Jones arrived with a different artistic heritage. His time at Hornsey College of Art, though similarly abbreviated, exposed him to post-war modernist thought that profoundly shaped his approach to songwriting and performance.

Hornsey had established itself as a hotbed of radical artistic thought following the famous student occupation of 1968, when students and faculty seized control of the college for six weeks, demanding fundamental reforms to art education. Though Jones arrived after this watershed moment, the institution retained its reputation for encouraging experimental approaches that questioned established boundaries between artistic disciplines.

“At Hornsey, they were teaching us that everything connected, art wasn’t just painting pictures to hang on walls; it was about communication, about challenging people to see things differently. That’s exactly what we were trying to do with The Clash.” Mick Jones.

This modernist, interdisciplinary approach shaped Jones’s guitar style and songwriting. His compositions frequently juxtaposed seemingly incompatible elements such as reggae rhythms against hard rock guitar lines, poetic social commentary against street slang, creating a collage effect that mirrored the cut-and-paste aesthetic of the band’s visual presentation.

Professor Brian Fielding, who taught at Hornsey during Jones’s brief tenure, observed: “Mick wasn’t our most technically accomplished student, but he grasped something essential about modernism the idea that art gains power through juxtaposition and re-contextualisation. When The Clash combined rockabilly with political manifestos or dub reggae with punk energy, that was pure modernist technique.”

No examination of The Clash’s artistic foundations would be complete without acknowledging the profound influence of artist, journalist and activist Caroline Coon. Though not formally their teacher in an institutional sense, Coon became a critical mentor figure whose background in fine art and radical politics helped shape the band’s direction.

After studying at Central Saint Martins in the 1960s, Coon had established herself as both a painter and a counter-cultural journalist when she encountered The Clash in their formative stages. Recognising their potential, she became their manager and de facto artistic director.

“Caroline understood exactly what we were trying to become before we did, she saw that punk wasn’t just about making noise; it was about creating a complete alternative language, visual, musical, political, everything.” Joe Strummer.

Coon brought rigorous artistic thinking to the band’s presentation. Her formal training enabled her to articulate visual strategies that amplified their political message. Under her guidance, The Clash developed a cohesive aesthetic that drew from Russian Constructivism, Jamaica’s political poster art, and American abstract expressionism, synthesising these influences into something that felt simultaneously revolutionary and accessible.

“I was simply applying what I’d learned as an art student,” Coon later explained modestly. “Art is most powerful when it connects with people’s lives, when it speaks to real conditions. The Clash had something urgent to say about those conditions, and my contribution was helping them find the visual vocabulary to say it.”

What distinguished The Clash from many of their punk contemporaries was their sophisticated understanding of bricolage, the postmodern technique of constructing new meaning through the recombination of existing cultural elements. This approach, central to the teaching at both Byam Shaw and Hornsey during the period, became fundamental to The Clash’s artistic strategy.

Simonon’s hand-painted shirts and customised instruments, Jones’s collage-inspired songwriting, and the band’s repurposing of military and workwear fashion all demonstrated bricolage in action. They appropriated symbols from across the cultural spectrum, from RAF target roundels to American western imagery, reconfiguring them to create new, subversive meanings.

This wasn’t merely fashion; it was applied semiotics. As cultural theorist Dick Hebdige would later observe in his seminal work “Subculture: The Meaning of Style,” The Clash’s visual presentation constituted “a form of consumer resistance” in which commercial objects were “worn and displayed in a way that subverted their original meaning.”

Bernie Rhodes, who managed the band after Coon’s departure, recognised the strategic value of this approach: “Most bands just wanted to make records. The Clash understood they were creating a complete cultural intervention. Every photograph, every poster, every stage set was carefully considered. That came directly from Mick and Paul’s art school background.” Evidenced also by the fury surrounding the release of Remote Control by CBS without their approval and subsequent rejection of this in the lyrics of Complete Control.

By the time The Clash released “London Calling” in 1979, the artistic influences that had shaped their development had cohered into a singular vision. The album’s iconic cover featuring Simonon smashing his bass on stage, was deliberately modelled after Elvis Presley’s debut album, creating a multi-layered visual statement about rock history and punk’s position within it.

Graphic designer Ray Lowry, who created the cover, worked closely with the band to realise this concept. “They weren’t like other musicians I’d worked with,” Lowry later recalled. “They understood design; they could talk about typography and composition. They knew exactly the historical references they wanted to invoke and subvert.”

Inside, the music demonstrated how completely Jones and Simonon had absorbed and transformed their artistic influences. Songs like “Lost in the Supermarket” applied situationist critiques of consumer culture that might have come straight from a Hornsey College lecture hall. “The Guns of Brixton” reflected Simonon’s ability to translate the visual immediacy of his art school training into urgent sonic landscapes.

In the decades following The Clash’s dissolution, both Jones and Simonon continued to demonstrate the lasting impact of their artistic foundations. Jones’s work with Big Audio Dynamite pioneered the integration of sampling and video art into rock music, while Simonon returned explicitly to the visual arts, exhibiting paintings that reflected his continuing engagement with urban landscapes and social commentary.

Their influence extended far beyond their own careers. The art school to punk pipeline they exemplified became a recognised pathway in British music, with institutions like Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, and the Royal College of Art producing successive generations of musicians who approached popular music as a multi-disciplinary art form rather than mere entertainment.

As writer Jon Savage noted: “The crucial contribution of The Clash was demonstrating that popular music could be simultaneously accessible and intellectually sophisticated, visceral and visually literate. That’s the art school legacy in action.”

In today’s fragmented cultural landscape, where musicians routinely control every aspect of their presentation across multiple media platforms, The Clash’s integrated artistic approach seems remarkably prescient. What appeared revolutionary in 1976, the idea that a band should consider every aspect of their output as part of a cohesive artistic statement has become standard practice.

This transformation owes much to those afternoons Simonon spent sketching at Byam Shaw, to Jones’s exposure to modernist theory at Hornsey, and to their collective willingness to apply formal artistic training to the raw materials of punk rock. In doing so, they helped establish popular music as a legitimate field for serious artistic expression, a cultural battlefield where trained artists could deploy their skills in service of authentic communication rather than academic abstraction.

The legacy of The Clash reminds us that the most enduring cultural revolutions often occur at the intersection of formal training and raw expression, where the techniques of the academy meet the urgency of the streets, creating something neither could produce alone.

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Art Pop / Pop Art: a study of the influences of art school, famous artists and movements on pop and rock music. Those institutions where failure is motivation, where the eccentric and pretentious emerge into the fascinating space where art and music meet.