Thursday, October 29, 2015
Public Image Ltd get it together in the country
"Well, punk was really a reaction against people like me, wasn’t it?" as Steve Winwood once said.
So there is a delicious irony to the fact that John Lydon's Public Image Ltd now record their albums at his Cotswold studio.
See them there in this video, and read a little more about that irony in John Lydon, Steve Winwood and the taming of punk.
The fact that punk was happily absorbed into the opening ceremony for the London Olympics a few months after I wrote that post suggests I was on to something.
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4 comments:
Although you could argue that PiL aren't really punk nowadays in the music they write.
Punk was a reaction. There was a fashion element but you didn't need to dress up in a bin bag to listen to great rhythm and blues. Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds delivered great rock blues. Graham Parker had a lot of soul. The best punk comes from country with a bit of psycho.
Steve Winwood was not the enemy. He had humour and a laugh. Led Zep style rock was inspiration for punks, but something to be kicked aside.
Prog rock was and is rubbish, and we should thanks punks for kicking it over.
Not that hoary old Big Lie again, largely made up Stalinist idiots lile Jilie Burchill in the music press.
A lot of the original punks, including The Damned's Captain Sensible and Rotten himself were big fans of some prog-rock bands, Van der Graaf Generator's Peter Hamill was a big influence on Rotten's distinctive vocal style, and Sensible was a fan of the Canterbury Scene.
Punk was as much a reaction against the terrible state of top-40 pop in 1975/6, much of which, unlike prog-rock, has long been forgotten.
If you grew up in the 1970s, you couldn't help listening to prog rock. Your mates played Yes and Genesis. You had to be a mate of Mark E Smith to escape it.
So, Tim, I agree that the original punks grew up with prog. They also grew up with nascent heavy metal which contributed a fair few riffs to the punk repertoire.The biggest lie, perhaps, was that punks were listening to New York bands.
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