Blowing out the sails of any new entity that wants to climb the rockpile is a game that you can easily get into. I mean, 99% of the musical papers are waving the 1984 Rock banner advocating mainstreet boot-hustler bands as the definitive solution to the wrinkles breaking out on Lady Rock's treble chins.
She's no high-school Madonna no more, the cracks in the plaster are showing through in the last couple of years.
Agreed, but shoving her into the geriatric division and trading her in for a new fresh-faced adolescent model is only sweeping the failure under the Wurlitzer and gets nobody nowhere fast.
Talent's been the rock drain, not enough of it gettin through, that is. From the '60s acne-sproutings of the East End London bands, the Gasoline Alley rebel posers of the '60s have receded and grown up into flatulent Yves St Laurent hobnob poncers. It's an extreme treacle somersault, but that's the trick. Like it or not, most people get a little bit older, a little bit more affluent and a little bit more removed from R&R.
All right, it's '76/'77 full circle, the Rock almanac hasn't done the full turn. Nothing happened. The clock chimed midnight. Lady Rock refused to throw in the rich garb and get her butt back where she once belonged. So you gotta get a stand-in. I mean, the streets are in a starvation stranglehold, young blood flowin' through the city. It needs a sound, something that s born from the basement, that crawls with a Gene Vincent limp on a starvation diet, because it holds out, doesn't compromise, because it still wants to blow R&R more than clock-a-card or push-a-broom on a factory floor.
Big Brother on the media hotline calls it 'punk', 'New Wave'. R&R answers, neatly packaged to file away, to become reference notes, appendix slot-notes and asterix explanations a couple of years from now.
But for me the brakes go straight down on this one. The promotional balloon that's been zooming way into space has been trailing a lot of leeches who would never have seen the inside of a recording studio if it wasn't for the hype circus of the media backing. My reaction? Kick out the scabo. The M.C.5 would have done it. There's a lot of high-powered dreck attached to this whole new manufactured pose - the real stuff's only gonna come out when the dust starts settling. If what comes out is genuine R&R talent, then the whole hobby-horse ride has been worth the saddlesores. But whatever, at this stage we ve gotta take a long, calculated look at what's goin' down in the garden shed, the pages of the 'Sniffin' Glue' or The Ramones' backyard if it's all gonna survive in the long run.
The Clash, The Jam, The Vibrators all still leave me down on Desolation Row, ready to throw out an old-folks cliched spiel. I told you so. The dupes to me are ripping up The Kinks, Downliner Sect, The Pretty Things, bedwetting like some early Michael Philip jamming in with Alexis Korner. It reminds me of how good the originals really were. So there's no point in pretending. I'm skeptical of the whole bash and I'm the wrong side of 15 to boot.
Shamrock Punk-in-the-flesh is staring right at me: two deviants from the Planet Punkaloon giving me the news that R&R has finally turned over. I go in game, rememberin' Dr Zim's words and roll with the changes. Philip Chevron and Peter Holidai fill in the bare-knuckled goings-on of the Radiators. 'Television Screen', the silver bullet single on Chiswick dented the English charts and has made No. 1 on the alternate New Wave charts. Sounds reviewed it a "record of the week". Tony Parsons made a comment like, "stoopid title, stoopid name," but gave the sound a thumbs-up. Philip Chevron comes on, as the main mouth.
"I know a lot of people say, 'oh yeah, The Radiators are a load of copy-crap', but for the past six years we've been playing our present kind of music and that hasn't changed. It's still music inspired by The Velvets, Iggy Stooge, The H.C.5. Punk Rock as a label came along and that made it easier for us, but we've always been doing that, so it's not English bandwagon-jumping as the Irish media have coined us. We d still be doing it even if reggae was the current thing . . .
" . . . It's really only since last November that the present line-up have come overground, when we supported The Hot Rods at Belfield. Before that, we were Bent Fairy and The Punks, before that Greta Garbage and The Trash Cans. A lot of guys would come and go, who wanted to play Deep Purple. It was impossible to get and keep a unit together, who were in touch with Noo York bands like Television, The Ramones, The Flamin' Groovies."
I start off innocently gettin' a run down on the, er, Celtic punkfield - what sort of effect have they been undercovering on the highways and byways?
"Carlow started off as a gig. For the first couple of numbers the audience was just shoutin' and slaggin' us. We took it all and gave it back, twice as bad."
Peter Holiday s cockney accents voicing this time: " . . . and at the end of the gig we won - we left as a good band. They wanted us back. Maybe they'll get up and do it the next time, instead of waiting for us. That's what it should be all about - new happenings. New young bands playing their own material are worth a thousand R&R bands doing food versions of 'Stairway To Heaven'. I mean, there's at least four or five new bands coming through with their own personal style. There s a group from Derry called The Undertones - they gigged with us at the Baggot. There's another new band from Derry called Dick Tracy And The Green Disaster - they're going to do a residency with us in July."
Meanwhile I thinks . . . C'mon, throw in Geldof, you're way behind. Calm rappin's nowhere. This isn't an afternoon-tea gossip corner.
The astronauts are already passin' around a bottle of Bell's whisky and lookin' bored, mean 'n' ornery style. I mention The Rats.
Yeah, I've just hit the right aggro number. There's a pained, jacknifed silence.
"The Boomtown Rats would never claim to be New Wave." Chevron's in for the wharf battle . . . "The Rats were R&R when New Wave became fashionable and they latched on to the trappings. Now, I don't wanna knock them either. It sounds like bitching. I think they're great - they did something in Ireland which nobody did before in years and in many ways they opened the way for us."
They also ripped off some of your ideas? " . . . I'm not going to wash the dirty linen, just to say, at the start, people put us down as sub-Rats and that was a drawback. I mean, we used the flashing white lights, the slides, right from the beginning and that predated The Rats."
But Cockney s breakin' up the beefcake . . . "Slagging - having a got at The Rats and any other New Wave band - is negative. It's going against what we believe in, 'cos they've got a good band. They've gone out and done something worthwhile and we're gonna back them up. Geldof, we hope, would do the same for us - it's just petty bashin' - it doesn't fit." Chevron's back in . . .
". . . It doesn't matter, like what happened in England. The Jam and The Clash did a tour together and they were supposed to back the tour for the fairly unknown bands who couldn't afford it. The Jam got heavy about money and The Clash or CBS had to take on responsibility for the tour. They lost £17,000 and there's this great feud between The Clash and The Jam. It's like what Tony Parsons said last week in NME, "While we re feuding among ourselves, the real enemies are laughing."
Right, the accents aren't in the Lord Fauntelroy class, but they sure as hell aren't monosyllabic grumblings. They ring clear, articulate, middle core, right side of town clips and this turns the knife for me. This is one irony I can't come to terms with - this whole swastika-juice-joint bovver breed. Vincent, Reed, M.C.5 were authentic street hoods with no pretensions (Bet your ass on that one, Cannon? - Ed.) uh duh numbers, the real muted punch-drunk lingo specialists.
"No, that's a load of crap, we've said it in interviews twice. We're middle class, we've never claimed otherwise, never tried to hide anything. The Pistols have pretended, The Clash . . . " Chevron's in on the dialectic attack . . . " have pretended, and everyone who knows our hand knows we're from Art School. R&R is a fantasy. It s always been that way. Lookit Jagger, he did the same. He was never working-class. His father was a teacher. It's not as if we're comfortable, we're not full-time. We can't afford to be in Ireland. We work part-time toilet-cleaning!"
It fits too smugly. I say it.
"It's not relevant," Chevron s got his hair ruffled. "It is." "No, it isn t . . ."
Suit yourself, stick it in the closet. Who gives a crap whether you're a part-time brain-surgeon singing Rock Follies? I know I don't, uh hum too. " . . . working-class, middle-class, is there any great distinction any more? We're all forced to go through the educational machine. I mean, when I went to school, I didn't go as much as I should. I went in two and a half days a week. I went on the hop into town, purely for the reason that if I went in and did the work, I'd come out as a moron. I saw the people in the A classes - they were absolutely fucken morons - appalling people, just learning machines and now they haven't got jobs and wonder why. They spent their entire lives working towards this and nothing happened. They just resisted the whole educational system, you've got to educate yourself or you come out with nothing. You know just lots of things about nothing. I mean, that's the whole point of punk - it's ignoring, doing the opposite of what you're conditioned to do. You can even bring it back to Salvador Dali, he was the first punk. It's personal anarchy, ignoring the conventions, the norm. There's no formulated plan, unlike the hippie movement that got bogged down in peace and love and failed to realise the realities - which isn't peace and love."
Will the real Jean Paul Sartre please stand up! I m moving on into music - it s safer. This guy's gonna get into punk metaphysics and start asking questions.
"Musically, we're our own bosses. We're not going to be dictated to by anyone, least of all the record company. Just take The Clash, the company are making tracks, not what the band wants, but what the company wants."
Peter Holidai takes it in on the home run. "We're starting the LP soon - basically just putting down single tracks like 'Sunday World' at the moment, and playing around. Chiswick's always behind us in everything we do, but we really owe a lot to Eamonn Carr. He took us up when we were not a viable proposition. He believed in us, and still does. When everyone thought we were a joke, he knew we were capable of it."
Okay, good time plugs over, back to the band-scratch. "People criticise us for not having a main frontman, but I think that's our strongest point. The Radiators are five distinct ideas but on the same level and going in the same direction. Jagger had Richard to bounce ideas off. It has to work like that to have a democratic levelling. I mean, our music is 90% original."
Where do you place the roots?
"I dunno, '60s? Not really. The '60s had its roots in the '50s, the music of the '80s will have roots in the '70s. Our new single 'Television Screen' is based on R&B, a 12-bar Chuck Berry idiom. It s taking that theme and making it seem fresh, amphetamined to suit today. That's Geldof's idea as well - to take the music of the '50s, '60s, '70s, Bowie, The Dolls, and merge them into late '70s and '80s. It's an exercise in freshness. I think we've succeeded in following a direct line even to the beat boom of the '60s. In Dublin, you have The Creatures, Peter Adler and The Action, The Greenbeats. There hasn't been anyone since Adler who can walk down the street. They knew he was a local hero. Yeah, there have been heroes like Lynott and Gallagher, but who are too far removed from kids to be real. In fact, without being bigheads, we are the successors to Adler, because we know from reactions from our audience after gigs that there is that sort of thing."
How do you follow that one? I ain't even gonna try. Hold back the '80s!