Oh Bondage, Up Yours Again!

While younger readers may scoff at the prospect of yet another opportunity for oul' lads to reminisce about the "glory days" of Punk Rock, there's no doubt that the recent release of 1-2-3-4: Punk & New Wave 1976-1979 on Universal provides the perfect platform for a pogo through the potholes of Pop history.

This 5-CD, 100-track collection has been playing utter havoc with my living pattern over the past week, causing unwarranted outbreaks of mirth during a particularly dramatic moment in Fair City (I tried explaining to my girlfriend that I'd just had a flashback to the Not Sensibles' "I'm In Love With Margaret Thatcher" — not much joy there) and the other night I found myself in a semi-sleeping state wondering if the Sex Pistols were actually going to be the "special guests" at Thin Lizzy's Dalymount bash. For anyone who hit legal drinking age when these songs were first released be warned: domestic disruption ahoy!

So, Punk Rock, what was it all about then? The popular notion is that it was an excuse for snotty adolescents (overwhelmingly white and male, as usual) to make a racket, wear stupid clothes and annoy their elders. It managed this without any bother of course, mainly kickstarted by the outrage the Pistols caused by cursing like pirates' parrots on Bill Grundy's teatime programme in December 1976 (which wasn't in Malcolm McLaren's plans at all), but what it really did was open a temporary wormhole to the music industry universe, allowing all manner of barely-competent mavericks the opportunity to have a crack at a career without first being required to play the Brandenburg Concertos blindfolded. It looked easy and it looked like a heap of fun — what more encouragement could anyone want?

The roots of Punk in these islands had in fact been established in the States years previously. Rock critic (and later guitarist with The Patti Smith Group) Lenny Kaye's classic 1972 compilation Nuggets brought the deranged howlings of lost '60s garage bands to a wider audience, while the in-yer-face approach of The Stooges, MC5 and New York Dolls was in direct contrast to the prevailing Prog and Country Rock consensus. The Velvet Underground also had a huge influence on the early '70s New York scene which gave us Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads and Television — indeed Malcolm McLaren took the ripped t-shirt/safety pin/spiky hair look from then Television bassist Richard Hell, so his time helping out the Dolls wasn't completely wasted. But it was the avowedly non-arty quartet The Ramones who defined one of Punk's main strands: buzz-fuzz guitars, ultra-short songs, chanted choruses and a speed-setting which read FAST!

By the summer of 1975 it was obvious from the NY despatches of NME's Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and Mick Farren that something serious was stirring abroad. Throughout the following year this disease of disaffection spread to this side of the Atlantic and by the time The Ramones released their debut album in July '76 the whole thing was primed to explode. Let's not forget that in Britain the fuelled-up R&B of Dr Feelgood and Eddie & The Hot Rods was also softening up the ground for the subsequent uprising (the shadows of Bowie, Bolan and, to a lesser extent, Slade were also evident in what eventually happened) but when the Sex Pistols released "Anarchy In The UK" in November of that year we finally had lift-off (without Ayesha!).

The opening four tracks of 1-2-3-4 comprise a rocket-fuelled fanfare for this alternative universe, bringing us The Clash ("Complete Control"), Sex Pistols ("Anarchy"), The Damned ("New Rose") and The Ramones ("The Blitzkrieg Bop"), classic slices of Rock 'n' Roll all, yet it's after those that things become really interesting, proving yet again that both the demons and the deities are to be found in the details. Some acts were quick to realise that something potentially lucrative was afoot. All any half-decent pub R&B band needed do to jump aboard was speed up, write some vaguely angry lyrics, cut their hair, ditch the flares for drainpipes and — hey presto! — they were a "Punk" band. The Clash's Joe Strummer had seen service with The 101ers, while 999, The Vibrators, The Boomtown Rats, The Saints and The Stranglers all found the new climate very much to their liking, but it was when the bedroom dreamers and complete chancers were let loose, that the glorious and the goofy began to appear on an almost weekly basis.

Back in Dublin this startling state of affairs didn't go unnoticed. Golden Discs in Liffey Street was the first shop where these wild artefacts we were reading about in NME and Sounds, (Melody Maker remained steadfastly loyal to Prog Rock until almost 1979) could be purchased, soon to followed by Advance Records on King Street. Otherwise, physical manifestations of the phenomenon were thin on the ground.

At the time The Boomtown Rats were little more than a Dr. Feelgood tribute band (although they wised up pretty sharpish) but there was hope on the horizon in the shape of The Radiators From Space, who made their live debut supporting Eddie & The Hot Rods in Belfield in November '76. Here was a band who looked and sounded the part, heavily influenced by Nuggets but, with a promising writing team developing in guitarists Philip Chevron and Pete Holidai, The Rads would go on to become one of the country's finest ever acts. Their immortal "Television Screen" is included on the box-set and by the time they were picking up "Single Of The Week" accolades across the water, they were far from alone.

The fanzine Heat stoked the flames further — apart from covering emerging Irish acts Heat had also a distinct fondness for American Power Pop and an attitude approaching contempt for Bob Geldof — and within six months the city's live circuit was playing host to contenders like Revolver, The Vipers and The Gamblers, soon to be followed by the next wave of The Sinners, The Fabulous Fabrics, The Boy Scoutz, Strange Movements and Sordid Details. But if Dublin was beginning to cop on, they were already miles ahead of us up North.

Terri Hooley, the owner of Belfast record shop Good Vibrations, galvanised the Northern music scene by setting up a label of the same name and four of their releases make a deserved appearance on 1-2-3-4. The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" you may have heard of, but Rudi's "Big Time" is one hell of a way for a label to announce itself to the world — a near-perfect blend of Pop and Punk. Funny thing, there were far more studios and bands in Dublin than the whole of Northern Ireland yet down here everyone seemed to be waiting for someone to do something for them rather than getting off their arses and doing it themselves — while up the road they were practically bringing out singles as soon as they'd written a song.

Up until 1979 the Northern bands also seemed to be far more melodic than their Southern counterparts, with Protex ("Don't Ring Me Up" makes the collection), The Tearjerkers, The Moondogs, X-Dreamysts and Ruferex all making their mark. The Outcasts' "Just Another Teenage Rebel" fits comfortably into Northern Pop mode but their East Belfast skinhead image was likely to provoke adverse reactions in the Republic, as was proved one night following a gig in The Magnet when a coachload of the band's fans had a running battle with local hardchaws up and down Pearse Street. Still, that particular incident did at least, er, inspire Strange Movements' "Dancing In The Ghetto", sadly not included here for posterity.

The undercurrent of violence was never too far away at Punk gigs. In England, Sham 69 ("Borstal Breakout"), Slaughter And The Dogs ("Where Have All The Bootboys Gone"), Angelic Upstarts ("The Murder Of Liddle Towers") and The Ruts ("In A Rut") all favoured an ultra-heavy image and attracted a similar following. Over here, the initial crowd going to the gigs had comprised avid NME readers and people who 'd gladly spend long hours in the pub talking about forming bands but by the summer of '77 the atmosphere had changed palpably.

Gobbing and pogoing had become the norm but things reached a terrible climax in June of that year when a Belfield gig featuring The Radiators, The Undertones, The Vipers, Revolver and The Gamblers resulted in 18-year-old Patrick Coultry from Cabra being stabbed to death. After that promoters were reluctant to take any acts tainted with the "Punk" tag and the country's live circuit was all but closed for over a year, while more bands than ever were being formed.

At this point in proceedings I'd like to take some time out to remind readers that Punk wasn't all angst and anarchy. In fact, some of it was almost surreally stupid. Examples of this dumb genius can be found in the shape of Menace's "GLC" (chorus: GLC!GLC!/GLC!GLC!/You're full of shit/shit/shit-shit-shit-shit!), Ed Banger & The Nosebleeds' "Ain't Bin To No Music School", the aforementioned Not Sensibles, Jilted John's eponymous novelty hit and The Leyton Buzzards' self-explanatory "19 & Mad".

In Ireland we weren't hiding behind the wall when it came to daft Punks either. One gig at the Project Arts Centre featured a band called The Kamikaze Kids, whose drummer wore a white boiler suit with the chilling phrase "Rathfarnham Rebel Rockers" stencilled on the back, while there's a great tale of the member of System X who got a mate to tune his guitar, then went home and promptly soldered the tuning-pegs, thinking it'd remain in tune forever!

And who could ever forget Side FX's immortal burst of righteousness "Thalidomide Kid", which — if memory serves — went "I'm dancing on a table/I'm dancing on a stool/I'd like to have a wank but I haven't got a tool/I'm a thalidomide kid/Look what your fucking drugs did!" One for Brian Kennedy's next album there.

By 1978 some clever chap somewhere decided that Punk was dead and coined the term "New Wave", which let the artier contingent through the net and gave the major labels another harvest of hopefuls to pounce upon. This shift in perception also allowed more skilled oldies another shot at success, except this time they didn't need to be half as angry and just needed to wear a skinny tie. Pop craftsmen like Squeeze ("Take Me I'm Yours"), Ian Dury & The Blockheads ("Sex & Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll"), Joe Jackson ("Is She Really Going Out With Him?") and Blondie ("Rip Her To Shreds") made the most of the opportunity while those with darker inclinations were well catered for.

The seeds of Goth were sown by Siouxsie & The Banshees ("The Staircase"), Joy Division ("Warsaw") and The Cure ("10:15 Saturday Night"), with hybrids of Bowie and Beefheart abounding courtesy of XTC ("Science Friction"), Ultravox! ("Young Savage") and Magazine ("Shot By Both Sides"). It really was an "anything goes" climate, allowing poets (poets for fuck's sake!) Patrik Fitzgerald and John Cooper Clarke the same space as oddball avant-garde conceptualists like Devo, The Pop Group, Public Image Ltd, Wire and Pere Ubu.

Even looking at the track-listing for 1-2-3-4 I find it hard to believe that all these songs emerged in a mere three-year timespan. The picture could never be perfectly complete, of course, as contractual problems excluded anything by Talking Heads, Patti Smith or The Fall, and Elvis Costello's omission is totally baffling, but still it does give you a flavour of a time when anything seemed possible if you were up for a go.

Naturally, some of these songs sound horribly dated — which is only to be expected given that at least half of them were recorded in a bucket for ten bob — but the impetus that Punk provided brought several subsequent major talents into the game. Shane MacGowan, Kevin Rowland and Billy Bragg all cut their teeth (possibly over-exuberantly in Shane's case) during the period with The Nips, The Killjoys and Riff Raff and without the plethora of small labels which sprang up the entire Indie arena would never have existed. Writers got their breaks through fanzines, artists and sleeve designers were put in the shop window via the same route — and it was fun.

Amazingly, given that nobody at the time thought the thing would last more than a year or two, there are plenty of these people still around, some having moved onwards and upwards, others rather sadly flogging themselves around the Punk cabaret circuit for the benefit of people who nowadays would be hard pressed to get one leg into the trousers they wore back in '77. Paul Weller, Tom Robinson, Shane MacGowan, Nick Lowe, Jonathan Richman, Billy Bragg, Squeeze, Ian Dury, Blondie, Mink DeVille, XTC and The Cure have all done none-too-badly, while Stiff Little Fingers, Buzzcocks, UK Subs, The Stranglers, 999 and The Lurkers haven't left us yet.

1-2-3-4 is a fantastic reminder of a truly fascinating period in Rock 'n' Roll history. It was the best of times, it was the worst — nah, fuck it! It really was the best of times!