Mark Hillman was of clearly demonstrable intelligence. There is no requirement for a dick to be dullwitted. Many dicks rest on their intelligence to express their essential dickness. Really, what makes a dick a dick is the compulsion to attack anyone outside of the cushioned norm that has been prepared for them. They ridicule rather than examine. Now when you talking digs at breatharianiswm, astrology or creationism it's a matter of rational compulsion. Ridicule of The Sex Pistols, on the other hand, when it's happening back in 1977 by someone who at 16 sounds like he's fifty, is a saddening old-before-time unwitting confession.
Mark Hillman not only considered it sufficiently witty to pack all of his ridicule of the Sex Pistols by singing the word anarchy like a country cousin who'd downed too many Bundy and cokes: airnaaarcheee. He finished that with a smirk of sincere self-congratulation. That's all he had and he would drone it out and aim it at me whenever he thought of something unconventional or even just from current youth culture. To him my frame held all sourgrapes-subversion and horse-frightening quackery imaginable and his attack on the topic of punk rock was that: annnnnaaaaaarcheeee. There was no comeback to this that would reach its target with any effect, so tight was his grip on the lifeline of conformity.
While at first this angered me it didn't take long for me to feel saddened by it. I couldn't imagine him, lodged within his grey and sexless padding ever receiving a surprising cultural experience with pleasure. Not too long after that, as my confidence of my conviction that punk was the only legit alignment for anyone of my age and dissatisfaction with the mainstream, I wore Mark Hillman's jibes as a pinless badge of honour. There was a reason it took some time.
At the beginning of the Christmas holidays 1976 I sat in front of Weekend Magazine after the Sunday ABC news. Weekend Magazine was a kind of soft news showcase of curios from around the world. Something visually poetic about saffron gathering or the last steam trains in sugar cane farming were typical. My brother Stephen was watching with me and our eldest, Greg, wandered in. If there were any other stories on that edition of the show I have forgotten them because what I saw didn't so much change my life as make me aware of what it should be.
The story included a few firsts and each of them had the three of us reacting differently. Stephen and Greg guffawed at the concepts (though Greg did like the music). I was rapt. Punk rock. Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten. All of that threw switches in my brain that had never been thrown before. The term sounded as good as a mammoth Jimmy Page riff chopped and replayed like fists hitting a wall (didn't know what sampling was then). Calling your band The Sex Pistols was beautifully childish and angry in a way that a fourteen year old could not just understand but instantly identify with. Johnny Rotten (at that stage both brothers were guffawing almost louder than the commentary) was more of that, like giving the forks to a statue of Captain Cook. And the outlandish audience looked as deliciously threatening as the sound playing under the story.
A clip from the video for Anarchy in the UK was featured unhampered by commentary was the last hook. The music was as good as everything else. In those five or so minutes I had been set free from mainstream culture and even the slightly exploratory diversion from it that Greg could provide. What I was seeing was the dimension I would seek to live in from that point on. While that became ever more figurative as time wore on the start it gave me away from the main track is a point that has never left me: if you don't like the big game make your own.
I spent the rest of the evening wondering how I could get that record. The full clip was played on the 1976 Top 50 hosted by Molly Meldrum and an assortment of local popsters. As with every song that captivates this one felt like I was living in it and though it only went for a few minutes it felt like I was playing around in it for hours. When I surfaced I barely heard Molly advise his electorate to buy the single as the band had been dropped from the label and would soon disappear from the shops. It had disappeared from Townsville shops but that's because it never entered them. I was reading RAM every fortnight and knew about mail order. I'd even taped some of the cruddy Led Zeppelin bootlegs that Win had bought that way but it never occured to me to buy a copy that way. In the 80s I saw a copy at a shop going for $40. I'd snap it up now for that price but not then. So what I had to do if I wanted to hear it again was wait for the album.
It was almost a year later that Never Mind the Bollocks came out and it was a tough wait. Some things helped like the debuts of the Damned, Clash and Jam. It felt exciting reading the interviews with Johnny Rotten in the NME. The photo of the Pistols signing the A&M contract outside Buckingham Palace with Sid giving the forks to someone out of shot was a thrill, a real one. There were sharp looking barbarians at the gates and I wanted them to smash through the solid vinyl weatherboard portals of the big boring empire where I lived. There was shouting through the walls and torchlight glowing over them. The mighty flavourless architectural monoliths of of-of-of prog rock and the lardy California drone would fall with a deafening crash, cut down by the searing noise of us.
I felt, really felt, that I had been granted a kind of cultural liberty by this, that school, its uniforms and uniformity, the great grey ridicule of the old-at-heart Mark Hillmans were just earthly constraints. I didn't smear my hair with Airfix glue or pierce my nose with a safety pin because by the time those things got to me they were uniform, too. Almost in reaction to this (I'm stretching the point here but not too far) my look if look I had grew more 60s except that every time I cut my hair it got shorter. Airnaaarchaay! Fuck you, Mark Hillman, you belong to yesterday where you probably still are .... I will admit, here, that yesterday is still winning. Anyway ...
God Save the Queen came out with its thrilling pub yobbo coda of noooooooooo fewchuh! and the tide just rose. By Pretty Vacant I was bursting. We needed that album. Now!
And then towards the end of the year my brother Michael gave me a lift into town. He was going to vote in what was to be the last election involving great reformer Gough Whitlam. I told him to do the right thing (he frowned in acknowledgement) and, clutching eight of my Nanna's dollars went off to buy her Christmas present from me, a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols. I had wanted it to be under the counter or at least in plain wrap but it was there at Palings, loud pink and yellow cover blaring, under S.
Michael wasn't impressed with this as he drove us back home. He got on the phone and went somewhere. I went to the rumpus room, lifted the lid on the turntable bay, unsheathed the record, checked the track listing on each side, and dropped it on to the platter.
To this day I still think of Side 2 as Side 1 because the song I wanted to start with was the second track on Side 2. It had been a year since I heard it last and that had been on tv. Was it anywhere near as good as that here in the rumpus room with its ear pummeling stereo? I lifted the needle and aimed it at the gap between tracks one and two and turned the volume up.
No comments:
Post a Comment