December 1977. Without knowing it, I had just gone to the last alcohol free party of my life. Strolling home through the dark humidity, my step lightened and I walked the suburb's distance back home and poured myself a coke from the fridge and pinched some rum from the liquor cabinet. That felt right. I went to bed and waited for Christmas.Gough Whitlam lost and crawled back home, found a dark corner and stayed there. Malcolm Fraser continued. Decades later he would emerge as this country's most improved public figure ever. Back then he was all tax and spending cuts. We got our Thatcher early. Joh, the avuncular gangster, still ran his thug herds down in Brisbane.
First maths class of the year. Before Mr Pehrson arrived I swung around to the tall, sexy and preternaturally cool Deidre Nevis and sang the first verse of Bodies: "She was a girl from BirmingHUM she juss hadn ab or SHUN..." Deidre's ice gaze met my headlight stare. She left a shrivelling few seconds of silence to hang between us and then said: "Now do Submission."
I did. Gentle reader, know you the sunshine rush of the purest natural ecstasy? I did. I did.
The NME's review was a pisstake dialogue. Rollingstone reviewed it like a silvery old hippy on Haight Ashbury. RAM ended its half broadsheet take with an ultimatum: You need to decide NOW! Or something else shouty and point missing. There were no barricades. This wasn't a revolution ... yet. When that came it was quiet and quietly decisive (it's now called post punk). From Christmas 1977 to getting the plane to Brisbane in 1980, Bollocks was my most played album. I lost count of the cassettes of it I made for others.
Eldest brother Greg, who'd scorned the band the year before when they were on Weekend Magazine, taped it off me. His parties rang with it. We started jamming more and I remember recording a version of Anarchy with just me and his Maton Sapphire put through the Companion fuzz box that Win had given me. Greg dismissed most punk he heard but loved the Stranglers. He would have. He was a cynic. They were dirty old men who'd jumped a bandwagon. They had only one good song (Grip) but the over-twenties felt they could trust a band that dressed like The Clash but sounded like Emerson Lake and Palmer.
I remember his dismissal because I felt the same way about the herd of US bands in the early 90s getting drenched in admiration when to me they sounded like punk had never happened. All long hair, denim and waily guitar solos. Anyway....
Grade 11. Everything was better. We moved across the road to the old university campus. I started smoking because everyone else I knew who mattered smoked and drew it in under the trees in the breaks. As driver's licences were acquired the leafy car park filled up and stuff happened there. Party almost every weekend. We talked about whatever buzzed around us along with the mossies which we thought we were intoxicating with our smoke (that's bees). The schoolwork got harder but left less of an impression. Party almost every weekend.
Pink or punk was a type I hated. I'm still not fond of costume dos but this was like buying into using the word punk as a cartoon character. I didn't call it punk. I didn't call myself punk. My hair did get shorter with each successive haircut but never had Airfix glue in it. I didn't pierce my nostrils or earlobes with safety pins or paperclips. Those things were uniforms and may as well have been school kit. I went to those parties dressed as I would have anyway. Mind you when Rosanna Marsden turned up to one with a leopard print top and a black garbage bag skirt I ogled with wonder and an absence of opprobium.
School parties took off with all the sophistication that groups of sixteen year olds can muster. After the first tot of Bundy (or bourbon which I usually brought: hey it was exotic and sophisticated then!) none of that mattered. But it wasn't just the girls who threw those parties (no boy ever threw a pink or punk shebang), all you had to do was look up.
The Angels were a self confessed ex-jug band from Adelaide with a singer who looked like a cleaned up Keith Richards. They had a few mild hits but did well enough for themselves to star in a rock movie called ROCKA. I only ever saw a small clip of the Help-like movie on Flashez where the band in high bumbling clownish fashion mounted bikes and rode off somewhere while their big one, Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again, played on the soundtrack. Watching two of them explain the plot (which involved a gang of girl villains called NICKA) was as bad as watching Molly Meldrum fail to control his nerves when he interviewed Prince Charles.
But that was all back in the terrible winter of '76. In 1978 The Angels cut their hair and tightened their stage gear (leather wherever denim had been) and released a song about Joh Bjelke Petersen's government called Take a Long Line which started with a thumbling bass over which a spiky two note guitar riff played: rant ranant rant ranant. It was less than a metre away from the pub rock they'd done ok with but now was playing dressups.
Skyhooks had been one of the most original sounding conventional bands in Australia who'd had real hits with inventive and genuinely witty songs like Ego is Not a Dirty Word and Living in the 70s. Their first dressup was called Women in Uniform which rocked hard but was all innuendo and saucy pun as though Benny Hill had written it. Even the horrible old Stranglers were upfront about their yobbo misogyny but this was either inexplicable or just a sign that the previous generation weren't invited. The singer left and they had another go with a song about the Joh Bjelke Petersen government (sigh) called Over the Border which had a slightly more arch laddishness about it but ... but no, fuck it, it was horrible. They split, they quit, not even middle-aged.
But the direction to look was not up. The people who had really got something from punk were forming their own bands or at least thinking about it. I tried. We even played in the drummer's garage once and some girls sat on the footpath listening. If we'd only had some real songs!
We didn't because I didn't. All I had was a few tunes ripped off from the Kinks and the Small Faces (then again, what's good enough for the Pistols...) which even I was too embarrassed to present. So we just jammed until everyone lost interest. And that's the closest I got in Townsville to having my own band. I had friends in bands but they were in their own bands or liked bad music.
The Sex Pistols toured America early in the year. They didn't break it but the other way round. McClaren emerged as a clueless narcissist and by the end of the year he had invented western civilisation as well as its nemesis. He outed himself as the kind of wanker that everyone who gets involved in creative partnerships will meet: the one who does none of the work but claims to have influenced all of it; the one whose only talents are schmoozing and lying. He was making a movie ... well, he was getting someone to make a movie.
The year came to a close with a massive implosion which knocked the life out of every face that heard of it as a religious leader convinced his bleating flock to poison their children and then themselves: almost one thousand of them. Where was Hieronymous Bosch to do the photo essay on this? Wasn't this the seventies? The NINETEEN seventies? Hadn't we erased that bronze age bullshit long ago? Hadn't the hippies lifted the veil on the conservative dream and weren't the punks making the question of it irrelevant? No. No. No. Some fights will never be won. Ever.
There didn't need to be a Sex Pistols for anyone to get angry. It's just that their anger felt as keenly there at the buttocks of the old Empire as it did around its rotting teeth in London. That's what mattered to me then and now. When I listen now (and I do, quite often) it's not hard to brush the nostalgia aside and just enjoy the force of it, the panzer division rhythm and serrated vocals. That's all I needed to touch if temporarily defeated or deflated. That anger felt the same as mine. But it could also pep the already hyper mood. I could set up an ignition for a weekend with Holidays or God Save the Queen.
But it was more than localised function or anaesthetic. If I ever felt self-isolated by the spite I had for the world of normal teenagers (and if that ever got to me) by early 1978 I felt invited. There was a world beyond the glare of the oval and it did not echo with the yells of boofheads or Mark Hillman (whose aaanaaarcheeee schtick amused him years beyond its fade into irrelevance for me). If the school parties were where I could now offer my difference rather than try to mask it they were nothing on the glowing warm wilderness of the parties thrown by uni students. Greg knew them and my sister went to tutes with them. I went to their celebrations and felt at home and attractively young. I drank less at these as they didn't make me nervous. And girls didn't go there; women did. That's what I found when I stepped through the door that punk opened and it opened widest with this long awaited album that outstripped its own promises and pushed me out the other end to freedom. Yes, freedom. Dangerous and often no more than a fucking bloody mess, but freedom all the same.
I'll end with the line from the record favoured by the wonderfully weird Judy Broome whose unsettling constant up-mood caused her head to swing side to side when she walked:
Eat your heart out on a plastic tray!
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