The mystery of subcultural persistence, aka non-synchronisation: the fact that rock epistemes overlap and Eras do not end punctually but bleed across the supposed periodizations that journalism (first draft of...) and history (second draft of...) work with
Example: this NME 1977 review of a benefit in Brighton for Release - the hippy era organisation that defended people charged with drugs possession. This in an issue with The Clash on the cover
Release was started by Caroline Coon, who had herself already nimbly transitioned to being a figure in the punk scene as a journalist (working on the first book about the music in fact) and would quite soon manage The Clash (she can be seen in Rude Boy).
Intriguingly one of the bands reviewed in the 1977 Release Benefit concert is Here and Now, featuring teen drumming prodigy Kif Kif Le Batteur, also known as Keith Dobson - within a few years he'd be leading his own noisepunk outfit The O12's and running the ultra-DIY cassette label Fuck Off Records. Then a few years after that, he'd front as singer-guitarist World Domination Enterprises who were either late postpunk or bang-on-time noise-rock (a British parallel to Big Black, except with a human drummer and humane lyrics)
Here's some subcultural persistence I eye-and-ear-witnessed myself: a free festival in early 1986 in Oxford that me and my pals accidentally stumbled upon when going for a night time stroll across Port Meadow. Probably just months before I interviewed World Dom for the first time.
World Dom not on the bill, nor any remnant of Here and Now as far as I can tell (although Robert Calvert and Nik Turner are separately there, sans Hawkwind), but loads of groups I never ever heard of and clearly on a completely different circuit to the one that was covered in the weekly rock press
And then high on the bill - despite being I'd have thought fairly unknown then - Cardiacs, whose frightmare theatricality boggled my mind when I saw them (not knowing even their name when I saw them and completely unprepared for their early Split Enz lunacy)
Cardiacs seem like a New Wave sore thumb in this company of Magic Mushroom Band and Webcore and Mournblade.
One name I do recognise: Shake Appeal, who would later become Swervedriver, but at this stage - one assumes from the name - are modelled directly on The Stooges
I also recognise with a shudder the name Jake the Pilgrim, a Goth combo whose dry ice adorned performance I would endure a year later when they supported A.R. Kane in some South London pub.
Oh yes, and Ozric Tentacles, in nascent form here I should imagine, later to be big figures in the free festival / techno-trance crossover moment of the '90s (and from who I gleaned a revelation: you can be tripping balls and you still retain your aesthetic discrimination... drugs don't improve a middling experience, they just intensify and 3D-ify its middlingness.)
Reprisal taken belatedly...
Something in between punk and the new hippie resurgence
Cardiacs are a good example of subcultural agnosticism - refusing to surrender their prog and psych influences or their Wire, Devo, and David Lynch love. Unsurprisingly, only one side of that divide was willing to indulge them, and it wasn't the latter.
ReplyDeleteHere & Now are actually another example - besides the person you mentioned, another member left to join Alternative TV, and they served as the backing band for Daevid Allen and Gong right before he went to New York and helped form another variety of post-punk/alt rock by discovering Bill Laswell - again, subcultural agnosticism