Lurid and ridiculous punk stories from the UK tabloid and broadsheet press, part 1: The singing hairdresser

Back in 2014, for reasons best known to myself, I conducted a number of durational studies of a series of UK press databases. The idea was to get more of an idea of how the UK tabloids and broadsheets were writing about punk between the years 1975 and 1995. Why? Firstly, I hadn’t lived through the 1976-1978 period and wanted to have more of an idea of social attitudes at the time. Secondly, and the reason I chose to do a 20 year period for the search, I wanted to look at how punk had been written about over a long period of time to see how attitudes had changed and how punk itself had changed and been perceived. 

The results, it’s fair to say, were not entirely as expected.

Oh, there were the usual tabloid yuck and bonk style journalism pieces, but there were also a number of pieces that were a) surprisingly sympathetic to punks from surprising quarters or b) just plain weird.

In what is going to be an ongoing series, I intend to talk about some of the weirder and more interesting stories I discovered on my travels through the databases.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail featured heavily in my search results. A fairly typical example of their coverage included a story from 30th December 1977, in which a teenage girl was arrested by police and fined at Liverpool Magistrates Court for wearing “an indecent badge with the name of a song by an American singer in a city centre railway station.” She was fined £10 under “the 18th century Vagrancy Act”. This story, while probably not untypical at the time, does raise a number of interesting questions about how the police were targeting punks as well as how punk was being covered by the tabloids. It gets more interesting when you read on and discover that the 17 year old girl who was charged claimed in court that the badge in question was being worn on her waist, under a jumper, but the police claimed that they could see it from about 10 yards away. Really? They could laser in on a badge from that distance? Incidentally, I like the way the description of the badge leads quite easily to the conclusion that it was probably for Jayne County’s ‘(If You Don’t Want To Fuck Me, Baby) Fuck Off’. Description of the defendants attire in court has her wearing “tight trousers, an old raincoat and a tartan bow tie” so it’s nice to think she made an effort for her day in court.

Perhaps my favourite bizarre story from this period - again, it was from the Daily Mail - was the one titled ‘Punk singing rocks a salon’, from 24th May 1978. Or, as I always remember it, the singing hairdresser one. This refers to a hairdresser who was sacked for allegedly returning from her lunch hour drunk and singing a punk song. As you’d expect, the management version of what happened varies somewhat to the hairdressers account. It says something about the social mores of the day that the Mail reports “The salon sacked her because they thought the scene was obscene and her behaviour was not ladylike.” Possibly fearing that this wasn’t sufficient grounds to get the readers onside, they add “And, they claimed, she spent the afternoon lounging in the staff room, which was later found littered with beer cans.”

The hairdresser herself claimed that she hadn’t been drunk and that she’d returned to work with a male colleague, who was singing Ian Dury and the Blockheads ‘Clever Trevor’, a song she happened to find funny. Something of a storm in a beer mug perhaps?

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash

Sonic Youth - Genetic

This was one of my favourite songs when I was 13 and I still have the 10" concentric groove EP it's on. It was effectively the B side to '100%', the lead single from the Dirty album. Coming as it did a year after Nirvana's Nevermind, it felt at the time as though Sonic Youth were being lined up (despite their longevity) as the next big band for grunge kids to latch onto.

I can't help but think that the band had this at the back of their minds when they released the wilfully perverse Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star in 1994. 

It is basically their fault, and the fault of the BBC for broadcasting a documentary about the Peel Sessions that featured Siouxsie and the Banshees, that I first started listening to the John Peel Show in January 1993.

There was a live concert from Sonic Youth on that nights show, plus a Peel Session from the Voodoo Queens. The Voodoo Queens session turned out to be much more important in the long term. That and the album tracks Peel was playing from the split Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear album Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah/Our Troubled Youth on Catcall (Liz Naylor's label).

Living amongst the detritus of someone else's history

My introduction to punk came via the seventies revival in the early 1990s. Specifically, it owes a lot to the BBC's Sounds of the Seventies series as well as re-releases of records by the Clash and Sex Pistols in 1991 and 1992.

I could say that when I first heard 'Anarchy in the UK' in 1992 the world changed. But I would be lying.

In the summer of 1992 I was very into Sonic Youth, specifically the song 'Genetic' from their Dirty album: 'Anarchy in the UK' sounded terribly slow when set against 'Genetic'.

I had first heard Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1991 when they appeared on Top of the Pops to promote their new single, 'Kiss them for me'. I was very intrigued by the band, to the extent that I did, in early 1992, buy a copy of the Superstition album from a stall on Stockport Market.

I liked it at the time, but it would be a stretch to think it had anything to do with punk.

Later in 1992, when I was recovering from an aggressive chest infection, I listened to a documentary on Radio 1 about the Peel Sessions. It was on this documentary that I first properly heard songs by punk bands, specifically, the Slits, Damned, Adam and the Ants (the early version of the Ants, when Jordan was managing them) and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Peel Session version of 'Hong Kong Garden' was played, and I was very taken with it.

A few weeks later me and my sister were out second hand record shopping in Double 4 in Stockport when we stumbled across the Banshees 1977-78 Peel Sessions LP.

We took it home and played it non stop for about a week, at which point it was cruelly taken away from me on the orders of my mum on the basis that it was an early Christmas present from my sister, and should be wrapped up and put away until the end of December. In retrospect, mum and dad were probably just sick of hearing it and fancied a break. They weren’t of the punk generation and, while we’d watched Sounds Of The Seventies together on TV as a family, they’d both made their excuses when the punk episode was on, returning to watch us sitting cross legged on the living room floor in front of the TV, singing along to Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’. It was a very long time before I found out that Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album, not to mention the Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls album, had been recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. 

In retrospect, it perhaps isn’t surprising that Stockport wasn’t blowing its own trumpet, culturally speaking, in 1991. We still had a hung council (this tends to be Stockport Council’s default setting, politically) and it was probably skint so, the upshot was, even if there had been the political will to celebrate the cultural history of the town, there wouldn’t have been the money to do so. Strawberry, like Staircase Café and the old Stockport workhouse, was so much neglected, rotting history in the early 1990s.

This wasn’t to say that there were no pockets of alternative culture in the town. The area around Underbank and Hillgate (the area of the town centre where Strawberry Studios used to reside) while struggling, did contain Double 4 Records, which sold second hand vinyl and new vinyl at cheap prices, and was wallpapered with billboard posters, meaning it looked like an indie inclined student bedroom. There was also Cobwebs, at that point a one floor alternative clothes emporium with a piercing and tattoo studio out back. It sold tie dyed hippy, patchouli scented stuff alongside PVC and fetish gear and t-shirts with slogans such as ‘When I die, bury me face down so the world can kiss my ass’ and ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me’. 

Stockport's premier alternative emporium circa 1993

The shop had existed, in one form or another, since either 1985 or 1986. In 1996 they moved to bigger premises across the road, meaning the hippy stuff was on the bottom floor, the goth and punk stuff upstairs, and the top floor had biker gear and t-shirts. The tattoo and piercing parlour, which became White Dragon, is still at the old site to this day, but Cobwebs closed in 2000. 

There was also The Stage Door, which sold fancy dress stuff alongside dance gear, including face glitter and deeley boppers, which were to come in handy during the Kenickie and bis years. There were also several charity shops and sex shops, including a branch of Harmony, the shop where Linder Sterling purchased the dildo she used in her infamous meat dress attired appearance at the Hacienda in the early 1980s. 

With a heavy dose of romanticised imagination, you could stroll up and down the tail end of Underbank and Lower Hillgate in the mid 1990s and imagine you were on the Kings Road in 1976. 

Image of Cobwebs from Pinterest 

New Year, New Book Pile

 

Album review: Florence + The Machine - Everybody Scream

An air of both sadness and rage hangs over the sixth Florence + The Machine album, which feels appropriate given that it was created in the wake of massive personal trauma for Florence Welch. This is perhaps best exemplified by the devastating majesty of 'You Can Have It All' in which Welch comes across as part seer, part sixties rock priestess against a darkly atmospheric rock soundtrack that has all the scale and ambition of a Bond theme. It is an astonishing, immensely powerful piece of work that she, understandably, makes the listener wait for. 

Rather than go in hard, the album opens instead with the title track and first single, a song which vividly re-creates the experience and memories of the extended bacchanalia that was the Dance Fever tour of 2022-2023. It's interesting to hear Florence Welch's take on what happened on that tour; the nakedly feral nature of stadium and festival crowds who had been cooped up for two years under Covid lockdowns, and who were losing their shit on a nightly basis because they were allowed out again. There's even a lyrical reference to the moment at London's O2 when Welch (not for the first time) injured herself. A show she continued with, only realising the day after that she had been dancing and running around all night on a broken foot (again, not for the first time...) There's also some highly perceptive lyrical takes on the power a performer can feel while on stage "Here I can take up the whole of the sky, I'm burning, becoming my full size" compared to when they are off stage, a much smaller space where Welch feels trapped by the dichotomy of needing to be "Kind, extraordinary, normal, all at the same time." All in all, it's a stylish and fun opener which works well as a single and as a statement of intent. 

Second track and second single, 'One of The Greats' stands in marked contrast to the exuberance of 'Everybody Scream', providing as it does a brooding and brutally candid assessment of the innate sexism of the music industry. There is a strong sense that Welch is not so much colliding with the glass ceiling as taking a pickaxe to it in order to make a tiny hole to scream through. The result is a sprawling Patti Smith esque slice of catharsis that feels exhausting but somehow worth it. 

'Music By Men' applies the same brutally candid approach but to relationships and feels very like the natural follow up to 'King' in many ways: An older and sadder version perhaps. By contrast, the highly infectious 'Kraken' chugs along nicely in a Eurythmics vs Stooges kind of way, with an irresistible build that makes it feel like a kindred spirit to 2022's 'Dream Girl Evil', albeit one that is less obviously furious. 

While a number of the songs on Everybody Scream are quieter, more contemplative and pared down, there are still songs that conjure up the older and more established features of Welch's previous work: that sheer otherworldly, world building etherealness is conjured up evocatively and magnificently by the surging and complex 'The Old Religion' while 'Witch Dance' feels as though it's occupying similar musical ground to 'Choreomania'. In a similar vein, there are moments of something approaching joy on third single 'Sympathy Magic' which, while it lacks the innocence of 'Dog Days', does share some of its defiant spirit.

The song 'Perfume and Milk' feels both delicate and seeped in sadness, representing a retreat from the horrors of the world in order to get well and recapture some kind of sense of peace. 'Drink Deep', by contrast, feels much more primal and ambitious in scale. While the tension is relieved by the much more pared down 'Music for Men', it does pave the way for the emotionally raw, highly powerful majesty of 'You Can Have It All'.

She could have easily ended the album there but in including 'And Love', a sparser, more reflective and thoughtful piece that is the natural follow up to 'No Choir', she leaves the door open for something more hopeful to follow. 

Alison by Lizzy Stewart

At the heart of Lizzy Stewart’s graphic novel is a powerful truth: The struggle of a young woman to establish herself as an artist in times that, as Viv Albertine put it when I interviewed her about her own book, were “ungenerous” to women. This struggle is intertwined with the difficulties of women artists being able to step out of the box they’ve been put in by a more famous male artist patron.

When we first meet Alison, she’s a young wife who is isolated and bored, but not unloved. She catches the eye of a famous artist and he asks her to come back to London with him, where he will teach her. 

We follow the eponymous Alison over the years and decades as she works to establish her art and her life on her own terms. We watch her strike out on her own and establish her own community of friends and artists as her work becomes stronger and more confident. And we observe the ways in which she can never quite escape her past.

Stewart makes her points with subtlety and creativity, never hammering the message home, leaving the reader to observe and make up their own minds, but it’s nonetheless powerful for this and is the kind of book that will stay with you and leave you thinking for a long time afterwards.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

I avoided reading this book for a long time because it has as it’s starting point an American high school shooting and, as someone who saw Bowling For Columbine when it came out, and could never be arsed reading We Need To Talk About Kevin, I didn’t really feel like reading anything else about school shootings.

Anyway, in retrospect that was a mistake because Vernon God Little isn’t so much about the shooting itself (which has already happened before the story starts) so much as the fallout from it on the community, and on the shooters best friend - Vernon G. Little. 

In tone the novel has a lot in common with JD Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye as well as having some of the absurdism of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces. Vernon is an engaging, likeable, if foul mouthed anti-hero and Pierre is highly skilled at having his artless narrater reveal just enough, but not too much. As a satire on the US that was published in 2003, it has aged depressingly well, with things the novel predicted sadly now seeming far more possible than they did in 2003. 

A powerful and increasingly timely read.