Babylon’s Burning:

From Punk To Grunge

Babylon’s Burning: From Punk To Grunge

Clinton Heylin

A Review By Marcus Gray

Did you see Jah Wobble’s review of the latest instalment in Alan Parker’s Sid Vicious saga, No One Is Interested? Chances are you did. Even if you don’t buy the Independent, a certain mischievous merde-stirrer whose desk here at trakMARX’s cyberspace HQ is (sadly) within paper pellet-flicking distance of my own did his best to spread the word via round robin email.

I was impressed by Wobble’s perceptive analysis of both his former friend and of Sid’s serial biographer. Also by his literary chops, and - under the circumstances - quite remarkable restraint. Not at all bad for a man whose chosen name means Unstable God.

Take another minute to enjoy:

‘It’s the 30th anniversary of punk this year. (I thought that punk actually began in 1976, but never mind.) Predictably this has prompted a media feeding frenzy, and it would be hard not to notice the proliferation of punk-related books and documentaries that abound at the moment. Even the 1980s movie Sid and Nancy, starring Gary Oldman, is to be re-released. Sid seems to have eclipsed all of his erstwhile peers in regards to marketability. The fact that he was in an archetypically co-dependent relationship with Nancy Spungen and that they both came to a sticky end only adds to his allure. Sid is the iconic figure that best represents the punk zeitgeist. That is to say, he was the most irreverent, narcissistic and self-destructive of all the dramatis personae of the punk scene.

It is no wonder that Alan Parker's name should crop up at this time, because for years he has been churning out indifferent books on all things Sex Pistol-related. This is the third “biography” of Sid that he has released. Parker is one of a coterie of blokes that eke out a living by stripping the last remains from the carcass of punk. Most of them are from the provinces and the majority of them seem to be in their late thirties/early forties, and therefore would have been no more than 12 or 13 when it all happened. If they are not writing books, they are flogging Sex Pistols or other punk-related memorabilia.

It is a very parochial scene, riddled with petty jealousies and rivalries. Needless to say, petty jealousies and rivalries apart, it is the absolute antithesis of the punk scene in 1977. Rest assured Sid would have hated them all. Having said that, I wager that this sad little punk revivalist scene would be wonderful material for a Pinteresque play. They all gather at the funerals of punk luminaries, where they adopt the personae of old soldiers attending the wakes of fallen heroes.’

And just a few weeks later, here you find us: a second provincial punk carcass-stripper preparing to review a book by a third. Does every trakMARX commission have to be such a poisoned chalice?

I don’t know him, but I’m sure Clinton Heylin is as keen as I am to distance himself from Wobble’s ‘coterie of blokes’. Neither of us pursues the memorabilia-selling or luminary-funeral-going options, and I’d guess that for CH, like me, any gang of Sharks with Alan Parker in it would be enough to inspire a pledge to be a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day. Neither of us would like to think we’re parochial in outlook. Nah, mate: we’re international sophisticates, like Wobble himself. But when Jah he talk of ‘petty jealousies and rivalries’… well, that accusation squats there on the rug and gives the beady, knowing eye to everyone who writes books on similar subjects and has any kind of competitive streak. The taint or suspicion of petty jealousy and rivalry will inevitably stick around for the remainder of this review, and I doubt either the reviewer or the reviewee is going to emerge at the other end to find himself held any higher in Sid’s retroactive esteem…

Time was when ‘tome’ was standard rockspeak for book: any book, thick or thin. It’s a term you’d normally shy away from these days if you didn’t want to mark yourself down as a walking cliché, but make no mistake, Babylon’s Burning is a tome: it weighs in at nearly 700 pages, which, in its hardback incarnation, makes it nearly as thick as it is wide. Some might suggest the reason it’s been lying around the trakMARX office unreviewed - and furthermore, unread and even unopened - for so long is that the folks around these parts are lazy good-for-nothing wasters with the attention span (and swat-appeal) of so many gnats.

It’s true that 700 pages is one hell of a commitment, but that’s not the real reason we trakMARXists have been shying away from it. For the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing Babylon’s Burning over caviar and champagne at the weekly editorial meetings - hard not to, really, as it’s been doubling as the table - and even before Wobble stuck his two penn’orth in, we’d pretty much agreed that our response was indicative of Punk Overview Fatigue Syndrome. A few years ago, any one of us would have been first in the queue to shoplift a book of this nature, and even relished the formidable challenge presented by its extravagant dimensions and (predictably) day-glo cover. But this time there’s been a feeling of… haven’t we read about almost all of this before in half a dozen other supposedly definitive books on the subject?

To which CH might well reply that Babylon’s Burning isn’t meant for jaded old lazy good-for-nothing wasters, etc, etc, like us. No, says my imaginary Clint, it’s for the loyal true believers who have never wavered in their dedication to and fascination with all things punk, and are always looking for a new thesis on its multiple connections, aspirations and inspirations. And it’s also for a new generation of seekers after truth with open, uncontaminated minds. And it’s (even more) also for future generations, that unknown and unknowable rabble invariably dignified with the catch-all term posterity. And let us not forget the reading lists of college courses offering the kids of tomorrow a BA (Hons) in Punk as a three-year respite from cold-calling and burger-flipping.

It’s either bad luck or bad timing that CH’s book came out shortly after Alex Ogg’s No More Heroes and Phil Strongman’s Pretty Vacant, not that long after John Robb’s Punk Rock and Simon Reynolds’ post-punk book Rip It Up And Start Again, and at a time when Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan’s humongous Punk. was still blocking our view of the stables and helipad from the French windows in the drawing room. Like Wobble says, in addition to the overviews, punk era memoirs have been coming at us from all directions over recent years; music magazines for men of a certain age remain as much in awe of punk as they are of the Beatles; there’s been a slew of documentaries and TV programmes addressing the subject; and there are countless websites devoted to both punk in general and to almost every individual band that ever shouted ‘1-2-3-4’ and then launched into four completely different songs.

If you keep abreast of any of this, and my guess is you do - because it’s hard to avoid; because you read trakMARX; because you’re reading this review - then you’ll be aware that there’s now a phenomenal amount of material out there. The few hundred people who were genuinely part of the scene’s core have all been interviewed at least a couple of times already, and most of the fifty or so key players have been re-interviewed anything up to a few hundred times apiece. Along the way, they’ve forgotten or confused facts, lied, exaggerated stories, polished their deliveries, borrowed anecdotes from each other, and appropriated details and tales from other interviews, articles and books they’ve read.

One of the reasons I genuinely don’t envy CH his self-appointed task is that I wouldn’t want to have to dive into those fathomless muddy waters, or wander through those fog banks of Chinese whispers. And he’s made the task so much harder for himself by setting his parameters so wide. He aspires to cover the story of punk on three separate continents over two decades, cross-referencing and stopping for periodic State of the Genre Addresses as he goes. Taking on, say, 1973 to 1980 would have been demanding enough for one volume - as it is, it gets him as far as page 534 - but he’s on a mission to follow the punk influence all the way to grunge at the close of the Eighties. While you can applaud his bravery, dedication and ambition - and I’m prepared to believe his balls of steel clack like maracas when he walks tall, walks straight and looks the world right in the eye - it’s the scope, more so than the size or apocalyptic title of Babylon’s Burning, that telegraphs hubris.

Heylin’s earlier punk book, From The Velvets To The Voidoids, has a relatively tight focus - the American roots of the genre - and still takes 365 pages. It came out in 1993, and broke a lot of new ground, as relatively little of that strand of the story had been covered in any real detail. From the Velvets… was well received at the time, not least by the people whose lives and work it documented, and it remains a gem of a book. In 1996, it was followed and somewhat overshadowed - though not, in my opinion, supplanted - by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s 500 page oral history Please Kill Me.

If you look at CH’s more recent punk overview rivals, Alex Ogg’s No More Heroes also clocks in around 700 pages but confines itself to UK punk from 1976 to 1980. It adopts an encyclopaedic format: connections are made as and when they occur, but the structure means Alex doesn’t have to do too much in the way of wider analysis, and the reader can dip in an out at will for an entertaining bus, bed, bath or bog read rather than slog doggedly through from beginning to end. The period parameters of John Robb’s Punk Rock are wider than Ogg’s, but it also limits itself to the UK branch of the movement. And it’s an oral history which presents entertaining memories from key punk figures, transcribed and then linked roughly chronologically and thematically, but with next to no authorial analysis or, for that matter, actual writing involved at all. It still clocks in at 500 pages.

Phil Strongman’s Pretty Vacant has 300 pages. I opened a couple of ‘em at random, was quietly impressed that so many errors and clichés could be crammed into so few lines, closed the book, placed it back on the bookshop shelf, and backed quickly away. Colegrave and Sullivan’s takes a wide sweep, covering the USA and UK from the mid-Sixties to mid-Eighties, but has a similar textual approach to John Robb’s, and its 400 large format pages rely heavily on illustrations. Simon Reynolds limits himself to the years 1978-1984, and still needs 750 pages.

In Babylon’s Burning, CH’s acknowledgements open with ‘Having started my own version of the history of punk back in 1990, with From the Velvets To The Voidoids, I have sat back and watched a significant number of books misrepresent the period, written by folk with those special specs that come complete with bias bifocals…’ On page 460 of the book proper, he stops to take a petty and possibly jealous sideswipe at one particular rival: ‘post-punk… before Simon Reynolds decided it was All The Music I Liked When I Was Young, a somewhat broad, not to say solipsist, view of pop…’ I’ll get back to CH’s sometimes challenging way with the English language in a minute, but for now, let’s just take it as read that he thinks he’s big and bad enough to lay waste to all that preceded him, including, perhaps, the original punk overview, Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming. Note the similarity in titles. Savage was the first to chart this terrain in 1991, and despite a fair bit of latter-day carping from those (not including me) who see the book as exclusive, elitist and academically po-faced, has until now remained untouched by all comers in terms of insight, ideas, analysis, connections, and standard of writing… but over 600 pages, England’s Dreaming only takes the story up to 1978, the point at which Jon’s main focus, the Sex Pistols, split, and everything else punk-related became really messy and complicated.

Unlike England’s Dreaming, Babylon’s Burning isn’t written even mostly from scratch. In addition to the new interviews he and Nina Antonia conducted for the book – and shouldn’t that qualify her for a co-credit somewhere a bit closer to the front than page 651? – CH has also consulted a good many secondary sources, including most of the other supposed volumes of misrepresentation he alludes to in the acknowledgements. He lists all these sources in great detail in the bibliography - Last Gang In Town, my definitive Clash biography (with strong punk overview element), is in there - and does go to the trouble to thank a select few writers - including me, me, me again - in the acknowledgements, and… let’s just take a look: hey, I’m in the index, too! I’d like to commend CH on his generosity and good grace. That might read like heavy handed sarcasm, but let me assure you it’s anything but: you’d be amazed how many unscrupulous sons of bitches make off with your quotes, raw information and analysis and sit there smugly denying it while wearing your intellectual property like an ill-fitting hat.

That said, if you go to the amount of trouble CH does to set yourself up as the One True Oracle on a subject, you’d better be, firstly, as original as possible, and secondly, damn-near infallible in all areas. I’ll be petty enough to list a few others where he’s not in a mo, but for now, let’s stick to the pseudo-academic end-papers. After listing each book consulted, he details the particular ‘quotes utilized’ from each. What a bullshit managementspeak non-word utilized is. What’s wrong with used? Or borrowed, or, more appropriately, lifted? I have no problem with the appropriation per se, because although permission was not sought, at least the debt is acknowledged. But get it right, CH. On page 112, ‘music fan Colin Keinch’ apparently told Marcus Gray that he thought ‘The Pistols were totally challenging and the 101ers weren’t.’ I’ve never spoken to Keinch in my life. As he was the guitarist in Kris Needs’ punk-era band the Vice Creems, my guess is that the quote in fact comes from the latter’s definitive Clash biography, Joe Strummer. Meanwhile, the un-attributed Tony Parsons quote on page 242 is from my book. And so is the Sebastian Conran quote on page 67 which is instead attributed to Pat Gilbert’s definitive Clash biography, Passion Is A Fashion.

I shouldn’t imagine Pat appreciates being wrongly credited for my hard work anymore than I enjoy being credited for that quote in Kris’ book. You might be thinking, who in the wider world cares about any of this, you provincial tosser? But here’s the real issue: that’s a few significant errors relating to my own minuscule second-hand, twice-removed, long-after-the-fact role, and if they’re wrong, what percentage of the rest of the book can be trusted?

Working your way through the text, you’ll be introduced to Stiff records co-owner Jake Rivera, Subway Sect frontman Vic Goddard, Acme Attractions owner John Crevene, Roxy manager Andy Czekowsi, 101ers bassist Dan Kello, Dr Feelgood producer Vic Mayo, Slits drummer Palm Olive, and Throbbing Gristle frontman Genesis P. Orridge, known as Orridge for short… who are better known to the rest of us as Jake Riviera (after the glamorous French coastline), Vic Godard (after Jean-Luc, the famous French director), John Krivine, Andy Czezowski, Dan Kelleher, Vic Maile, Palmolive (after the famous soap), and Genesis P-Orridge, known as P-Orridge for short (after the unglamorous but famous breakfast cereal). These are all everyday punk scene names.

As they appear in Babylon’s Burning, most of them have the look of transcription errors…. and yet almost all occur in the main body of the text, rather than within interview quotes. Surely it can’t be the case that the entire book was spoken onto tape by the author, transcribed by someone who knows nothing about punk… and then carefully not checked for accuracy by either the author or by copy editor Shan Morley-Jones (who is duly thanked ‘for her thoroughness’ in the acknowledgements)?

On page 192, we learn the Clash went back into Beaconsfield ‘a demo studio they already knew well’ on 12 February 1977. Actually, they went into CBS studios at that time to record their debut single and album. Beaconsfield was a film studio where they’d recorded a crafty demo some time earlier. On page 454, we’re told in an aside that Keith Levene gave Chrissie Hynde guitar lessons. Not true. Viv Albertine was inspired to pick up guitar by Hynde - who was already playing - and at that point Levene started to give Albertine lessons. The Attractions bass player is identified as Pete Thomas on page 324. That was Bruce Thomas. Pete was the drummer… These are just a few errors from subject areas I happen to know a little about. I found more, but don’t want to bore you. And again, I can’t help but wonder how many others there are in those where I’m less well-informed.

Perhaps more importantly, in that it undermines the book’s academic pretensions, is that CH’s so intent on being authoritative that he has a tendency to make sweeping statements without backing them up with any kind of evidence. ‘It’s often overlooked that England had a handful of “proto-punk” outfits contemporary with the CBGB’s scene,’ he asserts on page 58. It hasn’t been overlooked in any punk overview book worth its condiments for at least the last 15 years: it’s common knowledge. On page 67, he gets confused as to what ‘the dole’ is and isn’t, and a page later tells us that there was no need to squat as the dole would pay your rent. That’s solved that issue, then.

On page 156, we’re informed that the Clash’s ‘proud to be thick polemic’ ‘I Can’t Understand The Flies’ was ‘a reference’ to William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies. What’s your source, CH? You don’t say. I seem to remember reading (or was it writing?) that it was a literal rather than literary reference, specifically to the plague of flies in Joe Strummer’s Orsett Terrace squat during the long hot summer of 1976. Which seems a bit less of a stretch.

On page 388, CH states that Sandy Pearlman coined the term ‘heavy metal’ in relation to music. I could debate this at length, but let’s just leave it with: Pearlman claims this dubious honour, but no source has yet been provided to back it up. In his prologue, CH attributes first use of the term ‘punk’ in relation to music to his ‘personal candidate’ Lester Bangs. Again, highly debatable. Lester’s Creem colleagues Dave Marsh and Nick Tosches are both far more likely candidates, though proof has also yet to be lodged.

The prologue of Babylon’s Burning is entitled ‘In the beginning was the word…’ and CH duly commences by telling us how the term ‘punk rock’ predated the musical form as we know it. Depends on your definition of punk rock. The Monks?

Following on from this, CH develops his ‘in the beginning’ conceit to assert that punk first travelled the globe, not in it’s true form of performed or recorded music, but via the printed word: music paper reviews and commentaries. Babylon’s Burning goes on to provide examples of this, including: Creem and the New York Rocker being avidly read in London by the likes of Nick Kent and Mick Jones, later of the Clash; and future Buzzcocks Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto first reading about the Sex Pistols in the NME. However, CH also provides many other examples of how records were moved around the globe by fans, import-export arrangements and even more mainstream distribution networks. Musicians also travelled to see bands in other countries, or had relatives who did. TV appearances, radio plays, good ol’ word of mouth, flyers, and even pictures - which, as we all know, paint a thousand words – also helped get people first interested and then hooked.

Here’s a possibly over-familiar, but nonetheless illustrative, turnaround: Blondie drummer Clem Burke visited London around 1975, and took the first Dr Feelgood album back to New York. He played it at parties attended by other new wave scenesters, and insists it influenced the way things developed over there: minimalism, retro-styling, speedy delivery. A few months later, Malcolm McLaren brought a Xeroxed flyer for Television back from New York and put it on the wall in Sex. It featured a photograph of the band in action, along with selected titles from their repertoire, and it gave London punk the ripped T-shirt, the spiketop hairdo, some lyrical pointers (the title ‘Blank Generation’ being enough to inspire the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’)… and, of course, the Xeroxed flyer.

In other words, the ‘word’ was just part of it. Punk spread just like any other musical genre spread - by any means possible - in those long ago days pre-internet, before everything became instantly available in every medium imaginable to everyone everywhere.

While we’re dealing with approximations and fudges… In the acknowledgements, CH announces that he has ‘tried to quote everyone verbatim where possible’. But almost every substantial quote in the book is represented like this one from Phast Phreddie Patterson on page 363: ‘[At least] it wasn’t the Eagles or Elton John! The image was very important to [Slash]. [But] to us, it was [about] rock & roll.’ The whole point of quoting verbatim is to reproduce what the person you’re quoting said exactly. [Used sparingly, square-bracketed insertions can help avoid misunderstandings, correct inaccuracies, or add important information that may have been unintentionally or otherwise omitted by the interviewee.] But if you[’re going to chop and] change what they say [to make it read better, or better express what it is you think they’re saying], then you’re not quoting them verbatim, and you’re also implying they can’t speak properly [and insulting the intelligence of your readers by implying they can’t pick up the gist of what’s being said without your help]. Plus, as far as anyone else knows, you could be twisting everything around to suit your own purposes [which kind of undermines the whole purpose of the exercise]. [Plus this sort of thing is really hard on the eye.] As you’ve already taken out all the ers and ums, Why not just edit and polish the quotes like other writers have been doing since time immemorial? Either that, or paraphrase?

Is this nitpicking? Possibly, but CH’s style and tone don’t exactly encourage a warm and forgiving response to his foibles. Some of his reductionist descriptions are as distasteful as they are glib. Ari Up is ‘Germanic jailbait’ and Siouxsie Sioux the ‘most photogenic punkette in London’. Feminism: it was never going to last. Richard Branson is apparently ‘bright but untrustworthy’, Jake Rivera (sic) is a man after Elvis Costello’s ‘own wallet’. The first is pretty much a definition of a successful entrepreneur, the second a bit of a slur on the characters of Riviera and Costello, who have always been strong, determined and ambitious characters, yes, but in the punk days were motivated as much by genuine love of marginal music, the pleasure provided by mischievous and highly creative presentation, and the reward of achievement on their own terms at least as much as they were by commercial returns.

At one point Joy Division are described as having ‘an album’s worth of material under their cloth caps’. No doubt they also had at least a couple of singles tucked away in their pigeon lofts. The Ramones’ look is summed up by their (homosexual) manager Danny Fields thus: ‘it’s male, it’s beautiful, it’s tough’. To which CH somewhat unnecessarily adds ‘More like a gay man’s wet dream.’ Well, exactly: it was apparently based on the look adopted by the rent boys Dee Dee saw up on 53rd and 3rd, with the holes in the knees a code signalling how much time the lads in question were willing to spend down on ‘em earning their pay. Elsewhere we get the newsflash that Sid Vicious is out on bail for the ‘justifiable homicide of poisoned dwarf, Nancy Spungen’. Jeez. I know Nancy wasn’t generally well-liked, CH, but isn’t it up to the courts to reach that kind of verdict? And who poisoned her? (I thought she was knifed.) And was she really that small? (I thought she was of fairly average height.)

There’s more sneering in Babylon’s Burning than in Billy Idol’s entire career to date. God help you if you’re a pre-Pistols R&B or glam band. Or any kind of pre-Pistols band that later had a punk makeover, like Slaughter and the Dogs, the Vibrators, the Stranglers or Elvis Costello. Or are French, like the Stinky Toys with their ‘hopeless French punk parodie’. Or if you’re not particularly smart and you take the post Ramones, post-Clash three chord shouty approach, like Chelsea, or Sham 69, or Menace, or the Drones. Or you’re young and naïve and make the mistake of taking the punk mantra ‘anyone can do it’ too literally, like the Cortinas and - especially - the repeatedly rubbished Eater. Or you try out as a punk before going on to do something more interesting instead: the Killjoys are described as ‘Kevin Rowland’s first bandwagon-jump’. Or if you wrote for Sniffin’ Glue as punk was actually happening, so had to work out your response to it as you and it went along, rather than sitting back and waiting to be painfully hip after the event.

Sham 69 are a pretty easy target. Was it really so bad for Jimmy Pursey to have wanted to be in a new Bay City Rollers before he saw another bandwagon pulling into town? Because a new Bay City Rollers is exactly what the Ramones set out to be, and also what Malcolm McLaren initially wanted the Sex Pistols to be. And was it really so bad for Slaughter and the Dogs to be playing glam when the Sex Pistols first visited Manchester? David Bowie was a huge influence on punk even before he went to Berlin with Iggy. Whether CH likes it or not: no glam, no New York Dolls, no Sex Pistols, no punk.

In The Heylin Version, the Clash are a ‘geeky garageband’ who reduced the Pistols’ ‘message and style of music to its bare essentials, adding a quasi-political schtick that would resonate with a (largely reactionary) set of souls…’ Of course, you could argue that the Pistols’ first two singles, and best work, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ were political. And that the Clash added lyrical substance to Rotten’s otherwise adolescent nihilistic whining. And that underneath all the rhetoric, both bands were essentially pretty reactionary: channelling the mid-Sixties Anglo riff-pop of the Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Small Faces via the New York new wave.

Bernie Rhodes comes in for a particularly hard time. Which, obviously, I’m totally OK with for a bit of off-the-cuff fun on a website, but, for the record (which Babylon’s Burning aspires to be)… Bernie wasn’t a ‘chauffeur and gofer’ as he’s described on page 81, or Malcolm McLaren’s ‘erstwhile employee’ as he’s described on page 279. Nor was he inarticulate and unperceptive as he’s described (inevitably in comparison to McLaren) on page 108. He was at least the equal of his fellow plotter-of-punk, and was arguably more responsible than any other single individual named in this book for making UK punk happen. He recommended Johnny Rotten for the Sex Pistols, put the Clash together, and shaped both bands’ approaches to their material. No Pistols, no Clash… no movement to write 700 page books about.

As CH points out, albeit using slightly different terminology, punk came from a wide variety of sources, and very quickly split into an equally wide variety of sub-genres. The split can be roughly - very roughly - broken down into basic thrash’n’yell, upbeat spiky rock/pop, and arty avant-garde experimentalism of varying degrees of listenability (from ‘wow, that’s, er… unusual’ to ‘thanks, but I’d rather nail my testicles to a swinging gate in a force nine gale’). It becomes obvious fairly quickly that CH believes that the last of these is the one true path. His snobby dismissals of much of the rest remind me of being heckled for liking Bowie and Mott in 1973-74 by spotty geeks in greatcoats with prog albums under their arm. I felt bad about it for about five minutes before I realised there was an upside to being the butt of their jibes: I got to listen to Bowie and Mott, while they got to listen to prog.

CH does make exceptions, notably for Buzzcocks, the early Lurkers and the Ruts - who provide the book with its increasingly inappropriate title - the Undertones and those ‘dazzlingly danceable headcases from Edinburgh with a bad case of Sixtiesitis’, the Rezillos. Why? The Rezillos were no more bona fide punk than the Stranglers, and - putting considerations of Peel-approval and general enjoyability aside for the moment - the Undertones were no less of a made-over covers band with an eye for the commercial main chance than the Boomtown Rats. CH must have developed a soft spot for them before he learned to know better, or something. For the most part though, you’d be better off being Pere Ubu or Wire to get a halfway appreciative response around these parts. Either that or being so determined to kill off traditional rock’n’roll that you never actually get around to releasing an album, like the original Subway Sect.

Another band that didn’t really record, the Prefects, get a disproportionate amount of space, too. And from reading Babylon’s Burning, you’d think that Lora Logic, the teenage sax-killer who was briefly with X-Ray Spex, was more important a figure than, say, Chrissie Hynde. The Police and the Cure are barely mentioned. The Rats and U2 are airily dismissed. Simple Minds and the Skids simply never existed. And yet New York’s proudly unlistenable no wave - the New Clothes the Emperor happened to be wearing that year - gets a whole section to celebrate once again its celebration of self at the audience’s expense. Be still my bleeding ears.

R&B-despising, tradition-traducing noisenik CH Heylin has also written books on the Sex Pistols, PiL, Joy Division… and also on Van Morrison, Sandy Denny, and Bob Dylan. (Five books on Dylan alone.) There’s tradition, R&B and melody aplenty in the last three artists’ largely wonderful oeuvres. Innovation, too. But not much in the way of challenging left-field noise, unless you count Van’s occasional scat-grunting or Dylan’s Self Portrait.

Surely we’re far enough from the position-taking of the punk moment now to see some merit in the best of (almost) all the different strains of punk?

Near the beginning of the book, the Saints and Radio Birdman get a chapter detailing their origins. I guess that’s not going to harm Penguin’s sales of Babylon’s Burning in Australia, and I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t find this previously largely unexplored tributary of punk interesting, but… how vital was either band to the main story, really? There’s nothing about Paris’s thriving black leather proto-punk scene of 1973-75, which was far more of an influence on the London Class of ‘76. Northern Ireland gets a section to itself, but the Republic doesn’t. Or Scotland or Wales. And there’s not much about later UK scenes like anarcho punk, oi, or goth, for that matter. Yeah, they make me cringe, too, for the most part, but they have at least as much claim to be part of the story of punk as no wave does.

I felt wrong-footed from the off by Babylon’s Burning, because - long and deep and wide and tall though it is - it starts partway through the story. CH might claim that it picks up from where its prequel From the Velvets… left off, but it doesn’t, quite. There’s a somewhat uncomfortable overlap. I’m also suspicious that marketing considerations were at least partly responsible for making Seattle and Nirvana the book’s terminus. (First generation punks are in their forties, fifties and sixties now, so let’s broaden the demographic and bring in the thirty-somethings.) To get there - to justify the connection - we’re hurtled through American hardcore and the Buckskin-Paisley underground. But we don’t get to hear about Guns’n’Roses or the Beastie Boys, both of which were - in their diverse ways - every bit as much punk’s late Eighties heirs as were the grunge bands. And why stop there? What about the Manic Street Preachers? Or Rancid? Or Green Day? Or the Strokes? Like most of the decision-making involved in this book, it feels kind of arbitrary, very much dictated by CH’s personal tastes and whims. Which is exactly the criticism he makes of Simon Reynolds.

This seems as good a time as any to take the trakMARX private jet to Belfast and ask one of CH’s interviewees, Brian Young of Rudi, for his perspective. Brian has his own not insubstantial list of factual errors - ‘I know we speak funny over here, but there are some real howlers’ - but his main gripe concerns a more serious instance of misrepresentation. A June 1978 gig at Belfast’s Queens University was promoted as a Northern Irish Battle of the Bands. In his interview, Brian readily admitted to CH that headliners Rudi were ‘blown away’ on the night by the Undertones. A couple of pages later, the latter band’s John O’Neill talks about the same gig, and says the Undertones were playing ‘[almost] all our own songs, whereas some of the other bands, like Protex, were doing mostly obvious cover versions. We were doing the same thing six months earlier, but [back] then six months seemed a long time.’

At this point, CH adds a gratuitous footnote stating that headliners Rudi also played mostly cover versions, their set that night supposedly including, among others, ‘96 Tears’, ‘The Kids Are Alright’, ‘Gloria’, ‘Teenage Depression’, ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Pills’ and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’: basically, warmed-over Eddie and the Hot Rods, David Bowie, the New York Dolls and the Ramones. The strong implication is that the Undertones proved to be the winners on the night because they alone of the bands involved had original material. And as the chapter ends shortly afterwards, we’re left with the impression that it’s also the reason why they and Stiff Little Fingers went onto bigger things and left the other Northern Irish punk bands behind.

‘The bit that rankled with me was when he kinda assumed that the ‘Tones did well at the Battle of the Bands because they played their own material and we didn’t,’ says Brian. ‘That set list of ours he quoted was from a completely different gig about six months earlier! [Note: from a time when, as O’Neill admits, the Undertones were also playing mostly cover versions.] The Buzzcocks were headlining and their van broke down, so we played a freebie for everyone who turned up. As a result we played longer than expected, and threw back into the set some covers we hadn't played in ages. We certainly didn’t play ‘em at the Battle of the Bands. By that time, 95% of our set was originals. Rudi were the first Belfast band to write our own material. Which is why Gordy Blair joined us. He’d just left Stiff Little Fingers, who at that time didn’t have any originals except a 12-bar Rory Gallagher-styled boogie called ‘Acting The Wag’.’

‘I’m grateful that CH came over and spoke to people like me, and Owen McFadden from Protex, who are normally overlooked,’ continues Brian. ‘But then to see the same ol’ crap that only SLF and the Undertones mattered… it misses the point of what punk was all about, particularly in relation to places like Northern Ireland. The real punk bands were the local label zeroes in out-of-the-way shitholes worldwide. Most all big UK punk bands we met were ignorant, spoilt, posing idiots whose rockstarish behaviour was totally at odds with their contrived public image. I feel a bit churlish slagging CH. His conclusions don’t tally with mine, which is fine. But to me, the book takes a really narrow-minded view on punk.’

Brian makes some interesting points. CH’s criterion for proclaiming Stiff Little Fingers and the Undertones to be the most worthy products of the NI punk scene seems to be that they ‘made it’. How does this tally with deeming, say, Subway Sect and the Prefects to be among the most worthy of the initial wave of post-Pistols bands when they most assuredly didn’t make it? Or, for that matter, make records?

How important to punk - rather than BA (Hons) Punk - is the notion of a critically-defined and academically-debated Canon of Great Works and Compendium of Key Artists? Wasn’t the whole point of the movement that it was supposed to demystify and demythologise the process of music-making, snatch it from the bejewelled hands of glad-ragged and pampered preeners, and give it back to the unwashed masses? Isn’t it more important to note and celebrate the fact that previously dead towns now had bands, venues, scenes, excitement? That local folk got the chance to be part of something bigger, and feel empowered by the experience of making things happen? In which case, the True Records of Punk are books like Alex Ogg’s No More Heroes, which tells the often highly entertaining stories of the local label zeroes without grinding any personal axes, and the Messthetics series of albums which preserve their output for anyone interested in hearing it.

I have to confess to being torn on this issue. I appreciate the egalitarian sentiments of the above theory, but in practice…. euwww! I’m probably a bit of a quality snob, too. Which I guess makes me a Canon bloke. I just like to think it would be a bigger and wider Canon, and that I’d be a bit more consistent about where I pointed it. Or if I had every intention of being total and utter despot with it, I like to think I’d at least give the peasants due warning right up front in the prologue.

Might as well get into the general sloppiness of CH’s writing before we grind to a shuddering halt. This is an area that invites retribution in kind, and we all have our off days, so I won’t offer up more than a few examples from my increasingly bemused notes. On page 269, ‘Rat Scabies and Jerry Nolan, having huffed and puffed their way uphill for almost two years apiece, quit in a minute and a huff. In Scabies’ case it had been a long time coming…’ On page 283 the Adverts decide to ‘trade something Stiff for the altogether weightier Anchor’. On page 287, the Blockheads are ‘as dexterous as Dexedrine, and twice as fast’. On page 347, we hear about ‘the insidious idiosyncrasy’ of ‘Can’t Stand My Baby’. On page 406, Rudi didn’t sound much like their ‘chordically challenged cousins from Queens’. And, as already seen, from the acknowledgements: ‘those special specs that come complete with bias bifocals’. What can I say? There are far too many mixed and forced metaphors, words thrown together because they alliterate rather than combine in a meaningful way, and puns so piss-poor they’re more likely to raise a quizzical eyebrow than a smile or even a groan. An author really ought to weed out this kind of thing very early on, and if he doesn’t, his copy editor should catch it later. I don’t remember the going being this hard in From The Velvets To The Voidoids.

Parts of Babylon’s Burning are illuminating, and even entertaining, but nowhere near enough. For me it was anything but the ‘compelling non-stop page turner’ Mudhoney’s Mark Arm raves about on the cover. (Maybe he was in a hurry to get to his bit right at the end?) CH comes out swinging, proclaiming his book to be the Great Punk Overview. And it just isn’t. For the reasons outlined above, it’s pretty hard to even like, and it doesn’t compensate by stimulating much more than irritation. Looks like Jon Savage can rest easy for a while longer.

I should say that have no intention of attempting to claim the title with anything I’ve written or intend to write in future. I believe – and would prefer CH, Jah Wobble and you, the reader, to believe - that petty jealousy and rivalry have played no part in the measured, reasoned and totally justifiable good kicking I appear to have just given Babylon’s Burning.

****

Footnote:

In the spirit of fairness, and at my suggestion, Clinton Heylin was sent the first draft of the above review well before publication and offered the right of reply. The idea was that his spirited defence would be run alongside the piece, and perhaps stimulate some further debate.

In his email response to whoever the editor thinks he is this week, CH asserted that he ‘long ago gave up replying to the likes of Gray’, and asked for all references to him as ‘Clinton’ be changed to his ‘proper name’ of ‘Heylin’, as he doesn’t know me or wish to. In other words, if he can’t have a good review, then he will have the gravitas that is his due! I compromised with ‘CH’.

He also remarked, ‘There’s a reason no serious publisher would publish the guy (+ it’s me he can blame for Penguin turning down his Clash book – I told Tony to pass on it).’ If this is true, it reflects badly on both CH and his commissioning editor at Penguin, Tony Lacey. If it isn’t true (and I doubt it is), the boast is both deluded and sad.

I was given far more pause for thought by his opening remark, ‘Well, it’s a pretty idiotic piece.’ I wondered, idiotic as in, too stupidly wide of the mark in all areas to give any credence to whatsoever? Possibly, but unlikely.

Idiotic as in, not serious enough? Not being taken seriously would seem to be CH’s ultimate fear. Although I don’t want to encourage him to climb any further up himself than he already is, I did tone down a couple of the more facetious interludes, and I also removed the original ending, which was jocular in a provocative way that I can now see wasn’t entirely appropriate. But this ain’t the Times Literary Supplement, so the rest can stand. You don’t have to be humourless to make a serious point.

Idiotic as in, not wise? Making an enemy of a fellow writer operating in the same fairly small field might not be the best career move. And judging from his email, CH is the type to hold a grudge in a proactive kind of way. But, hell, the damage is done, now…

In order to avoid being influenced, positively or negatively, I didn’t read any other reviews of Babylon’s Burning before I reviewed it. Nor did I read anything about Clinton Heylin. Not even the interview with him in trakMARX 20… I did look through it just now, though, to see if I had misjudged the man. Apparently not.

That’s what I like about trakMARX. You get to make your own fun. Who cares if Babylon burns? Encoule! Throw another Queen Anne chair on the fire, and peel me a grape…

Marcus Gray – tMx 30 – 07/07