From roughly late 1974 to 1981 the monthly American publication Hit Parader magazine and the weekly UK publication New Musical Express (NME), were the primary resources for my knowledge of what was happening in rock, and particularly on the punk / New Wave scenes, but beyond that too, to power pop, ska/TwoTone, New Romantic, electronic pop, first wave Goth, funk, reggae, and so on.
My first introduction to the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Richard Hell, Wayne/Jayne County, Dictators, and the other New York bands that preceded the punk explosion in the UK, came from an article in Hit Parader (in August 1974), which otherwise focussed on mainstream rock in the USA. Hit Parader also introduced me to Aerosmith and, in the aftermath of the huge success of Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, it was a piece on the early, blues oriented version of Fleetwood Mac that induced me to buy an album called Fleetwood Mac: The Vintage Years, an excellent compilation of the best tracks from the Blue Horizon label.
I started buying the NME regularly in early 1977, after the Sex Pistols had become notorious and just as the punk bands that followed (The Clash, The Damned, The Stranglers, The Jam, and the hordes of others) began receiving attention from the British music press and for the next five years I followed the successive trends in UK music in the NME, but was also educated on P-Funk, reggae, contemporary comics, Elmore Leonard, Tottenham Hotspur football club, and the artists that were regarded as the godfathers of punk, such as Iggy Pop/The Stooges, the New York Dolls, Big Star and others. NME also covered mainstream American hard rock and it introduced me to Blue Öyster Cult and Cheap Trick (it liked the latter, mocked the former) and others.
So, though I pretty much knew what was going on in the UK (at least in regard to the acts and types of music the NME deemed worthy of covering), and quite a bit of what was happening in the USA, it was mostly theoretical knowledge. I hardly ever heard any of the music I read about.
I was studying towards my law degree and living in Stellenbosch. I was buying records but concentrated on bargain albums, due to financial constraints, and primarily on blues records too. I also found that the two local records shops (Sygma Records and the record bar at the CNA stationery shop) still mostly stocked mainstream rock and very little, if any, of the brand new music the NME was so enthusiastic about.
The owner of Sygma Records looked baffled and perhaps thought I was taking the piss when I asked him whether he had or would get, the Sex Pistols’ debut album Never Mind the Bollocks. The first New Wave album I bought was Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True, at the twice yearly CNA record sale in 1979 (on the same day I bought Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, also on sale) and at the end of the year I managed to lay my hands on The Clash’s London Calling at Silverstone Records in Cape Town. Sygma Records stocked Never Mind the Bollocks about a year after its release.
Ragtime Records was the premier record store in the Cape Town CBD and I probably visited it a couple of times, usually on a day trip to the City during holidays, but, as I’ve said, focussed on the bargain bin rather than the standard price new releases. When Ragtime Records shot lived Stellenbosch branch went belly up in 1981 and sold off its stock at reduced prices, I stocked up on Bob Dylan (Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited), the first three Blue Öyster Cult albums and the first two Stooges albums. Somewhere along the line I’d also acquired Aerosmith’s Rocks, Toys in the Attic and Night in the Ruts, and Cheap Trick’s In Color, Heaven Tonight and Dream Police.
In about 1981 I also bought Elvis Costello’s Get Happy (bargain bin) and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (brand new), The Ramones’ Leave Home, as well as Funkadelic’s Hardcore Jollies, One Nation Under a Groove and Uncle Jam, and Parliament’s Funkentelechy vs the Placebo Syndrome and Motor Booty Affair purely because the NME raved about the Parliafunkadelicment Thang so much.
The point is, though, that I didn’t buy any punk/New Wave albums, either because they weren’t available in Stellenbosch, or I didn’t look for them in Cape Town, or much of anything else of contemporary value. I never heard The Clash’s debut album, or anything by The Damned, The Jam, The Stranglers, or any of the run of the mill punk bands unless there was a snippet of their music on a Sunday night BBC insert on Radio 5 where the presenter introduced us to some of the new music.
I read about Eater, The Cortinas, The Lurkers, Chelsea, The Sound, The Fall, Buzzcocks, Magazine and literally dozens of other bands covered in the NME and had no idea what they sounded like and remained ignorant about them until well into the 21st century until I downloaded the YouTube app and signed up to Apple Music, and found a smorgasbord of music of all eras and all types, including the stuff I’d never heard between 1977 and 1981, not to mention even earlier in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
I kept scrapbooks of clippings from NME (and some other rock weeklies I bought) with record reviews and articles on acts that covered this five year period, and also from about 1983 to 1987, although the latter was not as comprehensively covered, and I often spent time poring over the scrapbooks, rereading favourite reviews or articles to refresh my memory and sometimes for the simple pleasure of enjoying the prose stylings of, say, Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, and was therefore regularly reminded of how little of the music I knew.
With YouTube and Apple Music virtually all of that unknown stuff is at one’s fingertips with a little searching. Best of all, I can now listen to, for example, the entire Jam back catalogue in sequence within the space of a day, if I choose and have the time. The two sad things is that there just isn’t enough time to listen to all of the music I once would’ve wanted to hear and, even worse, the shock and awe of the new ain’t there anymore and some of the albums, that might’ve been inspiring when I was in my late teens and early twenties don’t always sound that wonderful or interesting now.
One of the albums that had always intrigues me was The Lurkers’ debut album, Fulham Fallout, touted at the time, if memory serves, as some kind of rabid, devout replication of The Ramones’ “patented buzzsaw guitar” energy and kinda dumb, kinda poetic lyrics. Well, yeah, I can see where that view of the record comes from, but it’s not nearly as astounding or powerful as the first couple of Ramones records.
I think the phenomenon here is that I cannot hear Elvis Presley’s first ground breaking recordings the way they were heard in the ‘50s, when the audience was unprepared for this hybrid of blues and country, and the Beatles’ albums do not have the same impact today as they had when first released. There have been too many copyists or even original creators who’ve built on the same foundations to render those foundations particularly innovative to the contemporaneous audience.
Having said that, The Clash still sounds good, where the Jam’s albums are hard work to enjoy. I bought their last studio album, The Gift (1982), in Windhoek in 1983 and at the time, being so happy to have some Jam product, I was quite fond of the record, with the hit single “Town Called Malice” but when I listened to it again, many years later and after a long gap, it had lost whatever lustre it once had for me. “Town Called Malice” still has the visceral punch hit singles tend to have but the rest now sounds kinda rinky dink, high production values and good songcraft notwithstanding.
The Sound and The Cure are good examples of bands I wanted to hear back in the day, and very much wanted to like, but in each case, once I investigated I was incredibly disappointed by a sound (no pun intended) for which I no longer had an appetite. This specifically applied to The Sound, whom I’d never heard until a year or two ago when I found Jeopardy (1980), their debut, and couldn’t get past the first few tracks. I’d heard some early Cure tracks, like “Killing an Arab,” and their brand of what sounded like punchy post new wave guitar rock sounded appealing, but I was otherwise not clued up to their various early records. in the late ‘80’s the proto-Goth version of the Cure, and their pretty, tuneful and playful single “Love Cats” was a club hit in Cape Town (in the club I frequented) and much of their subsequent music became radio fodder in South Africa, none of which I like much. When, as with the Sound, I listened to the first couple of Cure albums very recently, I realised that I didn’t have enough patience to make it to the end of any of them and abandoned the project as a lost cause.
The lesson, I suppose, is, whereas I still love the music I did hear when I was a teenager, with some of the records from those times counting amongst my top favourites of all times (Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, In Color, Ramones Leave Home, End of the Century, London Calling, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, Get Happy, Malpractice, Blue Öyster Cult, Tyranny & Mutation, Rocks, Toys in the Attic) very few of the records I’ve listened to for the first time more than 40 years after the fact have become favourites, or even just records I like. Amongst the latter I can count almost only The Clash as a current favourite. The rest of the original crop of punk, New Wave and power pop bands have no traction for me.
Radio 5 played very little, if any, of the new music from the UK but on Radio Good Hope the Hobnailed Takkie Show, a short-lived innovative show in the period 1980 to 1981, the programmer or DJ made an effort to select the best of the then current fashionable bands, like the Liverpool contingent including Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, the more progressive rock sounds of Rush, and others. I taped a lot of this music and treasured my tapes for many years, as reminders of this period in my life when there was some actual connection with contemporary music, and not just through reading about it.
I recently discovered an interesting use of algorithm on Apple Music in that, after I play a certain album to the end, the music keeps going with a playlist of similar music by various other acts or artists, for example hard rock, blues or reggae, in seemingly random fashion.
The most prominent algorithm has been music from the post punk and pub rock R & B genres in that period between 1971 and 1981, which means that, for the first time, I heard tracks by bands like Lew Lewis’ Reformer, The Count Bishops, Ducks Deluxe, Tyla Gang, The Pirates (pub rock), The Skids, Department S (whose “Is Vic There” was a minor hit in 1981), The Pleasers (power pop), Chelsea, Sham 69, The Ruts, Angelic Upstarts, The Anti-Nowhere League, The Undertones (punk or second generation punk), The Members, Secret Affair, The Skids, The Prisoners (post punk) and others. All of these bands were mentioned in NME and some received a lot of attention too.
In general, this stuff is just of historical interest to me now. There is very little that I’d want to listen to more than once. For example, The Count Bishops, later The Bishops, (a band I’d forgotten about) seemed to be highly rated as R & B/blues practitioners, in the wake of Dr Feelgood, by the likes of Charles Shaar Murray, and might’ve excited me back in the day, but now the band sounds a tad stiff and lumbering on record, with nothing of the songcraft and visceral punch of Dr Feelgood, Wilko Johnson version, and can only be thought of as also ran journeymen whose performances were probably best enjoyed in crowded, smoky pubs. So, now I can tick The Count Bishops off my imaginary musical bucket list and without regret that I wasn’t exposed to their music when I was a teenager and perhaps less sophisticated in my musical tastes.
A contrasting example is the case of Eddie & The Hot Rods, who rose to prominence at about the same time as the punk explosion of 1976 but from the pub rock circuit. Apparently, their guitarist was heavily influenced by Wilko Johnson and the band had similar Canvey Island roots to that of Dr Feelgood. The band eventually shortened the name to just The Rods and had a middling hit with “Do Anything You Wanna Do.”
Because the NME punted Eddie & The Hot Rods, I bought their debut, Teenage Depression, as a cassette album when I saw it in a bargain bin somewhere, long before I heard any actual punk rock. I liked the fast, energetic rock and roll on the record but found it a tad simplistic and rough around the edges. For some reason, although all kinds of Eddie & The Hot Rods compilations, featuring tracks from the debut album, are available on Apple Music (or, at least, the South African version of it) that album is not, and one must fillet the “best of” compilations to recreate the record.
In this case, probably because it’s a familiar quantity, I still like those songs off the debut record and if it’s a tad underwhelming and no masterpiece, it has more traction with me than the punk or post punk bands of the era I now hear for the first time.
Going back even further than the punk era, I was continuously amazed and intrigued by record album covers in the shelves of Sygma Records, in its premises in Andringa Street, Stellenbosch with a denim shop right next door, a small section of hipness in a town, despite being a university town, that was conservative, sleepy and downright backward. Sygma Records was owned by one Pieter de Weet, the youngest, and hippest, son of the family that owned the Gebroeders De Wet’s Department Store in the town, and he stocked the best of mainstream rock in the early and mid-‘70s, and from the ‘60s.
The record sleeves were displayed and the records were kept behind the counter, to prevent theft. There were four or five turntables on the counter, with headphones, for those who wanted to listen to an album to help them decide whether to buy it. in this period, from roughly 1970 to 1976, I almost never had any money and if I had any, I spent it on plastic scale modelling kits, the building of which was my hobby at this time. I did buy some records but only rarely and asked for records as birthday or Christmas gifts.
For the most part, I simply flipped through album covers, making mental lists of albums I would buy if I had the money. I hardly ever asked to listen to any record because I knew I couldn’t buy any and felt awkward simply to listen to something I was never going to buy.
Going to Sygma Records was part of a long-standing Friday afternoon routine, which began with a visit to the Municipal Library, a stopover at the CNA book and stationery shop where I browsed comic books and ended at Sygma Records for record cover browsing.
I dreamt of owning the records, some of them at least, often purely because of the cover image though I had no idea what teh music sounded like, for example prog rock band Flash, whose album cover featured a pair of substantial naked breasts. When I looked at the credits and saw that the band used a synthesiser, I knew I would never buy the album because I had a loathing for them, and my parents would have been aghast, to say the least, I id’ brought that record home. To this day I’ve no idea what Flash sounded like. Perhaps I should search for them on YouTube or Apple Music.
Another band I fancied from the record cover alone was the Edgar Winter Group with They Only Come Out at Night (1972) with a naked Winter, blonde hair flowing in the breeze, wearing shocking red lipstick and make up, at the height of glam rock, and looking decidedly unlike the Texan blues and jazz man he was. It was a while before I heard of Johnny Winter, his brother. The Shock Treatment (1974) album cover was great too, but nothing as arresting and intriguing as its forerunner. I’ve subsequently listened to Edgar Winter’s stuff and don’t care for it and I suppose I wouldn’t have been impressed by it when I was a teenager.
There was mysterious Van der Graaf Generator (don’t recall which album), with possibly the most fascinating, obscure, non-rock ‘n roll name I’d ever heard at that time. I knew the band from a late-night music show on Saturdays on the SABC’s English Service from the early ‘70s, in which the producer or presenter featured the best of contemporary prog rock and jazz rock fusion , along with Van Der Graaff Generator also the likes of Genesis, Return to Forever, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and others. Sygma Records stocked albums by these bands too, and the covers were as fascinating yet very far from my interest. I didn’t care for prog rock or jazz / rock fusion and preferred fast, loud, simple rock ‘n roll.
Two other bands I knew from their album covers and that were considered extremely cool by my high school peer group, though I never knew anyone who owned the records, were Audience with The House on the Hill, and Pavlov’s Dog with Pampered Menial. One was British and the other one American and both were niche interests in the world at large but, somehow, had struck a chord in the South African musical psyche, at least in Stellenbosch that reverberated like nowhere else. Not unlike the high regard South Africans had for Rodriguez’ Cold Fact. None of these bands received much airplay on the SABC radios stations, as far as I knew. In the Eighties Chris Prior might have played one or two tracks from each album in his Radio 5 show. At some point in my later life, when I was in my thirties, I think, I obtained a copy of Pampered Menial and taped it, and this was the first time I listened to the entire thing. Someone, perhaps Prior, played “Jackdaw” from The House on the Hill on the radio and I also taped that for future reference but I recall hearing “ I Put a Spell on You” on the radio long before that, though I don’t recall when and which snow or station.
I must admit that I also heard very little Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin when I was still at school. From about 1977, when had a student job and could afford to buy more records, I started a Led Zeppelin project though not much of a Black Sabbath project before the early ‘80s, eschewed Jethro Tull and Uriah Heep (who I sneered at for being, in my opinion, a shit Deep Purple wannabe), and more or less all of the other “underground” bands my peer group raved about. In some cases, I simply didn’t care for the music but mostly I apportioned my limited funds to blues records and albums by some deep favourites such as Dr Feelgood and Cream, which were groups I’d discovered on my own and who seemed to be unknown, especially Dr Feelgood, to my hip peer group.
It’s been a recent development, with the benefit of YouTube and Apple Music and the vast range of music that’s become available through streaming, that I’ve been able to catch up with some of the ‘79s mainstream bands I hardly knew at the time, such as Uriah Heep. I made a project of listening to all their early albums, up to about 1980, and my original opinion, that Heep wasn’t going to be my cup of tea, has been reaffirmed. YouTube has a real treasure trove of obscure late ‘60s and early ‘70s hard rock bands, and just on this evidence alone I’d say that 1970 was a very good year for this genre. Not only releases by “name” bands but so many records by bands I’ve never heard of and who might have had only record out, and in a local market, especially in the USA, and Europe. The music is not only hard rock, lots of it blues based, but there’s a good variety of psychedelia and progressive rock too. Too much to listen to.
