In hindsight it’s a little difficult to believe that Talking Heads started life as one of the bands at the core of the mid 1970s New York Punk scene, alongside other CBGB luminaries such as The Ramones, Richard Hell, Suicide and Television. Because, unlike most of their peers, Talking Heads broke free from their Punky roots and, through front man David Byrne’s uncanny ability to write incredibly catchy tunes, captured the imaginations of much larger, more mainstream audiences. Which meant that they survived for much longer and much more successfully than most of their peers - right until 1991 in fact. They even reached the Top Twenty. Regularly.

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We left Jonathan Richman (see ABON 0188) having just been deserted by his first band - the, original, Modern Lovers - because of his decision to junk their Velvet Underground-inspired back catalogue and sound in favour of a new musical style that seemed to take Jonathan’s eternally optimistic world-view that had always fuelled the original Modern Lovers’ lyrics and apply it - in spades – to the music, the instrumentation, the production, even the album covers of everything he would do from then on.

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‘(I Belong To The) Blank Generation’ tends to be remembered as another classic Punk track, American variety, from that classic Punk year, 1977.

Except…

‘Blank Generation’ is not really from 1977 at all.

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Uncategorisable in 1977 and still uncategorisable after I’ve had 34 years to think about it, Chrome never really ‘fitted in’. Even the apparently handmade sleeve to 1977′s ‘Alien Soundtracks’ was made from card so thick that the album felt more like a scrap book than a vinyl release. And on my copy at least, had been kindly shrunk-wrapped to hold it all together.

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1977 Part 7. And then I’ll move on.

Back in 1977 while The Saints, The Ramones and The Sex Pistols were giving Rock Music a pretty hefty and very public shoeing, Lemmy Kilmister’s Motorhead were preparing to perform a similar operation on Heavy Metal.

And it needed it as much as Rock did. Heavy Metal had started in the 1960s as a loud, bass-driven, distortion-heavy version of The Blues, pioneered by groups such as Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly and Cream. And later, in the early 1970s, by Led Zeppelin (some of the time), Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.

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1977 Part 6. But it should probably have been Part 1 given its significance.

At the heart of Punk, at the start of Punk, there was rebellion. And the most conspicuous targets for that rebellion were the groups of the day and the music they made.

But actually the venom of the first Punks was aimed at least as much against the record companies as the groups. Because – quite astutely - the Punks had realised that the record industry at the time was dominated by a small number of very large multinational record labels who not only controlled what was released and what wasn’t but also had incredibly similar views about what music should sound like. So in fact it was the industry as much as the groups that was responsible for the stiffling musical output of the mid ’70s.

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