It’s a little difficult from the distance of 2010 to appreciate just how revolutionary ‘Ghost Rider’ and the album it came from were in 1977. Up to that point very little music with a driving beat or a dance rhythm in which everything had been created by keyboards and drum-machines had ever been released.

Kraftwerk of course, but they were by then German cool and never as manic as Suicide. Donna Summer’s revolutionary and revelatory ‘I Feel Love’, but that was never threatening.

And then there was Suicide - apparently out of nowhere with a complete album of the stuff, an album cover that featured nothing but the word ‘suicide’ written in what appeared to be blood and an album reverse that told us nothing more than that Suicide were a duo comprising Alan Vega who ‘sang’ and Martin Rev who played ’instrument’. What instrument was never made clear. 

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On the surface Wire are just another Punk group from 1977 playing angry, loud, fast, short songs. But scrape only a millimetre under that surface and you realise how completely wrong that assumption is. Maybe naming their debut album ‘Pink Flag’ was the first big clue that things weren’t going to be quite as they first seemed.

Wire were really a fantastical art project. Closer in attitude and spirit to Brian Eno than, say The Clash. Their raison d’etre was to create new, radical music through a mixture of serious artistic experimentation and often quite funny game-playing. So when they temporarily became a 3-piece after one member dropped out for a while it was no real surprise that they changed their name to Wir. And then back to Wire when he re-joined.

In fact the only completely consistent thread throughout their 25 year on-and-off existence has been that every single song they’ve recorded is not quite as it first seems.

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3 minutes that contain more energy than the whole bloated mid ’70s ‘Rock’ industry could produce across several double concept albums. Punk had arrived and immediately 80% of the music industry looked irrelevant. Possibly the most raucous and best couple of minutes the Clash ever produced and the first track of their first album.

For anyone too young to know – Janie Jones was involved in a sex for radio airplay scandal for which she was jailed.

Released 1977.

Available on the absolutely essential first Clash album ‘The Clash’: Amazon

We’ll be talking about late ’70′s Punk quite a lot on ABON and featuring many Punk recordings (can’t wait I hear you say). But what I want to talk about here is the revolutionary effect Punk had on what had previously been the music world’s accepted ‘norms’. And in particular the catalytic effect it had on the music that followed in its immediate wake.

Forget the tartan clothes and the mohicans for a moment – they were never really what early punk was all about anyway. The most important aspect of early Punk – in ’76 and ’77 – was that it liberated the performing and recording music scene. Punk broke down a lot of what had become accepted wisdom and introduced the concept that it was perfectly legit to perform and record music even if you weren’t a particularly experienced or even competent musician.

As a result there were hundreds of singles (often on independent labels) released in ’77 and ’78 by completely new bands. Many of these experiments died after one, sometimes appalling, 7inch, but some went on to inspire totally unexpected new sub-genres which as a whole became known as Post Punk. Angular-guitar funk-punk angst-ridden agit-rock being just one of these sub-genres – as more or less invented in 1978 by the wonderful Gang Of Four.

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