We encountered Caribou and their Rough-Trade-album-of-the year, ‘Swim’, earlier (see ABON 0120). ‘Swim’ is a wonderfully original mixture of thought-provoking ideas and left field dance rhythms. Written and performed by a genuine Dr of Mathematics, it - very appropriately you may think – sets out to prove that music can make you dance and think at the same time.

Whilst it’s not the first record to do that, ‘Swim’ doesn’t have many obvious historical reference points. In fact it doesn’t sound much like anything that has gone before.

Except of course for A Certain Ratio’s early Post-Punk icey Funk.

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Johnny Rotten, aka John Lydon, is such a colourful, controversial and out-spoken character that it’s not surprising that so much has been written about him. But nine times out of ten what’s written about him completely ignores, or even seems to deny, the fact that, underneath all the media hype and silliness - admittedly often created by Lydon himself - there lays an underrated genuine musical genius. How else can you explain the fact that Lydon was a key character in four - count ‘em - of the most remarkable albums of the past 50 years?

Everyone of course, is aware of ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ by the Sex Pistols. But what is often over-looked is that after he left the Pistols, he produced with his new band, Public Image Limited (PIL), another three phenomenal and phenomenally influential albums, ‘Public Image’, ‘Metal Box’ and ‘Flowers Of Romance’ between 1978 and 1981.

PIL was quite a different outfit to the Pistols.

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The first concert I ever went to was in Wolverhampton Civic Hall on May 22 1977. It was part of the Clash’s White Riot tour and the first major Punk gig ever to be held in Wolverhampton. Three days before the gig, The Jam who were supposed to be one of the supports, pulled out. Not that that mattered too much because The Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and The Slits were still on the bill and anyway it was The Clash that everyone really wanted to see. 

So the bottom-of-the-bill Slits turned out to be the first group I ever saw play live. 

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The first wave of Punk – from say late ’76 to late ’78 - was consciously revolutionary. As it attempted to rip everything up and start again it shouted its intentions very clearly and very loudly in both the press and in the lyrics it wrote as it went along. Being seen to be revolutionary was at least as important as actually creating something revolutionary. But what seemed radical, dangerous and confrontational at the time, now seems a little tame and safe and in many ways more the natural successor or evolution of ’50′s Rock’n'Roll than a revolution.

That’s not a criticism - some of the most remarkable music ever comes from that period and that genre.  It’s also not a suggestion that Punk wasn’t a very big and necessary departure from what came immediately before - it was and it acted like a well needed cleanser on the bloatedness and laziness of much mid ’70′s music.

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By 1959 Rock’n'Roll was well into its Rococo period. The wild and eye-opening creativity of early R’n'R had gradually been replaced by a seemingly endless series of similar-sounding work-outs over the same basic R’n'R blueprint, each with a few ornate differentiating details added for good measure.

Eventually this last wave of R’n'R would get bored with itself and we’d enter the barren years of 1961 and 1962 when Rock went home to its mother and tried to work out what to do next. And when it finally came out to play again it would find itself, rather surprisingly, in the UK. But that’s another story.

Anyway, even in this very late phase, in the last 2 years of the 1950′s, R’n'R could still produce some brilliant flourishes. Tracks that - paradoxically – influenced 1970′s Glam Rock and then Punk more than the earlier and more genuinely radical breakthrough-R’n'R. This was the period of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Somethin’ Else’, Frankie Ford’s ‘Sea Cruise’ and Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’. All of which shone brightly above the bland clutter of late ’50′s R’n'R and were very influential in the 1970′s, in the UK at least. ‘Brand New Cadillac’ was apparently on the jukebox at Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Sex’/'Seditionaries’ shop on London’s Kings Road.

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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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