Rapid Eye 2: The Plague Yard by Simon Dwyer

Author:Simon Dwyer [Dwyer, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Counter-Culture
ISBN: 9781909923225
Published: 2013-09-10T22:00:00+00:00

RENAISSANCE KID (TIMESTEPS)

“And I ran across a monster/who was sleeping by a tree/and I looked and found/that the monster was me...”

—David Bowie, The Width Of A Circle

Finding angels and devils within himself was The Subliminal Kid. Cool, sharp, hip. Come closer, my droogies. Nowadays, as the ‘90s stretch before us and retro and repro are in, the arts bohemia have returned to ransack and give a postmodern post mortem to that decade they so recently said they abhorred – the ‘70s. The Arts Bohemia is the domain inhabited by a small number of middleclass men (and some women) who consider themselves to be intelligent, creative and somewhat eccentric arbiters of taste and historical reality.

Starry old vecks all, they have currently turned their attentions to Punk, and got it wrong. Many academics who will remain nameless are fond of arguing as to the “roots” of the “Punk phenomenon”, but most are either too young, too old, or too distanced from it at the time to know what they are talking about. They have the terminology, but not the understanding.

As I have said, Punk did, in fact, mean different things to different people. Its interpretations are informed by its roots.

My version is simple. Rank and file Punk was as much informed by SF paperbacks, the New English Library, the football terrace, the comprehensive school, the waiting room of the juvenile court and the bar billiards snug of the local under age boozer as by the art school milieu.

Slade, T-Rex and, towering above all, David Bowie as major pop stars were more influential on Punk than anything penned by French intellectuals. Not surprisingly, among the smug hairy tattooed co-eds of the late ‘80s, post working with Bing (Little Drummer Boy), Marlene Dietrich (Just A Gigolo) and international I-live-in-Mustique superstardom (Let’s Dance), Bowie’s early influence, as asexual mega-cult manipulator, has been forgotten and derided. But, by 1972, my little malchick, ex-skinheads had forgone their suedehead brolly-boy status and grown a full Bowiecut. Blood red hair matched blood red DM Astronauts.

By 1973, any hard boy fan worthy of the moniker had amassed the complete works of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, due to Bowie’s work with Reed and Iggy: raw power walking on the wildside. Through Bowie’s own influences and references, they had also been exposed to the work of Warhol, Guy Peelart, Burroughs and Gysin, Kerouac, Jean Genet, Salvador Dalí, J G Ballard, Crowley and the Golden Dawn, Friedrich Nietzsche, Buñuel, Brecht, Manson, Zen Buddhism, Man Ray, Ginsberg, transvestism and assorted chemical and sexual experiments never before introduced so blatantly to mainstream popular culture.

Bowie’s boys were the ones who first read the most important novel on English youth culture ever written, Anthony Burgess’s brilliant A Clockwork Orange, not only because it was about them, but because Bowie used to play the main theme as the intro to his 1973 Ziggy tour, and because he and his old painter and decorator workmate Marc Bolan said they sat up all night and watched Stanley Kubrick’s

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