Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge
by Clinton Heylin
Viking £20, pp694
When, a few days before Christmas 2002, Joe Strummer died, aged just 50, of an undiagnosed heart condition, a tremor arced through a whole swathe of musicians and music fans worldwide. Strummer, front man of the Clash, was one of the greatest exponents of, and spokesmen for, the musical phenomenon that had revivified rock'n'roll in the last quarter of the 20th century, punk rock. He was the very embodiment of the motivations - a return to musical basics, a detestation of pop's bloated Seventies form - that galvanised punk, and the contradictions - art versus commerce, propaganda versus action - that stymied and sundered it. If Joe, so fit, so lean, so young, could die, then so could any of its practitioners and, with them, their stories.
It was an alarm call, one amplified 20 months later by the equally unexpected demise of punk's most prominent champion, John Peel. What was obviously and urgently needed was a definitive record of punk itself, and of the mutations it has continued to spawn. Clinton Heylin's whopping new book, whether inspired by these deaths or not, is an enormous, and enormously ambitious, attempt to provide just that.
Courageous, too, because, for two very different reasons, punk rock is extremely difficult to write about. In the first place, its shocking, electrifying force - musical, social, cultural - has proved remarkably resistant to capture by mere words. In the modern, marketing-dominated, focus group-directed world, its story seems utterly implausible. By the mid-Seventies, the music industry was postwar capitalism in excelsis - global, serene, self-congratulatory and belching out profits gigantic enough to fuel the heroically decadent lifestyles so luridly described in, among others, Marc Eliot's To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles and Simon Napier-Bell's Black Vinyl, White Powder
That such an edifice could be ridiculed, revolutionised and razed by a handful of year-zero bands and the kids they filled with something approaching religious zeal is extraordinary enough. That the aftershocks of punk can still be so strongly felt today - in music, fashion, cinema and advertising - is, given the scattergun chaos of the original project, something akin to a miracle.
Heylin's other great problem is the nature of punk's dramatis personae, who often resemble nothing more than old soldiers; indeed, many of them refer to the events of 1976, 1977 and 1978, only half-jokingly, as the Punk Rock Wars. Like their military counterparts, they are only too keen to recount their part in the drama and equally determined to establish their battlefield credentials, their I-was-there bona fides. The credit for every innovation is jealously fought over; every breakthrough has a thousand avowed fathers. Indeed, this snobbishness was embedded even in the earliest moments of the phenomenon. Heylin describes a hilarious face-off between Brian and Tony James, two tyros who would eventually form half of the Damned (whose 'New Rose' would beat all-comers to the title of first British punk single) and the older, balder, less hip Bernie Rhodes, eventually manager of the Clash. They meet at a gig; Rhodes and one of the teenagers are sporting identical T-shirts bought from Malcolm McLaren's King's Road shop, Sex. Tony James hisses at Rhodes: 'Don't wear the same T-shirt as us.' Rhodes replies: 'I designed it, you c***!'
As if these burdens were not enough, Heylin further encumbers himself by setting out to cover, at least ostensibly, too much. We are not party to the publishing decisions that require the book to extend from punk to grunge. Maybe it's just an excuse to get two icons - iconoclast Johnny Rotten and martyr Kurt Cobain - on to a cover that shamelessly echoes Peter Biskind's wonderful Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. The jacket designs are the only thing these two volumes have in common.
In any event, the 'Punk to Grunge' promise is entirely false. This is a book about punk; after 534 pages, we are still in 1979. This slight deceit is no big deal in itself, just a bit rich coming from an author who decides, after nearly 700 pages, that punk's essential message boils down to 'be honest in a dishonest world'.
In fairness, Babylon's Burning has some major strengths. The evident volume of research is impressive, the carefully unfolded tale studded and driven by a multitude of excellent original interviews. And there are insights and conclusions, some of them unfashionable or previously hidden, for whose inclusion we should be deeply grateful. The non-British, pre-76 glimmerings of punk, which Heylin has illuminated in a previous book, From the Velvets to the Voidoids, is concisely laid out.
Even better, there is a chapter devoted to the crucial role played by Canvey Island's brilliantly taut R'n'B merchants Dr Feelgood. Often cruelly dismissed as reactionary pub rockers, they were, in fact, the only stripped-down rock music available in mid-Seventies London. Their gigs, at such pubs as the Lord Nelson, were magnets for those who would later form the vanguard of punk, but who would only cite the exotic likes of the Stooges and the MC5 as influences. I know, because I saw them there, and Heylin is spot on in reinstalling the Feelgoods to their rightful place in the pantheon.
He is equally riveting on Johnny Rotten/John Lydon's post-Pistols career (with his more experimental band Public Image Limited), a second creative peak fuelled, sadly, by Lydon's mother's slow submission to cancer. Such expertise should, though, come as no surprise as he has already written not one, but two books about the Holloway-born nonconformist.
And best of all, in a work that determinedly avoids putting music into its social context, is a brief aside which acknowledges the critical importance of Britain's social security system in the development of the new breed. For all punk's biliousness about the dole, Heylin brilliantly outlines how lax administration of generous unemployment payments (and the ubiquitous 'supplementary benefit' for those who'd never even had a job) amounted to a virtual state subsidy for the artistically inclined. The Clash's song 'Career Opportunities' and Chelsea's 'Right to Work' were pure hokum; their authors and performers never had the slightest intention of getting a job.
Ultimately, though, the impact of these highlights, and that mountain of facts and quotes, is steadily undermined by some opinions that would best be described as maverick (the murder of Nancy Spungen by her Sex Pistol boyfriend Sid Vicious, for instance, is labelled 'justifiable homicide') and a resolute refusal to ascribe extra weight or significance to one event over another. Thus, such astounding happenings as the Pistols' apocalyptic TV appearance with interviewer Bill Grundy, Danny Baker's haranguing of a furious, bottle-throwing, crowd at the Vortex club when they celebrated the announcement of Elvis Presley's death and the torrent of violence rained down on New York art punks Suicide when they supported the Clash are reported in the same dry tone used to recount a band signing for this or that record company.
Such serious lack of light and shade, of narrative propulsion, is a decided flaw in a book of this gargantuan girth and one that can easily lead to the condition described in the Buzzcocks' early classic album, Boredom
Babylon's Burning isn't boring, but nor is it what it purports to be, nor as thrilling as it ought to be. For now, its sheer weight and length will make it the go-to, if slightly academic, volume on punk, an impressive achievement in itself but one that falls far short, one suspects, of Heylin's original remit and desire. In truth, if you want a truer flavour of the whole era, you should try Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's admittedly America-biased and sleaze-obsessed Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk or, for a matchless pictorial guide to the whole rollercoaster, Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan's chunky Punk.
· Danny Kelly is a former editor of the NME and Q magazine
