Thursday 4 August 2011

Never Mind The Dovecotes

I suppose quite a few readers of ReARM will remember the arrival of punk in the late 70s: brash, iconoclastic, rebellious (I'm beginning to sound like a Q magazine reviewer here), etc.  To relive those wild days, a compilation album is being released by Decca featuring, among others, The Sex Pistols, The Jam, G.B.H., Siouxsie and The Banshees, Lene Lovich, The Fall, Sham 69, and X-Ray Specs.  As it's hardly the first such compilation, so what?  Well, this one's called Never Mind The Dovecotes and it's to raise money for the - er - National Trust.  Apparently, nearly half a million of the Trust’s members were aged between 16-25 in 1977, so they anticipate a lot of interest among nostalgic, and now parental, punks playing it in the car as they take their families to Trust properties. 

Good luck to them ~ it's a vast improvement on John Lydon advertising dairy products.

4 comments:

  1. It does seem something of an incongrous juxtaposition, though. And I fall into that age category, but back in 1977 I was listening to Zeppelin, Rush, Tull and Genesis.

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  2. .............and no inclusion of the Leyton Buzzards I'd warrant - one of my personal fave bands from that time. Underrated now as then!

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  3. I suspect that a good many of us were listening to Zeppelin, Tull and Genesis (or Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Gentle Giant in my case). As for the teenage unrest that Punk documentary makers are so keen to highlight, it must have passed me by at Padgate College.

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  4. As I recall, a lot of people liked punk/new wave music without rejecting the music that had gone before. The "year zero" attitude was invented and cultivated by music journalists, who were only interested in looking hip to the latest music fashions. I stopped getting music papers (NME, MM, Sounds) at this point when I saw Genesis, I think it was, being slagged off by a reviewer who had praised the band to the skies less than a year earlier.

    After I left college, I went to a couple of local punk gigs with my long hair and patched jeans, and received absolutely no hostility whatsoever. I remember trying to chat a gorgeous punk girl without any success, not that that was unusual!

    As an aside, I always found the use of the phrase "year zero" in relation to pop music repulsive, seeing how it derived from Pol Pot's ideology which led directly to the killing fields.

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