Trivial Pursuit and Other Stories
1. The Birth of British Punk (for Some)
Terrence Roquefort is wearing a maroon Fred Perry polo shirt, Cool Hand Luke Jeans, black and white Creepers and a crew cut. His is built like the proverbial brick latrine and covered in crude tattoos.
On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played --------------- in Manchester. Legend has it that everyone who saw that gig went home and started a band the next day. I mean, there were famous ones: The Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall and The Smiths – but think of all the other no-talent kids that rushed out to buy guitars, headed to the garage to play a couple of choruses of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ (by The Ramones). Where are they now? Lost in the feedback of obscurity, the discord of history as the poet says...
2. The Rise and Fall of The Suicidal Stockbrokers
Lewis Nymaus is wearing a charity shop pinstriped suit. His tie has pictures of teddy bears and hunny pots on it. The ensemble is stained with generous daubings of fake blood.
We started the band after going to a punk rock festival called ‘Rebellion’ in Blackpool. We had been a couple of times before: I think we started going in 2005 when it was still called ‘Wasted’. But it was 2009 when we started Suicidal Stockbrokers. It was a credit-crunch themed punk rock band – at the time the country, and the world, was in financial turmoil. A bit of a laugh really: something that Sam [Raimouth, vocals] and Cribbins [Bernard, guitar] had talked about for a while, usually in the pub after a few pints of the local varnish.
So one day in the summer holidays I got a text from Cribbins asking if I wanted to play drums for their band. Never seriously played before but we all want to be rock stars, don’t we? His brother had a kit which we could use, so I text back ‘sure’.
We had a couple of songs, but our best one was ‘Into the Red’: a slide from the financially safe ‘black’ into demented anguish, B-movie inspired monetary troubles of ‘the red’. I think we pretty much ‘wrote’ the song in five minutes. Sam and Cribbins had lyrics – I remember we used to write these terrible songs in our tents in response to seeing good bands at festivals, so the lyrics came from that. Cribbins makes up a three-chord riff on the spot. I remember a standard drumbeat that I learnt at a house party once and played it at double speed and twice as badly. Then we fit the music around the movement of the lyrics and Sam’s vocals. It was terrible but it was brilliant. We were like: “Next!”
A big part of our ‘thing’ as a band was image and theatrics. We were the Suicidal Stockbrokers, so we had to look the part. The first step was buying cheap suits – we spent ages walking around Brighton on a hot August day looking for bargains until we found suits for the three of us. Then we poured fake blood all over ourselves. We got the recipe from Bruce Campbell’s autobiography. That was brilliant fun. The bloodstained suit is a memento of those happy days.
3. Exits and Entrances
English teacher Clarabelle Butler is wearing a Vivien of Holloway Tea Dress (‘Country Garden Green’) and Mary Jane canvass shoes. Accessories from unknown sources.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts ...
It’s funny how quotations are ripped from their context and bandied about; could anyone guess where this quotation comes from? It’s from As You Like It, actually. We all dutifully perform our entrances and exits. Some stick in the mind more persistently than others. The bard speaks further on the subject ... and we all have our favourite entrances and exits. My favourite example from Shakespeare can be found in the stage directions for Antigonus (The Winter’s Tale): ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’
4. Death Jam
Rock music historian Dave Phillips is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts with horn-rimmed glasses and corn-cob pipe accessories. A captain of the Fail Boat.
Dramatic, gripping, ripping, bloated, tragic, glorious, death has always ridden the coattails of rock music. We see that in the histories:
Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Sid Vicious, Bon Scott, Ian Curtis, John Bonham, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Phil Lynott, Peter Tosh, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Per Yngve “Dead” Ohlin, Johnny Thunders, Freddy Mercury, Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, Brad Nowell, Jeff Buckley, Screaming Lord Such, Ian Dury, Kirsty MacColl, Joey Ramone, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, Dimebag Darrell, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, Les Paul, Malcolm McLaren, Ronnie James Dio, Paul Gray, Peter Quaife, and counting ...
Rock death covers a wide spectrum of fatalities:
Plane crashes, drug overdoses, murders, heart attacks, electrocution (by guitar), cancer, drowning, skiing accidents, being mown in two by a speeding powerboat.
And like most spectrums, there are some elements of rock death that are hidden from us: we can never know. Jim Morrison’s fatal heart failure in 1971 is disputed to this day, Skatalite and trombone legend Don Drummond allegedly committed suicide while institutionalized in Belle Vue Asylum, Kingston in 1969. And of course, there is the modern phenomenon of Amanda Palmer...
Dave Phillips would like to thank Wikipedia for its generous contribution to his research.
5. Observation Anthology
Tinkerbell Thunderclap Peaches Moonunit Bowie is dressed quite normally considering the circumstances.
I first saw her at the Koko club in Camden. Jason Webley was supporting and had finished his set and I was tired, happy and dizzy from all the spinning around (spinning happens a lot when Jason is playing).
It was that point of breathless waiting for the main event. The crowd was bristling with expectation. I was sort of in the middle of it all. (I wish I had been nearer the front!) I remember looking up into the face of a tall, burly man dressed in Victorian steam-punk garb. He had a bald head and a neat little Hercule Poirot moustache which was literally bristling with expectation! And then the lights went low and we all surged forward to try and catch a glimpse of her. And there she was!
They lifted her up, their hands under her spread-eagle arms. This way her body was carried onto the stage for everyone to see. As she was raised from beneath the stage, the freaks at the front, those who had been waiting in the London rain to see her for hours in their make-up and top hats, howled their animal ecstasy, accompanying the funerary violins. Finally! And we all saw her and joined in the noise.
At that moment she didn’t have to play a single note. What was important was that she was there with us and we could say ‘Thank you’
or whatever we had to say
or not say
or laugh
or cry
get a little overwhelmed
or go to the bar
or put your arms around a stranger
or take a video on your phone to put on YouTube later
or dance
or fall over
or try to remember it all.
It could be done in that moment. It was just being there. With her...
6. Trivial Pursuit
“People are strange. Particularly people on the internet.” (Stephen Frycook, via Twitter)
7. A New Hope / The Good, The Bad and The ‘Palmeresque’ / Keyboard Bebop
Tapioca Rice is wearing a white vest and Amanda Palmer Brand Briefs (for men). Throughout the interview she pauses to take photos for her MySpace page.
It is kind of amazing. It can be the best thing, the worst thing. It’s definitely punk.
So The Icon produces art, writes on their blog, their MySpace, their Twitter, etc. etc. When people consume that whatever, it can affect them in a lot of ways depending where they are at. I have always admired the DIY spirit of art, the grassroots do-it-yourself kinda vibe. The authenticity makes sense to me. The music (and everything else) seems to matter more. And the internet is a big part of that happening today: I don’t need to spell this out to you. But anyway – The Icon permeates people’s lives in different ways.
Then The Icon dies and we’re all like “Oh man!” ... but now people can directly respond via social networking ‘sites (or whatever) for everyone to see (all secretly hope that The Icon will see their effort some day).
Some fly their black flags of mourning from their Facebook page or fire a twenty-one gun salute via Twitter. It could be a poem, a little story, a diary entry, a stream of consciousness, a massive joke, the most obvious cliché in the world, posted onto a blog in Sussex with trembling fingers (only five people will read it). It doesn’t have to make sense and the grammar and spelling can be awful (which is actually hugely liberating when you think about it). Whether it is good or makes your toes curl isn’t important: it is the act of responding itself which is the important part! So I’m down with it. I may not like what they are saying, but it is cool that they have the passion to write such audacity. That’s keyboard bebop, baby!
... Can I finish on that please? Kthanxbai
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