Boss Radio

Time for my annual 'How old are your kids?' call to my brother in the vain hope of getting a clue as to what to buy for them this Christmas, and as usual we have a moan about eBay and how easy it is to spot a con once you've fallen for it. Then we move on to music, which used to be how both of us earned enough to live on (Not so easy these days unfortunately), and from there on to the subject of Where It All Began.

Music, that is.

You see, he says (And I don't actually disagree with him on this) that you can trace the origins of any style of music back to before it supposedly began, whereas I maintain that you can pinpoint when various fashions in music occured. Well, OK, not pinpoint exactly, but I do have a rule that places everything into a window of maybe two to... erm...five years. It's my two stages of music theory, each stage of which takes 5 years.

It seems to me that real exitement in music must have started in the mid 50s when Rock'n'roll errupted. My brother can point to numberous other artists who were recording r'n'r-alikes way before that, and I don't deny it. Howlin' Wolf was recording architypical rock'n'roll way before then, and Hank Williams recorded a song called 'Move it on over' which was 'Rock around the clock', but that's not the point. Even though I was just a kid, I knew that something was happening when rock'n'roll was 'born'. One day music was boring, the next day some of it wasn't, and the newspapers were all trying to tell me not to listen to the exciting stuff. You don't have to be grown up to know that you're onto something here when that happens...

Of course, since then I've seen film of how it was when jazz broke out, and it obviously was just as pleasurable to that audience as rock'n'roll was to me, but I didn't know that then, and in any case rock'n'roll was the first 'Teenage' music. No one had ever created music for the below-adult-above-child-status audience before, because it didn't have any money then, now it did.

For around 5 years rock'n'roll drove the establishment crazy. Religiously inspired record burnings were organised by Church leaders who interpreted the Bible in such a way as to prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that rock'n'roll was the devil's music. Apart from anything else it was causing ordinary white kids to dance just like... well, nowadays we'd say 'Black kids', back then if you were one of the dancers you'd call them 'Negroes', which was way better than what these Holy-men were calling them. Then, as if by magic, the guys with the money realised that they were missing out on a profit opportunity and started marketing rock'n'roll properly. For about 5 years after that the music started to stagnate as everyone tried to find the lowest-common-denominator between teenage-wild and family-friendly.

Then along came the Beatles. In fact all they were doing was reinventing rock'n'roll. 4 long haired kids who couldn't play their instruments that well but sang great songs with verve and abandon. Plus the girls loved them. Once again the industry was taken by surprise, and for about 5 years music flourished, but by the end of the next five years it was stagnating again.

Then along came punk. A lot has been said and written about punk. In truth all they were doing was reinventing rock'n'roll again. You remember my post about the roackabilly buskers? There's a bit I didn't mention. Not everyone liked them. Two small kids walked past with their hands over their ears. As I said before, the music wasn't loud, you could talk over it, the hands over the ears thing was a critical opinion, but hey, they were just kids. About quarter of an hour later a young mum walked past with her hands over her ears, now she was old enough to know better, expecially since her kid was looking at her in that way that kids look when their parents are doing something really really embarrassing. I looked at the guy next to me with a knowing look. "Ah, she's alright," he said. "Let's face it, music really started in the 70s." I was standing there thinking "Don't say it, don't say it."

But he did.

"Punk." He said. "It all started with The Clash".

That what's they always say. What is it about the punk generation? They all know that The Pistols were supposed the punk band, but they also know that they were largely manufactured by Mr. M. McLaren, and that's not cool. So The Clash have become the band that started music in the 70s, and what were they really? They were a bunch of shaggy haired kids who couldn't play their instruments that well but sang great songs with verve and abandon. In fact most of their material would be filed under 'Protest songs' which was pretty much a staple diet of the 60s music scene. A lot of bands cashed in on the punk scene, including The Clash and The Stranglers, but the sad truth is that most punk hits were by the previous generation simply jumping on the bandwagon (Can I mention The Stranglers again?...).

Who, of the real punks (If there ever was such a thing) actually had more than one hit single? Toyah maybe, but she was just Lulu for a new generation, Siouxsie And The Banshees fared pretty well although they had to enlist a little help from The Beatles to maintain it. Not that any of this mattered anyway because the punk ethic quickly gave birth to UK Bluebeat on the one hand, and a new breed of boys dressed as girls on the other, and so it goes...

In other words my theory is that somewhere around the middle of each decade something happens to give music a kick up the bum, and for around five years it thrives, and for another 5 it dies, then someone else comes along and gives the scene another boot up the backside. I just wish there was some way of making money out of this theory. Even if it never works again it would've made me filthy rich by now.

On the other hand, the smoking in public ban comes into force in slightly over half a year, at which point I might just dust off my guitar and take to the stage again, all ready to reinvent rock'n'roll.

Maybe no one'll notice that I'm not a hairy kid any more...